The Last of the Flatboats

“And for the somebody else,” said Irv, “that will make those things out of the pig-iron, and for all the ‘somebody elses’ that work for them, and so on in every direction! Whew! it makes my head swim to think of it. But what a nabob you are, Ed! Just think! Thousands and even millions of people are, at this moment, at work to make you comfortable!”

“Yes, and each one of the millions is at work for all the others while all the others are at work for him. Theorists sometimes dream out systems of ‘coöperative industry,’ hoping in that way to better men’s condition. But their very wildest dreams do not even approach the complex and perfectly working coöperation we already have in use.”

“Just think of it!” said Irv. “Suppose that every man in our little town of two or three thousand people had to do everything for himself! He would have to raise sheep for wool, card, spin, and weave it, and fashion it into clothes. He would have to raise cotton and linen in the same way, and cattle too, and keep a tannery and be a shoemaker and a farmer and a mason and a carpenter and all the rest of it. And then he would have to mine his own iron and coal, and make his own tools and – well, he wouldn’t do it, because he couldn’t. He’d just wander off into the woods hunting for something that he could kill and eat, and he’d try to kill anybody else that did the same thing, for fear that the somebody else would get some of the game that he wanted for himself. He’d be simply a savage!”

“Well, but even savages go in tribes and hunt together and live together,” said Will.

“Of course they do,” answered Ed, “and that’s their first step up toward civilization. When they do that they have learned in a small way the advantage of working together, each for all and all for each. The better they learn that lesson, the more civilized they become.”

“Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything and everybody to work for the state and be supported by it?” asked Phil.

“Not a little bit of it,” said Ed. “That would be simply to go back to the tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize the advantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. We have worked out of that and into something better. With us, every man works for all the rest by working for himself in the way that best serves his own welfare. Under our system every man is urged and stimulated by self-interest to do the very best and most work that he can. Under a communistic or socialistic or tribal system, every man would be as lazy as the rest would let him be, because he would be sure of a share in all that the others might make by their labor. It is sharp competition that makes men do their best. It is in the ‘struggle for existence’ that men advance most rapidly.”

“Wonder if that wasn’t what Humboldt meant,” said Irv, “when he called the banana ‘the curse of the tropics,’ adding that when a man planted one banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendants to the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessity for clothes.”

“Exactly,” said Ed. “Somebody once said that ‘every man is as lazy as he dares to be.’”

“Well, I am, anyhow,” yawned Irv, “and so I’m going up on deck under the awning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night.”

CHAPTER XIX

SCUTTLE CHATTER

The pocket in which The Last of the Flatboats lay at anchor was well out of the path of passing steamboats. It was also pretty free from drift-wood, except of the smaller sort. So there was nothing of any consequence to be done during the two days of waiting. It was necessary to pump a little now and then, as the very tightest boat will let in a little bilge water, especially when she is as heavily loaded as this one was. There were what Irv Strong called “the inevitable three meals a day” to get, but beyond that there was nothing whatever to do.

Ed’s books were a good deal in demand at this time. Irv and Phil managed to do some swimming in spite of the drift-wood and the coldness of the water. For the rest, the boys lounged about on the deck, with now and then a “long talk” at the scuttle or in the cabin if it rained. Their “long talks” on deck were always held around the scuttle, so that the one on guard over Hughes might take part in them. There were only five steps to the little ladder that led from deck to cabin, and by sitting on the middle one the boy on guard could keep his feet on the edge of the prisoner’s bunk and let his head protrude above the deck.

They had naturally been thinking a good deal about what Ed had told them concerning food, and now and then a question would arise in the mind of one or another of them which would set the conversation going again.

“I wonder,” said Will Moreraud, “how men first found out what things were good to eat?”

“By trying them, I guess,” said Phil. “I read in a book somewhere that whenever the primitive man saw a new beast he asked first, ‘can he eat me?’ and next, ‘can I eat him?’”

“Yes,” said Ed, “and that sort of thing continued until our own time, when science came in to help us. You know where the jimson weed got its name, don’t you?”

None of them had ever heard.

