Lights by the thousand speckled the night-enshrouded water-front when I
reached the slip where my boat lay. On the huge roofed-in wharf
freight-handlers swarmed like bees. The rumble of hand trucks and the
tramp of feet rose to the great beams overhead and echoed back in a
steady drone. Lamps fluttered on vibrating walls. Men moved in haste,
throwing long shadows ahead and behind them. Boxes, bales, barrels,
sacked stuff vanished swiftly down three separate inclines to the lower
deck of the _Memphis Girl_, and from the depths of this
freight-swallowing monster came the raucous gabble, freely garnished
with profanity, of the toiling stevedores.
Out from under that vast sounding board of a roof the noise at once
diminished in volume, and I passed through the heart of the dust and
babel and gained the cabin deck of the _Memphis_. A steward looked over
my ticket and guided me to the berth I had reserved. It was then half
past nine; still two hours and a half to the time of departure. I took a
look around the upper deck. Quite a number of passengers were already
aboard. Some were gone to bed; others were grouped in the aft saloon.
One or two poker games had started, and little groups were looking on.
But of them all I knew not a soul. Youth hungers for companionship, and
I was no exception to my kind. It may be a truism to say that nowhere
can one be so completely alone as in a crowd; but the singularity of it
never came home to me until that night. But we are always learning the
old things and esteeming them new. I roamed about the _Memphis_, wishing
I had stayed up town till the last minute. It had been my plan to go
down and turn in; the ceremony of casting off was not one that
interested me greatly. But now the whim was gone; a spirit of unrest, an
impatience to be off, drove sleep from my mind. If you have ever known
the dreary monotony of waiting for train or steamer to start when your
whole being craves the restfulness of motion you will not wonder that I
made one more round of the deck and saloons and then left the _Memphis_
to roam aimlessly past the serried wharves that faced the stream.
I don't recollect just how far I wandered. If the place had been strange
to me I should likely have been more circumspect in my prowling. As it
was, my only concern was to be at the S.S. Company's wharf by midnight,
and midnight was yet afar. So I poked along, stopping now and then to
hang over a railing and peer across the dark sweep of the Mississippi
toward the Illinois shore. Between, the lights of divers craft twinkled
like fireflies, and tootings of major and minor keys with varying volume
of sound went wailing through the night.
A big passenger packet, hailing from up-river, swept into view. Ablaze
from her bow to the churning stern wheel she bore down like a floating
villa strung with yellow gems. A band blared "Dixie" from somewhere
amidships. I was young enough to have some degree of enthusiasm for such
spectacles, and I turned onto a long half-lighted wharf and walked to
its outermost tip to get a better view of the puffing river monster with
its thousand gleaming eyes.
Until she came abreast and passed, I stood there watching. In a careless
way I became aware of two men strolling out on the wharf; in fact, I had
passed them near the entrance gate. I remember that the swell from the
big packet was beginning to slap against the wharf wall when one of them
edged over and asked me the time.
Like a simpleton I hauled out my watch to tell him. It did not occur to
me that there might be any purpose behind the question. The river-front
in St. Louis was not a place where one could safely exhibit signs of
affluence in the way of cash or jewelry--and I knew it. I hadn't grown
up in a city without knowing some of its ways. No doubt it looked like
an easy game, out there on the end of a deserted wharf.
My watch was a plain hunting-case affair, with a fob. Without an inkling
of what was to come I turned toward the dim light as I sprung the case
open. In that instant the fellow struck the watch out of my grasp with
one hand, and smashed me full on the jaw with the other--a vicious,
pugilistic punch. I went down. Curiously, I didn't lose consciousness;
and the blow gave little pain. But it paralyzed my motor nerves for a
few seconds, gave me a queer, helpless feeling in my legs and arms, such
as one has in a nightmare. It passed though, and the pair of them were
just going through my pockets with a celerity that bespoke much practice
when I recovered sufficiently to jab my fist into a face that was bent
close to mine--at the same time driving both heels against the shins of
the other fellow with what force I could muster.
This instinctive outbreak rather surprised them, I think. Anyway, they
gave ground. Only for a moment, however. I made one valiant effort to
gain my feet, and they were on me like twin wolves. Kicking, striking,
struggling like primal beasts we three lurched this way and that on the
brink of the wharf. A hundred yards away people were hurrying by, and if
I'd had sense enough to realize that a shout was my best weapon I could
easily have routed the thugs. But I was too frightened to think.
And in a very short time sheer weight of numbers decided the issue. One
of them got a strangle hold about my neck. The other clasped me
fervently around the waist. Thus they dragged me down. For one brief
instant I rested on the hard planking, my head in a whirl, their weight
like a mountain on my heaving chest. Then, with a quick shove they
thrust me over the edge of the wharf.
