The Last of the Flatboats

“Ed.”

“Yes?” said the boy, laying down his book.

“I’m awfully tired, lying in one position. Can’t you turn me over a bit?”

Ed went at once to his relief. His torture was no part of the purpose of anybody on board. But after Ed had readjusted the ropes so that the fellow could rest more comfortably, the prisoner said: —

“See here, Ed, I want to talk to you. You fellows have made a tremendous strike, for of course there’s no use in disguising the truth any longer, to you at least, or pretending to be what I have tried to appear. You’ve got your man and you’ve got the proofs dead to rights. You’ve found me with the swag in my possession. If you turn me over to the law, I’ll go up for ten or twenty years to a certainty. There is no use in defending myself. The case is too clear, too complete. Do you see?”

“Certainly” responded Ed. “You must pay the penalty of your crime. We have no personal hard feeling against you, Jim, except that you ought not to have tried to involve us boys as you have done, and – ”

“Well, you see, Ed,” interrupted the bound man, “I was desperate. There was a big price on my head, and hundreds of men were looking for me everywhere. On the one hand, a prison stared me in the face, on the other was freedom with abundant wealth to enjoy it with. If I could get down the river, I thought I should have everything snug and right. I didn’t mean to get you boys into any trouble – really and truly I didn’t, Ed. My plan was to blunder into that chute, and while you fellows were all scared half to death about it, to slip ashore. I had those men on the bank just for safety’s sake. They don’t really know anything about me or what I’ve got – what I did have,” he corrected, with sudden recollection that his carpet-bag was no longer in his possession.

“Those men were hired by my partners to have horses there and run me off into Mississippi, and I was to give them a hundred or two for the job, besides paying for the horses we might ride to death. Really and truly, Ed, that’s all there was of that.”

“I see no particular reason to doubt your statement, Jim,” replied the boy. “But what of it?”

“Well, you see, I want to talk business with you, Ed, and I wanted you to know, in the first place, that I hadn’t tried to harm you boys in any way – at least, till I was caught in a trap by that sharp brother of yours.” There was a distinct touch of malignity in the man’s tone as he mentioned Phil, to whom he justly attributed his capture.

“Never mind that,” he resumed after a moment. “I want to talk business with you, as I said. Here are you five boys, all alone on the river. Anything might happen to a flatboat. You’re likely to make, as nearly as I can figure it out from your talk, about fifty or a hundred or at most a hundred and fifty dollars apiece out of the trip, after paying steamboat passage back. Now you’ve caught me. If you surrender me – ”

“Which of course we shall,” broke in Ed, in astonishment.

“As I was saying” continued Jim, “if you surrender me, you’ll probably get the reward offered, though that’s never quite certain.”

“What possible difference can that make?” asked Ed, indignantly. “You’re a thief. We have caught you with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of other people’s property in your possession. We have only one thing to do. We must deliver you to the officers of the law. We should do that if not a cent of reward was offered. We should do it simply because we’re ordinarily honest persons who think that thieves ought to be punished and that stolen property ought to be returned to its owners. What has the reward to do with it?”

“I’m glad you look at it in that way,” said the prisoner. “At most the reward is a trifle, as you say. Five thousand dollars to five of you means only a thousand dollars apiece. Now I’ve a business proposition to make. Suppose you let me slip ashore somewhere down here, I’ll leave behind me – I’ll put into your hands all the coupon bonds. They’re better than cash – they are good for their face and a good deal more anywhere. You boys can sink the old flatboat down the river somewhere, sell out the bonds to any banker, and go ashore rich – worth more than anybody in Vevay’s got, or ever will have.”

The man spoke eagerly, but not excitedly, and he watched closely to see the effect of his words.

