“Good evening, Abner,” York said. He stopped and glanced around the yards, where the half-built steamers lay like so many skeletons amid the gray flowing mists. “Cold night, isn’t it? For June?”

“That it is. You come far?”

“I’ve taken a suite at the Galt House over in Louisville. We hired a boat to take us across the river.” His cool gray eyes studied the nearest steamboat with interest. “Is this one ours?”

Marsh snorted. “This little thing? Hell no, that’s just some cheap stern-wheeler they’re building for the Cincinnati trade. You don’t think I’d put no damned stern-wheel on our boat, do you?”

York smiled. “Forgive my ignorance. Where is our boat, then?”

“Come this way,” Marsh said, gesturing broadly with his walking stick. He led them half across the boatyard. “There,” he said, pointing.

The mists gave way for them, and there she stood, high and proud, dwarfing all the other boats around her. Her cabins and rails gleamed with fresh paint pale as snow, bright even in the gray shroud of fog. Way up on her texas roof, halfway to the stars, her pilot house seemed to glitter; a glass temple, its ornate cupola decorated all around with fancy woodwork as intricate as Irish lace. Her chimneys, twin pillars that stood just forward of the texas deck, rose up a hundred feet, black and straight and haughty. Their feathered tops bloomed like two dark metal flowers. Her hull was slender and seemed to go on forever, with her stern obscured by the fog. Like all the first-class boats, she was a side-wheeler. Set amidship, the huge curved wheelhouses loomed gigantic, hinting at the vast power of the paddle wheels concealed within them. They seemed all the larger for want of the name that would soon be emblazoned across them.

In the night and the fog, amid all those smaller, plainer boats, she seemed a vision, a white phantom from some riverman’s dream. She took the breath away, Marsh thought as they stood there.