‘No, sir, I didn’t.–It was only to get a ride on the raft.
All boys does that.’
‘Well, I know that. But what did you hide for?’
‘Sometimes they drive the boys off.’
‘So they do. They might steal. Looky-here; if we let you off this time,
will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?’
”Deed I will, boss. You try me.’
‘All right, then. You ain’t but little ways from shore.
Overboard with you, and don’t you make a fool of yourself
another time this way.–Blast it, boy, some raftsmen would
rawhide you till you were black and blue!’
I didn’t wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore.
When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around
the point. I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home again.
The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure
has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman
which I desire to offer in this place.
I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush
times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination–
the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there.
I believe there has been nothing like it elsewhere in the world.
Chapter 4
The Boys’ Ambition
WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my
comrades in our village
bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman.
We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.
When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns;
the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us
all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope
that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a
steamboatman always remained.
Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis,
and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day
was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and
empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this.
After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now,
just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine
of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so;
one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores,
with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall,
chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep–
with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down;
a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk,
doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or
three lonely little freight piles scattered about the ‘levee;’
a pile of ‘skids’ on the slope of the stone-paved wharf,
and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them;
two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody
to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them;
the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi,
rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense
forest away on the other side; the ‘point’ above the town,
and the ‘point’ below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning
it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant
and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above
one of those remote ‘points;’ instantly a negro drayman,
famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up
the cry, ‘S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!’ and the scene changes!
The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious
clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours
out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead
town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go
hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf.
Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming
boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time.