Life on the Mississippi
emotion, for each new fact, and wrote it down in my note-book. The
pilot warmed to his opportunity, and proceeded to load me up in the good
old-fashioned way. At times I was afraid he was going to rupture his
invention; but it always stood the strain, and he pulled through all
right. He drifted, by easy stages, into revealments of the river's
marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another, and backed them up
with some pretty gigantic illustrations. For instance--
'Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well,
when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock, over
sixty feet high and two miles long. All washed away but that.' [This
with a sigh.]
I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing,
in any ordinary way, would be too good for him.
Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting aloft
on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance, he indifferently
drew attention to it, as one might to an object grown wearisome through
familiarity, and observed that it was an 'alligator boat.'
'An alligator boat? What's it for?'
'To dredge out alligators with.'
'Are they so thick as to be troublesome?'
'Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down. But they used
to be. Not everywhere; but in favorite places, here and there, where
the river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point, and Stack Island, and so
on--places they call alligator beds.'
'Did they actually impede navigation?'
'Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that
we didn't get aground on alligators.'
It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk.
However, I restrained myself and said--
'It must have been dreadful.'
'Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting. It was so
hard to tell anything about the water; the damned things shift around
so--never lie still five minutes at a time. You can tell a wind-reef,
straight off, by the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a
sand-reef--that's all easy; but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth
anything. Nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is; and when
you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there when _you _get there,
the devils have swapped around so, meantime. Of course there were some
few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they
could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for it; it
wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it. Let
me see: there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell, and
Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and Billy Gordon,
and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood--all A-1 alligator
pilots. _They _could tell alligator water as far as another Christian
could tell whiskey. Read it?--Ah, _couldn't_ they, though! I only wish I
had as many dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half
off. Yes, and it paid them to do it, too. A good alligator pilot could
always get fifteen hundred dollars a month. Nights, other people had to
lay up for alligators, but those fellows never laid up for alligators;
they never laid up for anything but fog. They could _smell _the best
alligator water it was said; I don't know whether it was so or not, and
I think a body's got his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he
knows himself, without going around backing up other people's say-so's,
though there's a plenty that ain't backward about doing it, as long as
they can roust out something wonderful to tell. Which is not the style
of Robert Styles, by as much as three fathom--maybe quarter-_less_.'
[My! Was this Rob Styles?--This mustached and stately figure?-A
slim enough cub, in my time. How he has improved in comeliness in
five-and-twenty year and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] After
these musings, I said aloud--
'I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much
good, because they could come back again right away.'
'If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn't
talk like that. You dredge an alligator once and he's _convinced_. It's
the last you hear of _him_. He wouldn't come back for pie. If there's
one thing that an alligator is more down on than another, it's being
dredged. Besides, they were not simply shoved out of the way; the most
of the scoopful were scooped aboard; they emptied them into the
hold; and when they had got a trip, they took them to Orleans to the
Government works.'
'What for?'
'Why, to make soldier-shoes out of their hides. All the Government shoes
are made of alligator hide. It makes the best shoes in the world. They
last five years, and they won't absorb water. The alligator fishery is
a Government monopoly. All the alligators are Government property--just
like the live-oaks. You cut down a live-oak, and Government fines you
fifty dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision
of treason--lucky duck if they don't hang you, too. And they will, if
you're a Democrat. The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South, and you
can't touch him; the alligator is the sacred bird of the Government, and
you've got to let him alone.'
'Do you ever get aground on the alligators now?'
'Oh, no! it hasn't happened for years.'
'Well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?'
'Just for police duty--nothing more. They merely go up and down now
and then. The present generation of alligators know them as easy as a
burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming, they break camp and
go for the woods.'
After rounding-out and finishing-up and polishing-off the alligator
business, he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein,
and told of some tremendous feats of half-a-dozen old-time steamboats
of his acquaintance, dwelling at special length upon a certain
extraordinary performance of his chief favorite among this distinguished
fleet--and then adding--
'That boat was the “_Cyclone_,”--last trip she ever made--she sunk, that
very trip--captain was Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever I
struck. He couldn't ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather.
