“SAM HOKOMOKE”
“You needn’t be scared!” Lewis exclaimed, for Moses was getting his
rifle. “He’s somebody you know. Guess who he is! Guess! Guess! Hurry and
guess—only you’ll never guess! And he got me out of the river!”
The captain and Lincoln stared with all their eyes, as Lewis and his big
rescuer came aboard, the Indian grinning broadly and offering to shake
hands.
“Me come see my son,” he announced in good, but halting, English. “Me
James Claiborne one time. Now me Sam Hokomoke.” “He’s a chief,” added
Lewis, excitedly. “A Chickasaw chief.”
“_James Claiborne!_” ejaculated Marion.
[Illustration:
“GUESS WHO HE IS! GUESS!”]
He was incapable of another word. He simply stood and stared.
“Jimmy!” shouted Moses, dashing past into the cabin, “Jimmy! _Here’s
your pa!_”
Marion had mechanically reached out and grasped the Indian’s hand and
was bewilderingly shaking it. As soon as he recovered himself a little,
he released it and allowed Lincoln to follow his example.
Lincoln spoke with much gravity. “You don’t say,” he drawled. “No wonder
his robber friends told Jimmy that his pa would know him by the
resemblance, when they fixed him up.”
James Claiborne, or Sam Hokomoke, drew himself up slightly, and the
smile died out of his face at this reference to his having robber
friends.
“Now you’ve offended him!” said Lewis, angrily. “I tell you he’s a big
chief in his tribe, though he isn’t dressed in his war togs.”
“Oh,” murmured Lincoln; “just a social call. Well, we’re mighty glad to
see you, Sam Hokomoke, or James Claiborne, whichever name you like the
best, and we know Jimmy will be.”
“We are very glad to have you here,” said Marion, rousing from his
stupefaction to his responsibilities as captain. It was almost
impossible for him, any more than for Shadwell Lincoln, to accept him as
a white man, like themselves. He had lost all resemblance to a white man
at first glance. He was the color of seasoned leather, and the fact that
he had fallen into the Indian ways of speech in his seldom practised
English, made it seem as if he could not possibly understand everything
they said as easily as they understood one another.
“We have missed you,” continued Marion, realizing that this was an
absurd way to state the case, but unable for the life of him to think of
a better one.
James Claiborne grinned again. He had said more already than he was
accustomed to, and apparently Marion’s statement did not strike him as
being in need of any verbal acknowledgment.
“Here’s Jimmy!” shouted Moses, dashing out of the cabin in front of him,
like a herald before a royal pageant. “Jimmy, here’s your pa!—Ain’t it
the greatest thing you ever set your eyes on?” he whispered to Lincoln,
as he squeezed close in to the quickly thickening group. “Think how
Jimmy set out to find him, and the dangers he went through, and the
suffering, and to have his pa just come strolling aboard—and a regular
Indian chief!”
“I guess _I_ had some hand in it,” said Lewis, darting a scornful look
at Mose.
“H’m! Might have knowed you’d be grumbling because you ain’t the whole
show,” retorted the ever-ready Mose.
Considered as a consummation, such as Moses described it, the meeting
between Jimmy Claiborne and his father left a good deal to the
imagination. Jimmy had advanced forward, thrust from behind, forcibly,
rather than moved by an impelling filial emotion. Within arm’s length of
the big Indian he came to a dead halt. The pressure from behind had
withdrawn itself, leaving him rooted to the deck. He was face to face
with his father, but it took a shrewd physiognomist to discover it.
James Claiborne Hokomoke, on his side, made no advance. The traditions
of fifteen years among the Indians may have made the American
observances strike him as inadequate to the occasion. Perhaps he would
have preferred to hold some sort of council, and sit in a circle for
hours, before a word was spoken on either hand. The arksmen grew
fidgety. Jimmy grew red. Some intuition of this embarrassment evidently
stirred the white man’s brain in Hokomoke, bringing with it a train of
more or less faded and obliterated memories.
“You my son?” he asked.
Jimmy hesitated. “I reckon I am,” he answered, deprecatingly. He did not
mean to appear doubtful, but he was embarrassed. A more positive answer
would have seemed to him pushing—like attracting attention to himself.
His eyes strayed imploringly to Marion, but the young captain had
stepped back to give him the entire floor.
“Humph! Ugly!” was his father’s comment.
There was a moment of astonishment at this unexpected sally. With his
long scalp and forelock and the rest of his hair in half grown tufts,
and the paint only partly worn off his face, Jimmy’s appearance
certainly was not such as to make a parent proud. A great laugh went up
from the men, in which Sam Hokomoke joined as heartily as any one, and
with that laugh the atmosphere of constraint cleared, and Jimmy felt at
ease.
