Obediently, I examined the river more carefully. It was still only about a third of a mile wide, picturesque enough between its wooded banks, but considerably less impressive than the Thames or Hudson. Perhaps I had better borrow Mr. Clemens’s book from Berrigan after all, I thought.
“Look, Wentworth, here comes a stern-wheeler downstream.” He pointed to the north, and sure enough, there came an absolutely unmistakable Mississippi riverboat—gleaming white in the sun, with a flag flying between the twin smokestacks up front and a little pilothouse perched between them, high atop the second deck. It looked much like the picture on the flyers I had seen advertising Mr. Clemens’s lecture tour. The boat was making a fair turn of speed, running with the current, and I could see a small crowd gathered on her foredeck. Another knot of people was waiting for her at the town dock in La Crosse, now visible from across the river.
“A steamboat landing used to be the biggest thing in town, back when I was a boy,” said Mr. Clemens. “That’s changed, too. I expect we had more people on the train platform in La Crosse than I see on the boat and dock together. The boats are still running, and I’m glad of it, Wentworth—but I’m afraid their time is almost over. It’ll be a sad day when a generation of children grows up along the river without hearing a steamboat whistle blow, and running like blazes down to the dock to watch the boat come in. Even the yeller dogs and the town drunks used to rouse themselves for that—or they would once a day, anyhow.”
“Will the Horace Greeley be as big as this one?”
“A bit bigger, I’d think—this one’s nothing special. I doubt she even has any staterooms for long-distance passengers. And this one has only three decks—usually there’s a fourth, smaller deck called the texas just below the pilothouse. I’d think the Greeley would be a good bit larger—the flyer I saw said it has eighty-odd cabins.”
“Eighty-four,” I said, recalling the figure from my file of information on the trip. “Why do they call it a texas deck? Was it invented there?”
“The story I heard was that one of the old passenger boats—can’t recall which one, but it was probably back in the forties, when the boats were fairly small—decided to name a cabin for every state in the Union. That’s where the name ‘stateroom’ comes from, by the way. Anyhow, after they’d named all the cabins on the second, or ‘hurricane,’ deck, they still had one state to go. So they put one more cabin up on the top deck, and named it after the state that was left over—which happened to be Texas.
“But even the Greeley won’t hold a candle to some of the old side-wheelers on the lower river—the big New Orleans boats used to run three hundred feet long; the Grand Republic topped three-fifty. A boat like that could barely turn around up here. Those boats were practically floating palaces—the Robert E. Lee cost a quarter-million dollars to build, back when that was real money! So did the J.M. White, and they claim the Thompson Dean cost more than that. But the J.M. White took the prize for luxury. She had a solid silver water cooler, with silver drinking cups, and the food was out of this world—all you could eat, too. Custom-made French furniture, walnut paneling, Irish linen, stained-glass skylights, a cabin so big they needed twelve chandeliers to light it—they didn’t stint on a thing, Wentworth.”
That sounded like the sort of life I’d dreamed of when I’d cast my lot as a writer, instead of drudging away at the law. “What a shame we can’t take our journey downriver on the J.M. White instead of the Greeley,” I said. “That would be a trip well worth writing a book about!”
Mr. Clemens gave me a curious look, then slumped back in his seat. “Ah, but you wouldn’t know, would you. The J.M. White burned to the waterline six years ago, down in Louisiana. The owners blamed it on passengers smoking on the engine deck, but there were others who said it was no accident. Twenty-eight aboard her died.” He shook his head with a rueful expression. “There’ll never be another like her. Fine as she was, though, they say she lost money every trip she made.”
“How dreadful! Are accidents common aboard the riverboats?”
“Not as much now as when I was piloting, but still too common. In the old days, the river was wild—snags and sandbars every ten feet, it seemed. The Army Engineers have cleaned most of that up since the war—a blind man could take the wheel from St. Louis to New Orleans and never once scrape anything that’d hurt his boat. But back when I learned the trade, a pilot had to remember the depth of the river every fifty yards, in high and low water, day and night. He had to know exactly where he was: how far along his route, how far from shore, and exactly what he could expect to find in the water ahead. Sometimes pilots made mistakes, and sometimes the river changed its course overnight. A lot of steamboats got killed by an unexpected change in the river. A lot more got killed by damn-fool human error.
