The Last of the Flatboats
by George Cary Eggleston · English · Gutenberg #44922 · 410,772 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Last of the Flatboats
Author: George Cary Eggleston
Release date: February 15, 2014 [eBook #44922]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST OF THE FLATBOATS ***
[Illustration: THE RESCUE OF THE CASTAWAYS.
“The rescue occupied considerable time and work.” (See page 283.)]
The Last of the Flatboats
_A Story of the Mississippi and its
interesting family of rivers_
By
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
Author of “The Big Brother,” “Captain Sam,”
“The Signal Boys,” “The Wreck of
the Red Bird,” etc., etc.
BOSTON
LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY LOTHROP
PUBLISHING
COMPANY.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
_TO MY LAST-BORN BOY_
CARY EGGLESTON
_A brave, manly fellow
Who knows how to swim
How to catch fish
How to handle his boat
How to shoot straight with a rifle
And how to tell the truth every time_
I Dedicate
_This Story about some other Boys of his kind_
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
_Culross-on-Lake-George_
Preface
Vevay, from which “The Last of the Flatboats” starts on its voyage down
the Mississippi, is a beautiful little Indiana town on the Ohio River,
about midway between Cincinnati and Louisville. The town and Switzerland
County, of which it is the capital, were settled by a company of
energetic and thrifty Swiss immigrants, about the year 1805. Their
family names are still dominant in the town. I recall the following as
familiar to me there in my boyhood: Grisard, Thiebaud, Le Clerc,
Moreraud, Detraz, Tardy, Malin, Golay, Courvoisseur, Danglade, Bettens,
Minnit, Violet, Dufour, Dumont, Duprez, Medary, Schenck, and others of
Swiss origin.
The name Thiebaud, used in this story, was always pronounced “Kaybo” in
Vevay. The name Moreraud was called “Murrow.”
The map which accompanies this volume was specially prepared for it by
Lieut.-Col. Alexander McKenzie of the Corps of Engineers of the United
States Army. To his skill, learning, and courtesy I and my readers are
indebted for the careful marking of the practically navigable parts of
the great river system, and for the calculation of mileage in every
case.
G. C. E.
Contents
Chapter Page
I. The Rescue of the Pigs 9
II. How it All Began 17
III. Captain Phil 27
IV. A Hurry Call 33
V. On the Banks of the Wonderful River 40
VI. The Pilot 47
VII. Talking 56
VIII. The Right to the River 62
IX. What happened at Louisville 71
X. Jim 77
XI. The Wonderful River 86
XII. The Wonderful River’s Work 95
XIII. The Terror of the River 105
XIV. In the Home of the Earthquakes 118
XV. In the Chute 131
XVI. “Talking Business” 147
XVII. At Anchor 161
XVIII. At Breakfast 170
XIX. Scuttle Chatter 179
XX. At Memphis 190
XXI. A Wrestle with the River 198
XXII. In the Fog 209
XXIII. Through the Crevasse 219
XXIV. A Little Amateur Surgery 228
XXV. A Voyage in the Woods 236
XXVI. The Crew and their Captain 245
XXVII. A Struggle in the Dark 251
XXVIII. A Hard-won Victory 261
XXIX. Rescue 278
XXX. A Yazoo Afternoon 291
XXXI. An Offer of Help 304
XXXII. Publicity 312
XXXIII. Down “The Coast” 324
XXXIV. A Talk on Deck 336
XXXV. Looking Forward 348
XXXVI. The Last Landing 361
XXXVII. Red-Letter Days in New Orleans 370
XXXVIII. “It” 379
The Last of the Flatboats
CHAPTER I
THE RESCUE OF THE PIGS
“Give it up, boys; you’re tired, and you’ve been in the water too long
already. And, besides, I’ve decided that this job’s done.”
It was Ed Lowry who spoke. He was lying on the sand under a big sycamore
tree that had slid, roots and all, off the river bank above, and now
stood leaning like a drunken man trying to stand upright.
Ed was a tall, slender, and not at all robust boy, with a big head, and
a tremendous shock of half-curly hair to make it look bigger.
The four boys whom he addressed had been diving in the river and
struggling with something under the water, but without success. Three of
them accepted Ed’s suggestion, as all of them were accustomed to do,
not because he had any particular right to make suggestions to them, but
because he was so far the moral and intellectual superior of every boy
in town, and was always so wise and kindly and just in his decisions,
that they had come to regard his word as a sort of law without
themselves quite knowing why.
Three of the boys left the river, therefore, shook the water off their
sunburned bodies,--for they had no towels,--and slipped into the loose
shirt and cottonade trousers that constituted their sole costume.
The other boy--Ed’s younger brother, Philip--was not so ready to accept
suggestions. In response to Ed’s call, he cried out in a sort of mock
heroics:--
“Never say die! In the words of the immortal Lawrence, or some other
immortal who died a long time ago, ‘Don’t give up the ship!’ _I’m_ going
to get that pig if it takes all summer.”
The boys all laughed as they threw themselves down upon the sand by Ed.
“Might as well let him alone,” said Will Moreraud; “he never will quit.”
Meantime Phil had dived three or four times more, each time going down
head first, wrestling with the object as long as he could hold his
breath, and each time manifestly moving one end or the other of it
nearer the shore, and into shallower water, before coming to the surface
again.
When he had caught his breath after the third or fourth struggle, he
called out:--
“I say, boys, it isn’t a pig at all, but a good average-sized elephant.
‘Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish,’ _I’m_ going to get that
animal ashore.”
“He’ll do it, too,” said Constant Thiebaud.
“Of course he will,” drawled Irving Strong. “It’s a way he has. He never
gives up anything. Don’t you remember how he stuck to that sum in the
arithmetic about that cistern whose idiotic builder had put three
different sized pipes to run water into it, and two others of still
different sizes to run water out? He worked three weeks over that thing
after all the rest of us gave it up and got Mrs. Dupont to show us--and
he got it, too.”
“Yes, and he can do it now backwards or forwards or standing on his
head,” said Constant Thiebaud; “while there isn’t another boy here that
can do it at all.”
“Except Ed Lowry,” said Irving Strong. “But then, he’s different, and
knows a whole lot about the higher mathematics, while we’re only in
algebra. How is it, Ed? You’ve been sick so much that I don’t believe
you ever did go to school more than a month at a time, and yet you’re
ahead of all of us.”
Just then Phil came up after a long tussle under the water, and this
time stood only a little way from shore where the water was not more
than breast high. He cried:--
“Now I’ve ‘met the enemy and it’s ours,’ or words to that effect. I’ve
got the elephant into three feet of water, but I can’t ‘personally
conduct’ it ashore. Come here, all of you, and help.”
The boys quickly dropped out of their clothes, and went to their
comrade’s assistance.
“What is the thing, anyhow?” asked Irving Strong.
“I don’t know,” said Phil. “All I know is that it’s got elbows and
wrists and all sorts of burs on it, on which I’ve been skinning my shins
for the last half hour; and that it is heavier than one of your
compositions, Irv.”
The thing was in water so shallow that all the boys at once could get at
it merely by bending forward and plunging their heads and shoulders
under the surface. But it was so unwieldy that it took all five of
them--for Ed too had joined, as he always did when there was need of
him--fully ten minutes to bring it out upon shore.
“I say, boys,” said Ed, “this is a big find. It’s that ferry-boat shaft
the iron man told us about, and you remember we are to have fifty
dollars for it.”
“Then hurrah for Phil Lowry’s obstinate pertinacity!” said Irving
Strong. “That’s what Mrs. Dupont called it when she bracketed his name
and mine together on the bulletin-board as ‘Irreclaimable whisperers.’
Phil, you may be irreclaimable, but you’ve proved that this shaft
isn’t.”
It was just below the little old town of Vevay on the Ohio River, where
Swiss names and some few Swiss customs still survived long after the
Swiss settlers of 1805 were buried. To be exact, it was at “The Point,”
where all Vevay boys went for their swimming because it lay a little
beyond the town limits, and so Joe Peelman, the marshal, could not
arrest them for swimming there in daylight without their clothes.
During the high water of the preceding winter a barge loaded with
pig-iron had broken in two there and sunk. The strong current
quickly carried away what was left of the wrecked barge,--which had
been scarcely more than a great oblong box,--leaving the iron to be
undermined by the water and to sink into the sand and gravel of the
bottom.
The agent who came to look after matters quickly decided that at such a
place very little of the cargo could ever be recovered--not enough to
justify him in sending a wrecking force there. He thought, too, that by
the time of summer low water--for the Ohio runs very low indeed in July
and August--the iron would have settled and scattered too much to be
worth searching for.
But Phil Lowry not only never liked to give up, he never liked to see
anybody else give up. So what he looked upon as the iron man’s weak
surrender gave him an idea. He said to the agent:--
“That iron’s where we boys go swimming in summer-time. If we get any of
it out during the low water, can we have it? Is it ‘finder’s keeper’?”
“Well, no,” said the man, hesitating. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do.
If you boys get out any considerable quantity,--say fifty tons or
more,--enough to justify me in sending a steamboat after it, I’ll pay
you three dollars a ton salvage for it.”
So the boys formed a salvage copartnership. Long-headed Ed Lowry, in
order to avoid misunderstandings, drew up an agreement, and the iron man
signed it. It gave the boys entire charge of the wreck, and bound the
owner to pay for recovered iron as he had proposed. Just before signing
the paper the agent remembered the ferry-boat wheel shaft, which had
been a part of the cargo; and as it was a valuable piece of property,
which he particularly wanted to recover, he added a clause to the
contract agreeing to pay an additional fifty dollars for it, if by any
remote chance it should be saved.
During the summer the boys had been specially favored by circumstances.
The river had gone down much earlier that year than usual, and it
went at last much lower than it had done for many years past. As a
consequence they had prospered well in their enterprise. Their pile of
iron “pigs” on the shore when the shaft was found amounted to three
hundred tons, and the agent was to arrive by the packet that night to
pay for it and take possession. This was, therefore, their last day’s
work, and thanks to Philip Lowry’s “obstinate pertinacity” it was the
most profitable day’s work of them all.
CHAPTER II
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
When the wheel shaft was tugged ashore, the boys slipped on their
clothes again and retired to the shade of the big sycamore tree, where
Ed Lowry had left the book he had been reading. Ed Lowry always had a
book within reach.
Philip threw himself down to rest. He was not only tired, he was
physically “used up” with his labors under water in tugging first one
and then the other end of the heavy shaft toward the shore.
It would have been very hard work even in the open air. Under water, and
without breath, it had completely exhausted the boy. Just now he was
bent upon sleep. So in spite of the sun glare, and in spite of the
chatter around him, and still more, in spite of a sense of triumph which
was strong enough in him to have kept anybody else awake, he fell into a
profound slumber.
“Well, we’ve finished the job,” said Constant Thiebaud after a while.
“What’s the result, Ed?”
Ed Lowry pulled a memorandum out of his pocket and studied it for a
while.
“We have saved a trifle over three hundred tons of pig-iron,” he
replied, “and for that, at $3.00 a ton, will get a little over $900.
We’re to get $50 more for the shaft, which makes $950. It’ll be a trifle
more than that, but not enough more to count. My calculation is that we
shall have about $190 apiece when the agent settles with us
to-night--possibly $195.”
“And a mighty good summer’s work it is,” said Will Moreraud.
“Especially as it’s been all fun,” said Irv Strong, “to a parcel of
amphibious Ohio River boys who would have stayed in the water most of
the time anyhow. It’s better fun diving after pig-iron than after
mussel-shells, isn’t it?”
Irving was the only boy in the party whose people were comparatively
well-to-do, and who could therefore afford to think of the fun they
had had without much concern for the profits. But Irv Strong had no
trace of arrogance in his make-up. He could have dressed, if he had
chosen, in much better fashion than any other boy in town. But he chose
instead to wear blue cottonade trousers and a tow linen shirt, and to
go barefoot just as his comrades did. So in speaking of the pleasure
they had had, he put the matter in a way that all could sympathize
with. For truly they had had more “fun” as he called it, than ever
before in their lives. Ed Lowry could have told them why. He could have
explained to them how much a real purpose, an object worth struggling
for, adds to the enjoyment people get out of sport; but Ed usually kept
his philosophy to himself except when there was a need for it. Just now
there was no need. The boys were as happy as possible in the completion
of their task, just as they had been as happy as possible in performing
it. Satisfaction is better than an explanation at any time, and Ed Lowry
knew it.
There was silence for a considerable time. Perhaps all the boys were
tired after their hard day’s work. Presently Constant Thiebaud spoke.
“A hundred and ninety dollars apiece! That’s more money than any of us
ever saw before. I say, boys, what are we going to do with it?”
There was a pause.
“Let him speak first who can speak best,” said Irv Strong. “So, Ed
Lowry, what are you going to do with _your_ share of the money?”
“I’m going shopping with it--shopping for some ‘bargain counter’
health,” replied the tall boy.
“How do you mean?” asked two boys at once, and eagerly.
“Well, my phthisic was very bad last winter, you know. It isn’t phthisic
at all, I think. Phthisic is consumption, and I haven’t that--yet.”
He spoke hopefully, rather than confidently. He hoped his malady might
not be a fatal one, but sometimes he had doubts.
Let me say here that his hope was better founded than his fear. For at
this latter end of the century, Ed Lowry--under his own proper name and
not under that which I am hiding him behind in this story--is not only
living, but famous. His bodily strength has always been small, but the
work he has done in the world with that big brain of his has been very
great, and his name--the real one I mean--is familiar to everybody who
reads books or cares for American history.
“But whatever it is,” Ed continued, “the doctor wants me to go South for
this winter, and now that I’ve got money enough, I’m going to do it.”
“But you haven’t got money enough,” said Irv Strong. “A hundred and
ninety dollars won’t much more than pay your steamboat fare to New
Orleans and back. What are you going to live on down there--especially
if you get sick?”
The irrepressible Phil selected this as the time to wake up. “Well,” he
said, sitting up in the sand and locking his muscular arms around his
knees, “_I’m_ in this game a little bit myself. I’ve got one whole
hundred and ninety dollars’ worth of stake in that big pile of iron; and
from Mrs. Dupont down to the last one-suspendered chap in the lot of
you, you are all always talking about my ‘obstinate pertinacity.’ Well,
my ‘pertinacity’ just now ‘obstinately’ declares that Ed shall take my
share in the stake and spend it for his health. He shakes his head, but
if he won’t, then I ‘solemnly swear or affirm’ that I’ll take every
dollar of it out to the channel there and throw it in. I’ll--”
But Phil had broken down. His affection for his half-invalid brother was
the one thing that nothing could ever overcome. He didn’t weep. That is
to say, none of the boys saw him shed tears, but instead of finishing
the sentence he was uttering, he suddenly became interested in the
pebbles along the river shore, fifty yards lower down the stream.
Ed, too, found it difficult just then to say anything. Ed had always
been disposed to worry himself about Phil--to regulate him, and when he
couldn’t do that, to suffer in his own mind and conscience for his
brother’s misdeeds--which, after all, were usually nothing worse than
manifestations of excessive boyish enthusiasm, the undue use of slang,
and an excessive devotion to purposes which Ed’s calmer temper could not
quite approve. Just now Ed had made a new discovery. He had found out
something of the rattling, restless, reckless boy’s character which he
had never fully known before. For he did not know, as the other boys
did, how Phil, a year ago, had waited for half an hour behind the
schoolhouse, and armed with stones had wreaked a fearful vengeance upon
the big bully twice his size, who had used his strength cruelly to
torment Ed’s weakness. That story had been kept from Ed, because it was
well understood that he did not approve of fighting; and the boys, who
fully sympathized with the little fellow’s animosity against the big
bully, didn’t want him censured for his battle and victory.
So there was silence after Phil’s declaration of his purpose, which
every boy there knew that he would fulfil to the letter. At last Ed
said:--
“On my own share of the money I could go by taking deck passage.”
“Yes,” cried Phil, suddenly reappearing in a sort of wrath that was very
unusual with him--“yes, and live on equal terms with a lot of dirty,
low-lived wretches--ugh! Now see here, Ed! I’ve told you you are to take
my share of the money. If you don’t, I’ll do exactly what I said,--I’ll
get it changed into coin, and I’ll drop it into the river at a point
where no diving will ever get it. I’ve said my say. I’ll do my do.”
“Look here,” drawled Irv Strong, after a moment. “Let’s _all_ go to New
Orleans, and don’t let’s pay any steamboat fare at all except to get
back!”
“But how?” asked three boys, in a breath.
“Let’s run a flatboat! In my father’s day, pretty nearly all the hay,
grain, bacon, apples, onions, and the like, grown in this part of the
country, were sent to New Orleans in flatboats. I don’t see why it
wouldn’t pay for us to take a flatboat down the river now. We’ve more
than enough money to build and run her, and we can get a cargo, I’ll bet
a brass button.”
The boys were all eagerness. They knew, of course, what a flatboat was,
but they had seen very few craft of that sort, as the old floating
flatboats had almost entirely given place on the Ohio to barges, towed,
or rather pushed, by big, stern-wheel steamboats. For the benefit of
readers who never saw anything of the kind, let me explain.
A flatboat was simply a big, overgrown, square-bowed and square-sterned
scow, with a box-like house built on top. She could carry a very heavy
cargo without sinking below her gunwales, and the house on top, with its
roof of slightly curved boards, was to hold the cargo. There was a
little open space at the bow to let freight in and out, while a part of
the deck-house at the stern was made into a little box-like cabin for
the crew. The scow part, or boat proper, was strongly built, with great
timber gunwales, and a bottom of two-inch plank tightly caulked. The
freight-house built on it was so put together that only a few of the
planks were required to have nails in them, so that when the boat
reached New Orleans she could be sold as lumber for more than she had
originally cost.
She was simply floated down the river by the current. There were two big
oars, or “sweeps,” as they were called, with which the men by rowing
could give the craft steerage way--that is to say, speed enough to let
the big steering oar throw her stern around as a rudder does, and guide
her course. All this was necessary in making sharp turns in the channel
to keep off bars; but as the flatboats usually went down the river only
at high stages of water, the chief use of the oars was to make landings.
Ed could have told his comrades some interesting facts concerning the
enormous part that the flatboats once played in that commerce which
built up the great Western country; but, as Irv Strong said, there was
“already a question before the house. That question is, ‘Why can’t we
five fellows build a flatboat, load her, and take her down the river?’
We’ll be the ‘hands’ ourselves, and won’t charge ourselves any wages, so
we can certainly carry freight cheaper than any steamboat can. We’ll
earn some more money, perhaps, and if we don’t, we’ll have lots of fun,
and best of all, we’ll ‘bust that broncho,’ or bronchitis of Ed’s--for
that’s what it is. They call it phthisic only because that’s the very
hardest word in the book to spell.”
The sun was getting low, but the boys were deeply interested. They would
have determined upon the project then and there but for Ed’s caution. As
it was, they made him a sort of committee of one to inquire into
details, to find out what it would cost to build a flatboat, what living
expenses would be necessary for her boy crew, what it would cost them
for passage back from New Orleans, and on what terms they could get a
cargo.
This is how it all began.
CHAPTER III
CAPTAIN PHIL
Ed’s report was in all respects favorable to the enterprise. Perry
Raymond, who in the old days had built many scores of flatboats, was now
too old to undertake an active enterprise. But he told Ed, to the very
last board, how much lumber would be required, and the price of every
stick in it. He volunteered, as a mere matter of favor and without any
charge whatever, to superintend and direct the work of the boys in
building a boat for themselves. The result was that they could build a
boat for a very small fraction of their money, and Perry promised to
show them how to caulk it for themselves.
Ed had seen the principal merchants of the place, also. It was their
practice to exchange goods for country produce--any sort that might come
to them, whether hay, or onions, or garlic, or butter, or eggs, or
wheat, or wool, or corn, or apples, or what not.
It was their business to know pretty accurately how much of each kind of
produce they were likely to get during any given season in return for
their goods, and how best to market it. They knew to a nicety how much
butter and how many eggs or how many bushels of onions or how many
pounds of hay they could get for a parasol or a bit of lace or a calico
dress or a sack of coffee. Their chief problem was how to sell all these
things to the best advantage afterward. Usually they found their best
market down the river.
So when Ed Lowry presented the case to them they were quick to see
advantage in it. His proposal was that the boys should provide the
flatboat and take her to New Orleans at their own expense; that the
merchants should furnish a cargo to be sold on commission either at New
Orleans or on “the coast,” as the river country for a few hundred miles
above that city is called, the boys to have a certain part of the money
as freight and a certain other part as “commission.”
Every merchant in town was ready to furnish a part of the cargo, and it
seemed altogether probable that the boys would easily secure more
freight than they could carry, though their flatboat was to be one of
the biggest that ever floated down the river. As she was likely also to
be one of the last, coming as she did long after that system of river
transportation had been generally abandoned, Irv Strong, in a burst of
eloquence, proposed that she should be called _The Last of the
Flatboats_, in order, he said, “that she may take rank with those noble
literary productions, ‘The Last of the Barons,’ ‘The Last of the
Mohicans,’ ‘The Last of the Mamelukes,’ ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ and
‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel.’”