The white man, who had so unaccountably turned his back on his family
and disappeared for so many years, was almost indifferent to the news
they poured into his ears about Fish Creek and its people. He asked no
questions, but he listened with some show of interest to the things they
told him of his father, and Maria, his wife. He accepted the hospitality
which Marion extended him, but expressed no enthusiasm when it was
proposed that he should return with them to Fish Creek in the autumn. He
made no further explanation of his reluctance than might be gathered
from the simple comment, “Squaw good,” and he had no messages for Maria,
although to his father he sent several long speeches, beautiful with
Indian symbolism and sentiment.
“But how on earth did you meet each other, and where in the world have
you been?” asked Marion of Lewis, when they were floating down the river
again, and a reserved relationship had established itself between Jimmy
and his father.
“Been chasing along the bank,” replied the boy. “I ran by you last
night. Didn’t you stop somewhere?”
“We stopped and went back to look for you,” replied Captain Royce.
“That was when I went by you, and didn’t know it!” exclaimed Lewis.
“Then after we had run a long way, Sam Hokomoke climbed up that high
bluff and saw ye comin’ down-stream. And I tell ye I was glad!”
“But how came you ashore in the first place?” exclaimed Moses. “Did you
jump ashore when the tree fell on us?”
“No, I didn’t!” replied Lewis, shortly. “I didn’t have a chance. I went
head foremost into the river! But that wasn’t the first of it,” Lewis
added. “The whole bluff slid down to begin with, and Sam Hokomoke with
it.”
“Didn’t I tell ye that there was someone up there?” Lewis interrupted
himself to say to Moses. “Didn’t I say so?”
“You said you believed there was a buffalo up there,” Moses admitted.
“I said ‘something’ was up there,” insisted Lewis. “Well, ’twas
Hokomoke”—somehow it seemed impossible to call him by the name of
Claiborne. “He tossed them little stones down to attract our attention,
just for fun, but when the bank caved in he was as surprised as anybody,
I guess, for down he came with it, head first; but he gave a mighty
jump, and landed on the ark roof, within three feet of me. I thought he
was going to scalp me, and I clinched him—for there was no chance to get
up my gun.”
“Was that when you said, ‘You red scamp, you?’” exclaimed Moses.
“Maybe,” replied Lewis. “I don’t know what I said. I thought he meant
me, and I clinched, and Tige jumped for him, too. But just then
something struck us. D’ye say ’twas a tree? The whole roof went smash,
and Tige and me and Hokomoke went heels over head into the river.
“I guess I’d ’a’ been drowned sure,” Lewis continued, more soberly. “I
went down, down, down, and swallowed considerable water. I thought I
never’d come up; but when I did, he had me by the hair, and was makin’
for the bank with me. He got out and pulled me out. I thought he had
only hauled me out to get my scalp, and I tried to break away from him.
But he began to say, ‘Me no kill! Me no kill! Me white man,’ Tige, too,
never once offered to bite him after we got ashore.
“As soon as I found I hadn’t got to fight, I began to look for the ark,”
Lewis went on, “but it had gone. I hallooed four or five times, but
couldn’t hear anything of you, though I heard somebody, whose voice
sounded like Mose’s, away down the river. We sat and rested a while, and
then Hokomoke gave me a pull by the arm, and said, ‘Me go catch white
man’s boat.’ And we started after you through the swamps and cane—an
awful place to get through in the night. I don’t believe I would ever
got down here if it hadn’t been for him. I told him about us, and then
he told me who he was. That’s all.”
In spite of their efforts to keep him longer, Sam Hokomoke took leave of
the arksmen the next day at a camp of his tribe near the fourth
Chickasaw bluff.
“It’s cert’n’y curious,” said Jimmy, as they watched him disappear,
waving his hand and grinning back at them, “to think I have a father who
is a full-fledged Indian chief, and that I have an invitation from him
to visit him or call upon him for assistance whenever I please.”
“The strangest part of it is that the Spaniards have treaties with them
against us Americans, and that they’re our worst enemies,” said Marion.
No adventure worthy of note now befell them for a number of days. They
passed the mouth of the St. Francis River and many natural meadows, or
prairies, at several of which settlers’ cabins had recently been built.
Here they were sometimes able to exchange corn and wheat for eggs,
poultry, bear meat and venison.
In two days the mouth of the Arkansas River was passed. At the new
settlement of Palmyra they tied up for a day and a half, in order to
obtain larger sweeps and to mend the roof of the ark. The next day the
Grand Gulf Hills came in view, and during the afternoon both Captain
Royce and Shadwell Lincoln found that all their skill and experience
barely sufficed to keep their heavily-laden craft out of Grand Gulf
Eddy. For here the channel narrows, and has a vast whirlpool on each
hand.
