ABOARD THE _MISSOURI BELLE_
Tom wended his way to the levee and as he passed the last line of
buildings and faced the great slope leading to the water's edge his eyes
kindled. Two graceful stern-wheel packets were moving on the river, the
smaller close to the nearer bank on her way home from the treacherous
Missouri; the larger, curving well over toward the Illinois shore, was
heading downstream for New Orleans. Their graceful lines, open bow decks
with the great derricks supporting the huge landing stages, and the
thick, powerful masts on each edge of the lower deck toward the bow,
each holding up the great spar so necessary for Mississippi river
navigation; the tall stacks with the initials of the boat against a
lattice work between; the regular spacing of windows and doors in the
cabins, and the clean white of their hulls and superstructure, rendered
more vivid by contrast with the tawny flood on all sides of them, made a
striking and picturesque sight. Each had a curving tail of boiling brown
water behind, and a bone in its teeth. These river boats were modeled on
trim and beautiful lines and were far from being crude, frontier
makeshifts.
Several Mackinaw boats moved anglingly across the current from the other
shore, and a keelboat glided down the river for New Orleans, or to turn
up the Ohio for Pittsburg, helped in the current by a dirty, square
sail. The little twin-hulled ferry was just coming in from the Illinois
shore, its catamaran construction giving it a safety which a casual
observation would have withheld. The passengers clung to its rails as it
pitched and bobbed in the rolling wake of the south-bound packet, a wake
dreaded by all small craft unfortunate enough to pass the slapping
paddle at too close a distance, for the following billows were high,
sharp, and close together.
On the great levee wagons and carts rattled and rumbled; drivers shouted
and swore as they picked their impatient and erratic way through the
traffic; lazy negroes, momentarily spurred into energetic activity,
moved all kinds of merchandise between the boats and the great piles on
the sloping river bank, two long lines of them passing each other on the
bridging gangplanks reaching far ashore. Opposed to this scene of labor
and turmoil was a canoe well offshore, whose two occupants, drifting
with the current, lazily fished for the great channel catfish which the
negro population loved so much.
On a packet, which we will call the _Missouri Belle_, a whistle blew
sharply and as the sound died away several groups of passengers hurried
across the levee, scurrying about like panicky bugs when a log is rolled
over, darting this way and that amid the careless bustle of the traffic,
as eager to reach a place of safety as are chickens affrighted by the
shadow of a drifting hawk. The crowd was cosmopolitan enough to suit the
most exacting critic. Freighters, merchants, hunters, trappers, and
Indians returning to the upper trading posts or to their own country;
gamblers; a frock-coated minister who suspiciously regarded every box
and barrel and bale that he saw rolled up the freight gangplank, and who
was a person of great interest to many pairs of eyes on and off the
boat; a priest; a voluble, chattering group of _coureurs des bois_; a
small crowd of soldiers going up to Fort Leavenworth; emigrants,
boatmen, and travelers made up the hurrying procession or stood at the
rails and watched the confusion on the levee.
Tom joined the animated stream, swinging in behind an elderly gentleman
who escorted a young lady of unflurried demeanor through the maelstrom
of wagons, carts, mules, horses, passengers, and heavily laden negroes.
Caught in a jam and forced to make a quick decision and to follow it
instantly, the young lady dropped her glove in picking up her skirts and
a nervous horse was about to stamp it into the dirt and dust when Tom
leaped forward. Grasping the bridle with one hand, he bent swiftly and
reached for the glove with the other. As he was about to grasp it, a man
dressed in nondescript clothes left his Mexican companion and bent
forward on the other side of the horse, his lean, brown fingers eagerly
outstretched.