Ed Lowry laughed, and the other boys voted for the name proposed.
As the boat was nearing completion, a few weeks later, and indeed had
already received a part of her cargo, the question arose, who should be
her captain.
The first impulse of everybody concerned was to say “Ed Lowry,” but Ed
vetoed that.
“I’m an invalid,” he said, “or half an invalid at the best, and this
thing isn’t play. There are very serious duties for the captain of a
flatboat to do. He must be able to expose himself in all weathers, which
I can’t do. He must be ready in resource and very quick to decide. In an
emergency, it is far more important to have a quick decision than a wise
one, and especially to have the one who decides a resolute person who
will carry his decision into effect.”
“I see,” said Irving Strong. “What we need in a captain is ‘obstinate
pertinacity.’ I move that Phil Lowry, as the possessor of a large and
varied stock of that commodity, be made captain of _The Last of the
Flatboats_.”
As Phil was the very youngest of the group, and as he had always been
regarded rather as a ready than a discreet thinker, there was a moment’s
hesitation. But a little thought convinced every one of the boys that
Phil was by all odds the one among them best fit to undertake the
difficult task of command--the one most likely to bring the enterprise
to a successful termination, especially if any serious difficulties
should arise, as was pretty certain to happen.
“It’s an awful responsibility for Phil to assume,” said Ed that night to
their widowed mother, a woman of unusual wisdom.
“Yes,” she replied; “but, after all, he is the one best fit, and that
ought to be the only ground on which men or boys are selected for places
of responsibility. Besides, it will educate Philip in much that he needs
to learn. No matter what happens on the voyage, he will come back the
better for it. He ought to have the discipline that responsibility
gives. The one lesson he most needs to learn is that he is not merely an
individual, but a part of a whole: that his conduct in any case affects
others as well as himself, and that he is, therefore, responsible to
others and for others. It is well that you boys have made him your
captain. Now remember to hold up his hands and obey him loyally in every
case of doubt. That will be hard for you, Edward, because of your
superior knowledge--”
“No, it won’t, mother, pardon me,” responded Ed: “first, because I know
too much about some things not to know that other people know more than
I do about others; and secondly, because I thoroughly understand what
Napoleon meant when he said that ‘one bad general in command of an army
is better than two good ones.’ The most unwise order promptly executed
usually results better than the wisest order left open to debate. Phil
will never leave things open to debate when the time comes for quick
action, and besides, mother, I have a much better opinion of Phil’s
capacity for command than you think. His readiness and resourcefulness
are remarkable. He may or he may not get us safely to New Orleans. But
if he doesn’t, I shall be perfectly certain that nobody else in the
party could.”
So it was that Phil Lowry, the youngest of the party, and the most
harum-scarum boy in all Vevay, was chosen captain of _The Last of the
Flatboats_ by those who were to voyage with him, simply because they all
believed him to be the one best fit for the place.
CHAPTER IV
A HURRY CALL
Without theorizing about it, and, indeed, without knowing the fact, Phil
began at once to rise to his responsibility. The success of the
enterprise, he felt, depended in a large degree upon him, and he must
think of everything necessary in advance.
One night, late in September, he asked his comrades to meet him “on
business” in Will Moreraud’s room over a store. When they were all
gathered around the little pine table with a smoky lamp on it, Phil drew
out a carefully prepared memorandum and laid it before him. Then he
began:--
“As you’ve made me responsible in this business, I’ve been studying up a
little. The river’s going to rise earlier than usual this year, and in
two weeks at most there’ll be water enough to get the boat over the
falls at Louisville.”
“How do you know that?” broke in Constant Thiebaud, incredulously.
“Because there has already been a smart rise all along, as you know, and
heavy rains are falling in the West Virginia and Pennsylvania mountains.
The Allegheny River is bank full; the Monongahela is over its banks; and
the Muskingum and the Big Kanawha and the Little Kanawha are all rising
fast. There’ll be lots of water here almost before we know it.”
“Whew!” cried Irving Strong, rising,--for he could never sit still when
anything interesting was under discussion,--“but how in the name of all
the ’ologies do you know what’s going on in the Virginia mountains, and
the rivers, and all that?”
“I’ve been reading the Cincinnati papers every day since you made me
‘IT’; that’s all. Mr. Schenck lends them to me.”
“Well, Gee Whillicks!” exclaimed Constant, “who’d ’a’ thought of that!”
“No matter,” said Phil, a little abashed by the approbation of his
foresight which he saw in all the boys’ eyes and heard in all their
voices. “No matter about that; but I’ve more to say. The sooner we can
get away with the flatboat, the better.”
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“Well, for most of the things we are taking as freight the prices are
apt to be much higher in the fall than later, after the steamboats load
up the market. That’s what Mr. Shaw says, and he knows. So we must get
the boat loaded just as quickly as we can, and go out as soon as there
is water enough to get her over the falls.”
“But we can’t do that,” said Ed, “because most of the produce we are to
take hasn’t been brought to town yet. The hay is here, of course, but
apples have hardly begun to come in--”
“That’s just what I’m coming to,” interrupted Phil. “I’ve been studying
all that. We could get enough freight for two cargoes by waiting for it,
but the best figuring I can do shows only about three-quarters of a load
now actually in town. I propose that we go to work to-morrow and get the
other quarter. That’s what I called you together for.”
“Where are we to get it?”
“Along the river, below town--in the neighborhood of Craig’s Landing.”
“But how?” asked Ed.
“By hustling. I’ve made out a list of everybody that produces anything
for ten miles down the river and five miles back into the hills,--Mr.
Larcom, Captain John Wright, Johnny Lampson, Mr. Albritton, Gersham
McCallum and his brother Neil, Algy Wright, Mr. Minnit, Dr. Caine, Mr.
Violet--and so on. Craig’s Landing is the nearest there is to all of
them, and they can all get their produce there quickly. I propose that
every boy in the crew take his foot in his hand early to-morrow morning,
and that we visit every farmer in the list and persuade him to send his
stuff to the landing at once. I’ve already seen Captain Wright,--saw him
in town to-day,--and he promises me thirty barrels of apples and seventy
bushels of onions with some other things. I’ll go myself to Johnny
Lampson. He has at least a hundred barrels of apples, and I’ll get them.
They aren’t picked yet, but I’ll offer him our services to pick them
immediately for low wages, and so--”
“I say, boys!” broke in Irv Strong, “I move three cheers for ‘obstinate
pertinacity.’ It’s the thing that ‘goes’ in this sort of business.”
“And in most others,” quietly rejoined Ed Lowry. “I’m afraid I’ve never
properly appreciated it till now.”
Phil had some other details to suggest, for he had been trying very
earnestly to think of everything needful.
They would need some skiffs, and he reported that Perry Raymond had six
new ones, of his own building, which he proposed to let them have as a
part of the cargo. They were to use any of them as needed on the voyage,
and their use was to offset freight charges. They were to sell the
skiffs at New Orleans or above, and to have a part of the proceeds as
commission.
“I move we accept the offer,” said Will Moreraud. “It’s a good one.”
“It is already accepted,” replied the young captain a trifle sharply.
“_I_ closed the bargain at once.”
His tone was not arrogant, but it was authoritative. It was a new one
for him to take, and it rather surprised the boys, but on the whole it
did not displease them. It meant that their young captain intended to be
something more effective than the chairman of a debating club; that
having been asked to assume authority, he purposed to exercise it; that
being in command, he meant to command in fact as well as in name.
Some of them talked the matter over later that evening, and though they
felt a trifle resentful at first, they finally concluded that the boy’s
new attitude promised well for the enterprise, and, better still, that
it was right.
“You see he isn’t ‘cocky’ about it at all,” said Will Moreraud; “it just
means that in this game he’s ‘IT,’ and he’s going to give the word.”
“It means a good deal more than that,” said shrewd Irv Strong, who had
been born the son of an officer in a regular army post. “It means we’ve
picked out the right fellow to be our ‘IT,’ and I, for one, stand ready
to support him with my eyes shut, every time!”
“So do I,” cried out all the lads in chorus. “Only you see,” said
Constant, “we didn’t quite expect it from Phil. Well--maybe if we had,
we’d have voted still louder for him for captain; that is, if we’ve got
any real sense.”
“It means,” said Ed, gravely, “that if we fail to get _The Last of the
Flatboats_ safely to New Orleans, it will be our own fault, not his.”
“That’s so,” said Irving Strong. “But who’d ever have expected that
rattlepate to think out everything as he has done?”
“And to be so desperately in earnest about it, too!” said another.
“Well, I don’t know,” responded Irving. “You remember how he stuck to
that cistern sum. It’s his way, only he’s never before had so serious a
matter as this to deal with, and I imagine we have never quite known
what stuff he’s made of.”
“Anyhow,” said Will, “we’re ‘his to command,’ and we’ll see him
through.”
With a shout of applause for this sentiment the boys separated for
sleep.
CHAPTER V
ON THE BANKS OF THE WONDERFUL RIVER
It was a busy fortnight that followed. The boys visited every farmer
within six miles of the landing to secure whatever freight he might be
willing to furnish. They picked and barrelled all of Lampson’s apples,
dug and bagged and barrelled all the potatoes in that neighborhood, and
got together many small lots of onions, garlic, dried beans, and the
like, including about ten barrels of eggs. These last they collected in
baskets, a few dozen from each farm, and packed them at the landing. Of
course every shipper’s freight had to be separately marked and receipted
for, so that the proper returns might be made.
During all this time the boys had lived in a camp of their own making at
the landing, partly to guard the freight against thieves, partly to get
used to cooking, etc., for themselves, partly to learn to “rough it,”
generally, and more than all because, being healthy-minded boys, they
liked camping for its own sake.
Their little shelter was on the shore, just under the bank. They
occupied it only during rains. At other times they lived night and day
in the open air. They worked all day, of course, leaving one of their
number on guard, but when night came, they had what Homer calls a “great
bearded fire,” built against a fallen sycamore tree of gigantic size,
and after supper they sat by it chatting till it was time to sleep.
They were usually tired, but they were excited also, and that often kept
them awake pretty late. The vision of the voyage had taken hold upon
their imaginations. They pictured to themselves the calm joy of floating
fifteen hundred miles and more down the great river, of seeing strange,
subtropical regions that had hitherto been but names to them, seeming as
remote as the Nile country itself until now.
And as they thought, they talked, but mainly their talk consisted of
questions fired at Ed Lowry, who was very justly suspected of knowing
about ten times as much about most things as anybody else in the
company.
Finally, one night Irv Strong got to “supposing” things and asking Ed
about them.
“Suppose we run on a sawyer,” he said. Ed had been telling them about
that particularly dangerous sort of snag.
“Well,” said Ed, “we’ll try to avoid that, by keeping as nearly as we
can in the channel.”
“But suppose we find that a particularly malignant sawyer has squatted
down in the middle of the channel, and is laying for us there?”
“I doubt if sawyers often do that,” said Ed, meditatively.
“Well, but suppose one cantankerous old sawyer should do so,” insisted
Irv. “You can ‘suppose a case’ and make a sawyer anywhere you please,
can’t you?”
Everybody laughed. Then Ed said: “Now listen to me, boys. I’ve been
getting together all the books I can borrow that tell anything about the
country we’re going through, and I’ll have them all on board. My plan is
to lie on my back in the shade somewhere and read them while you fellows
pull at the oars, cook the meals, and do the work generally. Then, when
you happen to have a little leisure, as you will now and then, I’ll
tell you what I’ve learned by my reading.”
“Oh, that’s your plan, is it?” asked Phil.
“Yes, I’ve thought it all out carefully,” laughed Ed.
“Well, you’ll find out before we get far down the river what the duties
of a flatboat hand are, and you’ll _do_ ’em, too, ‘accordin’ to the
measure of your strength,’ as old Mr. Moon always says in experience
meeting.”
“But reading and telling us about it is what Ed can do best,” said Will
Moreraud, “and that’s what we’re taking him along for.”
“Not a bit of it,” quickly responded Phil. “We’re taking him along to
make him well and strong like the rest of us, and I’m going to keep him
off his back and on his feet as much as possible, and besides--”
“But, Phil, old fellow,” Ed broke in, “didn’t you understand that I was
only joking?”
Ed asked the question with a tender solicitude to which Phil responded
promptly.
“Of course I did,” he replied. “You always do your share in everything,
and sometimes more. But I don’t think you understand. You know we
started this thing for you. I don’t know--maybe you’ll never get well if
we don’t do our best to make you--” but Phil had choked up by this time,
and he broke away from the group and went down by the river. A little
later Ed joined him there and, grasping his hand, said:--
“I understand, old fellow.”
“No, you don’t; at least not quite,” replied the boy, who had now
recovered control of his voice. “You see it’s this way. You and I are
_twins_. You’re some years older than I am, of course, but we’ve always
been twins just the same.”
“Yes, I understand all that, and feel it.”
“No, not all,” persisted the younger boy. “You see I’ve got all the
health there is between us, and it isn’t fair. If you should--well, if
anything should happen to you, I’d never forgive myself for not finding
out some way of dividing health with you--”
“But, my dear brother--” broke in Ed.
“Don’t interrupt me, now,” said Phil, almost hysterically, “because I
must tell you this so that you will understand. When we made up this
scheme and you fellows chose me captain, I got to thinking how much
depended on me. There was the cargo, representing other people’s money,
and I was responsible for that. There was the safety of the boat and
crew, and that depended upon me, too. But these weren’t the heavy things
to me. There was your health! That depended on me in a fearful way. I
felt that I must find out what was best for you to do and then _make_
you do it.” He laughed a little. “That sounds funny, doesn’t it? The
idea of my ‘making’ you do things!--Never mind that. I went to Dr.
Gale--”
“What for?” asked Ed, in astonishment at this new revelation of the
change in Phil’s happy-go-lucky ways.
“To find out just what it would be best for you to do and not to do, in
order to make you well and strong like me.” He choked a little, but
presently recovered himself and continued. “I found out, and I mean to
_make_ you do the things that will save you, even if you hate me for
my--”
He could say no more. There was no need. Ed, with his ready mind and
big, generous heart, understood, though he wondered. He grasped his
brother’s hand again and said, between something like sobs:--
“And I’ll obey you, Phil! Thank you, and God bless you! Be sure I could
never hate you or do anything but love you, and you must always know
that I understand.”
Then the two turned away from each other.
On their return to Vevay a few evenings later, Ed said to his mother:--
“You were right, mother; responsibility has already worked a miracle in
Phil’s character.”
“No, you are wrong,” said the wise mother. “It is only that you have
never quite understood your brother until now. Nothing really changes
character--at least nothing changes it suddenly. Circumstances do not
alter the character of men or women or boys. They only call out what is
already there. Responsibility and his great affection for you have not
changed your brother in the least. They have only served to make you
acquainted with him as you never were before.”
“Be very sure I shall never misunderstand him again!” said the boy, with
an earnestness not to be mistaken.
[Illustration: LOADING THE FLATBOAT.
“They worked like beavers getting cargo aboard.”]
CHAPTER VI
THE PILOT
The boys went hurriedly back to Vevay. They had cargo enough and to
spare. Indeed, they feared they might have difficulty in bestowing it
all on their boat. And the rise in the river was coming even earlier and
faster than Phil had calculated. They must get the Vevay part of their
load on board and drop down to Craig’s Landing before the water should
reach their freight there, which lay near the river. So they hired a
farm hand to watch the goods at the landing and hastened to town.
There they worked like beavers, getting cargo aboard, for it was no part
of their plan to waste money hiring anybody to do for them anything that
they could do for themselves. They loaded the boat under Perry Raymond’s
supervision, for even the tightest and stiffest boat can be made to leak
like a sieve if badly loaded.
Finally, everything was ready. The town part of the cargo was well
bestowed. Ed Lowry had deposited his books on top of tiers of hay bales,
in between barrels, and in every other available space, for there was no
room for them in the little cabin at the stern, where the boys must
cook, eat, sleep, and live. The cabin wasn’t over twelve feet by ten in
dimensions, and a large part of its space was taken up by the six
sleeping-bunks. For besides themselves there was a pilot to be provided
for.
His name was Jim Hughes. Beyond that nobody knew anything about him. He
had come to Vevay, from nowhere in particular, only a few days before
the flatboat’s departure, and asked to be taken as pilot. He was willing
to go in that capacity without wages. He wanted “to get down the river,”
he said, and professed to know the channels fairly well.
“If he does,” said Ed Lowry, “he knows a good deal more than most of the
old-time flatboat pilots did. With the maps I’ve secured I think we can
float the boat down the river without much need of a pilot anyhow. But
as Hughes offers to go for his passage, we might as well take him
along. We may get into a situation where his knowledge of the river, if
he has any, will be of use to us.”
So Jim Hughes was shipped as pilot of _The Last of the Flatboats_.
When all was ready that gallant craft was cast loose at the Ferry street
landing, and as she drifted into the strong current, there was a cheer
from the boys on shore who had assembled to see their schoolmates off.
“She floats upon the bosom of the waters,” cried Irv Strong, “with all
the grace of a cow learning to dance the hornpipe.”
Irv was in exuberant spirits, as he always was in fact. He was like soda
water with all its fizz in it, no matter what the circumstances might
be, and just now the circumstances were altogether favorable.
“I say, boys,” he cried, “let’s have a little dance on deck! Tune up
your fiddle, Constant.”
Constant dived into the cabin and quickly returned with his violin,
playing a jig even as he emerged from the little trap-door at the top of
the steps.
Phil did not join in the dance, for he had discovered a cause of
anxiety. Their pilot was making a great show of activity where none
whatever was needed. From the Ferry street landing to “The Point” the
current ran swiftly in a straight line, and if let alone, the boat would
have gone in precisely the right direction. But Hughes was not letting
her alone. With long sweeps of his great steering-oar he was driving her
out dangerously near the head of the bar, now under water but still a
shoal.
Phil, who was observing closely, called out:--
“I say, Jim, you must run further inshore, or you’ll hit the head of the
bar.”
“Lem me alone,” said Jim. “I know the river.”
Just then the boat scraped bottom on the bar. Phil called out quickly:--
“All hands to the larboard oars! Give it to her hard!” and himself
seizing the steering oar, he managed by a hair’s breadth to swing the
great box--for that is all that a flatboat is--into the deep and rapid
channel near the Indiana shore.
As she drifted into safe water, Phil said:--
“That’s incident number one in the voyage.”
“Yes, and it came pretty near being chapter first and last in the
log-book of _The Last of the Flatboats_,” replied Irv Strong.
For several miles now there was nothing to do but float. But Phil was
closely watching Jim Hughes and observed that that worthy made three
visits to the hold,--as the cargo part of the boat is called,--going
down each time by the forward ladder and not by the stairs leading to
the cabin.
When the boat reached the big eddy about half a mile above Craig’s
Landing, it was necessary for all hands to go to the oars again in order
to make the landing.
Presently Phil observed that Hughes was steering wildly. His efforts
with the steering oar were throwing the boat far out into the river,
away from the shore on which they were to land, and directly toward the
head of a strong channel which at this stage of water ran like a
mill-race along the Kentucky shore on the farther side of Craig’s bar.
Should the boat be sucked into that channel, she would be carried many
miles down the stream before she could ever be landed even on the wrong
side of the river, and she could never come back to Craig’s Landing
unless towed back by a steamboat.
Phil, seeing the danger, asked: “Why don’t you keep her inshore?”
“None o’ yer business. I’m steerin’,” answered the pilot.
One quick, searching glance showed Phil the extent of the man’s
drunkenness,--or his pretence of drunkenness,--for Phil had doubts
of it. There were certain indications lacking. Yet if the fellow was
shamming, he was doing it exceedingly well. His tongue seemed thick, his
eyes glazed, and his walk across the deck appeared to be a mere stagger,
supported by the great oar that he was wielding to such mischievous
effect.
There was not a moment to be lost if the landing was to be made at all.
Phil called all the boys to the larboard sweep and went to take
possession of the steering-oar. Jim Hughes resisted violently. Phil,
with a quietude that nobody had ever before seen him display under
strong excitement, picked up a bit of board from the deck, and instantly
knocked the big hulking fellow down by a blow on the head.
The man did not get up again or indeed manifest consciousness in any
way. If this troubled the boy, as of course it must, he at least did
not let it interfere with his duty. He had a difficult task to do and he
must do it quickly. He gave his whole mind to that. The boys obeyed with
a will his shouted orders to “pull hard!” then for two of them to go to
the starboard oar and “back like killing snakes.” In a little while the
boat swung round, and Phil called to Will Moreraud to “take a line
ashore in the skiff and make it fast.” The youth did so, just in time to
prevent the boat from grounding in the shoal water below the landing.