“Well, ‘jimson’ is only a corruption of ‘Jamestown.’ When the early settlers landed at Jamestown they found so many new kinds of grain, and animals, and plants that they began trying them to see which were good and which were not. Among other things they thought the burs of the jimson weed – the poisonous thorn-apple of stramonium – looked rather inviting. So they boiled a lot of the burs and ate them. Like idiots, they didn’t confine the experiment to one man, or better still ‘try it on a dog,’ but set to work, a lot of them at once, to eat the stuff. It poisoned them, of course, and made a great sensation in Jamestown. So they named the plant the Jamestown weed.”

“I remember,” said Irv, “my grandfather telling me that when he was young, people thought tomatoes were poisonous, and he said it took a long time for those that tried them to teach other people better.”

“That’s what I had in my mind,” said Ed, “when I said that there was no known way to find out whether things were good to eat or not except by trying them, till modern science came to our aid.”

“How does modern science manage it?” asked Will.

“Well, if any new fruit or vegetable should turn up now, a chemist would analyze it to find out just what it was composed of. Then the doctors who make a study of such things would ‘try it on a dog,’ or more likely on a rabbit or guinea pig, to find out if it had any value as a medicine. They try every new substance in that way in fact, whether it is an original substance just discovered or some new compound. They even tried nitro-glycerine, and found it to be a very valuable medicine. So, too, they have got some of our most valuable drugs from coal oil, simply by trying them.”

“Good for modern science!” said Phil. “But, Ed, what were the other new things the colonists found in this country?”

“There were many. But those that have proved of most importance are corn, tobacco, tomatoes, watermelons, turkeys, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes.”

“Oh, come now,” said Irv, raising his head and resting it on his hand, “you said Irish potatoes.”

“And why not? They are a very important product, and the crop of them sells for many millions of – ”

“But they didn’t originate in this country, did they? Weren’t they brought here from Ireland?”

“Not at all. They were taken from here to Ireland.”

“Then why are they called Irish potatoes?”

“Because they proved to be so much the most profitable crop the Irish people could raise that they soon came to be the chief crop grown there. I don’t know whether the colonists found any of them growing wild in Virginia or not. They are supposed to have originated in South America and Mexico. At any rate, they are strictly native Americans. By the way,” said Ed, “the people who thought tomatoes poisonous were not so very far out in their reckoning. Both the tomato and the potato are plants belonging to the deadly nightshade family, and the vines of both contain a virulent poison.”

“Perhaps somebody tried tomato vines for greens,” said Phil, “and got himself ready for the coroner before the tomatoes had time to grow and ripen.”

“That isn’t unlikely,” said Ed. “At any rate, an experiment of that kind would have gone far to give the fruit a bad name.”

“However that may be,” said Irv, “it is pretty certain that men must have found out what was and what wasn’t good to eat mainly by trying. There’s salt now. It is the only mineral substance that men everywhere eat. All the rest of our foods are either animal or vegetable.”

“And that’s a puzzle,” replied Ed. “Man must have got a very early taste of salt, or else there wouldn’t be any man.”

“How’s that?”

“Why, the human animal simply can’t live without salt. He digests his food by means of an acid which he gets from salt, and from nothing else whatever. So he must have had salt from the beginning.”

“The Garden of Eden must have been a seaport then,” mused Phil. “Adam and Eve probably boiled their new potatoes in water dipped up from the docks.”

The boys laughed, and Ed continued: —

“It is a curious fact that the ancients, even as late as Greek times, knew nothing about sugar; at least, in its pure state. They got a good deal of it in fruits and vegetables, of course, and the Greeks used honey very lavishly. They not only ate it, but they made an intoxicating liquor out of it which they called mead. But of sugar, pure and simple, they knew nothing whatever. Their language hasn’t even a word for it. Yet in our time sugar is one of the most important products in the world, so important that many nations pay large bounties to encourage its cultivation.”

“By the way,” asked Phil, after a few moments’ meditation, “what is the most important crop in this country?”

“Wheat” – “cotton,” answered Will and Constant respectively.

“No,” said Ed, “corn is very much our most important crop.”

“More so than wheat?”

