The Last of the Flatboats

A very slight examination showed that, while the blow from the bit of plank had brought some blood from the pilot’s head, it had done no serious damage. His stupor, it was Ed’s opinion, was due to whiskey, not to his chastisement.

Nevertheless it was a very bad beginning to the voyage, and Phil was strongly disposed to discharge the fellow then and there, and trust, as he put it, to “a good map, open eyes, and ordinary common sense, as better pilots than a drunken lout who probably doesn’t know the river even when he is sober.”

But the other boys dissuaded him. They thought that Jim’s intoxication was the result of his joy at getting off; that they could find his jug in its hiding-place and throw it overboard, – which presently they did, – and that after he should get sober, Jim’s experience in flat-boating might be of great advantage to them.

“You see,” said Ed Lowry, “we’ve taken a big responsibility. All this freight, worth thousands of dollars, belongs to other people, and I suppose half of it isn’t even insured because the rates on flatboats are so high. Think if we should lose it for lack of a pilot!”

“Yes, think of that!” said two or three in a breath.

“Very well,” said Phil. “I yield to your judgment. But my own opinion is that such a pilot is worse than none. I’ll keep him for the present. But I’ll watch him, and if he gets any more whiskey or plays us any more tricks, I’ll set him ashore once for all if it’s in the middle of an Arkansas swamp.”

The river was rising now, more and more rapidly every hour. There was three days’ work to do getting the rest of the cargo aboard and making room for it in the crowded hold. But at Ed Lowry’s suggestion the boys avoided overtaxing themselves. The energetic Swiss blood in the veins of Constant Thiebaud and Will Moreraud prompted them to favor long hours for work on the plea that they could make it up by rest while floating down the river.

But under Ed’s advice Phil overruled them, and it was decided to breakfast at six o’clock, work from seven to twelve, dine, rest for an hour, and work again till five.

CHAPTER VII

TALKING

The pleasantest part of the day, under this arrangement, was that between five o’clock and bedtime.

The boys talked then, and talking is about the very best thing that anybody ever does. It is by talk that we come to know those about us and make ourselves known to them. It is by talk that we learn to like our fellows, by learning what there is in them worth liking. And it is by talk mainly that we find out what we think and correct our thinking.

Ed Lowry was reading a book one day, when suddenly he looked up and said: —

“I say, fellows, this is good. Lord Macaulay said he never knew what he thought about any subject until he had talked about it. Of course that’s so with all of us, when you come to think of it.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Phil. “I often talk about things and don’t know what I think about ’em even after I’ve talked. Here’s this big bond robbery, for example. I’ve read all about it in the Cincinnati newspapers and I’ve talked you fellows deaf, dumb, and blind concerning it. Yet, I don’t know even now what I think about it.”

“I know what I think,” said Will Moreraud. “I think the detectives are ‘all off.’”

“How?” asked all the boys in chorus.

“Well, they’re trying to find the man who is supposed to be carrying the plunder. It seems to me they’d better look for the other fellows first; for if they were caught, they’d soon enough tell where the man that carries it is. They wouldn’t go to jail and leave him with the stuff.”

“The worst of it is they’re publishing descriptions of the fellow and even of what they’ve noticed concerning his clothes and beard, as if a thief that was up to a game like that wouldn’t change his clothes and part his hair differently and wear a different sort of beard, especially after he’s been told what they’re looking for.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said Irving Strong, reading from one of Phil’s Cincinnati newspapers:

“‘Red hair’ – a man might dye that – ‘parted on the left side and brushed forward’ – he might part it in the middle and brush it back, or have it all cut off with one of those mowing machines the barbers use, just as Jim Hughes does with his – ”

“Now I come to think of it,” continued Irv, after a moment’s thought, “Jim answers the description in several ways, – limps a little with his left leg, has red hair when he permits himself to have any hair at all, has lost a front tooth, and speaks with a slight lisp.”

“Oh, Jim Hughes isn’t a bank burglar,” exclaimed Will Moreraud. “He hasn’t sense enough for anything of that sort.”

“Of course not,” said Irv. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything of the kind. I merely cited his peculiarities to show how easily a detective’s description might lead men into mistakes. Why, Jim might even be arrested on that description.”

“But all that isn’t what Macaulay meant,” said Ed. “He meant that a man never really knows what he thinks about any subject till he has put his thought into words and then turned it over and looked at it and found out exactly what it is.”

“I guess that’s so,” drawled Irv. “I notice that whenever I try to think seriously – ”

The boys all laughed. The idea of Irv Strong’s thinking seriously seemed peculiarly humorous to them.