It was now the latter part of June, and despite many perils and
accidents, the ark was getting well toward its destination. But the
night after they had passed Grand Gulf proved one of the most exciting
of the voyage. No favorable place for tying up to the bank had presented
itself that afternoon, but as twilight came on they veered into a small
bayou, which opened into the forest on the eastern, or Mississippi,
shore.
Such creek mouths were far from being ideal stopping-places on account
of mosquitoes, which, at this season, tortured man and beast almost
beyond endurance. The day had been very warm, and despite the best that
could be done for their comfort, the live stock on the ark suffered
exceedingly.
Only ten of the crew mustered at mess that night. Corson had not yet
recovered; Clark MacAfee still complained of his injuries, and Obed
Hargous and Wistar Royce were also ill from the effects of bad water.
It was a dismal place, this narrow bayou, overhung with lofty trees, and
the gray, trailing mosses, which brushed the roof of the ark. Around, on
every hand, thousands of frogs were croaking, while here and there
water-moccasins lay stretched along dead cypress limbs that had fallen
on the stagnant waters. One was found on the roof of the ark as the crew
were tying up.
Moses and Lewis made short work of this intruder, and set lanterns
forward and aft, the better to see if more snakes crept aboard.
While eating supper they could hear the bellowing of alligators, which
began immediately after dark. The bayou appeared to be a haunt of these
formidable reptiles. Alligators, indeed, seem to have been far more
numerous, as well as larger, a century ago than at present. We now
rarely hear of one being seen above the mouth of the Red River; but in
early days they were found as far north as New Madrid and the mouth of
the Ohio. If we may believe the accounts given by boatmen, an alligator
twenty feet in length was not an unusually large reptile in the days of
the Louisiana Purchase.
Meanwhile the horses, frightened probably by the sound, were snorting
loudly. It became evident that the reptiles smelled the live stock. It
was not believed at first that they could clamber aboard; but fears of
this soon arose, for one of the big reptiles, having apparently climbed
out on a fallen magnolia, dashed for the side of the ark, forward, where
he struck his head so hard as to cause a considerable shock to the boat.
This raised a great commotion among the horses. The claws, or flippers,
of other alligators could be heard constantly scratching the sides, and
at length the big fellow came tumbling over the rail at the very heels
of the horses.
The uproar that followed can be imagined; the men shouting, the horses
kicking and squealing, Tige barking, and the pet bear growling in a
savage chorus.
As if terrorized into abnormal activity, this alligator lashed right and
left with his formidable tail, and snapped savagely at the legs of the
horses and at the pike-poles with which the crew attacked it.
One of the horses kicked the reptile and it scuttled back against the
bulwarks, rattled, dashed headlong past the gun-room, and jammed itself
between a post there and the rail. Here it stuck fast, and Captain
Royce, who had run to get a rifle, approached and fired the piece into
the reptile’s gaping throat.
No more of the saurians got on board, or the voyage might have ended
then and there; but it was not till day dawned that the scaly creatures
began to sink, and swim away to their coverts.
At sunrise they poled out of the bayou, and were glad to feel the ark
floating with the river again. But adventures and accidents, as has been
often noted, rarely come singly. The current bore them over toward the
Spanish, or Louisiana shore, and as the ark drifted past a bank of thick
willows, it was suddenly drawn into the rapid outset of water through a
crevasse.
As is frequently the case along the lower course of the Mississippi, the
surface of the river current is here higher than the swamps lying
adjacent to the banks, inundating the surrounding country, and either
finding its way back to the main stream, hundreds of miles below, or
else, as in the case of the Atchafalaya Bayou, reaching the Gulf of
Mexico by other channels.
So vast is the quantity of alluvial mud brought down by this mighty
stream that the river constantly exhibits a tendency to deposit and
raise banks for itself above the level of the low country through which
it flows. From the nature of things, however, these banks cannot go on
increasing in height beyond a certain well-marked limit.
Charlie Hoyt and Wistar Royce were standing by the long sweep, or
steering oar, at the time, and Lewis Hoyt had just gone forward on
lookout duty. As they floated past the willow bank a skiff with four
rowers, farther out on the river, came up and hailed them. Lewis turned
to answer and asked, “What news of the Spaniards?”
As he listened for their reply he felt the bow of the ark swing
shoreward, and glanced back at the steersmen. But Wistar and Charlie
were staring at him. He then saw the gap in the bank and the water
surging through it—a gap no more than fifty feet wide; but, before he
could even shout to the steersmen, the ark had headed into it and was
sucked through.