Undertaken voluntarily, a twenty-foot dive is no great matter, but it is
a horse of quite another color to be chucked into space and fall that
distance like a bag of meal. I struck the water feet first, as it
happened, and came to the top spluttering, half-strangled, but otherwise
none the worse. Right quickly I found that I'd merely exchanged one
antagonist for another. The current set strongly out from the wharf, and
it cost me many a stroke to get back to it, and then I saw that I was no
better off. Contrary to the usual thing the piles offered no avenue of
escape, for they were planked up, a smooth wooden wall that I could not
possibly climb. I felt my way toward shore, but the out-sweeping current
was too strong. So I hooked my fingers in a tiny crack and proceeded to
shed what clothing still burdened me. Of my coat only a fragmentary
portion remained. It had been ripped up the back in the fracas above,
and the side containing my ticket and most of my money had been torn
clear off me. There was little left save the sleeves. My shoes and shirt
and trousers I cast upon the waters with little thought of their return;
and then, clad in a suit of thin underclothes I struck out for the next
pier below, thanking my stars that I was a fair swimmer.
But I could not make it. The channel of the Mississippi threw the full
head of a powerful current against the St. Louis side at that particular
point; it struck the wharf-lined bank and swerved out again with the
strength of an ocean tide, and I was in the out-going curve of it. The
next wharf was not for me nor yet its fellow beyond. Steadily I was
carried into mid-stream. Shouting for help across the black space that
lay between me and the wharves soon exhausted what wind and strength I
did not use up in a footless attempt to swim against the current. I
stopped yelling then; it seemed to be sink or swim, and I began to
conserve my energies a bit. Slipping along in plain view of myriad
lights, hearing the fiendish screaming of steamer whistles, seeing the
moving bulk of them dimly in the night, I felt in no immediate
danger--not half as much alarm disturbed the soul of me as when the
fingers of those night-hawks were clawing at my throat. I knew I could
keep afloat an indefinite length of time, and some craft or other, I
reasoned, would pick me up if I failed to make shore.
By and by I rapped my hand smartly against some hard object as I cleft
the water, and gripping it I found myself the richer by a four-foot
stick of cordwood on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. This served to bear
me up without any exertion on my part, and gave me that much better
chance to buck the current. I was now well out from the wharves, and
straining my eyes for passing boats.
Far down the river the piercing shriek of a siren split a momentary
silence that had fallen on the stream. A drumming noise was borne up to
me on a fitful night breeze. From behind the black loom of a jutting
wharf a steamer appeared, and came throbbing upstream. Now she was
almost on me, the heart-like pulse of her engines and the thresh of her
great sternwheel deadening all the other sounds which that vast river
surface caught up and bandied back and forth.
Remorselessly the current bore me into her path. At first I had strained
every nerve to get in her way, but as the black hull with funnels
belching smoke and deck-lights riding high drew near I remembered that
if I missed a hold on her side I stood a fair chance of being sucked
into the flailing paddles. When that filtered into my cranium I backed
water in hot haste; but I had gone too far, and her speed was too great.
In another minute I was pawing at the slippery bulge of her water-line,
and striving to lift my voice above the chug of the engines as she slid
by.
The wash from her swung me away and drew me back again, and just as the
nearing thresh of her broad-paddled wheel struck a chill of fear into my
quaking heart my hands fouled in a trailing line and I laid hold of it
more tightly than ever drowning man clutched the proverbial straw.
It was a small line, and the strain of towing me was great, but it held.
In the tiers of cabins above my head lights flicked out one by one.
Again and again I called, bellowing upward with the regularity of a fog
signal. No answer; no inquiring face peered over the rail. The docks
slid by. God only knows how long I dangled at the end of that bit of
twisted fiber. The glow-worm lamps of St. Louis twinkled distantly on
the left, rapidly falling astern. The thin line wrapped about my wrist
numbed it to the elbow; I changed hands from time to time, in peril of
being cast adrift. Fervently I wished for my bit of driftwood. The
on-rushing demon to which I clung offered less hope of succor.
In a little while longer I should have cast loose from sheer inability
to hold on. The strain on my arms was exhausting, and the least shift
soused me under water, such was the speed. How I should have fared then,
I do not know. But in the nick of time an answering hail came from above
and when I had established the fact that a human being was clinging
alongside, a cluster of heads and a lantern or two appeared at the rail
and a rope ladder came wriggling down.
Cramped and sore and weary as I was I climbed thankfully aboard. A knot
of passengers surrounded an officer whom I took to be the mate. A
deckhand or two stood by, eyeing me curiously as I heaved myself on
deck. The mate held up his lantern and took a good look at me.
"You look some the worse for wear, bucko," he volunteered indifferently.
"How long you been hangin' onto us?"
I began to explain, but I daresay my appearance hardly lent an air of
truth to my words; he cut me short with an incredulous shrug of his
shoulders.
"Tell that t' the captain or the purser," he interrupted sharply. "Bilk,
you steer him t' the pilot house. I'll be there in a minute."
He turned on his heel, and Bilk motioned me to follow. As we passed
forward I wondered on what sort of craft I had landed, whither bound,
and how good my chance was of getting back to St. Louis and making a
fresh start. The first of these queries I voiced to Bilk.
"She's the _New Moon_," he growled. "Through freight t' Bismark, Cow
Island, and Fort Benton. Stop? Naw, she don't stop fer nothin' only
wood."