“Especially in the old days, the boilers were barely trustworthy under normal running conditions. A boat that lasted ten years on the river was a marvel of longevity, a Methuselah among steamboats. Too damned many of them didn’t make it. They weren’t designed to take the punishment they got from a captain trying to make up lost time. Or one who’d run the boilers red hot and tie down the safety valve, trying to set some kind of speed record out of sheer cussed pride. Or who’d patch up something that should by rights have been replaced, hoping to get away with it until he got to the end of his run and collected his pay for the cargo. Sooner or later, it would catch up with him, and usually take innocent people with him when it blew up in his face—or to be strictly accurate, in the poor stokers’ faces.” He stared out the window for a moment, then continued in a lower voice. “My brother Henry was killed in a steamboat explosion.”
“Good Lord!” I had never seen him with such a stricken expression, and could think of nothing appropriate to say. After a moment of awkward silence, I blurted out the first question that came to mind. “How did it happen?”
I immediately regretted my bluntness; Mr. Clemens seemed suddenly older and sadder. But he answered me calmly, not seeming annoyed by my breach of propriety. “It was on the Pennsylvania—which I’d worked on as a cub pilot, on her trip downriver. This was in 1858. I’d gotten in a fight with the pilot, a vicious man named Brown, to keep him from attacking Henry after an argument. Brown refused to ship with me again. The captain was ready to fire him and put me on as a full pilot in his place, but I was afraid I didn’t know the river well enough. So I stayed ashore in New Orleans, waiting for another boat that would take me on, while Brown piloted the Pennsylvania to St. Louis. But Henry was only a mud clerk, as we called it—a general errand boy, just beginning to learn the ropes. If he’d changed boats, he’d have had to start over from the bottom, and set himself back two or three months—an eternity for a boy of twenty, which is all he was. And so he decided to stay with the Pennsylvania, and do his best to keep clear of Brown.
“The Pennsylvania’s boilers exploded at Ship Island, just below Memphis. A hundred and fifty lives were lost; Henry was thrown clear, and landed in the river. The shore was within an easy swim, but he turned back to the burning boat and worked to save as many passengers as he could—exactly as I had advised him to act in the event of an accident aboard ship. By the time he got ashore again, he was past help; he lived another week in a hospital in Memphis. I have always believed he would have lived if he hadn’t gone back again.”
“Surely you can’t blame yourself for his bravery and altruism,” I told him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “People have always told me it was none of my doing, and I can’t for the life of me imagine what I could have done differently that would have saved him. But I can’t escape the damnable voice within my own breast. It’s tortured me for over thirty years, and I’m afraid it will torture me until my dying day.” And with that, he turned his gaze out the train window upon the river, and we passed the rest of the journey up to St. Paul in silence. I suppose it is just as well that the scenery along that stretch of the river was unusually picturesque.
At last we cross
ed over the river again, and came into the Union Depot in St. Paul, a thriving city—especially in conjunction with its “twin,” Minneapolis, some ten miles upstream. Mr. Clemens pointed out several buildings that had not been there on his previous visit over ten years ago. He told me that Minneapolis and St. Paul are rapidly expanding toward one another and can be expected to merge into a single large city if the growth continues. What the eventual name of the combined metropolis ought to be is a perennial subject of half-serious rivalry between the two cities, each representing itself as the only true center of civilization and industry in Minnesota.
The railroad station in St. Paul is quite large, and is located a short distance from the banks of the Mississippi, convenient to the steamboat landing. When we alighted from the train, Mr. Clemens decided to see if he could place a long-distance telephone call to New York from the train station, and left me to supervise the transfer of our baggage to the Horace Greeley, the riverboat on which we were to continue our journey down to New Orleans. I rounded up a husky colored porter who put our bags on his cart, and followed him down to the docks to look for our boat.
