Kitabı oku: «The Last of the Flatboats», sayfa 8
“That’s encouraging,” said Phil; “but it’s bedtime. Hie ye to your bunks! Whose watch is it?”
And so the scuttle chatter ended.
CHAPTER XX
AT MEMPHIS
About ten or twenty miles above Memphis the flatboat met a steamboat. It was out looking for the flatboat. Not only had bank officers and law officers arrived at Memphis, but they had become so apprehensive at the delay of the flatboat that they had chartered the steamboat and gone in search of her.
One of the bank officers came aboard, and to him Phil explained the situation, receiving in return the warmest congratulations upon the capture.
“We’ll take you in tow,” said the bank officer. “That will hurry matters, and we’ve men waiting at the wharf with all the necessary papers and arrest warrants.”
“But you must land us above or below the town,” said Phil.
“Why? Why not at the wharf?”
“Because we’re making this voyage as cheaply as possible, and mustn’t pay any unnecessary wharfage fees.”
“Wharfage fees be hanged!” replied the man. “I’ll take care of all that. Why, I’d pay your wharfage fees at every landing from here to New Orleans. I’d buy your flatboat and all her cargo ten times over. Why, my boy, you don’t know what a big piece of work you’ve done, or how grateful we are. Wharfage fees!” with an accent of amused disgust. “What are wharfage fees when you’ve caught the fellow and secured the plunder? And even that isn’t the best of it. The letters you’ve got” – for Phil had outlined their contents in his telegram to Cincinnati – “have enabled us to arrest the whole gang already. We’ve got ’em all, and you’re entitled to the credit of enabling us to break up the strongest band of bank robbers that was ever organized in this country. So – ” signalling to the steamer – “send a line aboard and we’ll be at Memphis in an hour or two. In the meantime you and your companions must take breakfast on the steamboat.”
The flatboat was quickly made fast at the side of the steamer, and three of the boys went aboard for breakfast, the other two following when the first three returned. For until all legal forms should be completed, and Jim Hughes safely delivered to the officers of the law, Phil had no notion of leaving that worthy or the flatboat holding him, in charge of anybody except himself or his comrades. When he himself went to breakfast, he left Irv Strong in command, with Constant for his assistant, and Ed as guard over Hughes in the cabin.
At Memphis the legal formalities were conducted on the part of the boys by a lawyer whom Phil employed to see to it that their interests should be guarded. They lay there for two days. Jim Hughes was delivered to the authorities. The reward of five thousand dollars was paid over to Phil in currency. He divided the money equally among the crew. But as it would never do to carry so great a sum with them on the flatboat, they converted it into drafts on New York, which all the boys sent to the bank in Vevay, the money to be held there till their return.
As to supplies for the flatboat, the Cincinnati banker made some lavish gifts. He sent on board fresh beef enough to last several days, four hams, two strips of bacon, two pieces of dried beef, ten pounds of coffee, five pounds of tea, a bag of flour, a sack of salt, a dozen loaves of fresh bread, a big box of crackers, five pounds of butter, a basket of eggs, two or three cases of canned vegetables and fruits, some canned soups, a large can of milk packed in ice, a sack of dried beans, a bunch of bananas, a box of oranges, and finally, a large, iced cake with miniature American flags stuck all over it.
“I can talk now,” said Hughes to Ed, after the law officers had received and handcuffed him; “and I’ve got just one thing to say. I never had anything against any of you fellows except that brother Phil of yours. But for his meddling, I’d be a free man now. I’ve ‘got it in for’ him.”
“Oh, as to that,” drawled Irv Strong, “by the time you’ve served your ten or twenty years in State Prison, I imagine Phil will be sufficiently grown up to hold his own with you. He’s a ‘pretty sizable’ fellow even now, for his age.”
“Tell us something more interesting, Jim,” said Will Moreraud. “Tell us why you tried to run us on Vevay Bar and again on Craig’s Bar.”
“I didn’t try to run you on them. I tried to run you behind them into the Kentucky shore channel.”
“What for?”
