the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers.
Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang,
dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat
as if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay
right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would
have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction.
We often hit WHITE logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we
were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night.
A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.
Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious
timber-rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi,
coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere,
and broad-horns from ‘Posey County,’ Indiana, freighted with ‘fruit
and furniture’–the usual term for describing it, though in plain
English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins.
Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned
with usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keep
a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken.
All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up,
right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice,
with the backwoods ‘whang’ to it, would wail out–
‘Whar’n the —- you goin’ to! Cain’t you see nothin’, you dash-dashed
aig-suckin’, sheep-stealin’, one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!’
Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces
would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator
as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and
deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity,
one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments
of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again.
And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue
our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time,
when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie
and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck. Once, at night, in one
of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen
intensely describe with the phrase ‘as dark as the inside of a cow,’
we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all,
but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught
the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage,
unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment.
These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed
and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it–
both sexes and various ages–and cursed us till everything turned blue.
Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a
steering oar of him in a very narrow place.
Chapter 11
The River Rises
DURING this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance.
We were running chute after chute,–a new world to me,–and if there was
a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet
a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a
still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water.
And then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged.
Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way
cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly
be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant
a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil,
close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap knives,
but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled
on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way!
One doesn’t hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steamboat