Sam held out his letter, now stained with his fingerprints. “But I should—”

Calabash snapped the letter from his hand. “You should do what I tell you. I’ve been assigned to break you in. For heaven’s sake, take off that coat before you keel over.” Sam took off his coat, and Calabash slung it over the chair on top of his own. He took up a cane. From a peg above his desk, he grabbed a finger-creased Panama hat and set it lightly on his shaggy head. “And get you a hat.”

They clattered down the wooden front stairs together and into the hazy heat of Market Street. “This humidity—makes a man fairly ooze” Calabash said. At that moment, from a stairwell doorway across the street, a lean figure emerged wearing a smart gray suit. A sign on the second floor read, The Record Publishing Company.

Calabash nodded toward him. “Alex Manly,” he said.

“No,” Sam said. “You’re mistaken.”

“Oh, I’m hardly ever that.”

“Fellow’s a preacher man. I met him on the train.”

Calabash squinted toward the man as he crossed the street toward them. “You sure?”

The preacher walked briskly past them, so close that he brushed Sam’s arm, though he did not acknowledge him.

After he had passed, Calabash said, “Thought you said you knew him.”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, by the living Jesus, he’s the spitting image of Manly, right down to the fancy moustache.”

“The fellow you were all talking about upstairs?”

Calabash nodded. “Let us retire to the waterfront.”

Three blocks down the hill, they sat over a bare board table. Calabash sipped cold beer from a schooner. Sam drank iced tea. The far side of the Cape Fear was crowded with moored vessels—schooners, steam packets, several full-rigged ships. Tugboats worked up and down the river, hauling barges. The ferry plowed methodically back and forth across the river, hauling workers to the turpentine stills and shipyards on the far shore. Even indoors, he could whiff the bitter ammoniac odor of the Navasso Guano factory at the north end of the wharf. Big mule-drawn freight wagons rumbled over the cobblestones.

On the near wharf, an oceangoing steamship was taking on provisions from B. F. Keith’s Warehouse & Dockage. Farther along, other vessels were being loaded with rice, timber, cotton, peanuts, tobacco, barrels of resin and case oil, naval stores. Gangs of black stevedores worked steam cranes and manhandled cargo nets. Not like the landing at Daiquiri in Cuba, Sam thought—soldiers falling out of boats, horses prodded over the side to drown.

He was impressed with all the activity—here was industry in high gear. Maybe Cousin Hugh was right, this was the future—how many tons of commodities were being transshipped before his very eyes while he sat idling?

Sam listened to hear the stevedores sing as they worked, but they only grunted, cursed, and joshed each other. “Quite a racket down here”