When everything was secure and the strenuous work done, the boy sank
down upon the deck and called to his brother.
“See if I’ve killed him, won’t you, Ed? _I_ can’t.”
A very slight examination showed that, while the blow from the bit of
plank had brought some blood from the pilot’s head, it had done no
serious damage. His stupor, it was Ed’s opinion, was due to whiskey, not
to his chastisement.
Nevertheless it was a very bad beginning to the voyage, and Phil was
strongly disposed to discharge the fellow then and there, and trust, as
he put it, to “a good map, open eyes, and ordinary common sense, as
better pilots than a drunken lout who probably doesn’t know the river
even when he is sober.”
But the other boys dissuaded him. They thought that Jim’s intoxication
was the result of his joy at getting off; that they could find his jug
in its hiding-place and throw it overboard,--which presently they
did,--and that after he should get sober, Jim’s experience in
flat-boating might be of great advantage to them.
“You see,” said Ed Lowry, “we’ve taken a big responsibility. All this
freight, worth thousands of dollars, belongs to other people, and I
suppose half of it isn’t even insured because the rates on flatboats are
so high. Think if we should lose it for lack of a pilot!”
“Yes, think of that!” said two or three in a breath.
“Very well,” said Phil. “I yield to your judgment. But my own opinion is
that such a pilot is worse than none. I’ll keep him for the present. But
I’ll watch him, and if he gets any more whiskey or plays us any more
tricks, I’ll set him ashore once for all if it’s in the middle of an
Arkansas swamp.”
The river was rising now, more and more rapidly every hour. There was
three days’ work to do getting the rest of the cargo aboard and making
room for it in the crowded hold. But at Ed Lowry’s suggestion the boys
avoided overtaxing themselves. The energetic Swiss blood in the veins of
Constant Thiebaud and Will Moreraud prompted them to favor long hours
for work on the plea that they could make it up by rest while floating
down the river.
But under Ed’s advice Phil overruled them, and it was decided to
breakfast at six o’clock, work from seven to twelve, dine, rest for an
hour, and work again till five.
CHAPTER VII
TALKING
The pleasantest part of the day, under this arrangement, was that
between five o’clock and bedtime.
The boys talked then, and talking is about the very best thing that
anybody ever does. It is by talk that we come to know those about us and
make ourselves known to them. It is by talk that we learn to like our
fellows, by learning what there is in them worth liking. And it is by
talk mainly that we find out what we think and correct our thinking.
Ed Lowry was reading a book one day, when suddenly he looked up and
said:--
“I say, fellows, this is good. Lord Macaulay said he never knew what he
thought about any subject until he had talked about it. Of course that’s
so with all of us, when you come to think of it.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Phil. “I often talk about things and don’t
know what I think about ’em even after I’ve talked. Here’s this big
bond robbery, for example. I’ve read all about it in the Cincinnati
newspapers and I’ve talked you fellows deaf, dumb, and blind concerning
it. Yet, I don’t know even now what I think about it.”
“I know what I think,” said Will Moreraud. “I think the detectives are
‘all off.’”
“How?” asked all the boys in chorus.
“Well, they’re trying to find the man who is supposed to be carrying the
plunder. It seems to me they’d better look for the other fellows first;
for if they were caught, they’d soon enough tell where the man that
carries it is. They wouldn’t go to jail and leave him with the stuff.”
“The worst of it is they’re publishing descriptions of the fellow and
even of what they’ve noticed concerning his clothes and beard, as if a
thief that was up to a game like that wouldn’t change his clothes and
part his hair differently and wear a different sort of beard, especially
after he’s been told what they’re looking for.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Irving Strong, reading from one of Phil’s
Cincinnati newspapers:
“‘Red hair’--a man might dye that--‘parted on the left side and brushed
forward’--he might part it in the middle and brush it back, or have it
all cut off with one of those mowing machines the barbers use, just as
Jim Hughes does with his--”
“Now I come to think of it,” continued Irv, after a moment’s thought,
“Jim answers the description in several ways,--limps a little with his
left leg, has red hair when he permits himself to have any hair at all,
has lost a front tooth, and speaks with a slight lisp.”
“Oh, Jim Hughes isn’t a bank burglar,” exclaimed Will Moreraud. “He
hasn’t sense enough for anything of that sort.”
“Of course not,” said Irv. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything of the
kind. I merely cited his peculiarities to show how easily a detective’s
description might lead men into mistakes. Why, Jim might even be
arrested on that description.”
“But all that isn’t what Macaulay meant,” said Ed. “He meant that a man
never really knows what he thinks about any subject till he has put his
thought into words and then turned it over and looked at it and found
out exactly what it is.”
“I guess that’s so,” drawled Irv. “I notice that whenever I try to think
seriously--”
The boys all laughed. The idea of Irv Strong’s thinking seriously seemed
peculiarly humorous to them.
“Well, I do try sometimes,” said Irv, “and whenever I do, I put the
whole thing into the exactest words I can find. Very often, when I get
it into exact words, I find that my opinions won’t hang together and
I’ve got to reconstruct them.”
“Exactly!” said Ed Lowry. “And that is the great difficulty animals have
in trying to think. They haven’t any words even in their minds. They
can’t put their thoughts into form so as to examine them. It seems to me
that language is necessary to any real thinking, and that it is the
possession of language more than anything or everything else that makes
man really the lord of creation.”
“Yes,” said Phil. “Even Bre’r Rabbit and Bre’r Fox and all the rest of
them are represented as putting their thoughts into words.”
“Perhaps,” said Irv, “that’s the reason why educated people think more
soundly than uneducated ones. They have a nicer sense of the meaning of
words.”
“Of course,” said Ed. “I suppose that is what President Eliot of
Harvard meant when he said that ‘the object of education is to teach a
man to express his thought clearly in his own language.’”
“Very well,” said Phil. “My own thought, clearly expressed in my own
language, is that it’s time for supper. Come, stir your stumps, ye
philosophical pundits! Bring me the skillet and the frying-pan, the salt
pork to fry, and prepare the apples and potatoes and eggs to cook in the
fat thereof. In the classic language of our own time, get a move on you,
and don’t forget the coffeepot; nor yet the coffee that is to be steeped
therein!”
The boys were ready enough to respond. Their appetites, sharpened
by hard work in the open air, were clamorously keen. The supper
promised--fried pork, fried apples, fried eggs, and coffee with a
short-cake--seemed to them quite all that could be desired in the way of
luxury. They could eat it with relish, and sleep in entire comfort
afterward. Probably not one of my readers in a hundred could digest such
a supper at all. That is because not one reader in a hundred gives
himself a chance for robust health by working nine hours a day and
living almost entirely in the open air.
Jim came out when supper was ready and helped eat it there on the shore.
At other than mealtimes it was his custom to stay on board the flatboat,
and not only so, but to keep himself below decks, although the weather
was still very warm. He had got over his drunkenness, but he was still
moody, apparently in resentment of the rough-and-ready treatment he had
received at Phil’s hands.
He rarely talked at all; when he did talk, it was usually in the dialect
of an entirely uneducated person. But now and then he used expressions
that no such person would employ.
“He seems to slip into his grammar now and then,” was Irv Strong’s way
of putting it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RIGHT TO THE RIVER
By the time that the last of the cargo was bestowed, the boat was so
full that there was scarcely a place in which to hang the four
fire-extinguishers which Mr. Schenck had supplied for the protection of
the cargo, of which he owned a considerable part.
The river by this time was bank full. Indeed, the flatboat lay that last
night almost under an apple tree, and directly over the place where
three days before the boys had cooked their meals.
When the final start was made, therefore, it was only necessary to give
three or four strokes of the great “sweeps” to shove the craft out into
the stream. After that she was left free to float. The biggest bars were
at least ten feet under water, and the boat “drew” less than three feet,
heavily laden as she was. For the rest, the current could be depended
upon to “keep her in the river,” as boatmen say, and the boys had
nothing to do, between Craig’s Landing and Louisville, fifty or sixty
miles below, except pump a little now and then, cook their meals, and
set up the proper lights at night. Of course someone was always “on
watch,” but as the time was divided between the five, that amounted to
very little.
As the boat neared Louisville, Ed suggested to his brother that he had
better land above the town, and not within its limits.
“Why?” asked Phil. “We’ve got to get some provisions as well as hire a
falls pilot, and it will be more convenient if we land at the levee.”
“But it will cost us five or ten dollars in good money for wharfage,”
replied Ed.
“But if we land above the town, how do we know the man owning the land
on which we tie up won’t charge us just as much?” asked Irv Strong, who
had never seen a large city and wanted to get as good a glimpse as he
could of this one.
“Because the Mississippi River and its tributaries are not ‘navigable’
waters, but _are_ ‘public highways for purposes of commerce,’” responded
Ed. “If they weren’t that last, we couldn’t run this boat down them at
all.”
“Not navigable?” queried Will Moreraud. “Well, looking at that big
steamboat out there, which has just come from Cincinnati, that statement
seems a trifle absurd.”
“Let me explain,” said Ed. “The English common law, from which we get
ours, calls no stream ‘navigable’ unless the tide ebbs and flows in it.
And as the tide does not ebb and flow in the Mississippi much above New
Orleans, neither that great river nor any of its splendid tributaries
are recognized by the law as navigable.”
“Then the law is an idiot,” said Irv Strong.
“One of Dickens’s characters said something like that,” responded Ed,
“when he was told that the law supposes a married woman always acts
under direction of her husband. But both he and you are wrong,
particularly you, as you’ll see when I explain. It is absolutely
necessary for the law to determine just how far a man’s ownership of
land lying along a stream extends. You see that?”
“Of course,” was the general response.
“Yes,” continued Ed, “otherwise very perplexing questions would arise as
to what a man might or might not do along shore. Now in England, where
our law on the subject comes from, it is a fact that the tide ebbs and
flows in all the navigable parts of the rivers and nowhere else. So the
law made the tide the test, or rather recognized it as a test already
established by nature.
“Now in order that commerce might be carried on, the law decreed that
the owner of land lying on a navigable stream should own only to the
edge of the bank--or to the ‘natural break of the bank,’ as the law
writers express it. This was to prevent owners of the shores from
levying tribute on ships that might need to land or anchor in front of
their property.
“But on streams that were not navigable, no such need existed. On the
contrary, it was very desirable, for many reasons, that the owners of
the banks should be free to deal as they saw fit with the streams in
front--to straighten or deepen them, and all that sort of thing. So the
law decreed that on streams not navigable the owner of the bank should
own to ‘the middle thread of the water,’ wherever that might happen to
be.
“Now as all these great rivers of ours, the very greatest in the world,
by the way, are in law non-navigable, it follows that the men who own
their banks own the rivers also, the man on each side owning to the
middle thread of water. Naturally, these men could step in and say that
nobody should run a boat through their part of the river without paying
whatever toll they might choose to charge. Under such a system it would
be impossible to use the rivers at all. It would cost nobody knows how
many thousands of dollars in tolls to run a boat, say from Cincinnati to
New Orleans.”
“Well, why don’t it, then?” asked Will Moreraud. “Why can’t every farmer
whose land we pass come out and make us pay for using his part of the
river?”
“For the same reason,” said Ed, “that the farmer can’t come out and make
you pay toll for passing over a public road which happens to cross his
land.”
“How do you mean? I don’t understand,” said Irv.
“Well, the only reason the farmer can’t make you pay toll for crossing
his land on a public road is, that the road is made by law a public
highway, open to everybody’s use, and it is a criminal offence for
anybody to obstruct it, either by setting up a toll-gate, or building a
fence, or felling trees across it, or in any other way whatever. And
that’s the only reason a man who owns land along these rivers can’t
charge toll for their use or put any sort of obstruction in them without
getting himself into trouble with the law for his pains.”
“How’s that?” asked one of the boys. “This river isn’t a public road.”
“That is precisely what it is,” said Ed. “Realizing the difficulty
created by the fact that this great river system is not legally
navigable while its actual navigation is a common necessity, Congress
early passed a law making the Mississippi River and all its tributaries
‘public highways for purposes of commerce.’ That’s why nobody can
prevent you from running boats on them, or charge you for the
privilege.”
The boys were deeply interested in the explanation, which was new to
them, and so they sat silent for a while, thinking it over, as people
are apt to do when they have heard something new that interests them.
Presently Phil said:--
“That’s all very clear and I understand it, but I don’t quite see what
it has to do with where we land at Louisville.”
“Well,” said Ed, “I can explain that. As the river is a public highway
for purposes of commerce, nobody can charge you for any legitimate use
of it, or its shores below high-water mark, such use, for example, as
landing in front of his property, a thing which may be absolutely
necessary to navigation. But if a man or a city chooses to spend money
in making your landing easy and convenient, say by building a levee or
wharf, putting in posts for you to make your boat fast by, or anything
of the kind, that man or city has a right to charge you, not for
landing, but for the use of the improvements and conveniences.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said Phil. “Every city does that, and so if you land
at its improved landing, you must pay. Well, we’ll land on unimproved
shores above Louisville, and above or below every other town that we
have occasion to land at. That’s business. But I don’t see why Congress
didn’t solve the whole riddle by adopting a new rule as to what are and
what are not navigable streams.”
“What rule?” asked Ed.
“Well, the common-sense rule, that a stream which is actually navigable
shall be regarded as navigable in law.”
“Actually navigable by what?” asked Ed. “There isn’t a spring branch in
all the country that isn’t actually navigable by some sort of boat. Even
a wash-basin will float a toy boat.”
“Oh, but I mean real boats.”
“Of what size?”
“Well, big enough to carry freight or passengers.”
“Any skiff drawing three inches of water can do that. Such a rule would
include Indian Creek and Long Run, and even all the branches we go
wading in, as navigable streams. And then again, some streams are
practically navigable even by steamboats at some seasons of the year,
and almost or altogether dry at others. This great Ohio River of ours,
in its upper parts at least, goes pretty nearly dry some summers. No, I
don’t see how any other line than that of the tide could have been
drawn, or how the other difficulty could have been met in any better way
than by declaring the Mississippi and all its tributaries ‘public
highways for purposes of commerce.’ That was the simplest way out, and
the simplest way is usually the best way.”[1]
[1] Ed’s exposition of the law and the reason for it is sound enough.
But different states, by statutes or court decisions, have
somewhat modified it, particularly as regards the extent of bank
ownership. Probably Ed knew this, but didn’t think it necessary
to go into details, which, after all, do not change the general
truth.--_Author._
“Yes,” said Irv Strong, “and as the simplest way to relieve hunger is to
eat, I move that we stop talking and get dinner.”
The suggestion was accepted without dissent, and the two whose turn it
was to cook went below to start a fire in the stove.
CHAPTER IX
WHAT HAPPENED AT LOUISVILLE
Just before the landing was made at Louisville, Jim Hughes was seized
with an attack of cramps and took to his bunk, where he remained until
near the time for the boat to be afloat again. The boys had feared that
he might go ashore there and get a new supply of liquor, and they had
even made careful plans to prevent him from bringing any aboard. His
sudden sickness rendered all their plans superfluous.
At Louisville Phil got a fresh supply of newspapers, giving all the
latest news concerning the great bond robbery, and took them aboard to
read at leisure. He learned that there was no need of hiring a pilot to
take the boat over the falls, which in fact are not falls at all, but
merely rapids. At very high water such as just then prevailed, the only
difference between that part of the river called the falls and any other
part was that that part had a much swifter and far less steady current
than prevailed elsewhere.
“I could take your money for piloting you over the falls,” said the
genial old pilot to whom Phil had applied, “but it would be robbery. I’m
a pilot, not a pirate, you see. All you’ve got to do, my boy, is to put
your flatboat well out into the river and let her go. She’ll amble over
the falls at this stage of the water as gently as a well-built girl
waltzes over a ball-room floor. She’ll turn round and round, just as the
girl does, but it’ll be just as innocent-like. There’ll be never less
than twenty-five foot o’ water under your gunwales, and there simply
can’t any harm come to you. Don’t pay anybody anything to pilot you
over. Do it yourself, and if anything happens to you, just let old Jabez
Brown know where it happened, please. For if there’s any new rocks
sprouted up on the falls of the Ohio since the water rose, an old falls
pilot like me just naterally wants to know about ’em.”
After laying in the provision supply that was needed, including
especially a big can of milk packed in a barrel of cracked ice, Phil
returned to the boat and announced his purpose of “running the falls”
without a pilot. It was at supper in the cabin that he made the
announcement, and Jim Hughes, who had been lying in his bunk with his
face toward the bulkhead, suddenly sat up.
“Good!” he said. “They ain’t no use fer a pilot when the river’s bank
full this way. When’ll you start, Phil?”
“Just after daylight to-morrow morning,” replied the captain.
“Well, I feel so much better,” said Jim, getting out of his bunk, “I
think I’ll sample the pork and potatoes and throw in just a little o’
that hot corn bread and the new butter for ballast.”
“For a man who a few hours ago was violently ill with an intestinal
disorder,” remarked Irv Strong a little later with a very pronounced
note of sarcasm in his tone, “it seems to me, Jim, that you’re eating a
tolerably robust supper. Now if I’d had the cramps you’ve been suffering
from to-day, I really wouldn’t venture upon cabbage and potatoes boiled
with salt pork. I’d try something ‘bland’ first, like a half pound of
shot or a pig’s knuckle, or a bologna sausage or a few soft-boiled
cobble-stones.”
But Jim was deaf to the sarcasm and went on eating voraciously.
“Wonder what that fellow is afraid of,” said Phil to Irv as they went
out on deck to set the lights and make ready for the night.
“Don’t at all know,” responded Irv, “unless he owes money to somebody in
Louisville. All I know is that he must have feigned that attack of
cramps, else he couldn’t eat now in the way he does. He didn’t want to
go ashore with you as you proposed, to hunt for a falls pilot.”
“Yes,” said Ed Lowry, “I’ve known all day that he was shamming, because
he hasn’t had the slightest touch or trace of proper symptoms. Even when
he professed to be in the most excruciating pain his pulse wasn’t in the
least bit disturbed. I’m no doctor, but I know enough to say positively
that a man with any such cramps as he pretended to have simply couldn’t
have kept his pulse calmly beating seventy-two times a minute as his
did. I timed it three times and then quit bothering with the fellow
because I knew he was shamming.”
“Wonder what he meant by it,” said Will.
“Shoo!” said Constant; “he’s listening at the top of the gangway.”
“And _I_ wonder what _that_ means,” said Phil, whose alert observation
of the professed pilot had never been relaxed since the episode at
Craig’s Landing; “I wonder what he’s listening for.”
There was naturally no response, for the reason that nobody had anything
to suggest. So the boys went toward the bow where the anchor-light hung,
to hear Phil read in his newspapers all the latest details about the
great bond robbery. They read on deck rather than in the cabin, because
one boy must at any rate remain there on watch, and they all wished to
hear.
The newspapers related that one of the gang of robbers was believed to
have got away with the stolen bonds and money, and that the main purpose
now was to find him. One man connected with the crime was already in
custody, and from hints given by him it was hoped that he might turn
state’s evidence in his own resentment against the “carrier of the
swag,” who, it was believed, had deserted his fellow thieves, or some of
them, and meant to keep the whole of the proceeds of the robbery for
himself and one or two others. At any rate, the man in custody had given
hints that were thought to be distinctly helpful toward the discovery
of the “carrier” and his partners who had betrayed the rest of their
fellows.
The case was very interesting, but the boys must be up early in the
morning, so at last they broke up their little confab, and all but one
of them went to bed. Constant Thiebaud, who first reached the
ladder-head, found Jim Hughes seated there with his head just above the
deck.
“I thought you were in bed long ago,” said Constant.
“So I was,” said Jim; “but I got restless and came out for some air.”
It wasn’t at all the kind of sentence that Jim Hughes was accustomed to
frame, and the boys observed the fact. But they had got used to what Irv
Strong called Jim’s “inadvertent lapses into grammar,” and so they went
to their bunks without further thought of the matter.
CHAPTER X
JIM
It didn’t take long to “run the falls.” From where the flatboat lay
above Louisville to the lower end of the rapids was a distance of about
eight or ten miles. Not only was the river bank full, but a great wave
of additional water--a rise of four or five inches to the hour--struck
them just as they pushed their craft out into the stream. There was a
current of six miles an hour even as they passed the city, which
quickened to eight or ten miles an hour when they reached the falls
proper.
The boat fully justified the old pilot’s simile of a girl waltzing. She
turned and twisted about, first one way and then the other, and now and
then shot off in a totally new direction, toward one shore or the other,
or straight down stream.
It all seemed perilous in the extreme, and at one time Jim Hughes
hurriedly went below and brought up his carpet-bag, which he deposited
in one of the skiffs that lay on deck.
“What’s the matter, Jim?” asked Phil, who was more and more disposed to
watch the fellow suspiciously. “What are you doing that for?”
“Well, you see we mout strike a rock, and it’s best to be ready.”