Ed preserved his self-control. Indeed, it was his habit always to grow cool, or at least to seem so, in precise proportion to the occasion for growing hot. He waited awhile before he spoke. Then he said: —

“Jim Hughes, – or whatever your name is – well, I’ll simply call you Thief, for that name belongs to you even if nothing else that you possess does, – you thief, if you had made such a proposition as that to my father, he would have – well, he was said to be hot-headed. I’m not hot-headed – ”

“No. You’re reasonable. You’re – ”

“Stop!” shouted Ed. “If you weren’t tied up there and helpless, you’d make me hot-headed, too, like my father, and I’d do to you what he would have done. As it is, I’m cool-headed. I’ll ‘talk business’ with you; and the business I have to talk is just this: I forbid you from this moment to open your mouth again, except to ask for water, while you are on this flatboat. If you say one other word to me or to any of my companions I’ll forget that I am not my hot-headed father, and – well, it will be very greatly the worst for you. Now not a word!” seeing that the fellow was about to speak. “Not a word, except the word ‘water,’ till my brother turns you over to the officers of the law. I’m not captain, but this particular order of mine ‘goes.’ I’m going to ask my brother to pass it on to the others, and it will be enforced, be very sure. They are not cool-headed as I am, particularly Phil. He’s like my father sometimes. Remember, you are not to speak any word except ‘water’ till you pass from our custody.”

The high-strung boy tried to control himself, but he was livid with rage. He choked and gasped for breath as he spoke. Weak as he was physically, he would certainly have assaulted the man who had deliberately proposed to make him a partner in crime, but for the fact that the fellow was bound, hand and foot, and therefore helpless. In his rage Ed ran up the ladder and called for his brother, meaning to ask that the man be released from his bonds in order that he, Ed Lowry, might wreck vengeance upon him for the insult.

Phil had gone ashore to send his telegrams. Irv Strong had been left in command of the boat. He asked Ed what was the matter. Ed, still choking with rage, explained as well as he could, growing more excited every moment, and ended by demanding: —

“Let the scoundrel loose! cut the ropes that bind him, and give me a chance at him!”

“Hold on, Ed,” said Irv. “The wise Benjamin Franklin once said: ‘No gentleman will insult one; no other can.’ This thief, burglar, bank robber, that we’ve got tied in a bunk down there, can’t insult you. He doesn’t know our kind. He isn’t in our class. It never occurs to his mind that anybody is really honest. It seems to him a question of price, and he thinks he has offered you mighty good terms. If any man who understood common honesty and believed in its existence had made such a proposition to you, your wrath would be righteous. As it is, your wrath is merely ridiculous. Of course a trapped bank burglar tries to buy his way out with his swag. Of course such a creature doesn’t know what honest people think or feel – he has no capacity to understand it any more than he could understand Russian. Go below, Constant, and watch that thief. Ed, you must recover yourself. Phil will come aboard presently, and I really don’t suppose you want to tell Phil precisely what has happened and leave him to – well, let us say to discipline Jim Hughes.”

“No, no; oh, no!” said Ed, suddenly realizing what that would mean. “Phil would – oh, I don’t know what he wouldn’t do. For conscience’ sake don’t tell him what happened!”

“Suppose you go forward then,” suggested Irv, “and sit down on the anchor and cool off, and so far recover yourself that Phil won’t notice anything or ask any questions when he comes aboard.”

The suggestion was very quietly given, quite as if the whole matter had been one of no consequence. But it was instantly effective. Irv well knew that Ed’s greatest dread was that Phil’s fiery temper might get the better of him sometime. So Irv had shrewdly appealed to that fear.

“I will; I’ll cool down at once,” said Ed, rising in his earnestness. “Nobody knows what Phil would do or wouldn’t do if he knew of this. Irv, you must prevent that. Make all the boys pledge themselves not to let him know, at least till Hughes is out of our hands.”

Irv was glad enough to make the promise and to fulfil it. For he, too, knew with what reckless fervor the high-mettled boy would be sure to inflict punishment for the insult should he learn of it.

“Phil is the jolliest, best-natured fellow in the world,” explained Irv, when he asked the other boys not to tell their captain what had happened, “but you know what a temper he has – or rather you don’t know. None of us does, because nobody has ever made the mistake of stirring him up with a real, vital insult.”

“No,” said Will, “and I pity the fellow that ever makes that particular mistake.”

“We’ll never tell him,” said Constant. “If we did, we mightn’t be able to deliver our prisoner.”

CHAPTER XVII

AT ANCHOR

Phil had sent two telegrams, – one to the authorities at Memphis, and the other to the plundered bank in Cincinnati. In each he had announced his captures, – the man and the funds, – and in each he had asked that officers to arrest and persons to identify the culprit should be waiting at Memphis on the arrival of the flatboat.

On his return to the flatboat he felt himself so excited and sleepless that he sent his comrades below to sleep and by turns to watch the prisoner. He would himself remain on duty on deck all night. As the night wore away, the boy thought out all the possibilities, for he felt that for any miscarriage in this matter he would be solely responsible.

Among the possibilities was this: that should the flatboat arrive at Memphis before some one could get there from Cincinnati to identify the prisoner, he might be discharged for want of such identification. It would take a day or two to send men by rail from Cincinnati to Memphis, while the fierce current of this Mississippi flood promised to take the flatboat thither within less than twenty hours.

After working out all the probabilities in his mind as well as he could, Phil called below for all his comrades to come to the sweeps. He did not tell them his purpose; they were too sleepy even to ask. But studying the “lay of the land” on either side, he steered the flatboat into a sort of pocket on the Tennessee shore, and to the bewilderment of his comrades, ordered the anchor cast overboard.

By the time that the anchor held, and the boat came to a rest in the bend, the boys were much too wide awake not to have their minds full of interrogation marks.

“What do you mean, Phil?” “Why have we anchored?” “How long are we to remain here?” “What’s the matter, anyhow?” “Have you gone crazy, or what is it?”

These and a volley of similar questions were fired at him.

He did not answer. He went to one side of the boat and then to the other to observe position.

“How much anchor line is out, Will?” he presently asked.

“Nearly all of it,” answered his comrade.

“This won’t do,” said Phil. “Up anchor.”

The boys were more than ever puzzled. But they tugged away at the anchor windlass till the flukes let go the bottom and the anchor was halfway up. Then Phil called out: —

“That will do. Put a peg in the windlass and let the anchor swing in the water. To the sweeps! Hard on the starboard! We must push her inshore and into shallower water, where the anchor will hold her, and where no steamboat is likely to run over us. Who would have thought it was so deep over here?”

The boys now began to understand why the first anchorage had been abandoned and a shallower one sought for, but they did not yet know what their captain meant by anchoring at all. They did not understand why, on so clear a night, with a river so generously flooded, he did not let things take their course and get to Memphis as quickly as possible.

Presently the anchor, dragging at half cable, fouled the bottom and, with a strain that made the check-post creak, the flatboat came to a full stop.

“That will do,” said Phil. “This is as good a place as any. Pay out some more anchor line and let her rest.”

“But what on earth are you anchoring for?” asked the others, “and how long are we going to lie here?” queried Ed.

“Nearly two days and nights,” was the reply, – “long enough to let somebody travel from Cincinnati to Memphis who can identify Jim Hughes and take him off our hands. I suppose it would be all right if we went on without waiting. But I’m not certain of that, and I’m not taking any chances in this business, so we’ll lie at anchor here for nearly two days. Go to bed, all of you except the one on watch over Jim Hughes. I’m not sleepy, so I’ll stay on deck for the rest of the night.”

But by that time the boys were not sleepy either, so they made no haste about going to their bunks.

“We’ll be pretty short of something to eat by that time,” said Constant, who was just then in charge of the cooking. “We have only a scrap of bread left. The eggs and fresh meat and milk are used up, and we’ll have to fall back on corn-bread and fried salt pork.”

“Well, that’s food fit for the gods,” said Irv Strong, “if the gods happen to be healthy, hungry flatboatmen. But how important the food question always is in an emergency! How it always crops up when you get away from home!”

“Yes, and at home too,” said Ed; “only there we have somebody else to look after the three meals a day. It’s the most important question in the world. If all food supplies were cut off for a single month, this world would be as dead as the moon.”

“That’s true,” broke in Will. “And really, I suppose the world isn’t very forehanded with it at best. I wonder how many years we could last, anyhow, if the crops ceased to grow.”