“Oh, I was in a hurry to get down the river, and I didn’t want you to make that long stop at Craig’s Landing. If I could have run you behind those bars, you’d have been at Carrollton before you could pull up, and of course it wouldn’t have paid you to get the boat towed back up the river. I was trying to hurry, that’s all; and I knew the river better than Captain Phil suspected.”
That was all of farewell there was between the crew of The Last of the Flatboats and her late pilot. When some one suggested to Phil that he should speak for the party and express regret at the necessity that had governed their course, Phil said: —
“But I don’t feel the least regret. I am glad we’ve secured him and his gang. It restores a lot of plunder to the people to whom it belongs; it breaks up a very dangerous band of burglars; and it will help teach other persons of that kind how risky it is to live by law-breaking. Perhaps it will help to keep many people honest. No, I’m not sorry that we’ve been able to render so great a service to the public, and I’m not going to pretend that I am.”
“You’re right, Phil,” said Ed.
“Of course he is,” said Irv; “and as for Jim Hughes, he will get only what he deserves. If there were no laws, or if they were not enforced by the punishment of crime, there wouldn’t be much ‘show’ for honest people in this world.”
“There wouldn’t be any honest people, I reckon,” said Will, “for honest people simply couldn’t live. Everybody would have to turn savage and robber, or starve to death.”
“Yes,” said Ed. “That’s how law originated, and civilization is simply a state of existence in which there are laws enough to restrain wrong. When the savage finds that he can’t defend himself single-handed against murder and robbery, he joins with other savages for that purpose. That makes a tribe. It must have rules to govern it, and they are laws. It is out of the tribal organization that all civilized society has grown, mainly by the making of better and better laws, or by the better and better enforcement of laws already made.”
“Then are we all savages, restrained only by law from indulging in every sort of crime?” asked Phil. “I, for one, don’t feel myself to be in that condition of mind.”
“By no means,” replied the elder boy. “We are the products of habit and heredity. We have lost most of our savage instincts by having restrained them through generations, just as cows and dogs have done. You see, it is a law of nature that parents are apt to transmit their own characteristics to their children. As one of the great scientific writers puts it, ‘the habit of one generation is the instinct of the next.’ If you want a dog to hunt with, you choose one whose ancestors have been in the habit of hunting, because you know that he has inherited the habit as an instinct. Yet the highest-bred setters, pointers, and fox hounds are all descended ultimately from a common ancestry of wild dogs, as fierce, probably, as any wolf ever was. They have been for many generations under law, – the law of man’s control, – and so they have not only lost their wildness, but have acquired new instincts, new capacities, and a new intelligence.”
“I see,” said Phil, meditatively. “It is a long-continued course of timely spanking that has slowly changed us from savages into fellows able to run a flatboat and inclined to wear trousers.”
“Ah, as to that,” said Irv, “we haven’t quite got rid of our savage instincts even yet. I for one am savagely hungry for some of that beef our Cincinnati friend sent on board, and I suspect the rest of the tribe are in the same condition.”
CHAPTER XXI
A WRESTLE WITH THE RIVER
After the boat left Memphis it was necessary to proceed with a good deal of caution. A new flood had come down the river, bringing with it a dangerous drift of uprooted trees and the like. Moreover, in many places there were strong currents setting out from the natural river-bed into the overflowed regions on either side, and constant care was necessary to avoid being drawn into these.
Memphis is built upon the high Chickasaw bluffs, but a little way farther down the river the country becomes low and flat, and in parts it grows steadily lower as it recedes from the river, so that at some distance inland the plantations and woodlands lie actually lower than the bed of the great river. It has been said, indeed, with a good deal of truth, that the Mississippi River runs along on the top of a ridge.
“How did it come to do that?” asked Will. “Why didn’t it find its level as water generally does – ”
“And as men ought to do, but usually don’t,” said Irv.