After Mr. Clemens’s description, I expected the Horace Greeley to be the largest and most elaborate of the half-dozen boats tied up along the landing. Our plan was to stop at a number of towns along the river for lectures, so none of the regular steamboats, which had to keep to a schedule, would have been suitable. Also, different companies provided steamboat service in the various sections of the river, which forced most passengers traveling from St. Paul to New Orleans by boat to change boats in St. Louis. Nor would the usual run of boats be set up for lectures on board ship, as my employer planned for the smaller towns with no lecture hall of their own. So Mr. Clemens’s backers had chartered the Horace Greeley for the entire length of the river.
As we approached the riverside, I picked out at first one, then another of the vessels tied at the dock as the boat on which we were to take our voyage. My excitement took a decided plunge when the porter finally stopped his cart among a small crowd gathered by the gangplank of the Horace Greeley. Granted, it had a fresh-looking coat of white paint, as well as some recently touched up gilt metal-work; and I readily identified the “texas” deck, the lack of which Mr. Clemens had noted on the boat we had seen docking at La Crosse. But the Greeley was no larger than the boats on either side of it: the one a regular St. Louis packet of the Diamond Jo Line, the other a freighter being loaded with hardwood lumber for some destination downriver. After Mr. Clemens’s glowing portrait of the floating palaces of earlier days, I felt somewhat let down by the rather ordinary vessel we were about to board.
I had barely completed my cursory dockside inspection of our boat when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder and an uncultured voice drawled, “Well, look who’s here.” I turned around to see Billy Throckmorton’s smirking face; his smaller brother Alligator was just behind him.
“Mr. Throckmorton,” I said, trying to keep my voice and expression neutral. “What can I do for you?”
“Mister Throckmorton, is it?” He laughed, a bit too loudly. “Hell, I ain’t never been called ‘Mister’ Throckmorton before. I must be comin’ up in the world, hey, Al? Mr. Fancy City Boy must know quality when he sees it.”
“My name is Wentworth Cabot,” I said, looking for some way to walk away from the confrontation. The baggage cart blocked me to the left, and the river’s edge was behind me; slowly, as if in a bad dream, I saw the smaller Throckmorton brother moving to my right, as if to cut off my escape. “What can I do for you?” I repeated.
“That’s a funny name,” said Billy Throckmorton. “Ain’t Worth Cabbage—that must be a pretty city-boy name, hey, Al?” His brother giggled, but said nothing.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I really have no time for talk. If you have no other business, I must take care of my baggage.”
“Ain’t Worth Cabbage don’t want to talk,” Billy Throckmorton said. “I reckon we ain’t good enough to talk to the city boy. He’s a pretty boy.” Then he capped the rhyme with a third variation too coarse to repeat, leering all the while.
“Sir, I advise you to be more civil,” I began, but Throckmorton stepped closer and took up a mocking chant: “City boy—pretty boy—****** boy.”
It was obvious that the fellow was looking for a fight, and I decided it was wisest to make good my escape before he struck the first blow. I looked to my right again; his brother was no longer in sight, and I was preparing to make a dash in that direction when Billy Throckmorton pushed me hard in the chest with both hands. As I stepped involuntarily back, I tripped over something soft behind my legs and started to topple.
In a flash I realized that Alligator Throckmorton had gone down on all fours directly behind me, to trip me when his brother pushed me—an old schoolyard bully’s trick—but it was already too late to do anything about it. It was too late to do anything but watch Billy Throckmorton’s apelike grin as I fell helplessly backward into the Mississippi River.
8
I landed flat on my back in the river after a short fall, and went under. Bringing myself to the surface with a quick scissor kick, I spent a few moments spitting out water and shaking my head to clear my eyes. I found myself between two steamboats, facing a sheer embankment—which was perhaps four feet high, just a bit more than I could easily scale. I treaded water looking for the best way to extricate myself without more interference from the Throckmorton brothers.
