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America’s Last Emperor: Cora and Casey
Chapter Fifteen
May 14th, 1856
Norton found his life without an office to go to rather unfocused. He continued his twice daily constitutionals but now paid no attention to the time it took him to make his rounds. He had no set path, but made his way from Meigg’s Wharf to the site of his Genesee Warehouse much in the same way he did when he owned the warehouse.
His friend Eastland bought the Genesee Warehouse so that Sherman’s Bank would not have to carry the debt. Norton watched earlier that spring as they’d razed the ship and erased the bay around it with dirt from the sand dunes that filled the area south of Market Street. He felt as though a little bit of his story of coming to this place was erased.
Since February the bar at the foot of Meigg’s Wharf was Norton’s unofficial office. He often met people there to talk. He was not bothered by the lewd pictures that Abe Warner put on the walls, but started to notice that Mr. Warner was not cleaning the place at all. The man slept in the room behind the bar, and had a crab trap that he dangled through a hole in the floor when he felt like eating seafood. Norton wryly thought that it smelled like he ate a lot of seafood.
More often than not he was followed by stray dogs on his rounds. The dogs would not go near the…