“It did at first, of course,” said Ed. “But whenever it got on a rampage like this, it took all the region along its course for its right of way. It spread itself out over the country and went whithersoever it chose. Then came men who wanted its rich bottom lands for farms. So they built earth levees to keep the river off their lands. As more and more lands were brought under cultivation, more and more of these embankments were built, and the river was more and more restrained. Now there is nothing in the world that resists and resents restraint more than water does. So the river breaks through the levees every now and then and floods the plantations, drowning cattle, sweeping away crops and houses, and creating local famines that must be relieved from the outside.”
Before beginning his explanation Ed had dipped up a glassful of the river water and set it on the deck. It was thick with mud, so that it looked more like water from a hog wallow than water from a river. He turned now and gently took up the glass. There was a deep sediment in the bottom and the water above was beginning to grow somewhat clearer.
“Look here,” said the boy. “If we let that water sit still long enough, all the mud would sink to the bottom and the water above would become clear. That’s what we should have to do with our drinking and cooking water on this boat if we hadn’t brought a filter along. Now you see that the water of this river is carrying more mud than it can keep dissolved. This mud is sinking to the bottom all the way from St. Louis to New Orleans. It is building up the bottom, raising it year by year, and so raising the river higher and higher. When the river was left free, the same thing happened, but whenever a flood came it would leave its built-up bed, run over its banks, and cut new channels for itself in the lowest country it could find. There are many lakes and ponds well away from the present river that were obviously a part of the channel once.
“When men began confining the river within its banks at all but the highest stages of water, and in many places at all stages, it couldn’t leave its old channels for new ones, no matter how much it had built up the bottom, and so the bed of the river steadily rose from year to year. That made the surface of the flood water higher, and so men had to build higher and higher levees to keep the floods from burying their plantations. As they have nothing better to make their embankments out of than the soft sandy loam of the bottom lands, the levees are not very strong at best, and the higher they are raised, the greater is the water pressure against them when the river is up. So they often give way, and when they do that the river rushes through the gap, or crevasse, as it is called, rapidly widening and deepening it, and pouring a torrent over all the country within reach. In such a flood as this men are kept watching the levees day and night to stop every little leak, lest it become a crevasse, and it is often necessary to forbid steamboats to pass near the shore, because the swells they make would wash over the tops of the levees and start crevasses in that way. Sometimes a strong wind pushes the water up enough to break a levee and destroy hundreds of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of property, for when a levee breaks, the region behind it is flooded too rapidly to permit much more than escape alive, and often it doesn’t permit even that.”
“What a destructive old demon this river is!” said Irv.
“Yes, at times,” replied the elder boy. “But it does a lot of good work as well as bad. It created all the lands that it overflows, and if man tries to rob it of its own, I don’t see why it is to be blamed for defending its possessions.”
“How do you mean that it created all the lands that it overflows?” asked Constant, who always wanted to learn all he could.
“Why, the geologists say that the Gulf of Mexico used to extend to Cairo, covering all the flat region in the Mississippi Valley south, except here and there a high spot like that on which Memphis stands. The high spots were islands in the Gulf.”
“But where did the land come from then?”
“Why, the Mississippi built it with its mud. It carries enough mud at all times to make half a state, if it were all brought together. When the river’s mouth was at Cairo, the river kept pouring mud into the Gulf. The mud sank, and in that way the shore-line was extended farther and farther south, spreading to the right and left as it went. The river is still doing this down at its mouth below New Orleans, and it has been doing it for millions of years. It has simply filled in all that part of the Gulf that once covered eastern Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the lower parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri.”
“But why don’t other rivers do the same thing?” asked Constant.
“They do, in a degree,” said Ed. “You know there is always a bar in the sea just off the mouth of a river.”
“Yes, but – ”
“Well, most rivers carry very little mud in their water, and that little goes to make the bar at the mouth. The Mississippi carries so much mud that its bars become land, and the river cuts a channel through them, carrying its mud still farther into the sea. Then again, the Mississippi has floods every year or twice a year, and in some years three times, such as most rivers never have. This is because it carries in a single channel the water from twenty-eight states and a territory, as we saw on the map one day up the river. Now as soon as the river mud forms a bar that shows above water, vegetation begins to grow on it. When the next flood comes, it covers the new-made land and builds it higher by depositing a great deal more mud on top of it and among the vegetation, which, by checking the current at the bottom, helps the mud to lodge there. In that way, all the lowlands for hundreds of miles along this river were created. It took hundreds of thousands of years – perhaps millions of years – to do it, but it was done.”