“Yes,” said Phil, “but what have you got in your carpet-bag that you’re
so careful of?” and as he asked the question he looked intently into
Jim’s eyes, hoping to surprise there a more truthful answer than he was
likely to get from Jim’s lips.
“Oh, nothin’ but my clothes,” said Jim, hastily avoiding the scrutiny.
“Must be a dress-suit or two among them,” said Phil, “or you’d be
thinking less about them and more about your skin. Let’s see them!” he
added suddenly, and offering to open the bag.
Jim snatched it away quickly, muttering something which the boy didn’t
catch. But by that time the falls were passed and the flatboat was
floating through calm waters between Portland and New Albany. So Jim
retreated to the cabin and bestowed his precious carpet-bag again under
the straw of his bunk, where he had kept it from the first.
“Wonder what he’s got there, Phil,” said Irv Strong, who had been
attentive to the colloquy.
“Don’t know,” replied Phil; “but if things go on this way, the time will
come when I’ll decide to find out.”
“By the way,” broke in Will Moreraud, “did any of you see him bring that
carpet-bag aboard?”
Nobody could remember.
“Guess he sneaked it aboard as he did that jug,” said Phil, “and as he
did his cramps.”
“Don’t be too hard on the fellow, boys,” said Ed, whose generosity was
always apt to get the better of his judgment. “Remember he’s ignorant,
and ignorance is always inclined to be suspicious. Probably he hasn’t
more than a dollar’s worth or so in that carpet-bag; but as it is all he
has in the world, he’s naturally careful of it. He’s afraid some of us
will steal his things. If he knew more, he would know better. But he
doesn’t know more. So he guards his poor little possessions jealously.”
There was silence for a minute. Then Phil said:--
“See if he’s listening, Constant;” and when Constant had strolled to the
gangway and reported “all clear,” Phil had this to say:--
“I’m not over-suspicious, I think. I don’t want to be unjust to anybody.
But I’m responsible on this cruise, and it’s my duty to notice things
carefully.”
“Of course,” said Irv Strong, the other “irreclaimable.” “I haven’t a
doubt you noticed that I ate four eggs and two slices of ham for
breakfast this morning. But before you ‘call me down’ for it, I want to
say that I’m going to do the same thing to-morrow morning, because,
since I came on the river, I’ve got the biggest hunger on me that I ever
had in my life, and not at all because I have any diabolical plot in my
mind to starve the crew of this flatboat into submission or admission or
permission or any other sort of mission.”
But Phil did not smile at the pleasantry. He hesitated a moment before
replying, as if afraid that he might say too much; for Phil, the
captain, was a very different person from the happy-go-lucky Phil his
comrades had hitherto known. After a little while he said:--
“You remember, don’t you, that Jim Hughes wanted to ‘get down the river’
so badly that he shipped with us without pay? If he is so poor that he
has only that carpet-bag and only a few dollars’ worth of stuff in it,
why didn’t he try to ‘strike’ us for some sort of wages? Does anybody
here know where he came from, or why he came, or where he is trying to
go to, or why he wants to go there, or in fact who he is, or anything
about him? Can anybody explain why he shammed cramps yesterday?”
“To all the highly interesting questions in that competitive
examination,” said Irv Strong, “I beg permission to answer, in words
made familiar to one by frequent school use--‘not prepared to answer.’”
All the boys laughed except Phil. He was serious. The _boy_ hadn’t at
all gone out of him, as was proved by the fact that in spite of the
October chill in the air he just then slipped off his clothes and “took
a header” into the river. But the serious _man_ had come into him with
responsibility, as was shown by the fact that he used a towel to rub
himself with after his bath. Having donned his clothes, he continued:--
“There may be nothing wrong about Jim Hughes. I don’t say there is
anything wrong. But there is a good deal that is suspicious. So, while I
accuse him of nothing, I’m watching him, and I have been watching him
ever since we left Craig’s Landing. I don’t believe he was drunk there,
for one thing.”
“Don’t believe he was drunk!” exclaimed the boys in a breath. “Why, you
had to knock him down yourself to save the landing!”
“Yes, of course,” said Phil. “But I took pains afterward to smell his
breath while he was supposed to be in a drunken stupor, and there wasn’t
a trace of whiskey on it.”
“But you remember we found his jug hid among the freight.”
“You did,” replied Phil; “and you reported to me, though you may have
forgotten the fact, that it was ‘full up to the cork.’ Those were your
own words, Will.”
Will remembered, though he had not before thought of the significance of
the fact.
“Well, Phil, what was the matter with him, then?” asked Ed.
“Shamming, just as he shammed the cramps yesterday.”
“But for what purpose?”
“I don’t know, any more than you know why he pretended to have cramps.
My theory is that he was so anxious to get down the river that he tried
to make us miss Craig’s Landing entirely. The sum and substance of the
matter is this. At Craig’s Landing I wanted to put the fellow ashore.
Now I don’t want to do anything of the kind, and I won’t either, till I
can read a good many riddles that he has given me to puzzle over.”
“Can we help you to read the riddles?”
“Yes. Watch him closely, and tell me everything you observe, no matter
how little it may seem to mean.”
Just then Jim Hughes came up out of the cabin scuttle, and all the boys
except Phil found occasion to go to other parts of the boat. When you
have been talking unpleasantly about another person, you naturally
shrink from talking to him.
Phil, however, stood his ground. “Hello, Jim!” he called out. “How are
the cramps, and how’s the carpet-bag? Going to try to earn your board
now by steering a little?”
Jim hesitated in embarrassment. Suddenly Phil began bombarding him with
questions like shots from a rapid-fire gun.
“Where did you come from, anyhow, Jim? What’s your real name? What are
you hiding from? How much do you know about the river? and about
flatboating? Have you really ever been down the river before, or was
that all a sham like your cramps yesterday? Who are you? What are you?”
Jim struggled for a moment. There was that in his face which might have
appalled anybody but a full-blooded, resolute, dare-all boy. But he
quickly mastered himself.
“See here, Phil,” he said in persuasive tones, “you’re mighty hard on a
poor feller like me, and I don’t know why. That was a vicious clip you
hit me at Craig’s Landing.”
Phil instantly responded, and again after the fashion of a
breach-loader. “So you remember that, do you? Then you were not so drunk
as you pretended.”
“Well,” said Jim, “I was pretty full, but of course I knew who hit me.”
“You were not drunk at all,” said the boy. “You hadn’t even been
drinking. I smelt of your breath, and the blow I struck didn’t knock you
senseless, for an hour, as you pretended, or for six seconds either. Now
look here, Jim, I don’t know what your purpose is in all this shamming,
but I know for a fact that it is shamming, and I’ve had quite enough of
it.”
With that the boy turned away in that profound disgust which every
healthy-minded boy or man feels for a lie and a liar.
CHAPTER XI
THE WONDERFUL RIVER
As the “Knobs”--which is the name given to the high hills back of New
Albany--receded, the day was still young. It was also overcast and cool.
So Ed, who was always studying something, brought his big map up on deck
and, spreading it out, lay down on his stomach to study it. He worked
over it till dinner time, and in the afternoon he spread it out again.
The boys having gathered around him, he said:--
“I say, fellows, we are making a journey that we ought to remember as
long as we live. We are going over a small but important part of the
greatest river system in the world.”
“‘Small but important part,’” said Will, quoting. “Well, I like that.”
“What’s your objection,” said Ed Lowry, for the moment borrowing Irv
Strong’s playful method,--“what’s your objection to my carefully chosen
descriptive adjectives?”
“Well, we’re going over pretty nearly the whole of it, aren’t we?”
“Not by any manner of means,” responded Ed. “We aren’t going over more
than a small fraction of it.”
“Why, the Ohio River alone is thirteen hundred miles long,” said Will;
“I remember that much of my geography; and most of the Mississippi lies
below the mouth of the Ohio, doesn’t it?”
“It’s lucky you’ve passed your geography examinations in the high
school, Will,” said Ed. “Now come here, all you fellows, and take a
look. This map shows the entire system of rivers of which the
Mississippi is the mother. It is the greatest river system in the world.
There is nothing, in fact, to compare it with but the Amazon and its
tributaries, and they have never done anything for mankind, because they
lie almost wholly in an unsettled and uncivilized tropical region that
has no commerce and no need of any, while the Mississippi and its
tributaries have built up an empire. They have in effect _created_ the
better part of this vast country of ours that is feeding the world
and--”
“Oh, come now,” said Irv Strong. “You aren’t writing a composition or an
editorial for the Vevay _Reveille_.” This was in allusion to the fact
that Ed sometimes published “pieces” in the local newspaper.
“Well, no,” said Ed, laughing at his own enthusiasm. “Besides, I’ll come
to all that some other time perhaps. At present I want to give Will some
new ideas about the bigness of our river system. True, the Ohio is
twelve or thirteen hundred miles long, but about half of it lies above
Vevay, so we’re covering only six or seven hundred miles of it. From
Cairo to New Orleans--the part of the Mississippi we shall traverse--is
about one thousand and fifty miles long. So we’re only going to travel
over sixteen or seventeen hundred miles of river. Now there are about
fifteen or sixteen thousand miles of this river system that steamboats
can, and actually do, navigate, and nobody has ever really reckoned the
length of the rest--the parts not navigable. We’re going over only about
one-tenth of the navigable part--one twenty-fifth part perhaps of the
whole.”
By this time the boys were all lying prone around the big map, their
feet radiating in every direction from it, like light-rays from a star.
“See here,” said Ed; “here’s the Tennessee River. It’s a mere tributary
of the Ohio, yet it is about two-thirds as long as the main river. Its
head waters are in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It
starts out through Tennessee and tries, in a stupid sort of fashion, to
find its way to the Gulf of Mexico through Alabama. But it gets
discouraged by the mountains down there, turns back, throws a dash of
water into the face of the state of Mississippi, returns to Tennessee
and travels north clear across that state and Kentucky, and finally in
despair gives up its effort to find the sea and turns the job over to
the Ohio. Look at it on the map!”
“And as if it thought the Tennessee had more than it could do to drain
so great a region,” said Phil, studying the map, “the Cumberland also
went into the business and after pretty nearly paralleling its sister
river for a great many hundreds of miles, fell into the Ohio only a few
miles above the mouth of the Tennessee. The two together are longer than
the Ohio itself.”
“Very decidedly,” said Ed. “And then there are all the other
tributaries of the Ohio,--look at them on the map. Together they again
exceed its total length.”
The boys looked at the map and saw that it was so. Then Ed resumed:--
“But, after all, the Ohio and all its tributaries combined amount to a
very small part of the great system. The lower Mississippi itself from
Cairo to the mouth is almost exactly as long as the Ohio. Then there
are the upper Mississippi,--stretching clear up into Minnesota,--the
Illinois, the Wisconsin, etc., the Missouri and its vast tributaries
flowing from the Rocky Mountains, the Arkansas, the Red River, the
Ouachita, the White, the St. Francis, the Yazoo, the Tallahatchie, the
Sunflower, the Yalobusha--and a score of others, to say nothing of the
vast bayous that connect with the wonderful river down South. Here they
all are on the map. Look!”
The next fifteen minutes were given up to a study of the map, interested
fingers tracing out the rivers, and a continual chatter contributing,
after the manner of boys’ talk, to the general stock of information.
Presently Irv Strong spoke. He had never before in his life been silent
so long.
“I remember, at this stage of the proceedings, the wise remark of our
honored teacher, Mrs. Dupont, that ‘eyes are excellent to see with, but
one interpretative brain means more than many additional pairs of
eyes.’”
“What’s all that got to do with it?” asked Constant. “She was talking
about Darwin and Spencer when she said that. What’s either of them got
to do with this river?”
“Ah, Constant!” said Irv, in mock melancholy. “You grieve me to the
heart. You never will see the inward and spiritual meaning of my outward
and visible quotations. I mean that Ed Lowry has studied out this whole
thing and knows ’steen times more about it and what it means than we
blockheads would find out by studying the map for a dog’s age. I venture
that assertion boldly, without having the remotest notion of what
constitutes a dog’s age. My idea is that we fellows ought to shut up,
though I’m personally not fond of doing that, and let Ed gently distil
into our minds his information about all these things. Let’s have the
benefit of the ‘interpretative brain’!”
“Let’s take a header first,” cried Phil, shedding his clothes again.
“I’ll beat the best of you in a swim around the boat, or if I lose, I’ll
wash the dishes for a whole day.”
And with that he went head foremost overboard, Will and Irv following
him.
When they reappeared on deck, blowing like porpoises and glowing like
boiled lobsters, Ed said:--
“You fellows are regular water-rats; Phil is, anyhow. He’s in this water
half a dozen times a day, no matter how cold the wind is.”
“That’s just it,” said Phil. “The water isn’t anything like so cold as
this October air.” Then, with mock seriousness: “Believe me, my dearly
beloved brother, it is to escape the frigidity of the atmosphere, or, as
it were, to warm myself, that I jump into the river. You were reading a
poem the other day in which the stricken-spirited scribe said:--
‘For my part I wish to enjoy what I can--
A sunset, if only a sunset be near,
A moon such as this if the weather be clear,’
and much else to the like effect. As you read the glittering, golden
words, I said in my soul: ‘Bully for you, oh poet! I’m your man for
those sentiments every time.’ And just now the poet and I agree that
nothing in this world would minister so much to our immediate enjoyment
as to jump off the boat again on the larboard side, dive clear under her
and come up on the starboard. Here goes! Who’s the poet to follow me?”
And overboard the boy went, feet first this time, for after striking the
water and sinking to a safe depth, he must turn himself about and swim
under water for fifty or sixty feet before daring to come to the surface
again.
Nobody tried to perform the feat in emulation of the reckless fellow. It
involved a great many dangers and a still greater many of disagreeable
possibilities such as broken heads, skinned backs, and abraded shins. Of
that I can give my readers full assurance because I’ve done the thing
myself many times, and bear some scars as witnesses of its risks.
But it was Phil’s rule of life never to let anybody “do anything in the
swimming way” that he couldn’t do equally well. He had once seen
somebody dive under a steamboat and come up safely on the other side.
So he straightway dived under the same steamboat and came up safely on
the other side. After that, diving under a flatboat was a mere trifle to
him.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER AND ITS TRIBUTARIES.
Prepared expressly for this work under the personal direction of
Lieut.-Col. Alexander McKenzie, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army.
_Note.--Navigable part of the river in red._]
CHAPTER XII
THE WONDERFUL RIVER’S WORK
“Now, then,” said Phil, wrapping a blanket around his person, for the
air was indeed very chill, and prostrating himself over the map, “now,
then, let the ‘interpretative brain’ get in its work! I interrupted the
proceedings just to take a personal observation of the river we are to
hear all about. Go on, Ed!”
“Wait a bit--I’m counting,” said Ed; “twenty-five, twenty-six,
twenty-seven, twenty-eight. There. If you’ll look at the map, you’ll see
that the water which the Mississippi carries down to the sea through a
channel about half a mile wide below New Orleans, comes from
twenty-eight states besides the Indian Territory.”
“What! oh, nonsense!” were the exclamations that greeted this statement.
“Look, and count for yourselves,” said Ed, pointing to various parts of
the map as he proceeded. “Here they are: New York, Pennsylvania, West
Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa,
Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado,
Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and the Indian
Territory. Very little comes from New York or South Carolina or Texas,
and not a great deal from some others of the states named, but some
does, as you will see by following up the lines on the map. The rest of
the states mentioned send the greater part of all their rainfall to the
sea by this route.”
“Well, you could at this moment knock me down with a feather,” said
Irving Strong. “Aren’t you glad, Phil, that we jumped in away up here
before the water got such a mixing up?”
“But that isn’t the most important part of it,” said Ed, after his
companions had finished their playful discussion of the subject.
“What is it, then? Go on,” said Irv. “I’m all ears, though Mrs. Dupont
always thought I was all tongue. What is the most important part of it,
Ed?”
“Why, that this river _created_ most of the states it drains.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, I mean that but for this great river system it would have taken a
hundred or more years longer than it did to settle this vastest valley
on earth and build it up into great, populous states that produce the
best part of the world’s food supply.”
“Go on, please,” said Will Moreraud, speaking the eager desire of all.
“You see,” said Ed, “in order to settle a country and bring it into
cultivation, you must have some way of getting into it, and still more,
you must have some way of getting the things it produces out of it,
so as to sell them to people that need them. Nobody would have taken
the trouble to raise the produce we now have on board this boat, for
instance,--the hay, grain, flour, apples, cornmeal, onions, potatoes,
and the rest,--if there had been no way of sending the things away and
selling them somewhere. Unless there is a market within reach, nobody
will produce more of anything than he can himself use.”
“Oh, I see,” said Irv. “That’s why I don’t think more than I do. I’ve
no market for my crop of thoughts.”
“You’re mistaken there,” said Constant, who was slow of speech and
usually had little to say. “There’s always a market for thoughts.”
“Where?”
“Right around you. What did we go into this flatboat business for except
to be with Ed? He can’t do half as much as any one of us at an oar, or
at anything else except thinking, and yet we would never have come on
this voyage--”
“Oh, dry up!” said Ed, seeing the compliment that was impending. “I was
going to say--”
“And so was I going to say,” said Constant; “and, in fact, I _am_ going
to say. What I’m going to say is that there isn’t a fellow here who
would be here but for you, Ed. There isn’t a fellow here that wouldn’t
be glad to do all of your share of the work, if Phil would let him, just
for the sake of hearing what you think. Anyhow, that’s why Constant
Thiebaud is a member of this crew.”
It was the longest speech that Constant Thiebaud had ever been known to
make, and it was the most effective one he could have made, because it
put into words the thought that was in every one’s mind. That is the
very essence of oratory and of effective writing. All the great speeches
in the world have been those that cleverly expressed the thought and the
feeling of those who listened. All the great books have been those that
said for the vast, dumb multitudes that which was in their minds and
souls vainly longing for utterance.
When Constant had finished, there was silence for a moment. Then Irv
Strong said impressively:--
“AMEN!”
That exclamation ended the silence, and expressed the common sentiment
of all who were present. For even Jim Hughes, who was listening, had
begun to be interested.
Ed was embarrassed, of course, and for the first time in his life words
completely failed him. He sat up; then he grasped Constant’s hand, and
said, “I thank you, fellows.” And with that he retreated hurriedly to
the cabin for a little while.
Constant went to the pump, and labored hard for a time to draw water
from a bilge that had no leak. Will went to inspect the anchor, as if
he feared that something might be the matter with it. Phil and Irving
jumped overboard, and swam twice around the boat.
Finally, all came on deck again, and Will said:--
“Go on, Ed. We want to hear.”
Ed at once resumed, Jim Hughes meantime working with the steering-oar.
“Well, this great river gave the people who came over the mountains,
and afterward the people who came up it from New Orleans, not only an
outlet to the sea, but a sort of public road, over which they could
travel and trade with each other. When the upper Ohio region began to
be settled, a great swarm of emigrants from the East poured over the
mountains, and made a highway of the river to get themselves and all
that belonged to them to the upper Mississippi, the lower Mississippi,
and the Missouri River country. My father once told me, before he died,
that in his boyhood you could tell a steamboat bound from Pittsburg or
Cincinnati to St. Louis from any other boat, because she was red all
over with ploughs, wagons, and all that sort of thing. Agricultural
implements were all painted red in those days, and as they weren’t very
heavy freight they were bestowed all over the boat,--on the boiler deck
guards, on the hurricane deck, and sometimes were in the cabin, and on
top of the Texas.[2] Now, without these ploughs, wagons, harrows, and
so forth, how could the pioneers ever have brought the great Western
country under cultivation? And without the river how could they ever
have got these necessary implements, or themselves, for that matter, to
the regions where they were needed?”
[2] The “Texas” of a western river steamer is an extra cabin,
built above the main cabin and under the pilot-house, for the
accommodation of the boat’s officers. It was named “Texas” because
about the time of its naming Texas was added to the Union. This
cabin was also something added.--_Author._
“Couldn’t they have taken them overland?”
“Only in a very small and slow way. There were no railroads, no
turnpikes, and even no dirt roads at that time. It would have cost ten
times more to take a wagonload of ploughs through the woods and across
the prairies, from Pittsburg or Cincinnati to Missouri or Iowa, than the
wagon and the ploughs put together were worth when they got there. But
the river came to the rescue. It carried the people and all their
belongings cheaply and quickly, and then it carried their produce to New
Orleans; and so the great West was settled.
“In the meantime the people in Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and other towns
saw that they could make all the wagons, ploughs, and other things
wanted by the people further west much cheaper than the same things
could be sent over the mountains from the East. Thus, factories and
foundries sprang up, new farms were opened and new towns built.”
“Were there steamboats from the first?” asked one of the boys.
“No; when Vevay was settled, Fulton hadn’t yet built the first steamboat
that ever travelled, and when steamboats did appear they were few and
small. Flatboats, just like this one, carried most of the produce to New
Orleans; but as flatboats couldn’t come back up the river, there were a
good many keelboats that brought freight and passengers up as well as
down stream.”
