and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls
of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible.
It was bad for the others, of course–this noise and these exhibitions;
so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind
or out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed
by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it.
He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines
and in his water–so he ceased from putting either to his lips.
Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days,
he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid,
and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength;
but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed
no more to be brought near him. Three times I saw him carried
to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time
he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back.
He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.
But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.
Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes
that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that
educated judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the
newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help.
On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with
matters far away, and his nerveless fingers ‘picked at his coverlet.’
His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.
Chapter 2I
A Section in My Biography
IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged.
I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting,
intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements.
Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed–and hoped–
that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die
at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came,
commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone.
I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner
in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner,
in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a special
correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent
in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer on
the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books,
and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England.
In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting
years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows
of a pilot-house.
Let us resume, now.
Chapter 22
I Return to My Muttons
AFTER twenty-one years’ absence, I felt a very strong desire
to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of
the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there.
I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to ‘take him down,’
and started westward about the middle of April.
As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing,
I took some thought as to methods of procedure.
I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river, I should
not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around,
as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom
of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding
stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put
the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts:
so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would
be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names.
The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother;
for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names
to remember when there is no occasion to remember them,
it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted.
How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind?