RESCUE
When Phil at last waked, Ed was putting supper on the table, and it was
rather a late supper too, for the boys had purposely postponed it in
order to let Phil get all the sleep possible. He had in fact slept for
fully eight hours.
“Well, how do you feel now, skipper?” asked Will.
“I don’t know exactly,” answered the boy, yawning and stretching.
“Stupid for the most part, hungry for the rest of it. I say, what time
of day or night is it?”
“It’s about eight thirty P.M.,” answered Constant, pulling out his
antique Swiss watch and consulting it.
“Yes, but _what_ P.M.? What day is it? When did I go to sleep?”
The boys soon straightened things out in their captain’s temporarily
bewildered mind. The effort to do so was aided by the sight and smell of
a great platter which Ed at that moment set upon the table. It held a
“boiled dinner.” There was a juicy brisket of corned beef on top. Under
it were peeled and boiled potatoes, boiled turnips still retaining their
shape, and beneath all was the last cabbage on board, the remains of a
purchase made at Memphis a week or ten days before, though to the boys
it seemed many moons past.
As Phil eyed the savory dish he became for the first time fully awake.
“I say, fellows,” he broke out, “what does this mean? Why didn’t you
have this sort of thing for dinner instead of keeping it for supper?”
“Because you weren’t awake at dinner time to help us eat it, Phil. It’s
the last really good meal we’re likely to see for days to come, and
we--”
“You see,” broke in Irv Strong, “we’re bound to build you up again,
Phil, if we have to do it with a hammer and nails. But how recklessly
you expose your country breeding!” as he helped all round; “if you were
captain of an ocean liner now instead of a flatboat, you would know that
dinner before six o’clock is impossible to civilized man, and that the
actual dinner hour in all those regions where dress coats and culture
prevail, ranges from seven to eight o’clock.”
“You are unjust in your mockery, Irv,” said Ed. “And by that you in your
turn simply expose your provincialism--and ours, too.”
“How?” asked Irv, chuckling to think that he had succeeded in diverting
the conversation from channels in which it might easily have become
emotional. For all the boys had been for hours under a strain of severe
anxiety on Phil’s account. They were full of admiration for the
self-sacrificing way in which he had worked and thought and planned for
the common welfare. They had been touched to the heart by his exhaustion
after his strenuous work was done, and they had been anxious all that
afternoon, lest the breakdown of his strength should prove to be
lasting. His appetite at supper relieved that fear, but the very relief
made them all the more disposed to be a trifle tender toward him. Irv
had prevented a scene, so he didn’t mind Ed’s criticism.
“How’s that, Ed?”
“Why, when you sneer at people because their customs are different from
those that we are used to, don’t you see you are just as narrow-minded
as they are when they sneer at us because our customs are not theirs.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to sneer,” said Irv. “But, of course, it does seem
odd for people to eat dinner at six or seven o’clock in the evening,
instead of eating it about noon.”
“Not a bit of it. The dinner hour is a matter of convenience. In a
little town like ours it is convenient for everybody to go home to
dinner at noon, and so everybody does it. In a big city where people
live five or ten miles away from their places of business, it is
impossible. In such cities business doesn’t begin till nine or ten
o’clock in the morning, when the banks and exchanges open, and it is in
every way handier to have dinner after the day’s work is done. Our
habits are just as odd to city people as theirs are to us.”
“Oh, yes, I see that,” said Irv, “and ‘Farmer Hayseed’ is just as
snobbish when he laughs at ‘them city folks’ as the city people are when
they ridicule him. It reminds me of the nursery story about the town
mouse and the country mouse.”
“How about the leaks, fellows?” asked Phil, who was now quite himself
again.
“There aren’t any to speak of,” reported Irv. “We’ve gone over the whole
bottom of the boat now, stopping every little crack, and now she’s as
dry as a bone. Five minutes’ pumping in an hour is quite enough.”
“All right!” said the captain. “Then we’ll take off her bandages in the
morning. With that tarpaulin wrapped around her she looks like Sally
Hopper when she comes to school with a toothache and a swelled jaw bound
up in flannel.”
But the next morning brought with it some other and more pressing work
than that of removing the tarpaulin.
At daylight the boat was floating easily and rapidly down the middle of
the overflowed river, when Phil, who was on deck, saw half a mile ahead,
a group of people huddled together upon a small patch of ground that
protruded above the water. It was, in fact, the top of one of those very
high Indian mounds that abound in the Sunflower swamp country.
Calling the other boys on deck, Phil took a skiff and rowed ahead as
rapidly as he could. When he reached the little patch of dry land,
which was circular in shape, and did not exceed twenty feet in diameter,
he found a family of people in a woful state of destitution and
wretchedness.
They had no fire and no fuel. They had been for several days without
food and were now so weak that they could scarcely speak above a
whisper. The party consisted of a father, a mother, three big-eyed
children, and a negro man.
The negro man, great stalwart fellow that he was, was now the most
exhausted one of the party, while the youngest of the children, whom the
others called “Baby,” as if she were yet too small to carry a name of
her own, was still chipper and full of interest in the strange things
about her when she was taken on board the flatboat.
The work of rescue occupied a considerable time and cost the boys some
very hard work. The people on the mound were too feeble from hunger and
long exposure even to help in their own deliverance. The negro man had
to be lifted bodily into a skiff and laid out at full length upon its
bottom. The rest, except “Baby” were not in much better condition. The
man could walk indeed, in an unsteady way, but he was so dazed in his
mind that it required force to keep him from dropping out of the skiff
on the way to the flatboat.
The woman and the two older children were chewing strips of leather, cut
from the man’s boot tops. The baby continually sucked its thumb.
People in such condition are very difficult to manage. They are
physically incapable of doing anything to help themselves, and mentally
just alert enough to interfere querulously with the efforts of others to
help them. To get such a company into frail, unsteady skiffs, to row
them away to the flatboat, and then to “hoist them aboard,” as Phil
called the operation, required quite two hours of very hard work, but it
was accomplished at last.
But to get them aboard was only the beginning of the work of rescue.
They were starving and they must be fed. Phil was for setting out the
remainder of the last evening’s boiled dinner at once and bidding them
help themselves. But Irv’s superior knowledge of such matters prevented
that disastrous blunder.
“Why, don’t you know, Phil, that to give them even an ounce of solid
food now would be to kill them! Open a can of consomme, and heat it
quick.”
When the soup was ready he peppered it lavishly, explaining to Ed:--
“The problem is not merely to get food into their stomachs, but to get
their stomachs to turn the food to some account after we’ve got it
there. In their weakened condition they can’t digest anything solid, and
it is a serious question whether their stomachs can even manage this
thin, watery soup. So I’m putting pepper into it as a ‘bracer.’ It will
stimulate their stomachs to do their work.”
As he explained, he fed the soup to the sufferers--a single spoonful to
each. They were clamorous for more, but Irv was resolute.
“Wait till I see how that goes,” he said. “You can’t have any more till
I say the word.”
The children cried. The woman hysterically laughed and cried
alternately. The man sat still with bowed head and with the tears
trickling down his face--whether tears of joy, of distress, or of mere
weakness, it was hard to say.
The negro man was too far gone even to swallow. Irv had to turn him on
his back and literally pour a spoonful of soup down his throat. Then he
said to Ed and Constant:--
“I’m afraid this man is dying. His hands are very cold and so are his
feet--cold to the knees. Take some towels--no, here,” seizing a
blanket from one of the bunks,--“take this. Dip it into boiling
water,--fortunately we’ve got it ready,--wring the blanket out and wrap
his feet and legs in it, from the knees down. Then take towels and
do the same for his hands. Pound him, too, punch him, roll him
about--bulldoze and kuklux him in every way you can till you get his
blood to going again! It’s the only way to save the poor fellow’s life.”
