Bright April sunshine, streaming in the window of the room, flooded the
bare walls with matter-of-fact daylight. It shone in Tad’s eyes, and he
woke up with a start.
The steamboat! It left at eight. He reached for his big silver watch
under the pillow, and found to his relief that it was only a few
minutes after six. At the same time he discovered the purse, still
firmly attached to his hand. The terror of the night seemed ludicrous
now. He chuckled at his own timidity and began dressing rapidly.
The two other occupants of the chamber were still heavily asleep
when Tad doused his face and hands in the wash basin, strapped his
traveling-bag, and went out.
In the front bar there was only a single customer--a humorous-faced
little Irishman in brass-buttoned blue clothes, who sat beside a table
with a glass of hot toddy in one hand and a pipe in the other.
He looked at Tad jovially. “Bedad, an’ it’s glad I am the last barrel
is aboard!” he said, quite as if they had known each other for years.
“Are you one of the steamboat men?” the boy asked.
“I am that, lad--first mate of the _Ohio Belle_, an’ a terrible tired
one. We’ve been takin’ cargo for two days an’ nights on end. An’ now
I’ve got a half hour ashore while they’re a-gettin’ up steam.”
“Does she sail in half an hour?” asked Tad.
“Or sooner,” replied the Irish mate. “Th’ ould man’s a driver whin his
cargo’s once loaded. If it’s breakfast ye’re thinkin’ of, wait and
have it aboard with me. I take it ye’re bound down river. I’ve bread
and butter and a cold chicken in me locker, and we’ll get coffee from
that black son o’ Ham in the galley. The passengers ain’t supposed to
begin gettin’ their meals aboard till dinner time. But we’ll have a
breakfast, or my name’s not Dennis McCann.”
The plan sounded like a good one to Tad. He waited while the mate
finished his glass and paid his score; then, shouldering the bulky
portmanteau, he followed him down the hill.
“Ye see,” said McCann, “this steamboatin’ is only a bit of a change
like, for me. Me real business is deep-water sailin’, as ye may tell by
the roll o’ me legs.”
Already, by twos and threes and singly, people were going aboard.
Tad and his companion shouldered through the crowd that had assembled
to witness the great event of the week, and crossed the gayly painted
gangplank.
Instead of climbing the broad stairway to the deck above, McCann led
the boy forward through a narrow alleyway just inside the paddle-box
amidships. A blast of heat struck them as they emerged, and Tad found
himself facing a row of glowing doors, where sweating darkies fed the
boiler-fires with cordwood.
“That’s prime, seasoned hickory,” shouted the mate above the roar of
the fires. “Don’t take long to get a head o’ steam with wood like this.
But wait till ye see the dirty green stuff they give us down along the
lower river.”
They went through another passage where the heat was almost stifling
and came out on the forward cargo deck, solidly piled with merchandise.
Climbing a steep, ladder-like companionway, they reached the main
passenger deck. Higher still, Tad could see the “Texas,” or upper deck,
with the pilot-house perched atop, and just aft of it the two tall
stacks, with clouds of smoke pouring from them.
“Rest here awhile, me lad,” said McCann, “whiles I rustle that
breakfast.”
Tad sat down on his portmanteau, close to the rail, and watched the
spectacle below. The passengers made a colorful assemblage. There were
plain pioneer folk in linsey-woolsey and butternut cloth, going back to
their homesteads in Indiana or Illinois. There were wealthy planters
from the cotton States, resplendent in fine raiment and attended by
retinues of colored body-servants. Small tradesmen, drovers and the
like, from the nearer river towns, made up a fair proportion, and Tad
saw two or three lonely-looking hunters in buckskin, with their long
rifles and little packs of provisions, bound for the wild western
country. One oddly dressed man, with an eyeglass, who was constantly
asking questions and jotting down notes in a little book, Tad decided
must be an English tourist.
There remained a little group which he found it harder to identify.
Three or four men in fashionable frock-coats, their pearl-gray beaver
hats cocked at a rakish angle, and clouds of smoke rolling up from
their cigars, idled and jested by the landward end of the gangplank.
Either they had no luggage, or it was already stowed aboard. Tad did
not care for their looks, and he liked them still less when he saw
them joined by a companion--the tall, dark fellow whom he had already
encountered twice in his brief stay at Wheeling.
The friendly mate returned just then with a steaming pail of coffee and
led Tad off to his bunk in the officers’ cabin. Breakfast over, McCann
rose and put on his mate’s cap.
“There goes the ‘all ashore’ call,” said he. “I’ll take ye down to the
purser, an’ ye can get yer room from him.”
Tad found the stateroom assigned to him and put his bag inside. It was
a tiny cubicle with a single bunk, its window opening on the deck far
aft. Outside, the boy joined a group of passengers at the rail.
The last hurried arrivals had rushed aboard, and final preparations for
departure were now in progress. Negro deck hands stood by the mooring
ropes at bow and stern. At a signal from the pilot-house the cables
were cast off and the darkies burst into song as they hauled them in
and coiled them down.
Bells rang sharply in the engine-room. With a creak and a splash the
tall paddle-wheels began to turn, and the steamboat, catching the swift
current, swept grandly out into the Ohio. A long, bellowing blast of
the whistle bade farewell to the waving throngs astern.