Before I had time to make more than a quick survey of my situation, I heard a shout of “Here, young feller!” from the bank above, and saw a long arm reach toward me. I swam to it, glancing up to make sure I wasn’t setting myself up for another trick, but the face looking down over the edge was that of the colored porter I had engaged to transport the luggage to the steamboat. I took the proffered hand, and at the same time someone else reached a strong arm down to assist me. A moment later I was standing on the bank, between the porter and another man—this one of average height, with a black goatee and a dark blue uniform. He looked familiar, although I couldn’t place him at the moment.
I looked around to see what had become of the Throckmortons, and was surprised to see them in full flight, being pursued by a slim figure vigorously brandishing a cane. “You miscreant dogs! Come back and take your medicine, you cowards!” It was Major Demayne, showing a turn of speed that would have done credit to a man half his age. Either of the Throckmorton brothers might have been a match for him, cane and all, had they stood their ground. But the two bullies clearly wanted nothing to do with the incensed major, and ran from him as if swarms of angry hornets were pursuing them, instead of one aging man with a cane.
“Are you all right, mister?” The porter looked at me with a concerned expression, and I nodded. “Just wet,” I said. “I’ve been overboard before, and never took any hurt from it. Thanks for the hand, though.”
“We’d best get you out of them clothes,” said the other man who’d helped him pull me out. He handed me my hat, which had miraculously fallen on dry land. “Are you coming on board the Horace?” he asked.
“I’ve a ticket for the Horace Greeley; I’m traveling with Mr. Clemens.” I groped in my pockets, wondering if my ticket was ruined by the water.
“Oho, you’ll be Mr. Cabot, his secretary? I’m Charlie Snipes, chief clerk of the Horace. Your cabin is at the aft end of the texas, right next to your boss’s. Go on up and dry off—I’ll have a boy fetch you an extra towel from the barbershop—and tell me which of those bags will have a dry suit for you. I’ll have it brought up to you directly. The porter can load the rest of them, and I’ll see that he gets a good tip for his work.”
By this time, Major Demayne had returned, puffing a bit after his pursuit of the Throckmortons. “Dad-burn those rascals,” he growled. “I wish I had me a good horsewhip—I’d teach them civilized manners! Are you hurt, sir?”
“Not at all, thanks to these two men—and to you, Major. I must say I didn’t expect to find so many st
out defenders so far from home. But I think I’d better get to my cabin and get into dry clothes.”
“Aye, that you’d better, and when you’re changed, I’d suggest a glass of something to warm up your blood,” said Snipes. He turned to a young boy on deck, who was leaning over the rail and gawking at the scene on shore. “Tommy! Show Mr. Cabot here to his cabin, and be quick about it for once!”
I made my way up the gangplank and on board the Horace Greeley. It was a long way up from there to the texas deck. I dripped a trail of water at every step, and my wet shoes made a squishing sound. I was never so glad as when my dry clothes arrived.
I had just gotten my dry collar buttoned when a knock came on my cabin door. I opened it to find Mr. Clemens outside. He smiled and said, “Tarnation, Wentworth, when I told you to study the river, I didn’t expect you to immerse yourself so thoroughly in the subject.”
“Given my choice, sir, I should not have chosen the Throckmorton brothers as my tutors. Am I to take this as a typical specimen of western manners?”
“Well, only if you can call the complete absence of the thing a typical example of it. Those Throckmorton boys have about as much to do with manners as a jackrabbit has to do with playing the violin. But if you’ll finish dressing and come with me to meet the captain, I think you’ll get a notion of hospitality more to your taste. Mike Fowler’s an old crony of mine, and he’s mighty disturbed to have one of his passengers pitched overboard.”
Mr. Clemens waited while I finished dressing, and I followed him to Captain Fowler’s quarters, which were located at the forward end of the texas. As we entered, a blocky fellow with iron-gray muttonchop whiskers jumped to his feet and shook my hand with a firm grip. He stood only about as high as my chin, but his gold-trimmed uniform gave him as much dignity as he could have gotten from a foot of additional height. I recognized him as one of the two nautical-looking men I had seen at Mr. Clemens’s lecture in New York. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Cabot,” he said. “I hear you was treated pretty rough by those scalawags on shore; I hope you didn’t get hurt too bad.”
[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi Page 8