For a hundred yards or more the torrent ran with great force, then
spread itself over a submerged swamp of cane, willow, and other small
growth, amid the tops of which the heavy craft went crashing its way for
fully a quarter of a mile before the arksmen could check it.
It came to rest, finally, on a ridge thickly timbered with magnolia and
live-oak trees, in the midst of which was a dense tangle of young bays
and myrtle bushes and trumpet vines. Wedged securely between a live-oak,
whose great branches swept the after-deck, and a tall magnolia at the
bow, like a pile at the end of a pier, the ark was as securely docked as
if it had reached the end of its travels.
It had all happened so suddenly that when Captain Royce came out of the
cook’s galley, he was amazed to find the ark in a hammock a quarter of a
mile back of the river.
“Well, Lewis,” drawled Shadwell Lincoln, “you’re a boss pilot. Reckon
our voyage ends here. Looks as if we’d have to foot it the rest of the
way.”
Charlie Hoyt, Wistar Royce and Lewis Hoyt stood staring at the disaster
that their negligence had wrought.
“Oh, shut up, can’t you?” said Moses. “This ain’t any time for sarcasm.
I guess Lewis didn’t come in here on a pleasure junket.”
Lewis, surprised at having Moses siding with him, cast a grateful look
at him. The extreme gravity of the situation, however, was fully
apparent to all. How to get so heavy a craft back into the river was a
difficult problem. Once off the hammock, all hands, working together,
might pole the ark back to the gap; but the strength of a hundred men
would hardly have sufficed to force it against the torrent that poured
through the gap in the bank.
MacAfee, who had made several voyages, thought that in four weeks the
river would fall, and that perhaps by that time they might be able to
haul back into the Mississippi. But Merrick and Kenton, and Obed
Hargous, boatmen of experience, thought this unlikely.
“When we warp her out of this timber,” said Marion, “she will be
strained and sprung so that we can’t keep her afloat. Probably, we’ll
have to unload and take her to pieces, and put her together again on the
river.”
“That will take months,” said Moses.
“One thing,” said Lewis. “The men in the skiff told me that the
Spaniards have closed New Orleans. We couldn’t land our goods, even if
we got there. There’s going to be a fight. The rivermen are drilling at
Natchez, and troops are coming down from Kentucky and everywhere.”
“Is that true?” asked Marion.
“I expect so,” said Lewis. “I don’t see why they should make it up, do
you?”
“I’ll take a skiff and go find out how things stand,” said Marion. His
confidence for a moment had deserted him. He felt obliged to get away
from the men who were looking to him to be told what to do next. The
heavy shock of having their trip brought to so hopeless a termination
almost unnerved him. He had hoped so much from this year’s voyage.
He launched his skiff at the edge of the hammock, Kenton and Moses
shoving him off, and rowed away across the flooded savannah to the river
bank.
When he returned, he confirmed all that the men in the skiff had told
Lewis. There was at present no outlet for the cargoes that were
collecting below Natchez. The rivermen were preparing to fight. As to
the ark, he had talked to a number of barge captains, and they had
suggested a project for getting the boat back into the river, when it
should have been warped off the hammock.
A week was spent in taking off the horses, for whom a rude shelter was
built from the cabin timbers of the ark. Some of the cargo was also
unloaded. For another week part of the crew were busy in making harness
from lines and hawsers, which they had on board for moorings and
“cordelling,” while others cut down tall, high feathering pines to be
used as rollers under the ark. The live-oak was also cut down and a way
cleared for the re-launching.
They christened the hammock “Ararat.”
When they were ready to get the ark down into the swamp, the crews of
two corn-laden barges from St. Louis came across to render assistance,
bringing with them hawsers and pulley-blocks.
The great broadhorn was finally floated on the submerged savannah, and
it was comparatively easy for the men to pole back to the river gap,
where the hardest of their task yet awaited the arksmen. Here the
clumsily wrought harness came into play again. Claiborne and Lincoln had
also contrived hames, roughly hewn out of green willow wood.
A strong post was set in the river bank, on the south side of the gap. A
section off the trunk of a large hollow tree was fitted upon the post so
as to revolve on it, for hawsers to reeve round. Their supply of line
running short, three extra hawsers were bought from passing boats, and a
double pulley-block constructed from seasoned plank and two iron bolts.
With such rude tackle, contrived wholly by the ingenuity of the
pioneers, twelve of the horses were at length hitched to a long hawser,
reeved through the pulley-block and running round the post, and the ark
was hauled foot by foot up into the river.
The St. Louis corn barges had gone on, but other barges had been
lying-by to render such assistance as was in their power, and they were
on the point of giving a cheer for the ark when they noticed that all
the labor spent upon her had been in vain.
The ark was sinking.
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