“What are keelboats?”
“Why, they were large barges built with a keel, a sharp bow, and a
modelled stern--in short, like a steamboat’s hull. These keelboats
floated down the river, and the men then pushed them back up stream
with long poles. When the current was too strong for that they got out
on the bank and hauled the boat by ropes. That was called ‘cordelling.’
The steamboats grew, however, in number and size when they came, and as
long ago as 1835 there were more than three hundred of them on the
Mississippi alone. In 1850 there were more than four thousand on these
rivers. They drove the keelboats out of business, but the flatboats
continued because of their cheapness till after the Civil War, when the
great towboats came into use. These, with their acres of barges, could
carry freight even cheaper than flatboats could. For a long time the
steamboats carried all the passengers, too, and many of them were
palaces in magnificence. But the railroads came at last and took the
passenger business away, and much of the freight traffic also, because
they are faster, and still more because they don’t have to go so far to
get anywhere.”
“Why, how’s that? I don’t understand,” said Irv.
“Yes, you do, if you’ll think a bit,” responded Ed.
“Couldn’t _think_ of thinking. I’m too tired or too lazy so tell me,”
was Irv’s rejoinder.
“Well, you know the river is crooked, and the steamboats must follow all
its windings, while the railroads can run nearly straight.”
“Yes, I know,” said Irv, “but the crookedness of the river isn’t enough
to make any very great difference.”
“Isn’t it? Well, down in Chicot County, Arkansas, there is one bend in
the river so big that from the upper landing on a plantation to the
lower landing on the same plantation, the distance by river is seventeen
miles, while you can walk across the neck from one landing to the other
in less than a mile and a half!”
“Whew!” said Phil. “And are there many such trips round Robin Hood’s
barn for us to make on the way down?”
“That’s best answered by telling you that from Cairo to New Orleans the
distance by river is about one thousand and fifty miles, while by rail
it is a little over four hundred miles. But come. It’s getting dark, and
I’ve got to bake some corn pones for supper, so I must quit lecturing.”
CHAPTER XIII
THE TERROR OF THE RIVER
For the next few days the voyage was uneventful. There was very little
to be done at the sweeps--only now and then a ten minutes’ pull to keep
the boat off the banks and in the river. For the water was now so high
that there was no such thing as a channel to be followed.
In many places the stream had overflowed its banks and flooded the
country for miles inland on either side. Sometimes a strong current
would set toward the points where the water was going over the banks,
and a constant watchfulness was necessary to prevent the boat from being
drawn into these currents and “going off for a trip in the country,” as
Irv Strong expressed it. Whenever she manifested a disposition of that
kind, all hands worked hard at the sweeps till she was carried out of
the danger.
During these days Ed read a great deal, and the other boys read a little
and talked not a little. On one or two days there were heavy all-day
rains, and at such times Ed would have liked to remain in the cabin when
not needed at the sweeps, and the other boys, hearing him cough so
frequently, pleaded with Phil to let him stay under cover.
“We never really need him for rowing,” said they, “and he ought to stay
down below all the time when it’s wet, for the sake of his health.”
“That’s just where you differ in opinion from the doctor,” responded
Phil. “_He_ says I’m to keep Ed in the open air on deck all the time.
Air is his only medicine, the doctor insists, and I’m going to give him
his medicine, for I’ve made up my mind to take him back to Vevay a much
‘weller’ fellow than he’s ever been before. So on with your rubber
goods, Ed, and out with you!”
“You’re entirely right, Phil,” said the elder brother. “And I’m much
‘weller,’ as you call it, already. I don’t cough so much or so hard as I
did. I sleep better and eat better and feel stronger. I guess I’ve been
too much taken care of.”
“Oh, as to that, I expect to make an athlete of you yet,” said Phil.
Then turning to Irving, with moisture in his eyes, as Ed mounted to the
deck, he added: “I don’t know, Irv, but I’m doing what the doctor told
me was best. It _hurts_ me, but I do it for _his_ sake.”
“Of course you do. And of course it’s best, too. Ed really is getting
better. I’ve watched him closely.”
“Have you?” asked Phil, eagerly. “And are you sure he’s getting better?
Oh, are you _sure_?”
“Of course I am,” said Irv, beginning to feel the necessity of lapsing
into light chatter to escape an emotional crisis. “Of course I am. Why,
haven’t you noticed that since we ran out of milk and sugar he’s drunk
his coffee clear like an honest flatboatman? And haven’t you noticed
that he rebukes my ignorance and your juvenility with a vigor that no
really ill fellow could bring to bear? He’s all right--Look!” as the two
emerged on deck. “He’s actually trying to teach Jim Hughes how to splice
a rope! Nobody but a man full of robust energy to the bursting point
would ever try to teach that dullard anything.”
“He isn’t a dullard,” replied Phil. “He shams all that, I tell you.”
Irv didn’t argue the point. He didn’t care anything about it. He had
accomplished his purpose. He had diverted Phil’s and his own thoughts,
and prevented the little emotional breakdown that had been so imminent.
Why is it that boys are so ashamed of that which is best and noblest in
their natures?
They were nearing Cairo now, and there was no time for further talk.
With the river at its present stage, and with a high wind blowing, and a
heavy rain almost blinding them, it was not an easy thing to get their
boat safely into the pocket between Cairo and Mound City, amid the
scores and hundreds of coal barges that were harboring there. For the
flatboat even to touch one of the coal barges, unless very gently
indeed, meant the instant sinking of many hundreds of tons of coal, and
in all probability, the loss of the flatboat also.
At one time Phil--for he had ceased to think of Jim as a pilot, or even
as a person who could lend any but merely muscular assistance
anywhere--was on the point of giving up the idea of landing at all. He
debated with himself whether it would not be wiser to float on past
Cairo, into the Mississippi. But the boat was really very short of
provisions. The milk supply had given out two days after passing the
falls; their meal was almost exhausted; their salt had got wet; they had
no butter left; there was only half a pound of coffee in their canister;
and no flour whatever remained. There was a little bacon in their cargo,
and there were flour, eggs, cornmeal, onions, and potatoes also. But it
was their agreed purpose not to risk complications in their accounts by
taking any of their cargo for their own use except in case of extreme
necessity.
“And as for eggs,” said Irv Strong, “I fear that those in our cargo are
beginning to be too far removed from the original source of supply,--too
remotely connected with the hens of Switzerland County, Indiana, as it
were,--too--well, they seem to me far more likely to give satisfaction
to educated palates in New Orleans ‘omelettes with onions’ and the like,
than on our frugal table. Besides, our cabin is rather small and it
would be troublesome to have to go up on deck every time the cook wanted
to break an egg.”
“You forget, Irv,” said Ed, “we aren’t more than ten or twelve days out
yet, and eggs keep pretty well for a much longer time than that.”
“True,” said Irv; “but it seems to me that we’ve been on the river for a
month. At any rate, Phil’s plan of not eating up our cargo is a good
one.”
Between Cairo and Memphis lay about two hundred and forty miles of
difficult river, and in all that distance there was not a town of any
consequence, at least as a market in which to buy boat stores. So the
necessity of landing at Cairo for supplies overrode all considerations
of difficulty and danger in the young captain’s mind, and after some
very hard work and some narrow escapes, he succeeded in securely tying
up _The Last of the Flatboats_ in the bend.
During their stay at Cairo Jim Hughes was again ill, afflicted this time
with chills and fever. But he angrily refused to have a doctor called,
and as Ed could find no trouble with his pulse or temperature, the crew
did not insist upon summoning medical assistance.
“Let’s put him ashore and be rid of him,” suggested Will Moreraud.
“Yes, let’s!” said Constant. “He’s of no use to us, and he spoils the
party by his presence.”
“No,” decided Phil, “I wanted to put him ashore at Craig’s Landing, but
I’ve got over that desire. He interests me now in his way. I’ve
discovered a good deal about him, and I mean to find out more. He’s
going somewhere, and I want to find out where it is. No, boys, we’ll
keep him on board for a while.”
At Cairo Phil bought a large supply of newspapers from Chicago, St.
Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans. They reported increasing floods in
every direction. The upper Mississippi was at a tremendous stage. The
Missouri was pouring a vast flood into it. The Tennessee and Cumberland
were adding enormously every hour to the great volume of water that was
pouring down out of the overflowed and still swelling Ohio. In short,
one of those great Mississippi floods was at hand which come only when
all the rivers--those from north, west, east, and south--“run out” at
the same time.
The river was full of drift; great uprooted trees and timbers from
houses and barns that had been swept from their foundations and reduced
to wreckage; driftwood from thousands of miles of shore. Flotsam of
every conceivable kind covered the face of the waters so completely that
it looked as if one might almost walk across, stepping from one floating
mass to another.
And there was a menace in it, too, that was ever present. The uprooted
trees refused to float steadily. They turned over and over like giants
troubled in their sleep with Titanic nightmares. They lashed their
wide-reaching limbs in fury, while currents and cross-currents caused
the floating stuff to rush hither and thither, now piling it high and
grinding it together with destructive energy, now scattering it again
and leaving great water spaces clear.
Now and then a house or a barn would float by, crushed half out of
shape, but not yet twisted into its original materials. Altogether the
river presented a spectacle that would have inspired any old Greek
poet’s imagination to create a dozen new gods and a score of hitherto
unknown demons to serve as the directors of it all.
So _The Last of the Flatboats_ tarried in the bend above Cairo, waiting
for the worst of the drift to run by before again venturing upon the
bosom of the great flood.
“I say, Ed,” said Phil, looking out upon the vast waste of water with
its seething surface of wreckage, “nothing in all that you have told us
about the river has given me so good an idea of its tremendous power as
the sight of that,”--waving his hand toward the stream.
“Of course not,” replied the elder. “Nothing that anybody could say in a
lifetime could equal that demonstration of power. Nobody that ever lived
could put this wonderful river into words. I have told you fellows only
of the good it has done--only of its beneficence. You see now what power
of malignity and destructiveness it has. This single flood has already
destroyed hundreds of lives and swept away scores and hundreds of homes,
and obliterated millions of dollars’ worth of property. Before it is
over the hundreds in each case will be multiplied into thousands. Even
now, right here at Cairo, a great disaster impends. Every able-bodied
man in the town has been sent with pick or shovel or wheelbarrow to work
night and day in strengthening and raising the levees. There are ten
thousand people in this town. With the Mississippi on one side and the
Ohio on the other, and with their floods united across country above the
town, these helpless people have nothing in the world but an embankment
of earth between them and death. Their homes lie from twenty to thirty
feet below the level of the water that surrounds them on every side. And
that level is rising every hour, every minute. It is already several
inches above the top of their permanent levees. The flood is held in
check only by a temporary earthwork, built on top of the permanent one.
It is no wonder that the embankments are ablaze with torches and that a
thousand men are working ceaselessly by night and by day to build the
barriers higher.”
“What if a levee should break?” asked Will, in awe.
“Ten thousand people would be drowned in ten minutes,” answered Phil,
who had been studying the matter even more closely than Ed had done.
“Cairo lies now in a triangle, with the floods on all three sides. If
the levee should give way at any point on any side, Niagara itself would
be a mere brook compared with the torrent that would rush into the
town. One of the engineers said to me to-day that the pressure upon the
levees at this stage of water amounts to thousands of millions of tons.
Should there be a break at any point, it would give to all this ocean of
water a sudden chance to fall thirty feet or so. Now think what that
would mean! The engineer, when I asked him, answered,--‘Well, it would
mean that in ten minutes the whole city of Cairo would be swept
completely off the face of the earth. Not only would no building be left
standing in the town, but there would be literally not one stone or
brick left on top of another. Indeed, the very land on which the city
stands, the entire point, would be scooped out fifty feet below its
present level and carried bodily away into the river. The site of the
town would lie far beneath the surface of the water.’”
“And all this may happen at any moment now?” asked Constant.
“Yes,” said Phil. “But it is not likely, and brave men are fighting with
all their might to prevent it. Let us hope they will succeed.”
“Why do people live in such a place?” asked Will.
“Why do men live and plant vineyards high up on the slopes of Vesuvius,
knowing all the time the story of what happened to Herculaneum and
Pompeii?” asked Irv.
“It’s sometimes because they must, because they have nowhere else to
live.”
“Yes,” said Ed, “but it is oftener because they have the courage to face
danger for the sake of bettering themselves or their children in one way
or another. Did it ever occur to you that all that is worth while in
human achievement has been accomplished by the men who, for the sake of
an advantage of one kind or another, were willing to risk their lives,
encounter danger in any form, however appalling, endure hardships of the
most fearful character, and take risks immeasurable? That is the sort of
men that in frail ships sailed over the seas to America and conquered
and settled this country, fighting Indians and fevers and famines and
all the rest of it. It was that sort of men,--and women, too,--for don’t
forget that in all those enterprises the women risked as much as the men
did and suffered vastly more,--it was that sort of men and women who
pushed over the mountains and built up this great West of ours. Talk
about the heroism of war! why, all the wars in all the world never
brought out so much of really exalted heroism as that displayed by a
single company of pioneer emigrants from Virginia or North Carolina,
crossing the mountains into Kentucky, Tennessee, or Indiana.”
“Then these Cairo people are heroes in their way?” asked Irv.
“Yes,” replied Ed, “though they don’t know it. Heroes never do. The hero
is the man who, in pursuit of any worthy purpose,--though it be only to
make more money for the support of his family,--calmly faces the risks,
endures the hardships, and performs the tasks that fall to his lot. The
highest courage imaginable is that which prompts a man to do his duty as
he understands it, with absolute disregard of consequences to himself.”
That night Phil read his newspapers very diligently. Especially, he
studied the portraits and the minute descriptions given of the man who
was “carrying” the proceeds of the great bank robbery. Somehow, Phil was
becoming more and more deeply interested in that subject.
CHAPTER XIV
IN THE HOME OF THE EARTHQUAKES
One night soon after _The Last of the Flatboats_ left Cairo, Phil’s
compass showed that the Mississippi River, whose business it was to run
toward the south, was in fact running due north. Phil recognized this as
one of the vagaries of the wonderful river. Consulting his map, he found
that the river knew its business, that the boat was in New Madrid Bend,
where for a space the strangely erratic river runs north, only to turn
again to its southerly course, after having asserted its liberty by
running in a contrary direction as it does at Cairo, where a line drawn
due north from the southerly point of Illinois cuts through a part of
Kentucky, a state lying to the south of Illinois. No ordinary map shows
this, but it is nevertheless true. Illinois ends in a hook, which
extends so far south and so far east as to bring a part of Illinois to
the southward of Kentucky.
Phil had fully grasped this fact. He had reconciled himself to the
eccentricities of the wonderful river, and was entirely content to float
northward, so long as that seemed to be the river’s will.
But about midnight there came a disturbance. First of all there was a
great roar, as of artillery or Titanic trains of cars somewhere in the
centre of the earth. Then there were severe blows upon the bottom of the
flatboat, blows that threatened to break its gunwales in two. Then three
great waves came up the river, curling over the flatboat’s bow and
pouring their floods into her hold, as if to swamp her. Then the boat
swung around, changed her direction, and for a time ran up the stream,
while waves threatened at every moment to overwhelm her.
Phil, who was on watch at the time, ran to the scuttle to call his
comrades, but there was no occasion. The tremendous thumps on the bottom
of the boat and the swaying of everything backward and forward had
awakened them, and, half clad, they were rushing on deck.
Just then the boat struck upon a shore bar and went hard aground. The
water that had come in over her bow had more than filled the bilge; but
how far the disturbance had made the boat leak, Phil could not find out,
for she was now resting upon a sandbank near the shore, and of course,
supported as she was by the river bottom, she could not settle farther.
So Phil ordered all hands to the pumps, in order to get out the wave
water, and to find out as soon as she should float again what water
there might be coming in through leaks caused by the disturbance just
experienced.
A little pumping showed that the boat was not leaking seriously. The
water in the hold went down in about the same proportion that the pumps
poured it out, thus showing that no additional supply was coming in
anywhere.
In half an hour the pumps ceased to “draw.” That is to say, no water
came out in response to their activity. But the flatboat was still
aground.
“Never mind about that,” said Irv Strong. “The river is still rising
rapidly, and it will soon float us.”
“Yes,” answered Phil, “if we are on a level bar and if the boat has
undergone no strain. You see as long as we have bottom under us, we
shan’t leak to any serious extent. But when we float again, the great
weight of our cargo will make every open seam admit water to its full
capacity.”
“Of course,” said Irv. “But what makes you think there are any open
seams?”
“Nothing,” answered Phil, “except a general impulse of precaution. We
went aground very easily. In fact, I didn’t know we were aground till I
saw the water flowing by, and by the way, it is RUNNING UP STREAM!” As
he said this he leaned over the side and observed the water carefully.
The other boys joined him and observed the same phenomenon, largely
in wonder, but almost half in fright. The Mississippi River was
unquestionably running the wrong way, and that, too, when a great flood
was pouring down it and seeking its way to the sea.
“What does it all mean, Ed?” asked Will Moreraud. “Tell us about it, for
of course you know.”
“I don’t know whether I know or not,” responded Ed, with more of
hesitation than was usual in his tone. “I think we have had a small
earthquake. We are in the midst of a region of small earthquakes. We
are in New Madrid Bend, and for the best part of a century that has been
a sort of earthquake nest.”
“The river is running down stream again,” called out Constant, “and we
are beginning to float, too.”
“So we are,” said Irv Strong, going to the side and inspecting. “Let’s
go below and find out whether or not we’re leaking.”
The suggestion was a timely one. Phil indeed had anticipated it, and
when his comrades went below they found him there with a lantern,
minutely inspecting every point where incoming water might be looked
for.
Their search clearly revealed the fact that the flatboat--which was now
again floating down the stream--was not leaking more than she did
ordinarily, not so much that a few minutes’ pumping now and then could
not keep her bilge empty.
Having satisfied themselves of the boat’s safety, the boys returned to
the deck, and renewed their demands upon Ed for an explanation.
“Well, you see,” said Ed, “we’re in New Madrid Bend. Now, as I said a
while ago, for the best part of a century, and probably for all the
centuries before that, this region has been the home of earthquakes, not
very great ones, but such as we have just experienced. Along about 1811
and 1812 it was distressed with much severer ones in an uncommon degree.
We have just had the Mississippi River running up stream for five or ten
minutes as a result of one of these disturbances. In 1811 it ran up
stream for three full days and nights. Great fissures were opened in the
earth all over the country round about, and as they always, or at least
generally, ran north and south, the settlers used to fell trees east and
west, and build their cabins upon them, so that they might not be
swallowed up by the earthquakes.”
“Why didn’t they run away from so appalling a danger?” asked Irv Strong.
“Because they were pioneers,” answered Ed, “because they were the sort
of heroes we were talking about at Cairo, men who took all the risks
that might come to them in order that they might secure advantages to
themselves and their children. Men of that sort do not run away from
earthquakes, any more than they run away from Indians, or fevers, or
floods, or any other dangers. And by the way, these same people had
Indians to contend with, in their very ugliest moods.”
“How so?” asked two of the boys at once.
“Why, in the time of the great earthquakes, all of Western Tennessee
and Kentucky, and the greater part of Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama
were inhabited by savage Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and other hostile
tribes. At that time the great Indiana chief, Tecumseh, conceived
his plan of uniting all the tribes from Indiana--then a part of the
Northwest Territory--to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina,
and Florida, in a league for determined resistance to the westward
advance of the whites.
“It was an opportune time, for a little later the British, being at war
with us, came to Florida and undertook to form an offensive and
defensive alliance with the Indians, whom they supplied with guns and
ammunition, for the destruction of the United States. And but for
Jackson’s superb war against the Creeks, and later his victory at New
Orleans, they would have succeeded in splitting this country in two.
“When Tecumseh went south to secure the coöperation of the Creeks,
Choctaws, and Seminoles in this plan for the destruction of our country,
he told the Muscogees that on his return to the north he would ‘stamp
his foot’ and they would feel the earth tremble.
“The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, which extended into
Alabama and Georgia, came just in time to fulfil this prophetic threat,
and there is no doubt that they played a great part in provoking the
most dangerous Indian war this country ever knew--the most dangerous
because, before it was over, there came to our shores a great British
army, the flower of English soldiery, under command of Pakenham,
Wellington’s most trusted lieutenant--to capture New Orleans and secure
control of our wonderful river, and all the region west of it.”
“And why didn’t they do it?” asked Will Moreraud.