By this time Irv deemed it safe to give each of his other patients
another spoonful or two of the soup, and he even ventured to pour three
more spoonfuls down the throat of the negro.
“He’s reviving a little,” Irv explained. “And as a strong man, with a
robust stomach accustomed to coarse food, he can stand more soup than
the others.”
Thus little by little Irv and Ed, with such assistance from the other
boys as they needed, slowly brought the starving party back to life. As
the negro man had been the first to succumb to starvation,--perhaps
because his robust physical nature demanded more food than more
delicately constructed bodies do,--so he was the first to recover. By
nightfall he was walking about on the deck, while all the rest were
still lying in the bunks below as invalids.
After awhile Irv stopped him.
“Did anybody ever tell you that you’re an exceptional personage?”
“Lor’ no, boss. Well, yes, some o’ de black folks in de chu’ch done took
’ceptions to me sometimes ’cause I wouldn’t give enough to de cause, but
fore de court, boss--”
“That isn’t what I mean,” broke in Irv, with smiles rippling all over
him, and running down even to his legs. “I mean, did anybody ever notice
that you were,--oh, well, never mind that; but tell me, would you like a
good big slice of cold corned beef before you go to sleep?”
The negro answered in words. But his more emphatic answer was not one of
words. He threw his arms around Irv in a giant’s embrace that almost
crushed the youth’s bones.
“There, that will do,” said Irv. “You have an engagement as a cotton
compress or something of that sort, when you’re at home, I suppose. But
now, if I let you have a good big slice of cold corned beef to-night,
will you eat it just as I tell you, take a bite when I tell you and at
no other time, and stop whenever I tell you? Will you promise?”
“Shuah, sar, shuah,” eagerly responded the man.
“But ‘sure’ isn’t enough,” replied Irv, half in amusement and half in
seriousness, for he felt that his experiment was very risky, and he
wanted to be able to regulate it, and stop it at any point. “Sure isn’t
enough. Will you promise me on the isosceles triangle?”
“Yes, boss.”
“On the grand panjandrum?”
“For shuah.”
“And even on the parallelopipedon itself?”
“Shuah, boss. I dunno what dem names mean, but for shuah I’ll do jes’
what you tells me to if you’ll lem’ me have de meat.”
Irv was satisfied. He went below and prepared a sandwich. Returning, he
allowed the man to eat it in bites, with long intervals between. It not
only did no harm, it restored the man to such vitality that Phil decided
to get some information out of him as to the flatboat’s whereabouts.
He learned first that the rescued family sleeping below was that of a
well-to-do planter; that the flood, coming as it did as the result of a
crevasse, and therefore suddenly, had taken them completely by surprise,
in the middle of the night, four or five days ago; that they had with
difficulty escaped to the Indian mound in a field near by, and that they
had not been able to take with them any food, or anything else except
the clothes they had on. This accounted for the fact that the woman wore
only a wrapper over her nightdress, that the man was nearly naked, and
that the children were clad only in their thin little nightgowns.
Then Phil learned that _The Last of the Flatboats_ was now in the
Tallahatchie River, as he had guessed, not far from the point where it
enters the Yazoo, at Greenwood. A little study of the map showed Phil
that if this were true, he might expect to reach Vicksburg within four
or five days, which in fact is what happened, not on the fourth or
fifth, but on the sixth day thereafter, early in the morning.
In the mean time the crew and their guests had eaten up pretty nearly
all the boat’s store of provisions, and _The Last of the Flatboats_ had
been stripped of her unsightly swaddling-cloth, the tarpaulin. Phil tied
her up at the landing near the historic town as proudly as if she had
not run away, and misbehaved as she had done.
“She has only been showing us some of the wonders of the Wonderful
River, that we should never otherwise have known anything about,” he
said.
But this is going far ahead of my story. The boys and their boat were
still in the Yazoo, nearly a week’s journey above Vicksburg. So let us
return to them.