The storm struck hard, lashing the muddy water high along the levee and
tossing the broadhorns at their moorings. After the furious wind came
rain in a deluge that drenched the boys under their hastily erected
tarpaulins. And after the rain a pitch-black, sodden night.
A few lights glowed feebly in the town, and the music struck up again
after a while, but even Allen was too damp and dispirited to feel like
going ashore. They got a fire started on the wet hearth, and huddling
around it, finally went to sleep.
The sun was shining in the morning and all along the water front
a bustle of activity began. Boatmen clambered across the decks of
neighboring craft to buy or sell goods or visit acquaintances. There
was a constant noise of laughing, shouting, swearing, and fighting.
The fiddles began their monotonous squeaking once more in the levee
saloons, and Allen began to cast a restless eye shoreward, but Abe
found plenty for them all to do aboard the _Katy Roby_. They cooked and
ate breakfast, swabbed the decks, and spread out their bedding to dry
in the sun. They watched a big, new steamboat, the _Tecumseh_, swing in
to the landing, her bow a bare thirty feet from them when she made her
mooring.
“That’s the fastest boat on the river,” they heard a near-by
ark-captain say. “She’s got new-fangled boilers with more steam
pressure on ’em than the _Amazon_, even. An’ they say her cap’n is out
to break all records to Louisville this trip.”
From the speed with which her darky deck hands rolled molasses
hogsheads aboard, it could be seen that some of the excitement of her
race up river had got into their blood.
A group of fastidiously dressed passengers, thronging her upper decks,
looked down with laughing interest at the scene on the landing. The men
were holding watches and laying wagers on the time of the steamer’s
departure. In less than half an hour the last huge barrel was in place
on the forward cargo deck and the mate cried his “All aboard,” as the
negroes ran the gangplank in. With a clang of bells the big boat’s
paddles churned the water and she backed out, wheeling into the current.
Tad, looking up a little wistfully at her gleaming brass and freshly
painted upper works, watched her whole magnificent length sweep by.
And then suddenly he gripped the gunwale of the flatboat and stared
open-mouthed. For high up on the hurricane deck, astern, he had seen a
solitary figure--a big middle-aged man with a beaver hat and a familiar
set to the shoulders. The man was just turning to leave the rail and he
was unable to get a good view of his face, but he was almost sure....
“Dad!” he screamed, with all the voice he could muster, “Dad!”
There had been a feather of white steam up aloft on the _Tecumseh’s_
funnel when he started to shout, and as he launched his cry a deafening
blast of the whistle came, drowning him out.
Another long-drawn hoot and two short ones followed. Before they were
finished, the steamboat was a hundred yards away, and the man who
looked like Tad’s father had vanished down the companionway. The boy
had a great lump in his throat as he turned away. He stumbled aft and
sat down beside Poke, blinking his eyes fast to keep back the unmanly
tears.
Abe had heard him shout and now came over to stand behind him, dropping
a big hand casually on his shoulder.
“Reckon that was your father?” he asked.
Tad nodded. “I couldn’t be sure,” he answered, “but it looked a lot
like him.”
“Wal,” said Abe, “I know how ye feel, right enough, but don’t take it
too hard. He’ll be back in New Orleans to meet ye. Didn’t ye tell him
in yer letter that we’d be thar next week?”
“Sure,” Tad replied. “Only he must be pretty worried, or he wouldn’t be
on his way up to try to find me, now.”
Allen had been up on the levee, watching the _Tecumseh’s_ departure and
chatting with a crowd of flatboat men. Now he returned with the look of
one bearing news.
“Hey, Tad,” he called as he jumped aboard, “what was the name o’ that
boat that was expected in Shawneetown--the one the postmaster said he’d
mail yer letter by?”
“The _Nancy Jones_,” said Tad.
“That’s what I thought,” Allen nodded. “Wal, they tol’ me up on the
bank jest now that the _Nancy Jones_ was blowed up two weeks ago in
Vicksburg bend, an’ lost with more’n half her passengers an’ crew.”
Tad’s jaw dropped. “Then--then Dad doesn’t even know I’m alive,” he
stammered. “No wonder he’s on his way up the river.”