“Not more than one year,” replied the older boy. “There never was a time when mankind had food enough accumulated to last for much more than a year, and probably there never will be. If there should be no crop for a single year, hundreds of thousands would starve every month, and a second failure would simply blot out the race. As for forehandedness, we actually live from hand to mouth, especially the people in the big cities. Only last winter a great snowstorm blockaded the railroads leading into New York for only three or four days, and even in that short time the price of food went up so high that the charitable institutions had all they could do to keep poor people from starving. So far from the world generally being forehanded for food, there never was a time when the food on hand was really sufficient to go round.”

“Well, of course,” said Will, meditatively, “there are always some people so ‘down on their luck,’ as the saying is, that they can’t earn a living, but there’s always enough food for them if they could get hold of it.”

“You’re mistaken,” said Ed. “There is nearly always something like a famine in parts of India and Russia, and even in Italy and other parts of Europe there are great masses of very hard-working people who never in their lives get enough to eat.”

There were exclamations of surprise at this, but Ed presently continued: “In many European countries the peasants do not see a piece of meat once a year, and in hardly any of them do the poorer people get what we would think sufficient for food. In fact, their food is not sufficient. They are always more or less starved, and that’s the reason so many of them are the little runts they are.”

“Then we are better off than most other nations?” said Irv.

“Immeasurably!” said Ed. “Ours is the best fed nation in the world. It is the only nation in which the poorest laborer can have meat on his table every day in the year, for even in England the poorer laborers have to make out with cheese pretty often.”

“What’s the reason?” asked Phil, who had acquired the habit of using short sentences and as few words as possible since his burden of responsibility had borne so heavily upon him.

“There are several reasons. Our soil is fertile – but so is that of France and Italy, for that matter. I suppose the great reason is that we do not have to support vast armies in idleness. In most of the European countries they make everybody serve in the army for three or four years. It costs a lot of money to support these armies and it costs the country a great deal more than that.”

“In what way?” asked Constant, who, being on sentry duty over Hughes, was sitting halfway down the ladder.

“Why, by taking all the young men away from productive work for three years. Take half a million young men away from work and put them in the army, and you lose each year all the work that a man could do in half a million years, all the food or other things that half a million men could produce in a year?”

“And the other people have to make it all up,” drawled Irv. “I don’t wonder they’re tired.”

“And besides making it all up, as you say,” responded Ed, “those other people have to work to feed and clothe and house and arm all these men, besides transporting them from one place to another, and paying for costly parades and all that sort of thing. Why, every time one of the big modern guns is fired at a target it burns up some man’s earnings for a whole year! Some man must work a year or more to pay the expense of doing it!”

“Then why don’t the people of those countries ‘kick’?” asked Will, “and abolish their armies?”

“Because the people of those countries have masters, and the masters own the armies, and the armies would make short work of any ‘kick.’ In our country the people are the masters, and they have always refused to let anybody set up a great standing army. When we have a war, the people volunteer and fight it to a finish. Then the men who have been doing the fighting are mustered out, and they go back to their work, earn their own living, and put in their time producing something that mankind needs.”

“Cipher it all down,” said Irv, “it’s liberty that makes this the best country in the world to live in.”

“Precisely!” said Ed, with emphasis. “And about the most important duty every American has to do is to remember that one, supreme fact, and do his part to keep our country as it is.”

CHAPTER XVIII

AT BREAKFAST

The day was dawning by this time, and the conversation was broken up. Constant set to work to prepare breakfast while the others extinguished the lanterns, trimmed them, filled them with oil, and “cleaned up” generally.

When breakfast was served, the scarcity of supplies was apparent. There were some “cold-water hoecakes,” – that is to say, bread made of corn-meal mixed up with cold water and a little salt, and baked in cakes about half or three quarters of an inch thick upon a griddle. There was a dish of fried salt pork, and with it some fried potatoes. And there was nothing else, except a “private dish” consisting of two slices of toast made from the scrap of stale wheat bread left, with a poached egg on each of them. There was no coffee and no butter, the last remains of that having been used upon the toast.

The “private dish,” Constant explained, was for Ed. “You see, we’re out to get him well, and his digestive apparatus doesn’t take kindly to fried things. I’ve saved four more eggs for him – the last we’ve got, – and six more slices of stale wheat bread. The rest of you are barbarians, and you’ll wrestle with any sort of hash I can get up till we get to Memphis.”

