AT ANCHOR
Phil had sent two telegrams,--one to the authorities at Memphis, and
the other to the plundered bank in Cincinnati. In each he had announced
his captures,--the man and the funds,--and in each he had asked that
officers to arrest and persons to identify the culprit should be waiting
at Memphis on the arrival of the flatboat.
On his return to the flatboat he felt himself so excited and sleepless
that he sent his comrades below to sleep and by turns to watch the
prisoner. He would himself remain on duty on deck all night. As the
night wore away, the boy thought out all the possibilities, for he felt
that for any miscarriage in this matter he would be solely responsible.
Among the possibilities was this: that should the flatboat arrive at
Memphis before some one could get there from Cincinnati to identify the
prisoner, he might be discharged for want of such identification. It
would take a day or two to send men by rail from Cincinnati to Memphis,
while the fierce current of this Mississippi flood promised to take the
flatboat thither within less than twenty hours.
After working out all the probabilities in his mind as well as he could,
Phil called below for all his comrades to come to the sweeps. He did not
tell them his purpose; they were too sleepy even to ask. But studying
the “lay of the land” on either side, he steered the flatboat into a
sort of pocket on the Tennessee shore, and to the bewilderment of his
comrades, ordered the anchor cast overboard.
By the time that the anchor held, and the boat came to a rest in the
bend, the boys were much too wide awake not to have their minds full of
interrogation marks.
“What do you mean, Phil?” “Why have we anchored?” “How long are we to
remain here?” “What’s the matter, anyhow?” “Have you gone crazy, or what
is it?”
These and a volley of similar questions were fired at him.
He did not answer. He went to one side of the boat and then to the other
to observe position.
“How much anchor line is out, Will?” he presently asked.
“Nearly all of it,” answered his comrade.
“This won’t do,” said Phil. “Up anchor.”
The boys were more than ever puzzled. But they tugged away at the anchor
windlass till the flukes let go the bottom and the anchor was halfway
up. Then Phil called out:--
“That will do. Put a peg in the windlass and let the anchor swing in the
water. To the sweeps! Hard on the starboard! We must push her inshore
and into shallower water, where the anchor will hold her, and where no
steamboat is likely to run over us. Who would have thought it was so
deep over here?”
The boys now began to understand why the first anchorage had been
abandoned and a shallower one sought for, but they did not yet know what
their captain meant by anchoring at all. They did not understand why, on
so clear a night, with a river so generously flooded, he did not let
things take their course and get to Memphis as quickly as possible.
Presently the anchor, dragging at half cable, fouled the bottom and,
with a strain that made the check-post creak, the flatboat came to a
full stop.
“That will do,” said Phil. “This is as good a place as any. Pay out some
more anchor line and let her rest.”
“But what on earth are you anchoring for?” asked the others, “and how
long are we going to lie here?” queried Ed.
“Nearly two days and nights,” was the reply,--“long enough to let
somebody travel from Cincinnati to Memphis who can identify Jim Hughes
and take him off our hands. I suppose it would be all right if we went
on without waiting. But I’m not certain of that, and I’m not taking any
chances in this business, so we’ll lie at anchor here for nearly two
days. Go to bed, all of you except the one on watch over Jim Hughes. I’m
not sleepy, so I’ll stay on deck for the rest of the night.”
But by that time the boys were not sleepy either, so they made no haste
about going to their bunks.
“We’ll be pretty short of something to eat by that time,” said
Constant, who was just then in charge of the cooking. “We have only a
scrap of bread left. The eggs and fresh meat and milk are used up, and
we’ll have to fall back on corn-bread and fried salt pork.”
“Well, that’s food fit for the gods,” said Irv Strong, “if the gods
happen to be healthy, hungry flatboatmen. But how important the food
question always is in an emergency! How it always crops up when you get
away from home!”
“Yes, and at home too,” said Ed; “only there we have somebody else to
look after the three meals a day. It’s the most important question in
the world. If all food supplies were cut off for a single month, this
world would be as dead as the moon.”
“That’s true,” broke in Will. “And really, I suppose the world isn’t
very forehanded with it at best. I wonder how many years we could last,
anyhow, if the crops ceased to grow.”
“Not more than one year,” replied the older boy. “There never was a time
when mankind had food enough accumulated to last for much more than a
year, and probably there never will be. If there should be no crop for
a single year, hundreds of thousands would starve every month, and a
second failure would simply blot out the race. As for forehandedness, we
actually live from hand to mouth, especially the people in the big
cities. Only last winter a great snowstorm blockaded the railroads
leading into New York for only three or four days, and even in that
short time the price of food went up so high that the charitable
institutions had all they could do to keep poor people from starving. So
far from the world generally being forehanded for food, there never was
a time when the food on hand was really sufficient to go round.”
“Well, of course,” said Will, meditatively, “there are always some
people so ‘down on their luck,’ as the saying is, that they can’t earn a
living, but there’s always enough food for them if they could get hold
of it.”
“You’re mistaken,” said Ed. “There is nearly always something like a
famine in parts of India and Russia, and even in Italy and other parts
of Europe there are great masses of very hard-working people who never
in their lives get enough to eat.”
There were exclamations of surprise at this, but Ed presently
continued: “In many European countries the peasants do not see a piece
of meat once a year, and in hardly any of them do the poorer people get
what we would think sufficient for food. In fact, their food is not
sufficient. They are always more or less starved, and that’s the reason
so many of them are the little runts they are.”
“Then we are better off than most other nations?” said Irv.
“Immeasurably!” said Ed. “Ours is the best fed nation in the world. It
is the only nation in which the poorest laborer can have meat on his
table every day in the year, for even in England the poorer laborers
have to make out with cheese pretty often.”
“What’s the reason?” asked Phil, who had acquired the habit of using
short sentences and as few words as possible since his burden of
responsibility had borne so heavily upon him.
“There are several reasons. Our soil is fertile--but so is that of
France and Italy, for that matter. I suppose the great reason is that we
do not have to support vast armies in idleness. In most of the European
countries they make everybody serve in the army for three or four
years. It costs a lot of money to support these armies and it costs the
country a great deal more than that.”
“In what way?” asked Constant, who, being on sentry duty over Hughes,
was sitting halfway down the ladder.
“Why, by taking all the young men away from productive work for three
years. Take half a million young men away from work and put them in the
army, and you lose each year all the work that a man could do in half a
million years, all the food or other things that half a million men
could produce in a year?”
“And the other people have to make it all up,” drawled Irv. “I don’t
wonder they’re tired.”
“And besides making it all up, as you say,” responded Ed, “those other
people have to work to feed and clothe and house and arm all these men,
besides transporting them from one place to another, and paying for
costly parades and all that sort of thing. Why, every time one of the
big modern guns is fired at a target it burns up some man’s earnings for
a whole year! Some man must work a year or more to pay the expense of
doing it!”
“Then why don’t the people of those countries ‘kick’?” asked Will, “and
abolish their armies?”
“Because the people of those countries have masters, and the masters own
the armies, and the armies would make short work of any ‘kick.’ In our
country the people are the masters, and they have always refused to let
anybody set up a great standing army. When we have a war, the people
volunteer and fight it to a finish. Then the men who have been doing the
fighting are mustered out, and they go back to their work, earn their
own living, and put in their time producing something that mankind
needs.”
“Cipher it all down,” said Irv, “it’s liberty that makes this the best
country in the world to live in.”
“Precisely!” said Ed, with emphasis. “And about the most important duty
every American has to do is to remember that one, supreme fact, and do
his part to keep our country as it is.”