Ed did not give this long explanation all in one speech. He was interrupted many times by Phil’s call of all hands to the sweeps, when rowing was necessary, and by other matters of duty, which it has not been necessary to detail here.
Whenever it was possible to land the boat for the night, the boys did so, and when no banks were in sight where a mooring could be made, they sought for some bend or pocket reasonably free from the more dangerous kinds of drift, and came to anchor for safety during the hours of darkness. Navigation was difficult and perilous now even in daytime when they could make out the course of the river by sight and keep away from treacherous shore currents, for the drift was very heavy. By night it was doubly dangerous.
Even in the daytime Phil kept the entire crew on deck at all times except when one of them went below to prepare food. Their meals were eaten on deck with a broad plank for table, even when it rained heavily, as it very often did. They slept on deck, too, under a rude shelter made of the tarpaulin. All this Phil regarded as necessary under the circumstances. Even when tied up to the trees or anchored in the snuggest cove to be found, it was sometimes necessary to jump into skiffs and “fend off” great threatening masses of drift. To this duty the calls were very frequent indeed.
Poor Phil got scarcely any sleep at all during these trying days and nights. The sense of responsibility was so strong upon him that he scarcely dared relax his personal watchfulness for a moment. But under the urgent pleadings of his comrades he would now and then leave another on duty in his place and throw himself down for a nap. He did this only when the conditions seemed most favorable, and usually even then he was up again within the half hour.
The escapes of the boat from damage or destruction were many and narrow, even under this ceaseless watching, and the strain at last began to show its effects upon the tough nerves of Captain Phil. He almost lived upon strong coffee. The coffee was an excellent thing for him under the circumstances, but his neglect to take other food was a dangerous mistake. He was still strong of body, but he was growing nervous and even a trifle irritable.
His comrades remonstrated with him for not sleeping, and begged him to eat.
“I don’t want to eat, I tell you,” he said, with much irritation in his voice.
“But you’ll break down, Phil, if you keep this up,” said Ed, “and then where shall we be? Without your judgment and quickness to see the right thing at a critical moment this boat would have gone to the bottom days ago. We need you, old fellow.”
The boys all joined in the pleading, and Phil at last sat down with them and tried to eat, but could not.
“No, no, don’t drink any coffee yet,” said Will, almost pulling the cup out of his hands. “It’ll kill the little appetite you’ve got. Eat first, and drink your coffee afterward.”
“Wait a minute,” said Irv, stretching out his long legs, and with a spring rising to his feet. “Wait a minute, and I’ll play Ganymede, the cup-bearer.”
He went below, where he broke an egg in a large soda-water glass and whipped it up with an egg-beater. Then he filled the glass with milk, of which they still had a gallon or so left, and again using the egg-beater, whipped the whole into a lively froth, adding a little salt to give it flavor and make it more digestible.
“Here, Phil,” he said, as he reappeared on deck, “drink this. You’ll find it good, and it is food of the very best sort, as well as drink.”
Phil took the glass, tasted its contents, and then drained it at a draught.
“Make me another, won’t you, Irv?” said Phil about five minutes later; “somehow that one has got lonely and wants a companion.”
Irv was glad enough to do so, and by the time Phil had slowly swallowed his second glass, he not only felt himself fed, but he was so. His nerves grew steady again, there was no further irritation in his voice, and by the time that the next meal was ready the boy had regained his appetite.
The boat came to anchor for the night a little after supper, and as the anchorage was particularly well protected behind a heavily timbered point of submerged land, Phil consented to take a longer sleep than he had done for several days past.
Irv and Constant remained on duty for several hours, after which Ed and Will took their places. Only twice during the night did Phil awake. Each time he arose, went all around the deck, inspecting the situation, and then lay down again upon the boards.
