THE WRECK ON THE RIVER
I made friends with many of these strange travelers, and was attracted
especially by one, a reticent man of perhaps sixty odd years, in Western
garb, full of beard and with long hair reaching to his shoulders. He had
the face of an old Teuton war chief I had once seen depicted in a canvas
showing a raid in some European forest in years long before a Christian
civilization was known--a face fierce and eager, aquiline in nose, blue
of eye; a figure stalwart, muscular, whose every movement spoke courage
and self-confidence. Auberry was his name, and as I talked with him he
told me of days passed with my heroes--Fremont, Carson, Ashley, Bill
Williams, Jim Bridger, even the negro ruffian Beckwourth--all men of the
border of whose deeds I had read. Auberry had trapped from the St.
Mary's to the sources of the Red, and his tales, told in simple and
matter-of-fact terms, set my very blood atingle. He was bound, as he
informed me, for Laramie; always provided that the Sioux, now grown
exceedingly restless over the many wagon-trains pushing up the Platte to
all the swiftly-opening West, had not by this time swooped down and
closed all the trails entirely. I wished nothing then so much as that
occasion might permit me to join him in a journey across the Plains.
Among all these west-bound travelers the savage and the half-civilized
seemed to me to preponderate; this not to say that they were so much
coarse and crude as they were fierce, absorbed, self-centered. Each man
depended upon himself and needed to do so. The crew on the decks were
relics from keel-boat days, surly and ugly of temper. The captain was an
ex-pilot of the lower river, taciturn and surly of disposition. Our
pilot had been drunk for a week at the levee of St. Louis and I misdoubt
that all snags and sandbars looked alike to him.
Among the skin-clad trappers, hunters and long-haired plainsmen, I saw
but one woman, and she certainly was fit to bear them company. I should
say that she was at least sixty years of age, and nearly six feet in
height, thin, angular, wrinkled and sinewy. She wore a sunbonnet of
enormous projection, dipped snuff vigorously each few moments, and never
allowed from her hands the long squirrel rifle which made a part of her
equipage. She was accompanied by her son, a tall, thin, ague-smitten
youth of perhaps seventeen years and of a height about as great as her
own. Of the two the mother was evidently the controlling spirit, and in
her case all motherly love seemed to have been replaced by a vast
contempt for the inefficiency and general lack of male qualities in her
offspring. When I first saw them she was driving her son before her to a
spot where an opening offered near the bow of the boat, in full sight of
all the passengers, of whose attention she was quite oblivious.
"Git up, there, Andy Jackson!" she said. "Stan' up!"
The boy, his long legs braiding under him, and his peaked face still
more pale, did as he was bid. He had no sooner taken his position than
to my surprise I saw his mother cover him with the long barrel of a
dragoon revolver.
"Pull your gun, you low-down coward," she commanded, in tones that might
have been heard half the length of the boat. Reluctantly the boy
complied, his own revolver trembling in his unready hand.
"Now, whut'd you do if a man was to kivver you like I'm a-doin' now?"
demanded his mother.
"G-g-g-Gawd, Maw, I dunno! I think I'd j-j-j-jump off in the river,"
confessed the boy.
"Shore you would, and good luck if you'd git plumb drownded, you
white-livered son of misery. Whatever in Gawd A'mighty's world you was
borned for certainly is more'n I can tell--and I your Maw at that, that
orto know if anybody could."
"Madam," I interrupted, astonished at this discourse, "what do you mean
by such talk to your son--for I presume he is your son. Why do you abuse
him in this way?" I was sorry for the shivering wretch whom she had made
the object of her wrath.
"Shut up, and mind yore own business," answered the virago, swiftly
turning the barrel of her weapon upon me. "Whut business is this here of
yores?"
"None, madam," I bowed, "but I was only curious."
"You keep your own cur'osity to yourself ef you'r goin' to travel in
these parts. That's a mighty good thing for you to learn."