“Four to one and more,” said Ed. “Our corn crop amounts to about two thousand million bushels every year – often greatly more. Our wheat crop averages about five hundred million bushels. And as corn has more food value in it, pound for pound, than wheat has, it is easy to see that not only for us, but for all the world, our corn crop is quite four to one more important than our wheat.”

“But I thought corn wasn’t eaten much except in this country?” queried Irv. “The Germans and French and English don’t eat it.”

“Don’t they, though?” asked Ed, with a quizzical look. “Don’t they eat enormous quantities of American pork, bacon, and beef? And what is that but American corn in another shape?”

“That’s so,” said Irv, this time sitting bolt upright. “I’ve heard that the big farmers all over the West keep tab on the price of meat and corn. If meat is high and corn low, they bring up all their hogs from the woods, fatten them on the corn and sell them. But if meat is low or corn high, they sell the corn.”

“And they know to the nicest fraction of a pound,” added Ed, “how much corn it takes to make a given amount of pork.”

“Well, even if we didn’t sell any corn at all to other nations,” said Phil, “I should think our crop would help them. We eat a great deal of it, and if we hadn’t it, we’d eat just so much wheat instead, and so we should have just that much less wheat to sell to them.”

“Exactly,” said Ed. “Every thing that feeds a man in any country leaves precisely that much more to feed other men with in other countries.”

“And what a lot it does take to feed a man!” exclaimed Will.

“Not so much as you probably imagine,” said Ed. “A robust man requires about a pound and a half of meat and a pound and a half of bread per day. Vegetables are simply substitutes for bread and cost about the same. Eggs, milk, etc., take the place of meat and cost less. So by reckoning on three pounds of food a day, half meat and half bread, or their equivalents, we find that a strong, healthy, hard-working man can be fed at a cost of about fifteen cents a day. The coarser and more nutritious parts of beef and mutton and good sound pork can be bought at retail at an average of eight cents a pound – often much less. The man’s meat, therefore, will cost him twelve cents a day or less. Good flour can be had at about two cents a pound. The man’s bread will, therefore, cost him about three cents a day, making the total cost of his food about fifteen cents a day, or less than fifty-five dollars a year.”

“But it costs something to cook it,” said Phil.

“Yes, but not much. I have calculated only the actual cost of the raw materials, but my figures are too high rather than too low, for corned beef and chuck steaks are often sold at retail as low as three or four cents a pound, and neck pieces, heads, hearts, livers, and kidneys even lower, while I have allowed eight cents a pound as an average price for all the meat that the man eats. Now, allowing for the cost of cooking and for unavoidable waste, I reckon that a strong, healthy American citizen can feed himself abundantly on less than seventy-five dollars a year.”

“But what if he can’t get the seventy-five dollars?” asked Will.

“In this country any man in tolerable health can get it easily. There is no excuse in this country for what somebody calls ‘the poverty that suffers,’ at any rate among people who have health. Why, one hundred dollars a year is a good deal less than thirty cents a day, and anybody can earn that.”

“What does cause ‘the poverty that suffers,’ then?” asked Will.

“Drink, mainly,” broke in Phil.

“By the way,” said Irv, looking up from some figures he had been making, “does it occur to you that our corn crop alone, even if we produced nothing else in the world, would furnish food enough for all the people in this country?”

“No; how do you figure it, Irv?” asked Will.

“Why, Ed says the corn crop amounts to 2,000,000,000 bushels. There are 56 pounds in a bushel, or 112,000,000,000 pounds in the crop. That would give every man, woman, and child in our 70,000,000 population 1600 pounds of corn per year, or pretty nearly four and a half pounds apiece each day in the year, while Ed says no man needs more than three pounds of food per day. So the corn crop, whether eaten as bread or partly in the shape of meat, furnishes a great deal more food than the American people can possibly eat. No wonder we ship such vast quantities of foodstuffs abroad!”

“That’s encouraging,” said Phil; “but it’s bedtime. Hie ye to your bunks! Whose watch is it?”

And so the scuttle chatter ended.

CHAPTER XX

AT MEMPHIS

About ten or twenty miles above Memphis the flatboat met a steamboat. It was out looking for the flatboat. Not only had bank officers and law officers arrived at Memphis, but they had become so apprehensive at the delay of the flatboat that they had chartered the steamboat and gone in search of her.