In a few words Abe told Allen of Tad’s momentary glimpse of the man
on the steamer. “Now the thing fer you to do,” said he, turning to the
boy, “is to send another letter post-haste to New Orleans, so the folks
thar kin reach him whar he’s gone.”
“I’m goin’ ashore,” Allen volunteered. “He kin come along an’ fix up to
send his letter whiles I transact some business.”
Abe looked doubtful. “All right,” he agreed finally. But to Tad, as
they prepared to leave the boat, he whispered, “Keep an eye on him now,
an’ don’t let him go in any places he shouldn’t.”
They clambered to the levee top and walked through the thick black
mud up the main street of the lower town. It was nearly noon, and
Natchez was waking up for the day’s work. Patrons by ones and twos were
entering the various barrooms they passed. Gambling joints were rolling
up shutters and dusting off tables. A few women, hard-faced and heavily
painted, leered at them from doorways, and the dance-hall music droned
on unceasingly.
A negro teamster directed them to the post office on a side street a
few blocks from the river.
“Here you are,” said Allen as they reached the entrance, and Tad would
have gone in at once if his eye had not been caught by a notice posted
in the dusty window. With growing excitement he stood before it,
staring at the boldly-printed words. What he read was this:
To Whom it May Concern
A
_REWARD OF $5,000_
(Five thousand Dollars)
will be paid for
_Information_
leading to the recovery of my son, Thaddeus
Hopkins, if alive, or of his body if dead.
This boy is 15 years old, of medium height
and weight for his age, with light brown hair,
blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion.
_DISAPPEARED_
from his cabin on the Steamboat _Ohio Belle_,
somewhere between Owensboro, Kentucky,
and the mouth of the Wabash River, on the
night of April 8th, 1828.
Any one having news of his whereabouts
should communicate immediately with
JEREMIAH HOPKINS,
26 St. Louis Street,
New Orleans, Louisiana.
“Allen!” Tad gasped. “Look at this!”
There was no answer. Swinging about in surprise, he found the street
behind him empty. Only a lean yellow dog scratched for fleas in the
middle of the dusty road.
Tad stared up and down the straggling rows of houses, bewildered at his
companion’s disappearance. Then his eye lit on two saloons across the
way, and he knew at once where Allen had gone.
With Abe’s parting injunction still fresh in his mind, he darted to
the other side of the street and stood a moment in hesitation before
the two doors. There was no way to tell which place Allen had entered
except to go in himself and find out. He decided to try the right-hand
building first.
The swinging half-door gave easily under his hand, and he stepped into
a square, half-darkened room, with stained wooden tables and a long
mahogany bar. There was no one in sight, and Tad hesitated a moment in
the middle of the sanded floor, looking about him, disappointed. Then
he caught the sound of voices and low laughter and saw that the door
leading into the rear room stood slightly ajar. He fancied that it was
Allen he heard, laughing over having given him the slip. Quickly he
crossed the floor, pushed open the door, and walked through.
A glance showed him that there were only three men in the room, and
that Allen was not one of them. At the right of the table was a broad,
thick-necked, powerfully-built man with a tight stock and a red,
angry-looking face. Next him sat a thin, sallow, rat-eyed fellow with a
nervous affection that twitched one corner of his mouth downward into
a sneer every second or two. The third member of the party slouched in
his chair, a long, slim figure with a dark mustache, the upper part of
his face shaded by the broad brim of his hat.
Each of the three had started slightly at the lad’s abrupt entrance,
and they now sat watching him with hostile eyes.
“I--I beg your pardon,” said Tad. “I thought a friend of mine came in
here.” And he started to back out.
Suddenly the tall man with the black mustache was on his feet.
“Wait!” he ordered in a husky voice that struck terror to Tad’s heart.
“Stay where yo’ are, suh.”
But waiting was the last thing in the boy’s mind. He had caught a
glimpse of the man’s face and his long, slim hands. It was the Wheeling
gambler who had thrown him overboard from the _Ohio Belle_. With a
sense of panic he turned and darted for the door, but he never reached
it. A stool came whirling through the air and struck him in the back of
the head, and down he went, his mind blanked out in a roaring gulf of
darkness.