Ed protested vigorously against the favoritism shown him, but the others supported Constant’s plan, and the older boy had to yield.

“Well, I am deeply grateful for your kindness, boys,” he said, “and I’m duly grateful also to the thousands of men in various parts of the country who have worked so hard to furnish me with these two slices of toast.”

The boys looked up from their plates.

“Here’s another revelation,” said Irv. “My ill-furnished intelligence is about to receive another supply of much-needed rudimentary information. Go on, Ed. Tell us about it. How in the world do you figure out your ‘thousands’ of men who have had anything to do with those two slices of toast?”

“Oh, that was a joke,” said Will.

“It was nothing of the kind,” answered Ed. “I can’t possibly count up all the people who have worked hard to give me this toast, but they certainly number greatly more than a thousand.”

“We’re only waiting for wisdom to drop from your lips – ” began Irv, with his drawl.

“O, quit it, Irv!” said Phil; “you’ll learn more by listening than by talking.”

“That is probably so,” said the other, “though I remember that we heard something away up the river, about how much a person learns of a subject by talking about it.”

“Yes, but – ”

“Listen,” said Ed, “and I’ll explain. The wheat out of which this toast was made was grown probably in Dakota or Minnesota. There was a farmer there, and perhaps there were some farm-hands also, who ploughed the ground, sowed the seed, reaped the wheat, threshed it, winnowed it, and all that. Then – ”

“Yes, but all that wouldn’t include more than half a dozen,” said Phil.

“Yes, it would,” said Irv, “for there’s all the womenfolk who cooked the men’s meals and – ”

“Never mind them,” said Ed, “though of course they helped to give me my toast. Let’s count only those that contributed directly to that kindly end. These farmer people used ploughs, harrows, drills, reapers, threshing-machines, wagons, and all that, and somebody must have made them. And back of those who made them were those who dug the iron for them out of the ground, and cut the wood in them out of the forest, and the men who made the tools with which they did all this, and – ”

“I see,” said Irv. “It’s the biggest endless chain imaginable. Thousands? Why, thousands had a hand in it before you even get to the farmer – the men who made the tools, and the men who made the tools that made the tools, and so on back to the very beginnings of creation. And if we face about, there are the men that ran the railroads which hauled the wheat to mill, and the millers, and all that. Oh, the thousand are easy enough to make out.”

“Yes,” said Ed, “and then the railroads and the mills had to be built. The men that built them, the engineers, mechanics, and laborers, all helped to give me my two slices of toast. So did the men behind them, the men who made their tools and their materials, the woodsmen who chopped trees for ties, the miners who dug the iron, the smelters, the puddlers, the rolling-mill men, who wrought the crude ore into steel rails; then there are all the men who made the locomotives, and the cars, and the machinery of the mills, and – ”

“Oh, stop for mercy’s sake,” said Will. “It’s no use to count. There aren’t thousands, but millions of them. And of course the same thing is true of our clothes, our shoes, and everything else.”

“But with so many people’s work represented in it,” asked Irv, reflectively, “why isn’t that piece of toast an enormously costly affair?”

“Simply because so many people’s work is represented in it,” answered Ed. “If one man had to do it all for himself, it would never be done at all. Just imagine a man set down on the earth with no tools and nobody to help him. How much buttered toast do you suppose he would be able to turn out in a year? Why, before he could get so much as a hoe he would have to travel hundreds of miles, dig some iron and coal, cut wood with which to convert the coal into coke, melt the iron out of its ore, change it into steel, and shape it into a hoe. Why, even a hoe would cost him a year’s hard work or more, while a wagon he could hardly make without tools in a lifetime. Now he can earn the price of a hoe in a few hours, and the cost of a wagon in a few days or weeks, simply because everybody works for everybody else, each man doing only the thing that he can do best.”

“Then we all work for each other without knowing it,” said Will.

“Of course we do. When we fellows were diving for that pig-iron, we were working for the thousands of people who will use or profit by the things that somebody else will make out of that pig-iron and – ”