Late the previous night, due to posting parallax....

The Trapper nears the door to Miz Fontaine's cabin when a shot rings out somewhere else aboard the Hansell. Hazardous times, he thinks, but one piece of business at a time. He reads the note tacked to the door, clearly in Sara Belle's delicate script, and lets out a low whistle. "Under any circumstances. Oh, jeese," he utters in an accent that hails from anywhere but Louisiana.

Right river, wrong end. The Trapper, like most anyone else aboard the steamboat Albert Hansell this night, is not exactly what he seems.

Note be damned, he's got some 'splainin' to do to the daughter of his old friend the Judge, and he raps softly on her door. The sooner done, the fewer complications. Twice, thrice. No answer. Time to investigate that shot.

By the time he finds a corridor where thinks he smells the acrid smoke of gunfire, there's little there to see. A bit of blood on the floor, and strangely, the faint odor of a falcon. He hadn't smelt that odor since a visit to an itinerant fortuneteller's tent in Dubuque, Iowa on his last trip home, so many years ago. So, is she here then? Nah, that'd be too many coincidences.

The trapper finds his way on deck, where he runs immediately into the Captain and Albert. After the usual pleasantries about the quality of his cabin come the inevitable further questions about the deckhand and the medallion. "Ah assure you, sah, as Ah have already made cleah, that Ah was bringin' the medallion on boahd for only the most honorable of reasons, to facilitate its return to its raghtful place. Has that villainous little deckhand been found? No? And Miz Fontaine?"

"She hasn't been seen outside her cabin in quite some time, Mr. deSoto."

"Very curious indeed." The Trapper salutes the pair with thumb and forefinger to the brim of his hat. "'Evenin' gentlemen."

The trapper soon finds himself at the outer glass doors to the saloon. Stunned by the first sight he sees, he wheels about and hurries away from the saloon as briskly as he can to avoid undue notice, and returns to his cabin. He sits on his bunk, eyes closed, and reconstructs the scene.

The Mojo woman he'd met in Dubuque, seated at a table with...the Gambler. Their presence complicates matters immensely. The Trapper reconstructs another, older scene, at the St. James Hotel in Red Wing, Minnesota, where, as the Mojo woman had predicted, his luck had run out. A poker game, too much whiskey, and a card player of preternatural instinct. The Gambler.

And, incongruously, a womanish-looking boy who looks maddeningly familiar in a way he just can't place.

Damn. The only two people who can tear down the carefully-constructed facade with which the Trapper had ingratiated himself to Judge Fontaine so many years ago, and they have to be aboard the Hansell now of all times.

Oh, jeese.

The Trapper drifts off into an uneasy slumber, until he is awakend by beautiful song. He stumbles to the deck and joins in with his own bass harmony. At this moment, he doesn't care if the Gambler or the Mojo woman notice him. It's too beautiful a morning.