By morning he was quite himself again.
CHAPTER XXII
IN THE FOG
The boat was now in a part of the river where the land on both sides lies very low, behind very high levees. These are the richest cotton lands in the world, and their owners have tried to reclaim all of them from the river floods instead of taking only part of them for cultivation. Along other parts of the stream there are levees only here and there, leaving the river a chance to spread out over great areas of unreclaimed land, thus relieving the levees of much of the pressure upon them. Here, however, the line of embankment is continuous on both sides of the stream. For long distances the river is held between the two lines of artificially made banks.
The water was now within a few inches of the top of the levees, and twenty or thirty feet above the level of the lands in the rear. The strain upon the embankments was almost inconceivably great, while the destruction which any break in that long line of earthworks would involve was appalling even to think of.
The boys could see gangs of men at work wherever any weakness showed itself in the embankments, while sentinels, armed with shotguns, were everywhere on guard to prevent mischief-makers from cutting the levees. For, incredible as it may seem, men have sometimes been base enough to do this in order to let the river out of its banks, and thus reduce the danger of a break farther up stream where their own interests lay. For, of course, when a crevasse occurs at any point it lets so much water run suddenly out of the banks that the river falls several inches for many miles above, and the strain on the levees is greatly reduced.
As the boys were floating down the middle of the flood, watching the work on the levees with keen interest, the air began to grow thick. A few minutes later a great bank of dense fog settled down upon them, covering all things as with a blanket. The shores and the great trees that grew upon them were blotted out. Then as the fog grew thicker and thicker, even the river disappeared, except a little patch of it immediately around the boat. On every side was an impenetrable wall of mist, and ragged fragments of it floated across the deck so that when they stood half the boat’s length apart the boys looked like spectres to each other.
“I say, Phil, hadn’t we better go ashore or anchor?” said Constant.
“Where is the shore?” asked Phil, quietly.
“Why, there’s a shore on each side of us.”
“Certainly. But in what direction? Which way is across the river, which way up the river, which way down the river?”
“Why, the current will tell that,” said Constant.
“How are we going to find out which way the current runs?” asked Phil, with a quizzical smile.
“Easy enough; by looking at the driftwood floating by,” said the boy, going to the side of the boat to peer at the surface of the river through the fog. Presently he called out in amazement: —
“Why, the whole thing has stopped – the drift, the river, and the flatboat! We’re lying here just as still as if we were on solid ground.”
“On the contrary,” said Phil, “we’re floating down stream at the rate of several miles an hour.”
“But – ”
“Think a minute, Constant,” said Phil. “We are floating just as fast as the river runs. The drift-wood is doing the same thing. The water, the drift, and the flatboat are all moving in the same direction at precisely the same speed.”
“Oh, I see,” said Constant, with an astonished look in his eyes. “We’ve nothing to measure by. We can’t tell which way we’re going, or how fast, or anything about it.”
“Why not come to anchor, then?” asked Irv. “If we keep on floating, nobody knows where we may go to. If there should be any gap in the line of levees anywhere, we might float into it. It would just tickle this flatboat to slip off on an expedition of that sort. Why not anchor till the fog lifts?”
“First, because we can’t,” said Phil. “The water is much too deep. But even if we could, it would be the very worst thing we could do. It would bring us to a standstill, while everything else afloat would keep on swirling past us, some of it running into us. If we should anchor here in the strong current, The Last of the Flatboats would soon have as many holes in her as a colander.”
“Then what do you intend to do, Phil?” asked Ed.
“Precisely nothing whatever,” answered the young captain. “Anything we might do would probably make matters worse. You see we were almost exactly in the middle of the river when the fog came down on us. Now, if we do nothing, the chances are that the current will carry us along somewhere near the middle, or at least well away from the shores. If it don’t, we can’t help it. The only thing we can do is to keep as close a watch as we can all around the boat, for we don’t know which end or which side of her is in front now. I want one fellow to go to the bow, one to the stern, and one to each side, and watch. If we are about to run into a bank or anything else, call out, and we may save ourselves at the last minute. That’s all we can do for the present. So go now!”
