The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen by Geraldine McCaughrean Page A

. believable. The great gilded passenger steamers might have sailed away into the past. Dan Rice’s push-along showboats might have sailed into history. But one scruffy wreck bouncing its way from bank to bank, just making ends meet by supplying a little joy and excitement as it went? Well, that was a scene they could picture easily enough. How was that any different from a touring theater company living out of the back of a wagon?
    â€œAs soon as my brother and the rest of the company catch up with us . . . ,” Everett began, glancing yet again toward the bank. All day they had scoured the landscape for waving figures—for the friends who had been accidentally left behind outside Salvation. Perhaps they had jumped some train, stolen horses, stowed away on a coach, and were even now racing to catch up with the Calliope .
    But the river was moving the boat along at prodigious speed—faster sometimes than a galloping horse—and the floods had washed out most of the riverside roads. There was no telling when or if Finn or Egil or Revere or Cyril would rejoin the boat. All but three of the professional Bright Lights Theater Company had been replaced by an inventor, a boiler scraper, a teacher, and three schoolchildren.
    â€œEch, you’ll need all kinds,” said Elijah, rubbing rust flakes out of his iron-gray hair. “Magicians and fortune-tellers and hellfire preachers and quacks and freaks and all such. Put out the word. They’ll come swarming like roaches: all evens and oddities.” Thunder rolled around the edge of the sky, and lightning flickered. “Course it’s gambling where the real money’s made.”
    Everett felt such a jolt shake his wife that he thought she had been struck by lightning.
    â€œNo gamblers. I won’t have gamblers aboard!” She said it in the way people speak of snakes or head lice. Her lip curled and her teeth clenched, and even her eyes shut out the very word: gambling.
    Instinctively the children moved closer together under the table where they were sheltering. It was as if someone had named Macbeth inside a theater, or spoken a curse.
    Elijah seemed a little old to be a boiler scraper, thought Cissy. At his age he ought to be taking life easier. But she could remember her mother telling her, with bitter relish: “Restin’s for the rich. Poor folks like us, we just hafta go on slavin’ till we drop.” Elijah certainly applied all his frail energy to scraping the boiler, grunting and coughing in the narrow flues of furnace and steam pipe. It was murderous work, and the old man seemed constantly surprised by the unwieldy size of his body. “Musta put on a pound or two,” he muttered. If this was true, Cissy could not see where he had put it. Elijah was as thin as a rusty rail.
    But thanks to his efforts, when the boat next came to rest, they actually managed to light the boiler and trickle steam through the veins and arteries of the derelict steamboat. They did not even attempt to engage the paddle wheel, drunkenly swinging on its axle, for fear it would smash itself to pieces against the hull.
    A dyspeptic bleat rang out over their heads, making everybody duck; next came an eerie, sorrowing howl. Strains of “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer!” wavered across the Numchuck River, and Curly stopped throwing bits of broken windowpane over the side and held his hat reverently over his heart. Miss May March had fathomed the workings of the calliope steam piano and was playing it for the benefit of the herons, water rats, and catfish.
    The Calliope obliged by putting herself ashore at Engedi. She caused alarm and raised voices by cannoning into the floating wharf and shunting a raft so hard that some of its cargo of prairie grass slumped into the river. The collision was made all the more sorrowful by a rendering of “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” played at funeral speed on the steam