“Because of Andrew Jackson,” answered Ed. “He went to New Orleans
to meet them. He had no army, but he created one mostly in a single
afternoon. His only experienced troops were three hundred Tennessee
volunteers under Coffee, one of his old Indian fighters. But he had
some backwoods volunteers, and he enlisted all the merchants he could
in New Orleans, and all their clerks, all the ragamuffins of the city,
all the wharf rats, and all the free negroes there, and armed them as
best he could. Half of Pakenham’s force had moved from Lake Borgue to
a point a few miles below the city. Without waiting for a force fit
to fight them with, Jackson cried ‘Forward’ to his motley collection
of men, and on the night of December 23, 1814, he attacked the great
veteran English army in the dark. It was a fearful fight, and the vigor
of it and its insolence as a military operation so appalled the British,
that they waited for more than two weeks for the rest of their forces
to come up before trying again to capture the city,--a thing which they
had intended to do the next morning without the loss of a man. In the
meantime, Jackson had fortified himself, and reënforcements had come to
him, so that when the British were at last ready, on the 8th of January,
1815, to advance to what they still expected to be the easy conquest
of the city, they were ‘licked out of their boots.’ That, in brief, is
the story of the battle which for the second time decided American
independence. For the British in the War of 1812-14 had nothing less in
view than the re-conquest of our country, and the restoration of the
states to the condition and status of British colonies.”
“But how about the earthquakes?” asked Irv; “why is this region subject
to them more than others?”
“I’m not sure that I know,” said Ed. “But countries in the neighborhood
of volcanoes are usually either peculiarly subject to earthquakes or
especially exempt from them. It seems that sometimes the volcanoes act
as safety valves, while sometimes they don’t work in that way till after
the region round about has been greatly shaken up, preparatory to an
eruption.”
“But what have volcanoes got to do with New Madrid Bend?” asked Phil.
“There aren’t any volcanoes in the United States.”
“No,” said Ed, thoughtfully; “but there are some hot springs over in
Arkansas, not very far from here, and they are volcanic of course in
their origin and character. Perhaps if the Arkansas hot springs were a
robust volcano, instead of being what they are, there would not be so
many earthquakes in this part of the country. If they threw out stones
and lava and let off steam generally as Vesuvius and Etna and the others
do, perhaps this part of the country wouldn’t have so many agues.”
Just then the boat heeled over, the river was broken into great waves
again, and all creation seemed to be see-sawing north and south. Phil
called the boys to the sweeps, as a matter of precaution, but the boat
was helpless in the raging river. She was driven ashore again; that is
to say, she was driven over the brink of a submerged river bank, where
she stuck securely in the mud.
This second earthquake did not last more than thirty or forty seconds,
but that was long enough to get _The Last of the Flatboats_ into the
worst trouble that she had yet encountered. She seemed to be bending in
the middle as if resting upon a fallen tree with both ends free.
Phil quickly manned the skiffs and instituted an inspection. By the use
of poles and lead lines he soon discovered that two-thirds of the boat’s
length lay upon a reasonably level bank, the remaining third overhanging
it. It was this that was bending her so dangerously.
“Get inside, boys, quick,” he called to his comrades. “The boat’s bow
overhangs the bank. We must get all the freight out of it as quickly as
possible.”
Then in brief sentences he gave his commands.
“Roll those apple barrels into the cabin! Carry those bags of meal on
deck and well astern! Take the anchor there, too! Lighten the bow all
you can!”
The boys worked like beavers, and after a while the entire forward part
of the boat was free of freight. The cabin as a consequence was full,
and the deck so piled up with bags and barrels that ordinary navigation
would have been impossible. But at any rate, the danger of breaking the
boat in two was averted.
Phil then got into a skiff with Irv, and armed with some lanterns, went
carefully all around the boat, measuring depths and looking for possibly
open seams or other damage. When he returned to the deck he reported:--
“We are lying in about six inches of Missouri mud with two and a half
feet of water above it, trespassing to that extent upon somebody’s farm.
But the reports from up the rivers when we were at Cairo were that at
least twelve inches more water might be expected within forty-eight
hours, and as it is raining like Noah’s flood now, and we only need a
few inches of water to set us free, we’ll be afloat again by morning if
we don’t have another earthquake to send us still farther out into the
country.”
The event justified Phil’s prediction. About five o’clock in the morning
the flatboat floated again, and with a few vigorous strokes of the
sweeps she was sent out into the middle of the river. Then Phil gave
orders for the restoration of the freight to its proper place. Not until
that was done was it possible to get breakfast, for the cabin had been
piled full of freight, and when it was done, Phil devoted himself for an
hour or more, before he would eat, to an inspection of the boat. He
found and stopped a few leaks that had been made by the strain, which
had caused the oakum to loosen in the seams.
The rain continuing, the boys had a dull day of it, but at any rate
their boat was in good condition, and was now again floating down stream
toward her destination.
CHAPTER XV
IN THE CHUTE
Below New Madrid the swollen river was so full that only the line of
trees on either side indicated its borders. In many places it had so
completely overflowed its banks that it was forty or fifty miles wide in
fact. In other places, where the banks were high, the river was confined
for brief spaces within its natural limits, and rushed forward with the
speed of water in a mill-race.
The driftwood had by this time largely run out, and while there was
still much of it in the river, its presence no longer involved any
particular danger. Still, it was necessary to observe it; and it was
especially necessary to keep a close watch on the boat’s course, lest
she should be drawn into some bayou or pocket, where danger would
impend.
Nevertheless, the boys had considerable leisure, and Ed devoted a good
deal of the time, at their request, to expounding to them all the lore
that he had gathered from his books. One day he brought out his map
again, and got them interested in it until they lost sight of
other things around them. For that matter, Jim Hughes was on the
steering-bridge, and was supposed to be directing the course of the
boat. It was his duty, of course, to call attention to anything that
might need attention; so the boys allowed themselves to become absorbed
in Ed’s explanations and in their own study of the map.
It was about sunset when Phil raised himself and took a look ahead. He
suddenly sprang to his feet and called out hurriedly, but not excitedly,
“Starboard sweep, boys.”
He himself ran to the steering-oar, and, in spite of some remonstrance
from the pilot, took possession of it.
“What are you doing, Jim,” he called out, “running us into this chute?
Give it to her, boys, with all your might.”
But it was of no use. It was too late. The boat had already been driven
into the chute behind an island, and must now go through it. Jim Hughes
had successfully managed that.
A chute is that part of the river which lies between an island and the
shore nearest to it. At low water, the chutes in the Mississippi are not
usually navigable at all. But when the river is high, they are deep
enough and wide enough for a steamboat to pass through; and, as passing
through the chute usually saves many miles of distance against a strong
current, the steamboats going up the stream always “run the chute” when
they can. But as these chutes are rarely wide enough, even in the
highest water, for two boats to pass each other safely within them, the
law forbids boats going down the river to run them at all.
Phil had been instructed in all this by Perry Raymond, and he was
therefore much disturbed when he found the flatboat hopelessly involved
in the head of the chute.
He explained in short, crisp, snappy sentences to his fellows the
violation of law they were committing, and the danger there was of
snags, fallen trees and other obstructions, in running the chute under
the most favorable circumstances.
But he was in for it now, and there was only one thing to be done. Go
through the chute he must. The problem was to get through it as quickly
and as safely as possible. If he could get through it without meeting
any up-coming steamer and without running the boat afoul of any snags or
other obstructions, all would be well enough, except that it would still
leave Jim Hughes’s action unexplained and puzzling. Should he meet a
steamboat in the narrow passage, he must take the consequences, whatever
they might happen to be. He kept the boys continually at the sweeps, in
order to give him good steerage way; and earnestly adjured them to be
alert, and to act instantly on any order he might give, to all of which
they responded with enthusiasm.
“How long is this chute, Jim?”
“How do I know?” answered that worthy, or more properly, that unworthy.
“I thought you knew the river. You shipped as a pilot,” said the boy.
“Hard on the starboard, boys; hard on the starboard! There, that’ll do.
Let her float now!”
Then turning to Jim, he said again:--
“You shipped as a pilot. You pretended to know the river. Probably you
do know it better than you now pretend. You deliberately ran us into
this channel. You did it on purpose. You must know the chute then. What
did you do it for? What do you mean by it?”
“Yes, I shipped as a pilot,” answered the surly fellow, “but I shipped
without pay, you will remember. I was careful to assume no obligation
for which I could be held responsible in law.”
Phil started back in amazement. Neither the sentence nor the assured
forethought that lay behind it fitted at all the character of the
ignorant lout that the man who spoke had pretended to be. Phil now
clearly saw that all this man’s pretences had been false, that his
character and his personality had been assumed, and that, for some
purpose known only to himself, the fellow had been deceiving him from
the start. Not altogether deceiving him, however, for Phil’s suspicions
had already been so far aroused that it could not be said that he had
been hoodwinked completely. But for these suspicions, indeed, he would
not now so readily have observed the man’s speech and behavior. He would
not so accurately have interpreted his truculence when he commanded him
to “go to a sweep,” and the man answered, “Not if I know it!” and went
to the cabin instead.
But at that moment Phil had no time to deal further with the fellow, or
even to think of him. For just as dark was falling, the flatboat swung
around a sharp bend in the chute, and came suddenly face to face with a
great, roaring, glaring, glittering steamboat that was running the chute
up stream at racing speed.
The steamboat whistled madly, and reversed her engines full force. The
captain, the pilot, both the mates, all the deck-hands, all the
roustabouts, and most of the male passengers on board shouted in chorus,
with much of objurgation for punctuation marks, to know what the
flatboat meant by running the chute down stream.
Phil paid no attention to the hullabaloo, but gave his whole mind to the
problem of navigating his own craft. The steamboat’s wheels, as she
backed water so mightily, threw forward great waves which, catching the
flatboat under the bow, drove her stern-on toward the bank. By a
vigorous use of the sweeps, and a great deal of tugging on his own part
at the steering-oar, Phil managed to slew the boat around in time to
prevent her going ashore; and fortunately there was just passageway
enough to let her slip by the steamer, grazing the guards in passing.
It was the work of a very few minutes, but it seemed an age to
the anxious boy; and as the steamer resumed her course, her crew
sending back a volley of maledictions, his only thought was one of
congratulation that he had escaped from so desperate an entanglement.
Just then, however, he observed Jim Hughes at the stern, climbing into
the towed skiff, into which he had already thrown his carpet-bag. He
observed also that before engaging in this manœuvre the pilot had set up
a handkerchief at the bow, apparently as a signal, and that some
rough-looking men were gathered on the shore just astern.
Quick as a flash Phil realized that for some reason Jim Hughes was
quitting the boat, and was in communication with the men on shore.
Without quite realizing why he should object to this, he proceeded to
put a stop to it. He called to his comrades, who could now leave the
oars, as the boat was floating out of the chute and into the main river
again, to come to his assistance. Without parley they tumbled over the
end of the boat into the skiff, which had not yet been cast loose, and
there seized the runaway. He fought with a good deal of desperation, but
five stalwart Hoosier boys are apt to be more than a match for any one
man, however strong and however desperate he may be. They quickly
overcame Jim Hughes and hustled him back on board the flatboat. There
they held him down, while one of them, at Phil’s request, ran for some
rope. A minute later they had their prisoner securely tied, both as to
arms and as to legs, and dropped him, feet first, down the cabin stairs.
No sooner was he out of the way than the men on shore began firing at
the flatboat. They had refrained prior to that time, apparently, lest
they should hit their comrade, for such he manifestly was. Their firing
was at long range, however, and it was now nearly dark. The swift
current soon carried the boat wholly beyond reach of rifle-shots and out
into the river. Lest the desperadoes on shore should follow in skiffs or
otherwise, Phil ordered the boys to the sweeps again, and kept them
there until they had driven the boat well over toward the opposite
shore. Then he summoned a council of war.
[Illustration: THE FIGHT WITH THE PILOT.
“A minute later they had their prisoner securely tied.”]
“What are we going to do with that fellow?” he asked.
“Well,” said Ed, “you have got him well tied and--”
“Yes, but,” said Irv, “have we any right to tie him? He hasn’t committed
any crime.”
“Yes, he has,” said Phil. “At least, we caught him in the act of
committing one. He was trying to steal one of Perry Raymond’s skiffs.
That’s worth twenty-five dollars. If he hadn’t anything worse in his
mind, his attempt on the skiff was grand larceny.”
“That’s so,” said Ed, “and we can turn him over to a magistrate at the
first landing for that.”
“I don’t think I shall make any landing,” said Phil, “until we get to
Memphis, and in the meantime I am going to know all there is to know
about this fellow. When he came on board he had his hair shaved close
with a barber’s mowing-machine, but, unfortunately for him, he didn’t
bring one of the machines with him. His hair is growing out again now,
and I have been comparing several of its little peculiarities closely
with descriptions and portraits in the newspapers I got at Cairo of the
fellow who is running away with that swag. Boys, I believe we have got
the man.”
Phil’s comrades were positively dumb with astonishment. At last the
silence was broken.
“If we have,” said Irv Strong, “this voyage will pay, for the rewards
offered for this man are very heavy.”
“Yes,” said Phil; “I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s so. There are
five thousand dollars on his capture.”
Just then there was a flash in the dark from the cabin scuttle, and a
bullet whistled over the heads of the boys. Jim Hughes had managed to
extricate himself, in part at least, from his bonds, and had begun to
use a weapon which he had doubtless hidden before that time, and of
which the boys had known nothing.
Ed was the first to act. He was always exceedingly quick to think. He
called to the boys to follow him, and, disregarding Jim’s fusillade, ran
to the scuttle.
In an instant, by their united efforts, they pushed the fellow back and
closed the lid that covered the stairs. Then Ed remembered that there
was a door leading out of the cabin into the hold of the boat. He
suggested to two of the boys that they go below, and close that with
bales of hay and the like. They did so hurriedly, piling the hay and
some apple barrels against the door, until it would have required the
strength of half a dozen men to push it open. In the meantime Ed had
possessed himself of a hatchet and nails, and had securely nailed down
the scuttle.
Just then Irv Strong thought of something.
“Suppose he gets desperate? He could easily set fire to things down
there.”
“That’s so,” said Phil, who had just returned from the hold. “Bring the
fire-extinguishers.”
By the time they got the four large carbonic acid receptacles a new
thought had occurred to Ed.
“Bring an auger, boys. There’s one lying forward there. The big one.”
It was quickly brought, though none of the boys could guess what Ed
intended to do. He took the auger, and quickly bored an inch hole in the
scuttle. A flash and a bullet came through it, but nobody was hurt.
“Now, give me an extinguisher,” said Ed.
Putting the nozzle of the hose through the hole, he turned the apparatus
upside down, and allowed its contents to be driven violently into the
little cabin. When the first extinguisher was exhausted he turned on the
hose of another, and after that of a third.
For a while the imprisoned man, shut up in a box ten feet by twelve and
not over five or six feet high, indulged in lusty yells, but these soon
became husky, and presently ceased entirely. The moment they did, Ed
called out:--
“Rip off the scuttle quick, boys; he’s suffocated.”
The boys did not at all understand what had happened, but they acted
promptly in obedience to their wisest comrade’s order. When the scuttle
was opened and a lantern brought, Jim was seen lying limp at the foot of
the little ladder.
“Now, be careful,” said Ed. “Irving, you and Phil--you’re the
strongest--go down, hold your breath, and drag him up. Be sure to hold
your breath. Do just as you do when you’re diving.”
They made an effort, but almost instantly came back, gasping for air,
sneezing, and with eyes and noses tingling.
“Catch your breath quick,” said Ed, “and go down again. You must get him
out, or he will be dead, if he isn’t dead already.”
They made another dash, this time acting more carefully upon the
instruction to treat the descent as if it were a dive, and carefully
holding their breath. In a brief while they dragged the body of the
pilot out upon the deck, and Ed gave directions for restoring life by
artificial respiration.
“You see, he’s practically a drowned man,” he said.
“Drowned?” said Will Moreraud. “Why, he’s not even been in the water,
and that little dash with the hose wouldn’t drown a kitten.”
“Never mind that,” said Ed; “quick now; he’s drowned, or just the same
thing. We must bring him to life.”
“Well, slip that rope around his arms and legs while we do it,” said
Phil, “or we’ll have trouble when he comes to.”
This was a suggestion which they all recognized as altogether timely,
and so the apparent corpse was carefully secured by two of the boys,
while the rest worked at the task of restoring him to life.
He “came to” in a little while, and lay stretched out upon the deck,
weak and exhausted. Then, at Ed’s suggestion, the boys went below by the
forward door, rolled away the obstructions, and threw open the door of
the cabin, so that all the air possible might pass through it. It was
half an hour at least before breathing became comfortable in that little
box. Then Phil made a thorough exploration of Jim’s carpet-bag, bunk,
and everything else that pertained to him. His only remark as to the
result of his personal inquiry was:--
“I guess we needn’t trouble ourselves about having arrested this man.”
While waiting for the air to render the cabin habitable again, Constant
said, “But, Ed, how did he _drown_ without going into the water? I don’t
understand.”
“Neither do I,” said Will Moreraud; “but he was drowned all safe enough.
I’ve seen too many drowned people not to know one when I see him.”
Then Ed explained:--
“That cabin is a little box about ten feet by twelve, and six feet high,
and when shut up it’s nearly air tight. It contains only a little over
seven hundred cubic feet of air. These chemical fire extinguishers are
filled with water saturated with soda or saleratus. There is a bottle in
each one, filled with oil of vitriol, or a coarse, cheap sort of
sulphuric acid. It is so arranged that when you turn the thing upside
down the bottle breaks, and the acid is dumped into the water. Now when
you pour sulphuric acid into a mixture of water and soda, the soda gives
off an enormous quantity of what is commonly called carbonic acid gas,
though I believe its right name is carbon dioxide. At any rate, it is
the same gas that makes soda water ‘fizz.’ But when you turn one of
these machines upside down you get about ten or twenty times as much of
the gas in the water as there is in the same quantity of soda water; and
when you turn this doubled and twisted soda water loose it gives off its
gas in enormous quantities. Now this gas is heavier than air, so when it
was set loose down in the cabin there, it sank to the bottom, and the
air floated on top of it. As the cabin filled up with the gas the air
came out through the hole in the scuttle and the cracks round it.
Pouring that gas into the cabin was just like pouring water into a jug;
the gas took the place of air just as the water in the jug takes the
place of the air that was in it at first.
“Suppose you let a lighted lantern down into the cabin, Will,” suggested
the older boy, “and see what happens.”
Will did so, and the lantern went out as promptly as it would have done
if plunged into water.
“You see,” said Ed, “this gas puts out fire, and it puts out life in the
same way. It smothers both. It absolutely excludes oxygen, and neither
animal life nor fire can exist without oxygen. Do I make the thing
clear?”
“Perfectly,” said all the boys.
“Then that’s why we choked so when we went down the ladder?” said Phil.
“Certainly. Your air was as completely cut off as if you had dived into
water. That’s why I cautioned you to hold your breath just as if you had
been diving into the river.”
CHAPTER XVI
“TALKING BUSINESS”
Naturally the boys were too much excited over their capture to talk of
anything else, and for a time they did not even think or talk of the
most important phase of that. They discussed the shooting, which all of
them saw to be reason enough for the arrest, but it was not until well
on into the night that any of them thought to ask Phil about the results
of his search of Jim’s satchel.
Meantime they had carried the pinioned man below and securely bound him
to his bunk. Then they had cooked and eaten their supper, talking all
the time, each playfully describing his own consternation at every step
of the late proceeding. Finally Will Moreraud said:--
“By the way, what does it all mean?”
“Yes,” joined in Irv Strong, “it at last begins to dawn upon my hitherto
excited consciousness, that we have not yet heard the results of Phil’s
explorations among Jim’s effects. Tell us all about it, Phil.”
They were sitting in the cabin, or half way in it. That is to say, Phil
was sitting in the mouth of the scuttle above, watching the river and
the course of the flatboat; Irv sat just below him on the steps, and the
other boys were gathered around the little table at the foot of the
ladder.
“One of you come up here, then,” said Phil, “and keep the lookout while
I tell you about it. I thought you’d ask after you got through relating
your personal experiences.”
Ed volunteered to take the place at the top of the stairs, although his
frail nerves were now quivering after the strain he had been through.
Phil seized the carpet-bag which he had instinctively kept under his
hand all the time, and descended the ladder.
There he opened it and spread its contents on the table.
“These are what I have found,” he said, suppressing his excitement.
“This big bundle of government bonds,” laying it on the table; “this big
bundle of railroad and other securities,” laying that down in its turn;
“this great wad of greenbacks, and, best of all, _these_!”
As he finished, he held up a bundle of letters.
“What are they? Why are they the best part of all?” queried the boys in
a breath.
“They are letters from Jim Hughes’s fellow criminals. I called them
‘best of all’ because they will enable the authorities to catch and
convict the whole gang!”
The exultation of the crew was great.
“We shall have rendered a great service to the public, shan’t we?” asked
Constant.
“A very great service, indeed. And that’s what we must rejoice in,”
answered Ed. “But we mustn’t fail to render it. We mustn’t let the thief
slip his bonds and escape.”