The wisdom of Phil’s decision to do nothing except watch alertly was clear to all his comrades, so they took the places he had assigned them, while he busied himself first at one point and then at another, thinking all the while whether there might not be something else that he could do – some precaution not yet thought of that he could take. He went to the pump now and then and worked it till no more water came up. He went below two or three times to see that nothing was wrong with the cargo. The boys, meanwhile, were walking back and forth on their beats, each carrying a boat-hook with which to “fend off” the larger bits of drift which the eddies, cross currents, and those strange disturbances in the stream called “boils,” sometimes drove against the gunwales.
The “boils” referred to are peculiar to the Mississippi, I believe. They are whirlpools, caused by the conflict of cross currents, and, as Will Moreraud said during this day of close watching, they are “sometimes right side up and sometimes upside down.” That is to say, sometimes a current from beneath comes to the surface like water in a boiling kettle and seems to pile itself up in a sort of mound for a half minute or so, while sometimes there is a genuine whirlpool strong enough even to suck a skiff down, as old-time flatboatmen used to testify.
These were anxious hours for the young captain and his crew, but worse was to come. For night fell at last with the fog still on, and between the fog and the darkness it was no longer possible to see even the water at the sides of the boat from the deck.
The crew had eaten no dinner that day. They had forgotten all about their meals in the eagerness of their watching. Now that watching was no longer possible they remembered their appetites, and had an evening dinner instead of supper.
They set their lights of course, though it was of little use from any point of view. They could not be seen at a distance of twenty yards, and moreover there was nobody to see them.
“There’s not much danger of any steamboat running into us now,” said Phil, who had carefully thought the matter out.
“Why not?” asked Ed.
“Because this fog has lasted for nearly twelve hours now, and by this time every steamboat is tied up to some bank or tree. For no pilot would think of running in such a cloud after finding any shore to which he could make his boat fast.”
“But how can a steamboat find the shore when we can’t?” asked Will.
“Because she can keep running till she finds it; and if she runs slowly she can back when she finds it till she makes an easy landing. She has power, and power gives her control of herself. We have none, except what the sweeps give us. In fogs like this steamboats always hunt for the shores and tie up till the fog lifts. So after ten or twelve hours of it, there are no steamboats prowling around to run into us.”
“Another advantage the steamboats have in hunting for the shore,” said Will, “is that they can blow their whistles and listen for echoes. They can tell in that way not only in which direction the shore is, but about how far away it is.”
“How do steamships manage in fogs out at sea?” asked Constant.
“Theoretically,” replied Ed, “they slow down and blow their whistles or their ‘sirens,’ as they call the big steam fog-horns that can be heard for many miles. But in fact the big ocean steamships drive ahead at full speed – twenty miles an hour or more – blowing their sirens – till they hear some other ship’s siren. Then they act according to fixed rules, each ship turning her helm to port – that is to say to the left – so that they sail well away from each other.”
“But what if there are sailing vessels in the way?”
“They also have fog-horns, but they sometimes get themselves run down by steamships, and once in a great while one of them runs into the side of a steamship. The Cunard steamer Oregon was sunk in that way by a sailing craft. That sort of thing would happen oftener if the big steamships were to stop or run very slowly in fog. By running at full speed they make it pretty sure that they will themselves do any running down that is to be done. With their enormous weight and great speed they can cut a sailing vessel in two without much danger of serious damage to themselves, and as they have hundreds of people on board while a sailing ship has a very few, the steamship captains hold that it is right to shift the danger in that way.”
The night dragged slowly along. Now and then a little conversation would spring up, for the boys were sleeping very little, but often there would be no word spoken for an hour at a time.
The fog made the air very chill, and the boys, who remained on deck all night, had to stir about frequently to keep reasonably warm.
The fog began whitening at last as the daylight dawned, and all the boys strained their eyes to see through it.
But it showed no sign of lifting.
