My stomach rumbles as I soak my kerchief in the river and wash up. Joe has made a chowder from a big catfish he caught this morning, mixed with salt pork and onions. Beside the pot of chowder is a steaming cornmeal cake. Thank the stars Mrs. Joyner didn’t bake it, or it would be burned to a crisp.

We crewmen grab our bowls and run to be served. Mrs. Joyner retrieves a checkerboard tablecloth from a trunk and spreads it out over a walnut table with shiny polish. It’s an odd sight, all that fancy furniture sitting on the riverbank, surrounded by mud and grass, water and trees. People stare as they pass, but Mrs. Joyner goes about smoothing that cloth just so and setting a perfect table like she’s preparing for Sunday after-church visitors.

I sit on the edge of the flatboat’s roof and dangle my feet, watching the Joyners eat their formal meal together. That’s what civilization looks like out west, I suppose. Like a round peg in a square hole. As I use the cornbread to soak up the chowder, I find myself itching to put all that furniture away and out of sight.

“You sure you don’t want to travel down river and see New Orleans?” Captain Chisholm says at my shoulder.

I jump. “No, sir, I’m set on heading west.” If he could find gold the way I can, he’d head west too. Anyone would.

“Thought as much.” He reaches out to shake my hand, and presses some coins into my palm. “Here’s wishing you luck along the way.”

Before I can force out a thanks, I notice Joe packing leftover cornmeal cake into my saddlebag. “It’s going to go bad with no one here to eat it,” he says.

“Please stay,” Red Jack says. “But only so I don’t get demoted back to unskilled labor.”

“We emptied the whole boat,” I protest. “There’re no more stalls to muck. You’ll sleep in every morning like the lazy cat you are.”

He frowns at me, just like he did that first day, but now I know he means it kindly.

That’s about all the good-byes I can take, so I pull my hat brim low to hide my watery eyes and head ashore. Peony paws the ground, itching to stretch her legs, but I hang around, pretending to check my gear while Mr. Joyner haggles with some longshoremen about pay.

“Need help loading everything?” I ask Mr. Joyner.

“I’m not paying you,” he says.

“I didn’t ask for pay.”

He hesitates, but he nods. “I’d be much obliged.”

As I heft a trunk toward the wagon, he says, “You might as well go north with us, at least as far as Cape Girardeau.”