Buffalo Bill Wanted! by Alex Simmons Page B

downriver, closer to the sea.
    â€œMost of the workers we spoke to wouldn’t even talk to us once we mentioned smuggling.” Wiggins poked Dooley with an elbow. “I hope that means they’re honest men.”
    Dooley pulled his jacket closer, shivering. “I was thinking the same thing. What if word gets back to the people we’re looking for?”
    â€œThat’s why we’re only talking to friends of your father,” Wiggins replied, “and why I made up that story we’re telling them. So don’t give up. Now, who’s next?”
    Dooley pointed toward a teetering wreck of a flophouse held up, it seemed, only by the wisps of incoming fog. “That’s where Old Crowe lives.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œOld Barnabas Crowe,” Dooley replied. “He’s been a sailor since before my father was even born.”
    Dooley squinted again as a short, dark figure exited the run-down building. “There he is! Come on!”
    The two boys easily caught up with the old seaman, who seemed in no hurry to go anywhere in particular.
    â€œWhy, it’s young William O’Dare,” Barnabas Crowe declared cheerfully. “’Ow are ye, lad?”
    Dooley grinned and shook his head. “I’m fine, and it’s Doolan, sir —Dooley to my friends. You know my da. He works on—”
    â€œHalf the rigs on these docks,” the old man finished for him. “Course I know him. What old salt worth his cast wouldn’t?” He seemed to notice Wiggins for the first time. “Who be ye, boy?”
    â€œThis is Wiggins,” Dooley answered eagerly. “He’s my friend, and—”
    â€œI was about your age when I went to sea,” Crowe told Wiggins. “That was on the old Venture . Grand ship out of . . .” He scratched his head. “Now, what was that port?”
    â€œSounds like a great story, sir,” Wiggins said politely. “We’ve been trying to find out something very important, and Dooley thought you might have the answers.”
    â€œIf it has anything to do with the sea, I’m your man.” The old seaman took a seat on a nearby crate and motioned for the boys to do the same. “What’s your question?”
    Wiggins took a second to recall the details of his prepared story. “A friend of ours is in trouble,” he explained. “He found some goods that didn’t belong to him—”
    â€œStole ’em?” The old seaman scowled. “Got no time to palaver with a thief.”
    â€œNo, sir,” Dooley quickly declared. “He didn’t steal nothing, and neither did we!”
    â€œThat’s right,” Wiggins added. “We think the, uh, things he found were brought here by smugglers. And if we don’t find out who they are, our friend could wind up in trouble with the law.”
    â€œSmugglers, eh?” Barnabas Crowe rubbed his stubbled chin. “Now, there’s a scurvy lot, to be sure.”
    Wiggins and Dooley leaned forward eagerly.
    â€œThey run about every port in the world the way rats swarm through the sewers,” Crowe told them. “They’ll steal anything, lie through their teeth, and slit your throat for a tumbler of gin and a song.”
    Dooley shuddered and then glanced around the almost-empty street. Wiggins tried to appear as if this were old news to him, but he felt almost as uneasy as his friend.
    â€œSeen ’em in every port I traveled,” the old seaman went on.
    â€œEven here in London?” Wiggins asked.
    â€œOh, aye,” Old Crowe replied. “More here than in most places. That’s because London is a rich port city.”
    Crowe fumbled in his old peacoat to pull out a stained clay pipe. “Even with open trade, there still be bounty that folks want, but the law says otherwise.”
    â€œLike what?” Dooley asked. All around, the evening fog began to roll in. The buzz of a busy