Hughes was lying there in his bunk all the while, but they paid no
attention to him. They had ceased to think of him as a man. To them he
was only a criminal, just as he might have been an alligator or a
rattlesnake.
“Oh, we’ll take good care of that,” responded Phil. “From this moment
till we deliver him to the officers of the law, we’ll keep one fellow
always right here on guard over him. It will mean double duty for some
of you to-night, for I’m going ashore presently.”
“Going ashore! What for, and where?” was eagerly asked.
“There’s a little town down here somewhere, as I see by the map, and
when we get to it I’m going ashore to send telegrams. You see, Hughes’s
‘pals’ might have somebody at Memphis armed with a _habeas corpus_ or
something of that sort, and take him away from us. I’ve a mind to
deliver the fugitive myself. So I propose to have officers to meet us
with warrants and things when we reach Memphis.”
“Good idea,” said Irv.
“And there’s the town just a little way ahead,” called out Ed, from the
top of the ladder.
Phil went at once on deck, leaped into the skiff and rowed rapidly ahead
of the slowly floating flatboat, or as rapidly as the drift would let
him. When he reached the village he found to his disappointment that
there was no telegraph office there. But he learned that there was one
at the hydrographic engineer’s station a few miles below, on the
opposite side of the river.
By this time the flatboat had passed him, and he had a long “stern
chase” through the darkness and drift before he could overtake and board
her again.
Then, assigning Ed to guard their prisoner in the cabin, he called the
other boys to the sweeps.
“The river is very wide here,” he explained, “and the telegraph station
is on the other side. We must take the boat well over there.”
The boys pulled with a will, and long before the station came in view
the flatboat was close in shore on the farther side of the river.
Meantime, or a little later, something happened in the cabin. Ed was
reading a book, when suddenly the prisoner called out:--
“Ed.”
“Yes?” said the boy, laying down his book.
“I’m awfully tired, lying in one position. Can’t you turn me over a
bit?”
Ed went at once to his relief. His torture was no part of the purpose of
anybody on board. But after Ed had readjusted the ropes so that the
fellow could rest more comfortably, the prisoner said:--
“See here, Ed, I want to talk to you. You fellows have made a tremendous
strike, for of course there’s no use in disguising the truth any longer,
to you at least, or pretending to be what I have tried to appear. You’ve
got your man and you’ve got the proofs dead to rights. You’ve found me
with the swag in my possession. If you turn me over to the law, I’ll go
up for ten or twenty years to a certainty. There is no use in defending
myself. The case is too clear, too complete. Do you see?”
“Certainly” responded Ed. “You must pay the penalty of your crime. We
have no personal hard feeling against you, Jim, except that you ought
not to have tried to involve us boys as you have done, and--”
“Well, you see, Ed,” interrupted the bound man, “I was desperate. There
was a big price on my head, and hundreds of men were looking for me
everywhere. On the one hand, a prison stared me in the face, on the
other was freedom with abundant wealth to enjoy it with. If I could get
down the river, I thought I should have everything snug and right. I
didn’t mean to get you boys into any trouble--really and truly I didn’t,
Ed. My plan was to blunder into that chute, and while you fellows were
all scared half to death about it, to slip ashore. I had those men on
the bank just for safety’s sake. They don’t really know anything about
me or what I’ve got--what I did have,” he corrected, with sudden
recollection that his carpet-bag was no longer in his possession.
“Those men were hired by my partners to have horses there and run me off
into Mississippi, and I was to give them a hundred or two for the job,
besides paying for the horses we might ride to death. Really and truly,
Ed, that’s all there was of that.”
“I see no particular reason to doubt your statement, Jim,” replied the
boy. “But what of it?”
“Well, you see, I want to talk business with you, Ed, and I wanted you
to know, in the first place, that I hadn’t tried to harm you boys in any
way--at least, till I was caught in a trap by that sharp brother of
yours.” There was a distinct touch of malignity in the man’s tone as he
mentioned Phil, to whom he justly attributed his capture.
“Never mind that,” he resumed after a moment. “I want to talk business
with you, as I said. Here are you five boys, all alone on the river.
Anything might happen to a flatboat. You’re likely to make, as nearly as
I can figure it out from your talk, about fifty or a hundred or at most
a hundred and fifty dollars apiece out of the trip, after paying
steamboat passage back. Now you’ve caught me. If you surrender me--”
“Which of course we shall,” broke in Ed, in astonishment.
“As I was saying” continued Jim, “if you surrender me, you’ll probably
get the reward offered, though that’s never quite certain.”
“What possible difference can that make?” asked Ed, indignantly. “You’re
a thief. We have caught you with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth
of other people’s property in your possession. We have only one thing to
do. We must deliver you to the officers of the law. We should do that if
not a cent of reward was offered. We should do it simply because we’re
ordinarily honest persons who think that thieves ought to be punished
and that stolen property ought to be returned to its owners. What has
the reward to do with it?”
“I’m glad you look at it in that way,” said the prisoner. “At most the
reward is a trifle, as you say. Five thousand dollars to five of you
means only a thousand dollars apiece. Now I’ve a business proposition to
make. Suppose you let me slip ashore somewhere down here, I’ll leave
behind me--I’ll put into your hands all the coupon bonds. They’re better
than cash--they are good for their face and a good deal more anywhere.
You boys can sink the old flatboat down the river somewhere, sell out
the bonds to any banker, and go ashore rich--worth more than anybody in
Vevay’s got, or ever will have.”
The man spoke eagerly, but not excitedly, and he watched closely to see
the effect of his words.
Ed preserved his self-control. Indeed, it was his habit always to grow
cool, or at least to seem so, in precise proportion to the occasion for
growing hot. He waited awhile before he spoke. Then he said:--
“Jim Hughes,--or whatever your name is--well, I’ll simply call you
Thief, for that name belongs to you even if nothing else that you
possess does,--you thief, if you had made such a proposition as that to
my father, he would have--well, he was said to be hot-headed. I’m not
hot-headed--”
“No. You’re reasonable. You’re--”
“Stop!” shouted Ed. “If you weren’t tied up there and helpless, you’d
make me hot-headed, too, like my father, and I’d do to you what he would
have done. As it is, I’m cool-headed. I’ll ‘talk business’ with you; and
the business I have to talk is just this: I forbid you from this moment
to open your mouth again, except to ask for water, while you are on this
flatboat. If you say one other word to me or to any of my companions
I’ll forget that I am not my hot-headed father, and--well, it will be
very greatly the worst for you. Now not a word!” seeing that the fellow
was about to speak. “Not a word, except the word ‘water,’ till my
brother turns you over to the officers of the law. I’m not captain, but
this particular order of mine ‘goes.’ I’m going to ask my brother to
pass it on to the others, and it will be enforced, be very sure. They
are not cool-headed as I am, particularly Phil. He’s like my father
sometimes. Remember, you are not to speak any word except ‘water’ till
you pass from our custody.”
The high-strung boy tried to control himself, but he was livid with
rage. He choked and gasped for breath as he spoke. Weak as he was
physically, he would certainly have assaulted the man who had
deliberately proposed to make him a partner in crime, but for the fact
that the fellow was bound, hand and foot, and therefore helpless. In his
rage Ed ran up the ladder and called for his brother, meaning to ask
that the man be released from his bonds in order that he, Ed Lowry,
might wreck vengeance upon him for the insult.
Phil had gone ashore to send his telegrams. Irv Strong had been left in
command of the boat. He asked Ed what was the matter. Ed, still choking
with rage, explained as well as he could, growing more excited every
moment, and ended by demanding:--
“Let the scoundrel loose! cut the ropes that bind him, and give me a
chance at him!”
“Hold on, Ed,” said Irv. “The wise Benjamin Franklin once said: ‘No
gentleman _will_ insult one; no other _can_.’ This thief, burglar, bank
robber, that we’ve got tied in a bunk down there, _can’t_ insult _you_.
He doesn’t know our kind. He isn’t in our class. It never occurs to
his mind that anybody is really honest. It seems to him a question of
price, and he thinks he has offered you mighty good terms. If any man
who understood common honesty and believed in its existence had made
such a proposition to you, your wrath would be righteous. As it is,
your wrath is merely ridiculous. Of course a trapped bank burglar tries
to buy his way out with his swag. Of course such a creature doesn’t
know what honest people think or feel--he has no capacity to understand
it any more than he could understand Russian. Go below, Constant, and
watch that thief. Ed, you must recover yourself. Phil will come aboard
presently, and I really don’t suppose you want to tell Phil precisely
what has happened and leave _him_ to--well, let us say to _discipline_
Jim Hughes.”
“No, no; oh, no!” said Ed, suddenly realizing what that would mean.
“Phil would--oh, I don’t know what he wouldn’t do. For conscience’ sake
don’t tell him what happened!”
“Suppose you go forward then,” suggested Irv, “and sit down on the
anchor and cool off, and so far recover yourself that Phil won’t notice
anything or ask any questions when he comes aboard.”
The suggestion was very quietly given, quite as if the whole matter had
been one of no consequence. But it was instantly effective. Irv well
knew that Ed’s greatest dread was that Phil’s fiery temper might get the
better of him sometime. So Irv had shrewdly appealed to that fear.
“I will; I’ll cool down at once,” said Ed, rising in his earnestness.
“Nobody knows what Phil would do or wouldn’t do if he knew of this. Irv,
you must prevent that. Make all the boys pledge themselves not to let
him know, at least till Hughes is out of our hands.”
Irv was glad enough to make the promise and to fulfil it. For he, too,
knew with what reckless fervor the high-mettled boy would be sure to
inflict punishment for the insult should he learn of it.
“Phil is the jolliest, best-natured fellow in the world,” explained Irv,
when he asked the other boys not to tell their captain what had
happened, “but you know what a temper he has--or rather you don’t know.
None of us does, because nobody has ever made the mistake of stirring
him up with a real, vital insult.”
“No,” said Will, “and I pity the fellow that ever makes that particular
mistake.”
“We’ll never tell him,” said Constant. “If we did, we mightn’t be able
to deliver our prisoner.”
CHAPTER XVII
AT ANCHOR
Phil had sent two telegrams,--one to the authorities at Memphis, and
the other to the plundered bank in Cincinnati. In each he had announced
his captures,--the man and the funds,--and in each he had asked that
officers to arrest and persons to identify the culprit should be waiting
at Memphis on the arrival of the flatboat.
On his return to the flatboat he felt himself so excited and sleepless
that he sent his comrades below to sleep and by turns to watch the
prisoner. He would himself remain on duty on deck all night. As the
night wore away, the boy thought out all the possibilities, for he felt
that for any miscarriage in this matter he would be solely responsible.
Among the possibilities was this: that should the flatboat arrive at
Memphis before some one could get there from Cincinnati to identify the
prisoner, he might be discharged for want of such identification. It
would take a day or two to send men by rail from Cincinnati to Memphis,
while the fierce current of this Mississippi flood promised to take the
flatboat thither within less than twenty hours.
After working out all the probabilities in his mind as well as he could,
Phil called below for all his comrades to come to the sweeps. He did not
tell them his purpose; they were too sleepy even to ask. But studying
the “lay of the land” on either side, he steered the flatboat into a
sort of pocket on the Tennessee shore, and to the bewilderment of his
comrades, ordered the anchor cast overboard.
By the time that the anchor held, and the boat came to a rest in the
bend, the boys were much too wide awake not to have their minds full of
interrogation marks.
“What do you mean, Phil?” “Why have we anchored?” “How long are we to
remain here?” “What’s the matter, anyhow?” “Have you gone crazy, or what
is it?”
These and a volley of similar questions were fired at him.
He did not answer. He went to one side of the boat and then to the other
to observe position.
“How much anchor line is out, Will?” he presently asked.
“Nearly all of it,” answered his comrade.
“This won’t do,” said Phil. “Up anchor.”
The boys were more than ever puzzled. But they tugged away at the anchor
windlass till the flukes let go the bottom and the anchor was halfway
up. Then Phil called out:--
“That will do. Put a peg in the windlass and let the anchor swing in the
water. To the sweeps! Hard on the starboard! We must push her inshore
and into shallower water, where the anchor will hold her, and where no
steamboat is likely to run over us. Who would have thought it was so
deep over here?”
The boys now began to understand why the first anchorage had been
abandoned and a shallower one sought for, but they did not yet know what
their captain meant by anchoring at all. They did not understand why, on
so clear a night, with a river so generously flooded, he did not let
things take their course and get to Memphis as quickly as possible.
Presently the anchor, dragging at half cable, fouled the bottom and,
with a strain that made the check-post creak, the flatboat came to a
full stop.
“That will do,” said Phil. “This is as good a place as any. Pay out some
more anchor line and let her rest.”
“But what on earth are you anchoring for?” asked the others, “and how
long are we going to lie here?” queried Ed.
“Nearly two days and nights,” was the reply,--“long enough to let
somebody travel from Cincinnati to Memphis who can identify Jim Hughes
and take him off our hands. I suppose it would be all right if we went
on without waiting. But I’m not certain of that, and I’m not taking any
chances in this business, so we’ll lie at anchor here for nearly two
days. Go to bed, all of you except the one on watch over Jim Hughes. I’m
not sleepy, so I’ll stay on deck for the rest of the night.”
But by that time the boys were not sleepy either, so they made no haste
about going to their bunks.
“We’ll be pretty short of something to eat by that time,” said
Constant, who was just then in charge of the cooking. “We have only a
scrap of bread left. The eggs and fresh meat and milk are used up, and
we’ll have to fall back on corn-bread and fried salt pork.”
“Well, that’s food fit for the gods,” said Irv Strong, “if the gods
happen to be healthy, hungry flatboatmen. But how important the food
question always is in an emergency! How it always crops up when you get
away from home!”
“Yes, and at home too,” said Ed; “only there we have somebody else to
look after the three meals a day. It’s the most important question in
the world. If all food supplies were cut off for a single month, this
world would be as dead as the moon.”
“That’s true,” broke in Will. “And really, I suppose the world isn’t
very forehanded with it at best. I wonder how many years we could last,
anyhow, if the crops ceased to grow.”
“Not more than one year,” replied the older boy. “There never was a time
when mankind had food enough accumulated to last for much more than a
year, and probably there never will be. If there should be no crop for
a single year, hundreds of thousands would starve every month, and a
second failure would simply blot out the race. As for forehandedness, we
actually live from hand to mouth, especially the people in the big
cities. Only last winter a great snowstorm blockaded the railroads
leading into New York for only three or four days, and even in that
short time the price of food went up so high that the charitable
institutions had all they could do to keep poor people from starving. So
far from the world generally being forehanded for food, there never was
a time when the food on hand was really sufficient to go round.”
“Well, of course,” said Will, meditatively, “there are always some
people so ‘down on their luck,’ as the saying is, that they can’t earn a
living, but there’s always enough food for them if they could get hold
of it.”
“You’re mistaken,” said Ed. “There is nearly always something like a
famine in parts of India and Russia, and even in Italy and other parts
of Europe there are great masses of very hard-working people who never
in their lives get enough to eat.”
There were exclamations of surprise at this, but Ed presently
continued: “In many European countries the peasants do not see a piece
of meat once a year, and in hardly any of them do the poorer people get
what we would think sufficient for food. In fact, their food is not
sufficient. They are always more or less starved, and that’s the reason
so many of them are the little runts they are.”
“Then we are better off than most other nations?” said Irv.
“Immeasurably!” said Ed. “Ours is the best fed nation in the world. It
is the only nation in which the poorest laborer can have meat on his
table every day in the year, for even in England the poorer laborers
have to make out with cheese pretty often.”
“What’s the reason?” asked Phil, who had acquired the habit of using
short sentences and as few words as possible since his burden of
responsibility had borne so heavily upon him.
“There are several reasons. Our soil is fertile--but so is that of
France and Italy, for that matter. I suppose the great reason is that we
do not have to support vast armies in idleness. In most of the European
countries they make everybody serve in the army for three or four
years. It costs a lot of money to support these armies and it costs the
country a great deal more than that.”
“In what way?” asked Constant, who, being on sentry duty over Hughes,
was sitting halfway down the ladder.
“Why, by taking all the young men away from productive work for three
years. Take half a million young men away from work and put them in the
army, and you lose each year all the work that a man could do in half a
million years, all the food or other things that half a million men
could produce in a year?”
“And the other people have to make it all up,” drawled Irv. “I don’t
wonder they’re tired.”
“And besides making it all up, as you say,” responded Ed, “those other
people have to work to feed and clothe and house and arm all these men,
besides transporting them from one place to another, and paying for
costly parades and all that sort of thing. Why, every time one of the
big modern guns is fired at a target it burns up some man’s earnings for
a whole year! Some man must work a year or more to pay the expense of
doing it!”
“Then why don’t the people of those countries ‘kick’?” asked Will, “and
abolish their armies?”
“Because the people of those countries have masters, and the masters own
the armies, and the armies would make short work of any ‘kick.’ In our
country the people are the masters, and they have always refused to let
anybody set up a great standing army. When we have a war, the people
volunteer and fight it to a finish. Then the men who have been doing the
fighting are mustered out, and they go back to their work, earn their
own living, and put in their time producing something that mankind
needs.”
“Cipher it all down,” said Irv, “it’s liberty that makes this the best
country in the world to live in.”
“Precisely!” said Ed, with emphasis. “And about the most important duty
every American has to do is to remember that one, supreme fact, and do
his part to keep our country as it is.”
CHAPTER XVIII
AT BREAKFAST
The day was dawning by this time, and the conversation was broken up.
Constant set to work to prepare breakfast while the others extinguished
the lanterns, trimmed them, filled them with oil, and “cleaned up”
generally.
When breakfast was served, the scarcity of supplies was apparent.
There were some “cold-water hoecakes,”--that is to say, bread made of
corn-meal mixed up with cold water and a little salt, and baked in cakes
about half or three quarters of an inch thick upon a griddle. There was
a dish of fried salt pork, and with it some fried potatoes. And there
was nothing else, except a “private dish” consisting of two slices of
toast made from the scrap of stale wheat bread left, with a poached egg
on each of them. There was no coffee and no butter, the last remains of
that having been used upon the toast.
The “private dish,” Constant explained, was for Ed. “You see, we’re
out to get him well, and his digestive apparatus doesn’t take kindly
to fried things. I’ve saved four more eggs for him--the last we’ve
got,--and six more slices of stale wheat bread. The rest of you are
barbarians, and you’ll wrestle with any sort of hash I can get up till
we get to Memphis.”
Ed protested vigorously against the favoritism shown him, but the others
supported Constant’s plan, and the older boy had to yield.
“Well, I am deeply grateful for your kindness, boys,” he said, “and I’m
duly grateful also to the thousands of men in various parts of the
country who have worked so hard to furnish me with these two slices of
toast.”
The boys looked up from their plates.
“Here’s another revelation,” said Irv. “My ill-furnished intelligence is
about to receive another supply of much-needed rudimentary information.
Go on, Ed. Tell us about it. How in the world do you figure out your
‘thousands’ of men who have had anything to do with those two slices of
toast?”
“Oh, that was a joke,” said Will.
“It was nothing of the kind,” answered Ed. “I can’t possibly count up
all the people who have worked hard to give me this toast, but they
certainly number greatly more than a thousand.”
“We’re only waiting for wisdom to drop from your lips--” began Irv, with
his drawl.
“O, quit it, Irv!” said Phil; “you’ll learn more by listening than by
talking.”
“That is probably so,” said the other, “though I remember that we heard
something away up the river, about how much a person learns of a subject
by talking about it.”
“Yes, but--”
“Listen,” said Ed, “and I’ll explain. The wheat out of which this toast
was made was grown probably in Dakota or Minnesota. There was a farmer
there, and perhaps there were some farm-hands also, who ploughed the
ground, sowed the seed, reaped the wheat, threshed it, winnowed it, and
all that. Then--”
“Yes, but all that wouldn’t include more than half a dozen,” said Phil.
“Yes, it would,” said Irv, “for there’s all the womenfolk who cooked
the men’s meals and--”
“Never mind them,” said Ed, “though of course they helped to give me my
toast. Let’s count only those that contributed directly to that kindly
end. These farmer people used ploughs, harrows, drills, reapers,
threshing-machines, wagons, and all that, and somebody must have made
them. And back of those who made them were those who dug the iron for
them out of the ground, and cut the wood in them out of the forest, and
the men who made the tools with which they did all this, and--”
“I see,” said Irv. “It’s the biggest endless chain imaginable.
Thousands? Why, thousands had a hand in it before you even get to the
farmer--the men who made the tools, and the men who made the tools that
made the tools, and so on back to the very beginnings of creation. And
if we face about, there are the men that ran the railroads which hauled
the wheat to mill, and the millers, and all that. Oh, the thousand are
easy enough to make out.”
“Yes,” said Ed, “and then the railroads and the mills had to be built.