One of the bank officers came aboard, and to him Phil explained the situation, receiving in return the warmest congratulations upon the capture.

“We’ll take you in tow,” said the bank officer. “That will hurry matters, and we’ve men waiting at the wharf with all the necessary papers and arrest warrants.”

“But you must land us above or below the town,” said Phil.

“Why? Why not at the wharf?”

“Because we’re making this voyage as cheaply as possible, and mustn’t pay any unnecessary wharfage fees.”

“Wharfage fees be hanged!” replied the man. “I’ll take care of all that. Why, I’d pay your wharfage fees at every landing from here to New Orleans. I’d buy your flatboat and all her cargo ten times over. Why, my boy, you don’t know what a big piece of work you’ve done, or how grateful we are. Wharfage fees!” with an accent of amused disgust. “What are wharfage fees when you’ve caught the fellow and secured the plunder? And even that isn’t the best of it. The letters you’ve got” – for Phil had outlined their contents in his telegram to Cincinnati – “have enabled us to arrest the whole gang already. We’ve got ’em all, and you’re entitled to the credit of enabling us to break up the strongest band of bank robbers that was ever organized in this country. So – ” signalling to the steamer – “send a line aboard and we’ll be at Memphis in an hour or two. In the meantime you and your companions must take breakfast on the steamboat.”

The flatboat was quickly made fast at the side of the steamer, and three of the boys went aboard for breakfast, the other two following when the first three returned. For until all legal forms should be completed, and Jim Hughes safely delivered to the officers of the law, Phil had no notion of leaving that worthy or the flatboat holding him, in charge of anybody except himself or his comrades. When he himself went to breakfast, he left Irv Strong in command, with Constant for his assistant, and Ed as guard over Hughes in the cabin.

At Memphis the legal formalities were conducted on the part of the boys by a lawyer whom Phil employed to see to it that their interests should be guarded. They lay there for two days. Jim Hughes was delivered to the authorities. The reward of five thousand dollars was paid over to Phil in currency. He divided the money equally among the crew. But as it would never do to carry so great a sum with them on the flatboat, they converted it into drafts on New York, which all the boys sent to the bank in Vevay, the money to be held there till their return.

As to supplies for the flatboat, the Cincinnati banker made some lavish gifts. He sent on board fresh beef enough to last several days, four hams, two strips of bacon, two pieces of dried beef, ten pounds of coffee, five pounds of tea, a bag of flour, a sack of salt, a dozen loaves of fresh bread, a big box of crackers, five pounds of butter, a basket of eggs, two or three cases of canned vegetables and fruits, some canned soups, a large can of milk packed in ice, a sack of dried beans, a bunch of bananas, a box of oranges, and finally, a large, iced cake with miniature American flags stuck all over it.

“I can talk now,” said Hughes to Ed, after the law officers had received and handcuffed him; “and I’ve got just one thing to say. I never had anything against any of you fellows except that brother Phil of yours. But for his meddling, I’d be a free man now. I’ve ‘got it in for’ him.”

“Oh, as to that,” drawled Irv Strong, “by the time you’ve served your ten or twenty years in State Prison, I imagine Phil will be sufficiently grown up to hold his own with you. He’s a ‘pretty sizable’ fellow even now, for his age.”

“Tell us something more interesting, Jim,” said Will Moreraud. “Tell us why you tried to run us on Vevay Bar and again on Craig’s Bar.”

“I didn’t try to run you on them. I tried to run you behind them into the Kentucky shore channel.”

“What for?”

“Oh, I was in a hurry to get down the river, and I didn’t want you to make that long stop at Craig’s Landing. If I could have run you behind those bars, you’d have been at Carrollton before you could pull up, and of course it wouldn’t have paid you to get the boat towed back up the river. I was trying to hurry, that’s all; and I knew the river better than Captain Phil suspected.”