Why, he would make you fairly shudder. He _was _the most scandalous
liar! I left him, finally; I couldn't stand it. The proverb says, “like
master, like man;” and if you stay with that kind of a man, you'll come
under suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live. He paid first-class
wages; but said I, What's wages when your reputation's in danger? So I
let the wages go, and froze to my reputation. And I've never regretted
it. Reputation's worth everything, ain't it? That's the way I look at
it. He had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world--all
packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged.
They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up
in the air. People thought it was vanity, but it wasn't, it was malice.
If you only saw his foot, you'd take him to be nineteen feet high, but
he wasn't; it was because his foot was out of drawing. He was intended
to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was made first, but he
didn't get there; he was only five feet ten. That's what he was, and
that's what he is. You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the
size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.
That “Cyclone” was a rattler to go, and the sweetest thing to steer that
ever walked the waters. Set her amidships, in a big river, and just let
her go; it was all you had to do. She would hold herself on a star
all night, if you let her alone. You couldn't ever feel her rudder. It
wasn't any more labor to steer her than it is to count the Republican
vote in a South Carolina election. One morning, just at daybreak, the
last trip she ever made, they took her rudder aboard to mend it; I
didn't know anything about it; I backed her out from the wood-yard
and went a-weaving down the river all serene. When I had gone about
twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked crossings--'
'Without any rudder?'
'Yes--old Capt. Tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault with me
for running such a dark night--'
'Such a _dark night_?--Why, you said--'
'Never mind what I said,--'twas as dark as Egypt now, though pretty soon
the moon began to rise, and--'
'You mean the _sun_--because you started out just at break of--look
here! Was this _before _you quitted the captain on account of his lying,
or--'
'It was before--oh, a long time before. And as I was saying, he--'
'But was this the trip she sunk, or was--'
'Oh, no!--months afterward. And so the old man, he--'
'Then she made _two _last trips, because you said--'
He stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his perspiration, and
said--
'Here!' (calling me by name), '_you _take her and lie a while--you're
handier at it than I am. Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an
innocent!--why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words; and I made
up my mind to find out what was your little game. It was to _draw me
out_. Well, I let you, didn't I? Now take the wheel and finish the
watch; and next time play fair, and you won't have to work your
passage.'
Thus ended the fictitious-name business. And not six hours out from St.
Louis! but I had gained a privilege, any way, for I had been itching
to get my hands on the wheel, from the beginning. I seemed to have
forgotten the river, but I hadn't forgotten how to steer a steamboat,
nor how to enjoy it, either.
CHAPTER 25
From Cairo to Hickman
THE scenery, from St. Louis to Cairo--two hundred miles--is varied and
beautiful. The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now,
and were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing
between. Our trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to
breeze and sunshine, and our boat threw the miles out behind her with
satisfactory despatch.
We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a
penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. At Grand Tower, too,
there was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau. The former town gets
its name from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the
water on the Missouri side of the river--a piece of nature's fanciful
handiwork--and is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of
that region. For nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil's
Bake Oven--so called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble
anybody else's bake oven; and the Devil's Tea Table--this latter a great
smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with diminishing wine-glass stem, perched
some fifty or sixty feet above the river, beside a beflowered and
garlanded precipice, and sufficiently like a tea-table to answer for
anybody, Devil or Christian. Away down the river we have the Devil's
Elbow and the Devil's Race-course, and lots of other property of his
which I cannot now call to mind.
The Town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in
old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new
coat of whitewash all over. Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old
coat once more. 'Uncle' Mumford, our second officer, said the place had
been suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking its
best now. But he said it was not strange that it didn't waste white-wash
on itself, for more lime was made there, and of a better quality, than
anywhere in the West; and added--'On a dairy farm you never can get any
milk for your coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation; and it
is against sense to go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.' In my own
experience I knew the first two items to be true; and also that people