So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary
soon satisfied the captain, who said–
‘Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S—- for the entire season.’
‘I will provide for you,’ said the secretary. ‘I will detail a pilot
to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o’clock.’
‘But if I discharge S—-, he will come on me for the whole season’s wages.’
‘Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S—-, captain.
We cannot meddle in your private affairs.’
The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge
S—-, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot
in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now.
Every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged
captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity,
and installed a hated association man in his berth. In a very
little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty,
brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired.
The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably.
These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased
to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take
when the passing business ‘spurt’ was over.
Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners
and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots.
But their triumph was not very long-lived. For this reason:
It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never,
under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel
to any ‘outsider.’ By this time about half the boats had none
but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders.
At the first glance one would suppose that when it came
to forbidding information about the river these two parties
could play equally at that game; but this was not so.
At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other,
there was a ‘wharf-boat’ to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier.
Freight was stored in it for transportation; waiting passengers slept
in its cabins. Upon each of these wharf-boats the association’s
officers placed a strong box fastened with a peculiar lock which was
used in no other service but one–the United States mail service.
It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing.
By dint of much beseeching the government had been
persuaded to allow the association to use this lock.
Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes.
That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand
when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger–
for the success of the St. Louis and New Orleans association
had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring
steamboat trades–was the association man’s sign and diploma
of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing
a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed,
his question was politely ignored. From the association’s secretary
each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks,
printed like a billhead, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns;
a bill-head worded something like this–
STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC.
JOHN SMITH MASTER
PILOTS, JOHN JONES AND THOMAS BROWN.
+————————————————————-+
| CROSSINGS. | SOUNDINGS. | MARKS. | REMARKS. |
+————————————————————-+
These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage
progressed, and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes.
For instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from St. Louis,
was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank,
under the appropriate headings, thus–
‘St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head
on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef,
then pull up square.’ Then under head of Remarks: ‘Go just outside
the wrecks; this is important. New snag just where you straighten down;
go above it.’
The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding
to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis)
took out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward-bound steamers)