That was all of farewell there was between the crew of The Last of the Flatboats and her late pilot. When some one suggested to Phil that he should speak for the party and express regret at the necessity that had governed their course, Phil said: —

“But I don’t feel the least regret. I am glad we’ve secured him and his gang. It restores a lot of plunder to the people to whom it belongs; it breaks up a very dangerous band of burglars; and it will help teach other persons of that kind how risky it is to live by law-breaking. Perhaps it will help to keep many people honest. No, I’m not sorry that we’ve been able to render so great a service to the public, and I’m not going to pretend that I am.”

“You’re right, Phil,” said Ed.

“Of course he is,” said Irv; “and as for Jim Hughes, he will get only what he deserves. If there were no laws, or if they were not enforced by the punishment of crime, there wouldn’t be much ‘show’ for honest people in this world.”

“There wouldn’t be any honest people, I reckon,” said Will, “for honest people simply couldn’t live. Everybody would have to turn savage and robber, or starve to death.”

“Yes,” said Ed. “That’s how law originated, and civilization is simply a state of existence in which there are laws enough to restrain wrong. When the savage finds that he can’t defend himself single-handed against murder and robbery, he joins with other savages for that purpose. That makes a tribe. It must have rules to govern it, and they are laws. It is out of the tribal organization that all civilized society has grown, mainly by the making of better and better laws, or by the better and better enforcement of laws already made.”

“Then are we all savages, restrained only by law from indulging in every sort of crime?” asked Phil. “I, for one, don’t feel myself to be in that condition of mind.”

“By no means,” replied the elder boy. “We are the products of habit and heredity. We have lost most of our savage instincts by having restrained them through generations, just as cows and dogs have done. You see, it is a law of nature that parents are apt to transmit their own characteristics to their children. As one of the great scientific writers puts it, ‘the habit of one generation is the instinct of the next.’ If you want a dog to hunt with, you choose one whose ancestors have been in the habit of hunting, because you know that he has inherited the habit as an instinct. Yet the highest-bred setters, pointers, and fox hounds are all descended ultimately from a common ancestry of wild dogs, as fierce, probably, as any wolf ever was. They have been for many generations under law, – the law of man’s control, – and so they have not only lost their wildness, but have acquired new instincts, new capacities, and a new intelligence.”

“I see,” said Phil, meditatively. “It is a long-continued course of timely spanking that has slowly changed us from savages into fellows able to run a flatboat and inclined to wear trousers.”

“Ah, as to that,” said Irv, “we haven’t quite got rid of our savage instincts even yet. I for one am savagely hungry for some of that beef our Cincinnati friend sent on board, and I suspect the rest of the tribe are in the same condition.”

CHAPTER XXI

A WRESTLE WITH THE RIVER

After the boat left Memphis it was necessary to proceed with a good deal of caution. A new flood had come down the river, bringing with it a dangerous drift of uprooted trees and the like. Moreover, in many places there were strong currents setting out from the natural river-bed into the overflowed regions on either side, and constant care was necessary to avoid being drawn into these.

Memphis is built upon the high Chickasaw bluffs, but a little way farther down the river the country becomes low and flat, and in parts it grows steadily lower as it recedes from the river, so that at some distance inland the plantations and woodlands lie actually lower than the bed of the great river. It has been said, indeed, with a good deal of truth, that the Mississippi River runs along on the top of a ridge.

“How did it come to do that?” asked Will. “Why didn’t it find its level as water generally does – ”

“And as men ought to do, but usually don’t,” said Irv.

“It did at first, of course,” said Ed. “But whenever it got on a rampage like this, it took all the region along its course for its right of way. It spread itself out over the country and went whithersoever it chose. Then came men who wanted its rich bottom lands for farms. So they built earth levees to keep the river off their lands. As more and more lands were brought under cultivation, more and more of these embankments were built, and the river was more and more restrained. Now there is nothing in the world that resists and resents restraint more than water does. So the river breaks through the levees every now and then and floods the plantations, drowning cattle, sweeping away crops and houses, and creating local famines that must be relieved from the outside.”

Before beginning his explanation Ed had dipped up a glassful of the river water and set it on the deck. It was thick with mud, so that it looked more like water from a hog wallow than water from a river. He turned now and gently took up the glass. There was a deep sediment in the bottom and the water above was beginning to grow somewhat clearer.