Tom's surprise at this unexpected interference acted galvanically and
his hand, turning up from the glove, grasped the thrusting fingers of
the other in a grip which not only was powerful but doubly effective by
its unexpectedness. He swiftly straightened the wrist and forearm of his
rival into perfect alignment with the rest of the arm and then, with a
sudden dropping of his own elbow, he turned the other's arm throwing all
his strength and weight into the motion. The result was ludicrous. The
rival, bent forward, his other hand on the ground, had to give way in a
hurry or have his arm dislocated. His right foot arose swiftly into the
air and described a short arc as his whole body followed it; and
quicker than it takes to tell it he was bridged much the same as a
wrestler, his arched back to the ground. Tom grinned sardonically and
with a swift jerk yanked his adversary off his balance, and as the other
sprawled grotesquely in the dust, the victor of the little tilt picked
up the glove, leaped nimbly aside and looked eagerly around for its
owner. He no sooner stood erect than he saw her with a handkerchief
stuffed in her mouth and, bowing stiffly and with sober face he gravely
presented the glove to her. She had waited, despite all her escort could
do, somewhat breathlessly watching the rescue and the short, quick
comedy incidental to it; and now, with reddened cheeks and mischievous
eyes, she took the glove and murmured her thanks. The elderly gentleman,
grinning from ear to ear, raised his high beaver, thanked the plainsman,
and then hurried his charge onto the boat, fearful of the time lost.
Tom stood in his tracks staring after them, hypnotized by the beauty of
the face and the timbre of the voice of the woman whose eyes had
challenged him as she had turned away.
The profane remarks of the wagon driver, the more picturesque remarks of
other drivers, and the vociferous, white-toothed delight of the negroes
did not soothe Ephriam Schoolcraft's outraged dignity nor help to cool
his anger, and he arose from his dust bath seeking whom he might devour.
He did not have to seek far, for a negro's shouted warning reached Tom
in time to spin him around to await his adversary. The plainsman was
cool, imperturbable, and smiling slightly with amusement.
Schoolcraft leaped for him and was sent spinning against a pile of
freight. As he recovered his balance his hand streaked for his belt, but
stopped in the air as he gazed down the barrel of the new Colt snuggling
against the hip of the younger man. It must have looked especially
vicious to a man accustomed to a single-shot pistol, or a
double-barreled Derringer, at best.
"That was no killing matter," said Tom quietly. "Don't make it so, and
don't make us both miss that packet, and get locked up in a St. Louis
jail. I'll get out again quicker than you, but that hardly matters. If
you're going aboard, go ahead; I'm in no great hurry." Out of the corner
of his eye he was watching the Mexican, but found nothing threatening.
Schoolcraft glared at him, allowed a hypocritical smile to mask his
feelings, bowed politely, and walked down the levee, the Mexican
following him, and Tom bringing up the rear. They were quickly separated
by the bustle on the boat, each giving his immediate attention to the
preparations necessary for his comfort during the voyage.
A second blast of the whistle was followed by the groaning of the great
derrick as it lifted the landing stage and swung it aboard; lines were
hauled in and the passengers along the rails waved their adieus and
called last minute messages to those they were leaving behind. It would
be many years before some of them saw their friends again, and for a few
the reunion would not be on this earth. A bell rang aft and the great
stern paddle slapped and thrashed noisily as it bit and tore at the
yellow water beneath it. Showers of sparks, incandescent as they left
the towering stacks, fell in gray flakes on the decks and the river, the
bluish smoke of the wood fires trailing straighter and straighter astern
as the packet rounded into the boiling current and pushed upstream at a
constantly increasing speed, leaving behind her the western metropolis
on the left-hand bank and a straggling hamlet on the other.
Here the Mississippi is a mighty river, approaching half a mile in width
between its limestone banks; deep, swift, its current boiling up the
muddy contribution of the great Missouri, as if eager to expose the
infamy of its pollution to the world. But whatever it lost in purity by
the addition of the muddy water, pouring in eighteen miles above the
city, it gained in greatness. Other large rivers have been tamed and
rendered nearly harmless, but these two have baffled man's labors and
ingenuity, and finally the contributing stream has been given up as
incorrigible.
The confusion of the passengers attending to their baggage, places at
table and their sleeping quarters grew constantly less as mile followed
mile, and by the time the _Belle_ swung in a great, westward curve to
leave the Father of Waters for the more turbid and treacherous bosom of
the Big Muddy, many were eagerly looking for the line marking the
joining of the two great streams. It was plain to the eye, for the
jutting brown flood of the Missouri, dotted with great masses of drift,
was treated with proper suspicion by the clearer flood of the nobler
stream, and curved far out into the latter without losing the identity
of its outer edge for some distance below.