That day and those that followed were full of experiences for Tad.
Hour after hour he sat by the rail, or stood on the Texas with his
friend the mate, watching the valley unfold. The river was running
bank-full, fed by the April freshets; and added to the eight or ten
miles an hour of which the steamer was capable, the strong current gave
them a speed that seemed almost dizzying.
They shot past dozens of loaded broadhorns and keel-boats, drifting
down with a single long steering-oar directing their course. The
boatmen would cheer the _Ohio Belle_ or curse her, depending on their
humor and whether or not their craft misbehaved when her wash hit them.
Some of these rude arks held all the worldly possessions of a
family--homesteaders setting out to conquer the wilderness in Missouri
or Iowa. Many of them had chicken coops on their half-decks, and once
Tad saw a yoke of red steers chained to a post amidships and watching
the water with rolling, frightened eyes.
He tried to imagine what sort of life the people led, aboard those
homely, slow-moving boats. Almost he envied the freckled youngster
he saw fishing over the side of one weather-beaten broadhorn. If he
weren’t going to New Orleans to see his Dad--well, he couldn’t help
thinking what a lazy, carefree, interesting voyage one could take in
an Ohio River flatboat!
To Tad, raised in the more thickly populated country along the Atlantic
seaboard, the forest-covered hills that rolled back from the river as
far as the eye could see were satisfyingly wild and mysterious. And yet
he was surprised at the feeling of bustle and activity that pervaded
the valley.
Little settlements of new log houses were continually appearing along
the shore, and in many places sheep and cattle were grazing in freshly
cleared pastures. Ferry-boats, rowed by lusty river-men, plied back
and forth between the West Virginia and Ohio villages. Trading scows,
loaded with calico, tools, and manufactured goods from the East, put in
at the farms and hamlets to exchange their merchandise for produce.
“This is a great country, lad--a great country,” Dennis McCann would
say. “Some day, belikes, ’twill be almost as great as Ireland!”
Tad watched the pilot spin the huge wheel to left and right, as
the _Ohio Belle_ splashed her way down through the shallows. There
was plenty of water and fairly easy steering, but the skill of the
gray-bearded old keel-boat man in the pilot-house seemed uncanny
nevertheless. He could sense a sunken snag farther away than Tad could
see a floating one. And he seemed to mind steering at night no more
than in the daytime.
They stopped at Marietta and later at Parkersburg that first afternoon,
and as darkness fell, the chief pilot came up to relieve his assistant,
who had had the wheel most of the day. Tad, before he turned in that
night, had the thrill of standing in the pilot-house and watching the
old-time river-man take his craft down through the inky blackness,
swinging the bends like a race horse.
The little stateroom was clean and comfortable in spite of its tiny
size, and the boy slept so soundly that not even the hoarse wail of the
whistle awoke him.
The _Ohio Belle_ made a stop of several hours at Cincinnati to load and
unload freight the morning of the third day. And again the following
forenoon at Louisville there was a long delay.
The weather, which had been fine up till then, turned cloudy with spits
of rain that morning, but Tad, as usual, spent his time on deck with
the mate. The river was high enough to make the passage of the Falls a
possibility, and the _Ohio Belle_, shallow of draft like all the river
steamers, took the white water safely.
The rain increased in the afternoon, and Tad was finally driven inside
out of the wet. He had paid very little attention to his fellow
passengers on the voyage so far. But now, for something to do, he
strolled down the inside passageway to the main saloon. It was just
before he reached the cabin companion that he passed a door standing
ajar and heard men talking angrily. Suddenly one voice rose to a
shout and a chair was pushed back with a violent scraping noise. Then
the door opened, and in it, with his back to Tad, stood a tall man
in shabby, well-cut clothes. The fellow swayed a little and caught
the door-jamb with one hand. With the other he flung a pack of dirty
playing-cards back into the room. Then he spoke in a thick, choking
voice.
“You’ve cleaned me,” he said. “You’ve got my last cent, curse you! But
I’ll be back, and don’t you forget it!” As he turned to leave he almost
fell over Tad, and the boy was startled by the look of ferocity on his
white, drawn face--a face he knew and had begun to fear.
With long strides the man reached the end of the passage, then checked
himself in the act of turning the corner, and glanced back at Tad as if
he remembered something. An instant later he was gone.
The other gamblers in the stateroom were silent for a moment after his
departure. Then one of them burst into a loud guffaw.
“So he’ll be back, eh!” he cried. “That’s a good ’un. Who’d lend him a
plugged nickel on board here?”
They resumed their game, and some one slammed the door shut. Restless,
Tad roamed about the interior of the vessel, went down to watch the
darkies firing the boilers on the lower deck, watched the Indiana
bluffs to the northward slide past in the rain, ate supper with the
other cabin passengers, and finally went back to his stateroom. When he
had undressed he bolted the door, opened the window a few inches for
fresh air, and went to bed. Lulled by the steady beat of the rain, he
was soon asleep.
It must have been hours later when he woke, for the downpour had ceased
and a gusty wind was blowing. Was it the wind rattling his door that
had wakened him? Rubbing his eyes he rose on one elbow and peered over
the edge of his bunk. And there, just climbing through the window, was
the black, looming figure of a man.