“You can feel it different in the wheel if the tow breaks up and you and the boat are out all by your lonesome while they’re drifting every which way. We’re doing fine, don’t you worry none. I don’t have to see what I know.” He spit tobacco juice into a box filled with sawdust. “Heck, most of what I can’t see I can feel in the floor or whether the paddle wheel turns sluggish. Feeling the river shoals tells me where I am. What I can’t see or feel, I have stashed in my memory machine.”

Bell wondered how the pilot saw other tows on a collision course with his. Jennings’s white beard suggested he had survived decades on the river, but it seemed worth asking.

“If in doubt, I ring the stopping bell,” came the laconic reply.

Bell looked back and saw a dim light that might be the barge fleet behind them. Jennings’s son was driving it. The three tows behind it were invisible. Bell had stationed the levelheaded Archie Abbott, who like he had grown up around sailboats and steam yachts, on the rearmost. He put Wally Kisley on the next, then Mack Fulton. And if there was anything to be grateful for, it was the blinding black fog.

Ahead, an eerie reddish luminescence began to spread in the dark. It grew steadily in size and intensity. “What’s that red light?”

“Jones & Laughlin blast furnaces . . . Watch close, you’ll see something you’ll never forget. There!”

A procession of red balls appeared to float in the air as they moved across the river, high above the water. Bell was mystified at first until his keen eyes distinguished the girders of trusswork. “Is that a bridge?”

“The Hot Metal Bridge.”

As the forward barges in their tow pushed under it, Bell could see a locomotive pulling flatcars through the trusses. On each car was a glowing red mass of fire.

“What are those railcars carrying?”

“J & L crucibles of molten steel from the furnaces across to the rolling mill. Ain’t that something?”

After clearing the bridge, the pilot nudged his big wooden wheel, which was as tall as he was, and coaxed the tow into a broad turn. There was a white glow to the left. A gust of wind shredded the fog momentarily, and Bell glimpsed the point of the Amalgamated Coal Terminal. It was ablaze in electric work lights as the conveyors lifted coal from barges to the tipple. Seven miles of dark river to go. At least an hour. Load the people, and seven miles back. The black fog thickened.

Suddenly, Bell sensed movement alongside. Camilla’s searchlight played on a masonry bridge pier. They passed close enough to see the cement between the stones. “Brown’s Bridge,” said the pilot. “We’re on our way.”