‘points,’ bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the information
was to be found only in the notebook–none of it was in my head.
It made my heart ache to think I had only got half of the river
set down; for as our watch was four hours off and four hours on,
day and night, there was a long four-hour gap in my book for every
time I had slept since the voyage began.
My chief was presently hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I packed
my satchel and went with him. She was a grand affair. When I stood
in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I seemed perched on
a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me,
that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little ‘Paul Jones’
a large craft. There were other differences, too. The ‘Paul Jones’s’
pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped for room:
but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance in;
showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions
and a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns
and ‘look at the river;’ bright, fanciful ‘cuspadores’ instead of a
broad wooden box filled with sawdust; nice new oil-cloth on the floor;
a hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my head,
costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs
for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black ‘texas-tender,’ to
bring up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night.
Now this was ‘something like,’ and so I began to take heart once more
to believe that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all.
The moment we were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer
and fill myself with joy. She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room;
when I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through
a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter,
on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed
chandeliers; the clerk’s office was elegant, the bar was marvelous,
and the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost.
The boiler deck (i.e. the second story of the boat, so to speak)
was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle;
and there was no pitiful handful of deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts
down there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring
from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers!
This was unutterable pomp. The mighty engines–but enough of this.
I had never felt so fine before. And when I found that the regiment
of natty servants respectfully ‘sir’d’ me, my satisfaction was complete.
Chapter 7
A Daring Deed
WHEN I returned to the pilot-house St. Louis was gone and I was lost.
Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book,
but I could make neither head nor tail of it: you understand,
it was turned around. I had seen it when coming up-stream, but I
had never faced about to see how it looked when it was behind me.
My heart broke again, for it was plain that I had got to learn this
troublesome river BOTH WAYS.
The pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to ‘look at the river.’
What is called the ‘upper river’ (the two hundred miles between St. Louis
and Cairo, where the Ohio comes in) was low; and the Mississippi changes
its channel so constantly that the pilots used to always find it
necessary to run down to Cairo to take a fresh look, when their boats
were to lie in port a week; that is, when the water was at a low stage.
A deal of this ‘looking at the river’ was done by poor fellows who seldom
had a berth, and whose only hope of getting one lay in their being
always freshly posted and therefore ready to drop into the shoes
of some reputable pilot, for a single trip, on account of such pilot’s