And the boat IS rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp
and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys,
with a gilded device of some kind swung between them;
a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and ‘gingerbread’, perched on top
of the ‘texas’ deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous
with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat’s name;
the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck
are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings;
there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff;
the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely;
the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands
by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes
of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys–
a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before
arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle;
the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied
deckhand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil
of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through
the gauge-cocks, the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings,
the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam,
and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there
is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight
and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time;
and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with!
Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag
on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys.
After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town
drunkard asleep by the skids once more.
My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed
the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that
offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing;
but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless.
I first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white
apron on and shake a tablecloth over the side, where all my old comrades
could see me; later I thought I would rather be the deckhand who stood
on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand,
because he was particularly conspicuous. But these were only day-dreams,–
they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities.
By and by one of our boys went away. He was not heard of for a long time.
At last he turned up as apprentice engineer or ‘striker’ on a steamboat.
This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings.
That boy had been notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse;
yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery.
There was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness.
He would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat
tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and
scrub it, where we could all see him and envy him and loathe him.
And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around
the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could
help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts
of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used
to them that he forgot common people could not understand them.
He would speak of the ‘labboard’ side of a horse in an easy, natural way
that would make one wish he was dead. And he was always talking about
‘St. Looy’ like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions
when he ‘was coming down Fourth Street,’ or when he was ‘passing
by the Planter’s House,’ or when there was a fire and he took a turn
on the brakes of ‘the old Big Missouri;’ and then he would go on and lie
about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day.