Life on the Mississippi
We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday: two full hours'
liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight. In the back streets
but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored
folk--mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered
in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut--a glaring
and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles.
Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population--which
is placed at five thousand. The country about it is exceptionally
productive. Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty
thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has
a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has
$1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways,
and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross
receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New
Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000.
CHAPTER 31
A Thumb-print and What Came of It
WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think about my
errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was bad--not
best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand.
The more I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one
form, now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:
is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little
sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and
no inquisitive eyes around. This settled it. Plain question and plain
answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.
I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create
annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed
best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon. Their
disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. Their main
argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface,
in such cases, since the beginning of time: 'But you decided and _agreed
_to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise
thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make _two _unwise things of
it, by carrying out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good
success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show
them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to
blame for it, I presently drifted into its history--substantially as
follows:
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria.
In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's _pension_, 1a,
Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the
house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her
two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to
me--by request. One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one
of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses
until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in
a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were
thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on
slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white,
rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides
of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these
lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks
of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger
of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring;
and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a
watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert
and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who,
waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest,
movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined
myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging
watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all
my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful
summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if
the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to
make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle
and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went
my way with a humbled crest.
Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed--
'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.
He has been a night-watchman there.'
He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his
head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless,
his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was
talon-like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her
introduction of me. The man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly
out from the twilight of their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he
lifted his lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. But the widow kept
straight on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and
an American. The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even
eager--and the next moment he and I were alone together.
I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;
thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.
This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day,
and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and
children. Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three
things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light
glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its
place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever
saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for
that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing
that I said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know,
by either sight or hearing, when I left the room.
When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two
months, he one day said, abruptly--
'I will tell you my story.'
A DYING MAN S CONFESSION
Then he went on as follows:--
I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going to
die. I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too.
You say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find
opportunity. Very well; that, together with a certain strange
experience which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my
history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you
will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will
willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative.
Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being
long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to
settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I
had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely
good and blameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in
miniature. It was the happiest of happy households.
One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke up out of a sodden
lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with
chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other,
in a hoarse whisper, 'I told her I would, if she made a noise, and as
for the child--'
The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice--
'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or I wouldn't
have come.'
'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up; you
done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you; come, help
rummage.'
Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they had
a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler robber
had no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around my poor cabin for a
moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage whisper--
'It's a waste of time--he shall tell where it's hid. Undo his gag, and
revive him up.'
The other said--
'All right--provided no clubbing.'
'No clubbing it is, then--provided he keeps still.'
They approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a sound of
voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and listened;
the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came a shout--
'_Hello_, the house! Show a light, we want water.'
'The captain's voice, by G--!' said the stage-whispering ruffian,
and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their
bull's-eye as they ran.
The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by--there seemed to
be a dozen of the horses--and I heard nothing more.
I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds. I tried to speak,
but the gag was effective; I could not make a sound. I listened for my
wife's voice and my child's--listened long and intently, but no sound
came from the other end of the room where their bed was. This silence
became more and more awful, more and more ominous, every moment. Could
you have endured an hour of it, do you think? Pity me, then, who had
to endure three. Three hours--? it was three ages! Whenever the clock
struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since I had heard it last. All
this time I was struggling in my bonds; and at last, about dawn, I got
myself free, and rose up and stretched my stiff limbs. I was able to
distinguish details pretty well. The floor was littered with things
thrown there by the robbers during their search for my savings. The
first object that caught my particular attention was a document of mine
which I had seen the rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast
away. It had blood on it! I staggered to the other end of the room. Oh,
poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended,
mine begun!
Did I appeal to the law--I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the
King drink for him? Oh, no, no, no--I wanted no impertinent interference
of the law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing
to me! Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: I
would find the debtor and collect the debt. How accomplish this, do you
say? How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither
seen the robbers' faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any
idea who they might be? Nevertheless, I _was _sure--quite sure, quite
confident. I had a clue--a clue which you would not have valued--a clue
which would not have greatly helped even a detective, since he would
lack the secret of how to apply it. I shall come to that, presently--you
shall see. Let us go on, now, taking things in their due order. There
was one circumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction
to begin with: Those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp
disguise; and not new to military service, but old in it--regulars,
perhaps; they did not acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures,
carriage, in a day, nor a month, nor yet in a year. So I thought,
but said nothing. And one of them had said, 'the captain's voice,
by G--!'--the one whose life I would have. Two miles away, several
regiments were in camp, and two companies of U.S. cavalry. When I
learned that Captain Blakely, of Company C had passed our way, that
night, with an escort, I said nothing, but in that company I resolved to
seek my man. In conversation I studiously and persistently described the