“Well, I do try sometimes,” said Irv, “and whenever I do, I put the whole thing into the exactest words I can find. Very often, when I get it into exact words, I find that my opinions won’t hang together and I’ve got to reconstruct them.”

“Exactly!” said Ed Lowry. “And that is the great difficulty animals have in trying to think. They haven’t any words even in their minds. They can’t put their thoughts into form so as to examine them. It seems to me that language is necessary to any real thinking, and that it is the possession of language more than anything or everything else that makes man really the lord of creation.”

“Yes,” said Phil. “Even Bre’r Rabbit and Bre’r Fox and all the rest of them are represented as putting their thoughts into words.”

“Perhaps,” said Irv, “that’s the reason why educated people think more soundly than uneducated ones. They have a nicer sense of the meaning of words.”

“Of course,” said Ed. “I suppose that is what President Eliot of Harvard meant when he said that ‘the object of education is to teach a man to express his thought clearly in his own language.’”

“Very well,” said Phil. “My own thought, clearly expressed in my own language, is that it’s time for supper. Come, stir your stumps, ye philosophical pundits! Bring me the skillet and the frying-pan, the salt pork to fry, and prepare the apples and potatoes and eggs to cook in the fat thereof. In the classic language of our own time, get a move on you, and don’t forget the coffeepot; nor yet the coffee that is to be steeped therein!”

The boys were ready enough to respond. Their appetites, sharpened by hard work in the open air, were clamorously keen. The supper promised – fried pork, fried apples, fried eggs, and coffee with a short-cake – seemed to them quite all that could be desired in the way of luxury. They could eat it with relish, and sleep in entire comfort afterward. Probably not one of my readers in a hundred could digest such a supper at all. That is because not one reader in a hundred gives himself a chance for robust health by working nine hours a day and living almost entirely in the open air.

Jim came out when supper was ready and helped eat it there on the shore. At other than mealtimes it was his custom to stay on board the flatboat, and not only so, but to keep himself below decks, although the weather was still very warm. He had got over his drunkenness, but he was still moody, apparently in resentment of the rough-and-ready treatment he had received at Phil’s hands.

He rarely talked at all; when he did talk, it was usually in the dialect of an entirely uneducated person. But now and then he used expressions that no such person would employ.

“He seems to slip into his grammar now and then,” was Irv Strong’s way of putting it.

CHAPTER VIII

THE RIGHT TO THE RIVER

By the time that the last of the cargo was bestowed, the boat was so full that there was scarcely a place in which to hang the four fire-extinguishers which Mr. Schenck had supplied for the protection of the cargo, of which he owned a considerable part.

The river by this time was bank full. Indeed, the flatboat lay that last night almost under an apple tree, and directly over the place where three days before the boys had cooked their meals.

When the final start was made, therefore, it was only necessary to give three or four strokes of the great “sweeps” to shove the craft out into the stream. After that she was left free to float. The biggest bars were at least ten feet under water, and the boat “drew” less than three feet, heavily laden as she was. For the rest, the current could be depended upon to “keep her in the river,” as boatmen say, and the boys had nothing to do, between Craig’s Landing and Louisville, fifty or sixty miles below, except pump a little now and then, cook their meals, and set up the proper lights at night. Of course someone was always “on watch,” but as the time was divided between the five, that amounted to very little.

As the boat neared Louisville, Ed suggested to his brother that he had better land above the town, and not within its limits.

“Why?” asked Phil. “We’ve got to get some provisions as well as hire a falls pilot, and it will be more convenient if we land at the levee.”

“But it will cost us five or ten dollars in good money for wharfage,” replied Ed.

“But if we land above the town, how do we know the man owning the land on which we tie up won’t charge us just as much?” asked Irv Strong, who had never seen a large city and wanted to get as good a glimpse as he could of this one.

“Because the Mississippi River and its tributaries are not ‘navigable’ waters, but are ‘public highways for purposes of commerce,’” responded Ed. “If they weren’t that last, we couldn’t run this boat down them at all.”

“Not navigable?” queried Will Moreraud. “Well, looking at that big steamboat out there, which has just come from Cincinnati, that statement seems a trifle absurd.”

“Let me explain,” said Ed. “The English common law, from which we get ours, calls no stream ‘navigable’ unless the tide ebbs and flows in it. And as the tide does not ebb and flow in the Mississippi much above New Orleans, neither that great river nor any of its splendid tributaries are recognized by the law as navigable.”

“Then the law is an idiot,” said Irv Strong.