"Very true, madam," said I, gently disengaging the revolver barrel from
the line of my waist, "but won't you tell me why you do these things
with your son?"
"It's none of your damned business," she answered, "but I don't mind
tellin' you. I'm tryin' to make a man out'n him."
"Ah, and this is part of the drill?"
"Part of it. You, Andrew Jackson, stick yore pistol up agin your head
the way I tol' you. Now snap it, damn you! Keep _on_ a-snappin'! Quit
that jumpin', I tell you! Snap, it till you git through bein' scared of
it. Do it now, or by Gawd, I'll chase you over the side of the boat and
feed you to the catfish, you low-down imertation of a he-thing. Mister,"
she turned to me again, "will you please tell me how come me to be the
mother of a thing like this--me, a woman of ole Missoury; and me a
cousin of ole Simon Kenton of Kentucky beside?"
"My good woman," said I, somewhat amused by her methods of action and
speech, "do you mind telling me what is your name?"
"Name's Mandy McGovern; and I come from Pike," she answered, almost
before the words were out of my mouth. "I've been merried three times
and my first two husbands died a-fightin, like gentlemen, in
diffikilties with friends. Then along come this Danny Calkins, that
taken up some land nigh to me in the bottoms--low-downest coward of a,
man that ever disgraced the sile of yearth--and then I merried _him_."
"Is he dead, too, my dear woman?" I asked.
"Don't you 'dear woman' me--I ain't free to merry agin yit," said she.
"Naw, he ain't dead, and I ain't deevorced either. I just done left him.
Why, every man in Pike has whupped Danny Calkins one time or other. When
a man couldn't git no reputation any other way, he'd come erlong and
whupped my husband. I got right tired of it."
"I should think you might."
"Yes, and me the wife of two real men befo' then. If ever a woman had
hard luck the same is me," she went on. "I had eight chillen by my two
husbands that was real men, and every one of them died, or got killed
like a man, or went West like a man--exceptin' this thing here, the son
of that there Danny Calkins. Why, he's afraid to go coon huntin' at
night for fear the cats'll get him. He don't like to melk a keow for
fear she'll kick him. He's afraid to court a gal. He kaint shoot, he
kaint chop, he kaint do nothin'. I'm takin' him out West to begin over
again where the plowin's easier; and whiles we go along, I'm givin' him
a 'casional dose of immanuel trainin', to see if I can't make him part
way intoe a man. I dunno!" Mrs. McGovern dipped snuff vigorously.
Thereafter she looked at me carefully. "Say, mister," said she, "how
tall are you?"
"About six feet, I think."
"Hum! That's just about how tall my first husband was. You look some
like him in the face, too. Say, he was the fightin'est man in Pike. How
come him to get killed was a diffikilty with his brother-in-law, a
Dutchman that kept a saloon and couldn't talk English. Jim, he went in
there to get a bite to eat and asked this Dutchman what he could set up.
Paul--that was the Dutchman's name--he says, 'Well, we got dawg--mallard
dawg, and red head dawg, and canvas back dawg--what's the kind of dawg
you like, Chim?'
"My husband thought he was pokin' fun at him, talkin' about eatin'
dawg--not knowin' the Dutchman was tryin' to say 'duck,' and couldn't.
'I might have a piece of duck,' said Jim, 'bit I ain't eatin' no dawg.'
"'I _said_ dawg,' says Paul, still a-tryin' to say 'duck.'
"'I know you did,' says Jim, and then they clinched. Jim He broke his
knife off, and the Dutchman soaked him with a beer mallet. 'But Mandy,'
says Jim to me, jest before he shet his eyes, 'I die content. That
there fellow was the sweetest cuttin' man I ever did cut in all my
life--he was jest like a ripe pumpkin.' Say, there was a man for you,
was Jim--you look some like him." She dipped snuff again vigorously.
"You compliment me very much, Mrs. McGovern," I said.
"Say," she responded, "I got two thousand head o' hawgs runnin' around
in the timber down there in Pike."