The men that built them, the engineers, mechanics, and laborers, all
helped to give me my two slices of toast. So did the men behind them,
the men who made their tools and their materials, the woodsmen who
chopped trees for ties, the miners who dug the iron, the smelters, the
puddlers, the rolling-mill men, who wrought the crude ore into steel
rails; then there are all the men who made the locomotives, and the
cars, and the machinery of the mills, and--”
“Oh, stop for mercy’s sake,” said Will. “It’s no use to count. There
aren’t thousands, but millions of them. And of course the same thing is
true of our clothes, our shoes, and everything else.”
“But with so many people’s work represented in it,” asked Irv,
reflectively, “why isn’t that piece of toast an enormously costly
affair?”
“Simply _because_ so many people’s work is represented in it,” answered
Ed. “If one man had to do it all for himself, it would never be done at
all. Just imagine a man set down on the earth with no tools and nobody
to help him. How much buttered toast do you suppose he would be able to
turn out in a year? Why, before he could get so much as a hoe he would
have to travel hundreds of miles, dig some iron and coal, cut wood with
which to convert the coal into coke, melt the iron out of its ore,
change it into steel, and shape it into a hoe. Why, even a hoe would
cost him a year’s hard work or more, while a wagon he could hardly make
without tools in a lifetime. Now he can earn the price of a hoe in a few
hours, and the cost of a wagon in a few days or weeks, simply because
everybody works for everybody else, each man doing only the thing that
he can do best.”
“Then we all work for each other without knowing it,” said Will.
“Of course we do. When we fellows were diving for that pig-iron, we were
working for the thousands of people who will use or profit by the things
that somebody else will make out of that pig-iron and--”
“And for the somebody else,” said Irv, “that will make those things out
of the pig-iron, and for all the ‘somebody elses’ that work for them,
and so on in every direction! Whew! it makes my head swim to think of
it. But what a nabob you are, Ed! Just think! Thousands and even
millions of people are, at this moment, at work to make you
comfortable!”
“Yes, and each one of the millions is at work for all the others while
all the others are at work for him. Theorists sometimes dream out
systems of ‘coöperative industry,’ hoping in that way to better men’s
condition. But their very wildest dreams do not even approach the
complex and perfectly working coöperation we already have in use.”
“Just think of it!” said Irv. “Suppose that every man in our little town
of two or three thousand people had to do everything for himself! He
would have to raise sheep for wool, card, spin, and weave it, and
fashion it into clothes. He would have to raise cotton and linen in the
same way, and cattle too, and keep a tannery and be a shoemaker and a
farmer and a mason and a carpenter and all the rest of it. And then he
would have to mine his own iron and coal, and make his own tools
and--well, he wouldn’t do it, because he couldn’t. He’d just wander off
into the woods hunting for something that he could kill and eat, and
he’d try to kill anybody else that did the same thing, for fear that the
somebody else would get some of the game that he wanted for himself.
He’d be simply a savage!”
“Well, but even savages go in tribes and hunt together and live
together,” said Will.
“Of course they do,” answered Ed, “and that’s their first step up toward
civilization. When they do that they have learned in a small way the
advantage of working together, each for all and all for each. The better
they learn that lesson, the more civilized they become.”
“Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything and
everybody to work for the state and be supported by it?” asked Phil.
“Not a little bit of it,” said Ed. “That would be simply to go back to
the tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize the
advantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. We
have worked out of that and into something better. With us, every man
works for all the rest by working for himself in the way that best
serves his own welfare. Under our system every man is urged and
stimulated by self-interest to do the very best and most work that he
can. Under a communistic or socialistic or tribal system, every man
would be as lazy as the rest would let him be, because he would be sure
of a share in all that the others might make by their labor. It is
sharp competition that makes men do their best. It is in the ‘struggle
for existence’ that men advance most rapidly.”
“Wonder if that wasn’t what Humboldt meant,” said Irv, “when he called
the banana ‘the curse of the tropics,’ adding that when a man planted
one banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendants
to the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessity
for clothes.”
“Exactly,” said Ed. “Somebody once said that ‘every man is as lazy as he
dares to be.’”
“Well, I am, anyhow,” yawned Irv, “and so I’m going up on deck under the
awning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night.”
CHAPTER XIX
SCUTTLE CHATTER
The pocket in which _The Last of the Flatboats_ lay at anchor was well
out of the path of passing steamboats. It was also pretty free from
drift-wood, except of the smaller sort. So there was nothing of any
consequence to be done during the two days of waiting. It was necessary
to pump a little now and then, as the very tightest boat will let in a
little bilge water, especially when she is as heavily loaded as this one
was. There were what Irv Strong called “the inevitable three meals a
day” to get, but beyond that there was nothing whatever to do.
Ed’s books were a good deal in demand at this time. Irv and Phil managed
to do some swimming in spite of the drift-wood and the coldness of the
water. For the rest, the boys lounged about on the deck, with now and
then a “long talk” at the scuttle or in the cabin if it rained. Their
“long talks” on deck were always held around the scuttle, so that the
one on guard over Hughes might take part in them. There were only five
steps to the little ladder that led from deck to cabin, and by sitting
on the middle one the boy on guard could keep his feet on the edge of
the prisoner’s bunk and let his head protrude above the deck.
They had naturally been thinking a good deal about what Ed had told them
concerning food, and now and then a question would arise in the mind of
one or another of them which would set the conversation going again.
“I wonder,” said Will Moreraud, “how men first found out what things
were good to eat?”
“By trying them, I guess,” said Phil. “I read in a book somewhere that
whenever the primitive man saw a new beast he asked first, ‘can he eat
me?’ and next, ‘can I eat him?’”
“Yes,” said Ed, “and that sort of thing continued until our own time,
when science came in to help us. You know where the jimson weed got its
name, don’t you?”
None of them had ever heard.
“Well, ‘jimson’ is only a corruption of ‘Jamestown.’ When the early
settlers landed at Jamestown they found so many new kinds of grain, and
animals, and plants that they began trying them to see which were good
and which were not. Among other things they thought the burs of the
jimson weed--the poisonous thorn-apple of stramonium--looked rather
inviting. So they boiled a lot of the burs and ate them. Like idiots,
they didn’t confine the experiment to one man, or better still ‘try it
on a dog,’ but set to work, a lot of them at once, to eat the stuff. It
poisoned them, of course, and made a great sensation in Jamestown. So
they named the plant the Jamestown weed.”
“I remember,” said Irv, “my grandfather telling me that when he was
young, people thought tomatoes were poisonous, and he said it took a
long time for those that tried them to teach other people better.”
“That’s what I had in my mind,” said Ed, “when I said that there was no
known way to find out whether things were good to eat or not except by
trying them, till modern science came to our aid.”
“How does modern science manage it?” asked Will.
“Well, if any new fruit or vegetable should turn up now, a chemist would
analyze it to find out just what it was composed of. Then the doctors
who make a study of such things would ‘try it on a dog,’ or more likely
on a rabbit or guinea pig, to find out if it had any value as a
medicine. They try every new substance in that way in fact, whether it
is an original substance just discovered or some new compound. They even
tried nitro-glycerine, and found it to be a very valuable medicine. So,
too, they have got some of our most valuable drugs from coal oil, simply
by trying them.”
“Good for modern science!” said Phil. “But, Ed, what were the other new
things the colonists found in this country?”
“There were many. But those that have proved of most importance are
corn, tobacco, tomatoes, watermelons, turkeys, Irish potatoes, and sweet
potatoes.”
“Oh, come now,” said Irv, raising his head and resting it on his hand,
“you said _Irish_ potatoes.”
“And why not? They are a very important product, and the crop of them
sells for many millions of--”
“_But_ they didn’t originate in this country, did they? Weren’t they
brought here from Ireland?”
“Not at all. They were taken from here to Ireland.”
“Then why are they called Irish potatoes?”
“Because they proved to be so much the most profitable crop the Irish
people could raise that they soon came to be the chief crop grown there.
I don’t know whether the colonists found any of them growing wild in
Virginia or not. They are supposed to have originated in South America
and Mexico. At any rate, they are strictly native Americans. By the
way,” said Ed, “the people who thought tomatoes poisonous were not so
very far out in their reckoning. Both the tomato and the potato are
plants belonging to the deadly nightshade family, and the vines of both
contain a virulent poison.”
“Perhaps somebody tried tomato vines for greens,” said Phil, “and got
himself ready for the coroner before the tomatoes had time to grow and
ripen.”
“That isn’t unlikely,” said Ed. “At any rate, an experiment of that kind
would have gone far to give the fruit a bad name.”
“However that may be,” said Irv, “it is pretty certain that men must
have found out what was and what wasn’t good to eat mainly by trying.
There’s salt now. It is the only mineral substance that men everywhere
eat. All the rest of our foods are either animal or vegetable.”
“And that’s a puzzle,” replied Ed. “Man must have got a very early taste
of salt, or else there wouldn’t be any man.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, the human animal simply can’t live without salt. He digests his
food by means of an acid which he gets from salt, and from nothing else
whatever. So he must have had salt from the beginning.”
“The Garden of Eden must have been a seaport then,” mused Phil. “Adam
and Eve probably boiled their new potatoes in water dipped up from the
docks.”
The boys laughed, and Ed continued:--
“It is a curious fact that the ancients, even as late as Greek times,
knew nothing about sugar; at least, in its pure state. They got a good
deal of it in fruits and vegetables, of course, and the Greeks used
honey very lavishly. They not only ate it, but they made an intoxicating
liquor out of it which they called mead. But of sugar, pure and simple,
they knew nothing whatever. Their language hasn’t even a word for it.
Yet in our time sugar is one of the most important products in the
world, so important that many nations pay large bounties to encourage
its cultivation.”
“By the way,” asked Phil, after a few moments’ meditation, “what is the
most important crop in this country?”
“Wheat”--“cotton,” answered Will and Constant respectively.
“No,” said Ed, “corn is very much our most important crop.”
“More so than wheat?”
“Four to one and more,” said Ed. “Our corn crop amounts to about two
thousand million bushels every year--often greatly more. Our wheat crop
averages about five hundred million bushels. And as corn has more food
value in it, pound for pound, than wheat has, it is easy to see that not
only for us, but for all the world, our corn crop is quite four to one
more important than our wheat.”
“But I thought corn wasn’t eaten much except in this country?” queried
Irv. “The Germans and French and English don’t eat it.”
“Don’t they, though?” asked Ed, with a quizzical look. “Don’t they eat
enormous quantities of American pork, bacon, and beef? And what is that
but American corn in another shape?”
“That’s so,” said Irv, this time sitting bolt upright. “I’ve heard that
the big farmers all over the West keep tab on the price of meat and
corn. If meat is high and corn low, they bring up all their hogs from
the woods, fatten them on the corn and sell them. But if meat is low or
corn high, they sell the corn.”
“And they know to the nicest fraction of a pound,” added Ed, “how much
corn it takes to make a given amount of pork.”
“Well, even if we didn’t sell any corn at all to other nations,” said
Phil, “I should think our crop would help them. _We_ eat a great deal of
it, and if we hadn’t it, we’d eat just so much wheat instead, and so we
should have just that much less wheat to sell to them.”
“Exactly,” said Ed. “Every thing that feeds a man in any country leaves
precisely that much more to feed other men with in other countries.”
“And what a lot it does take to feed a man!” exclaimed Will.
“Not so much as you probably imagine,” said Ed. “A robust man requires
about a pound and a half of meat and a pound and a half of bread per
day. Vegetables are simply substitutes for bread and cost about the
same. Eggs, milk, etc., take the place of meat and cost less. So by
reckoning on three pounds of food a day, half meat and half bread, or
their equivalents, we find that a strong, healthy, hard-working man can
be fed at a cost of about fifteen cents a day. The coarser and more
nutritious parts of beef and mutton and good sound pork can be bought at
retail at an average of eight cents a pound--often much less. The man’s
meat, therefore, will cost him twelve cents a day or less. Good flour
can be had at about two cents a pound. The man’s bread will, therefore,
cost him about three cents a day, making the total cost of his food
about fifteen cents a day, or less than fifty-five dollars a year.”
“But it costs something to cook it,” said Phil.
“Yes, but not much. I have calculated only the actual cost of the raw
materials, but my figures are too high rather than too low, for corned
beef and chuck steaks are often sold at retail as low as three or four
cents a pound, and neck pieces, heads, hearts, livers, and kidneys even
lower, while I have allowed eight cents a pound as an average price for
all the meat that the man eats. Now, allowing for the cost of cooking
and for unavoidable waste, I reckon that a strong, healthy American
citizen can feed himself abundantly on less than seventy-five dollars a
year.”
“But what if he can’t get the seventy-five dollars?” asked Will.
“In this country any man in tolerable health can get it easily. There is
no excuse in this country for what somebody calls ‘the poverty that
suffers,’ at any rate among people who have health. Why, one hundred
dollars a year is a good deal less than thirty cents a day, and anybody
can earn that.”
“What does cause ‘the poverty that suffers,’ then?” asked Will.
“Drink, mainly,” broke in Phil.
“By the way,” said Irv, looking up from some figures he had been making,
“does it occur to you that our corn crop alone, even if we produced
nothing else in the world, would furnish food enough for all the people
in this country?”
“No; how do you figure it, Irv?” asked Will.
“Why, Ed says the corn crop amounts to 2,000,000,000 bushels. There are
56 pounds in a bushel, or 112,000,000,000 pounds in the crop. That would
give every man, woman, and child in our 70,000,000 population 1600
pounds of corn per year, or pretty nearly four and a half pounds apiece
each day in the year, while Ed says no man needs more than three pounds
of food per day. So the corn crop, whether eaten as bread or partly in
the shape of meat, furnishes a great deal more food than the American
people can possibly eat. No wonder we ship such vast quantities of
foodstuffs abroad!”
“That’s encouraging,” said Phil; “but it’s bedtime. Hie ye to your
bunks! Whose watch is it?”
And so the scuttle chatter ended.
CHAPTER XX
AT MEMPHIS
About ten or twenty miles above Memphis the flatboat met a steamboat. It
was out looking for the flatboat. Not only had bank officers and law
officers arrived at Memphis, but they had become so apprehensive at the
delay of the flatboat that they had chartered the steamboat and gone in
search of her.
One of the bank officers came aboard, and to him Phil explained the
situation, receiving in return the warmest congratulations upon the
capture.
“We’ll take you in tow,” said the bank officer. “That will hurry
matters, and we’ve men waiting at the wharf with all the necessary
papers and arrest warrants.”
“But you must land us above or below the town,” said Phil.
“Why? Why not at the wharf?”
“Because we’re making this voyage as cheaply as possible, and mustn’t
pay any unnecessary wharfage fees.”
“Wharfage fees be hanged!” replied the man. “I’ll take care of all
that. Why, I’d pay your wharfage fees at every landing from here to New
Orleans. I’d buy your flatboat and all her cargo ten times over. Why,
my boy, you don’t know what a big piece of work you’ve done, or how
grateful we are. Wharfage fees!” with an accent of amused disgust. “What
are wharfage fees when you’ve caught the fellow and secured the plunder?
And even that isn’t the best of it. The letters you’ve got”--for Phil
had outlined their contents in his telegram to Cincinnati--“have enabled
us to arrest the whole gang already. We’ve got ’em all, and you’re
entitled to the credit of enabling us to break up the strongest band of
bank robbers that was ever organized in this country. So--” signalling
to the steamer--“send a line aboard and we’ll be at Memphis in an hour
or two. In the meantime you and your companions must take breakfast on
the steamboat.”
The flatboat was quickly made fast at the side of the steamer, and three
of the boys went aboard for breakfast, the other two following when the
first three returned. For until all legal forms should be completed, and
Jim Hughes safely delivered to the officers of the law, Phil had no
notion of leaving that worthy or the flatboat holding him, in charge of
anybody except himself or his comrades. When he himself went to
breakfast, he left Irv Strong in command, with Constant for his
assistant, and Ed as guard over Hughes in the cabin.
At Memphis the legal formalities were conducted on the part of the boys
by a lawyer whom Phil employed to see to it that their interests should
be guarded. They lay there for two days. Jim Hughes was delivered to the
authorities. The reward of five thousand dollars was paid over to Phil
in currency. He divided the money equally among the crew. But as it
would never do to carry so great a sum with them on the flatboat, they
converted it into drafts on New York, which all the boys sent to the
bank in Vevay, the money to be held there till their return.
As to supplies for the flatboat, the Cincinnati banker made some lavish
gifts. He sent on board fresh beef enough to last several days, four
hams, two strips of bacon, two pieces of dried beef, ten pounds of
coffee, five pounds of tea, a bag of flour, a sack of salt, a dozen
loaves of fresh bread, a big box of crackers, five pounds of butter, a
basket of eggs, two or three cases of canned vegetables and fruits, some
canned soups, a large can of milk packed in ice, a sack of dried beans,
a bunch of bananas, a box of oranges, and finally, a large, iced cake
with miniature American flags stuck all over it.
“I can talk now,” said Hughes to Ed, after the law officers had received
and handcuffed him; “and I’ve got just one thing to say. I never had
anything against any of you fellows except that brother Phil of yours.
But for his meddling, I’d be a free man now. I’ve ‘got it in for’ him.”
“Oh, as to that,” drawled Irv Strong, “by the time you’ve served your
ten or twenty years in State Prison, I imagine Phil will be sufficiently
grown up to hold his own with you. He’s a ‘pretty sizable’ fellow even
now, for his age.”
“Tell us something more interesting, Jim,” said Will Moreraud. “Tell us
why you tried to run us on Vevay Bar and again on Craig’s Bar.”
“I didn’t try to run you on them. I tried to run you behind them into
the Kentucky shore channel.”
“What for?”
“Oh, I was in a hurry to get down the river, and I didn’t want you to
make that long stop at Craig’s Landing. If I could have run you behind
those bars, you’d have been at Carrollton before you could pull up, and
of course it wouldn’t have paid you to get the boat towed back up the
river. I was trying to hurry, that’s all; and I knew the river better
than Captain Phil suspected.”
That was all of farewell there was between the crew of _The Last of the
Flatboats_ and her late pilot. When some one suggested to Phil that he
should speak for the party and express regret at the necessity that had
governed their course, Phil said:--
“But I don’t feel the least regret. I am glad we’ve secured him and his
gang. It restores a lot of plunder to the people to whom it belongs; it
breaks up a very dangerous band of burglars; and it will help teach
other persons of that kind how risky it is to live by law-breaking.
Perhaps it will help to keep many people honest. No, I’m not sorry that
we’ve been able to render so great a service to the public, and I’m not
going to pretend that I am.”
“You’re right, Phil,” said Ed.
“Of course he is,” said Irv; “and as for Jim Hughes, he will get only
what he deserves. If there were no laws, or if they were not enforced by
the punishment of crime, there wouldn’t be much ‘show’ for honest people
in this world.”
“There wouldn’t be any honest people, I reckon,” said Will, “for honest
people simply couldn’t live. Everybody would have to turn savage and
robber, or starve to death.”
“Yes,” said Ed. “That’s how law originated, and civilization is simply a
state of existence in which there are laws enough to restrain wrong.
When the savage finds that he can’t defend himself single-handed against
murder and robbery, he joins with other savages for that purpose. That
makes a tribe. It must have rules to govern it, and they are laws. It is
out of the tribal organization that all civilized society has grown,
mainly by the making of better and better laws, or by the better and
better enforcement of laws already made.”
“Then are we all savages, restrained only by law from indulging in every
sort of crime?” asked Phil. “I, for one, don’t feel myself to be in
that condition of mind.”
“By no means,” replied the elder boy. “We are the products of habit
and heredity. We have lost most of our savage instincts by having
restrained them through generations, just as cows and dogs have done.
You see, it is a law of nature that parents are apt to transmit their
own characteristics to their children. As one of the great scientific
writers puts it, ‘the habit of one generation is the instinct of the
next.’ If you want a dog to hunt with, you choose one whose ancestors
have been in the habit of hunting, because you know that he has
inherited the habit as an instinct. Yet the highest-bred setters,
pointers, and fox hounds are all descended ultimately from a common
ancestry of wild dogs, as fierce, probably, as any wolf ever was.
They have been for many generations under law,--the law of man’s
control,--and so they have not only lost their wildness, but have
acquired new instincts, new capacities, and a new intelligence.”
“I see,” said Phil, meditatively. “It is a long-continued course of
timely spanking that has slowly changed us from savages into fellows
able to run a flatboat and inclined to wear trousers.”
“Ah, as to that,” said Irv, “we haven’t quite got rid of our savage
instincts even yet. I for one am savagely hungry for some of that beef
our Cincinnati friend sent on board, and I suspect the rest of the tribe
are in the same condition.”
CHAPTER XXI
A WRESTLE WITH THE RIVER
After the boat left Memphis it was necessary to proceed with a good deal
of caution. A new flood had come down the river, bringing with it a
dangerous drift of uprooted trees and the like. Moreover, in many places
there were strong currents setting out from the natural river-bed into
the overflowed regions on either side, and constant care was necessary
to avoid being dra
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