At the moment I did not see the veiled tenderness of this speech, but
thought of nothing better than to tell her that I was going no further
up the river than Fort Leavenworth.
"Um-hum!" she said. "Say, mister, mebbe that's yore wife back there in
the kebbin in the middle of the boat?"
"No, indeed. In fact I did not know there was any other lady on the boat
besides yourself. I am not much interested in young ladies, as it
happens."
"You lie," said Mrs. McGovern promptly, "there ain't nothin' in the
whole world you are ez much interested in as young wimmin. I'm a merried
woman, and I know the signs. If I had a deevorce I might be a leetle
jealous o' that gal in there. She's the best lookin' gal I ever did see
in all my time. If I was merried to you I dunno but I'd be a leetle bit
jealous o' you. Say, I may be a widder almost any day now. Somebody'll
shore kill Danny Calkins 'fore long."
"And, according to you, I may be a married man almost any day," I
replied, smiling.
"But you ain't merried yit."
"No, not yet," I answered.
"Well, if you git a chanct you take a look at that gal back there in the
kebbin."
Opportunity did not offer, however, to accept Mrs. McGovern's kindly
counsel, and, occupied with my own somewhat unhappy reflections, I
resigned myself to the monotony of the voyage up the Missouri River. We
plowed along steadily, although laboriously, all night, all the next day
and the next night, passing through regions rich in forest growth,
marked here and there by the many clearings of the advancing settlers.
We were by this time far above the junction of the Missouri River with
the Mississippi--a point traceable by a long line of discolored water
stained with the erosion of the mountains and plains far up the
Missouri. As the boat advanced, hour after hour, finally approaching the
prairie country beyond the Missouri forests, I found little in the
surroundings to occupy my mind; and so far as my communings with myself
were concerned, they offered little satisfaction. A sort of shuddering
self-reproach overcame me. I wondered whether or not I was less coarse,
less a thing polygamous than these crowding Mormons hurrying out to
their sodden temples in the West, because now (since I have volunteered
in these pages to tell the truth regarding one man's heart), I must
admit that in the hours of dusk I found myself dreaming not of my
fiancée back in old Virginia, but of other women seen more recently. As
to the girl of the masked ball, I admitted that she was becoming a
fading memory; but this young girl who had thrust through the crowd and
broken up our proceedings the other day--the girl with the white lawn
gown and the silver gray veil and the tear-stained eyes--in some way, as
I was angrily obliged to admit, her face seemed annoyingly to thrust
itself again into my consciousness. I sat near a deck lamp. Grace
Sheraton's letter was in my pocket. I did not draw it out to read it
and re-read it. I contented myself with watching the masked shadows on
the shores. I contented myself with dreams, dreams which I stigmatized
as unwarranted and wrong.
We were running that night in the dark, before the rising of the moon, a
thing which cautious steamboat men would not have ventured, although our
pilot was confident that no harm could come to him. Against assurance
such as this the dangerous Missouri with its bars and snags purposed a
present revenge. Our whistle awakened the echoes along the shores as we
plowed on up the yellow flood, hour after hour. Then, some time toward
midnight, while most of the passengers were attempting some sort of
rest, wrapped in their blankets along the deck, there came a slight
shock, a grating slide, and a rasping crash of wood. With a forward
churning of her paddles which sent water high along the rail, the _River
Belle_ shuddered and lay still, her engines throbbing and groaning.
In an instant every one on the boat was on his feet and running to the
side. I joined the rush to the bows, and leaning over, saw that we were
hard aground at the lower end of a sand bar. Imbedded in this bar was a
long white snag, a tree trunk whose naked arms, thrusting far down
stream, had literally impaled us. The upper woodwork of the boat was
pierced quite through; and for all that one could tell at the moment,
the hull below the line was in all likelihood similarly crushed. We hung
and gently swung, apparently at the mercy of the tawny flood of old
Missouri.