The Boy Settlers: A Story of Early Times in Kansas

The afternoon sped on delightfully, and Sandy’s spirits rose. He thought it would be fine if the “New Lucy” should stay stuck on a sand-bar for days and days, and he should have such a good game of whist, with the lovely lady from Baltimore for a partner. But the military gentleman grew tired. His luck was very poor, and when the servants began to rattle dishes on the supper-table, he suggested that it would be just as well perhaps if they did not play too much now; they would enjoy the game better later on. They agreed to stop with the next game.

When they had first taken their places at the card-table, the military gentleman had asked Sandy if he had any cards, and when he replied that he had none, the military gentleman, with a very lordly air, sent one of the cabin waiters to the bar for a pack of cards. Now that they were through with the game, Sandy supposed that the military gentleman would put the cards into his pocket and pay for them. Instead of that he said, “Now, my little man, we will saw off to see who shall pay for the cards.”

“Saw off?” asked Sandy, faintly, with a dim notion of what was meant.

“Yes, my lad,” said the military gentleman. “We will play one hand of Old Sledge to see who shall pay for the cards and keep them.”

With a sinking heart, but with a brave face, Sandy took up the cards dealt to him and began to play. It was soon over. Sandy won one point in the hand; the military gentleman had the other three.

“Take care of your cards, my son,” said the military gentleman; “we may want them again. They charge the extravagant price of six bits for them on this boat, and these will last us to St. Louis.”

Six bits! Seventy-five cents! And poor Sandy had only twenty-five cents in his pocket. That silver quarter represented the entire capital of the Boy Settlers from Kansas. Looking up, he saw Charlie regarding him with reproachful eyes from a corner of the saloon. With great carefulness, he gathered up his cards and rose, revolving in his mind the awful problem of paying for seventy-five cents’ worth of cards with twenty-five cents.

“Well, you’ve got yourself into a nice scrape,” tragically whispered Charlie, in his ear, as soon as the two boys were out of earshot of the others. “What are you going to do now? You can spar your way down to St. Louis, but you can’t spar your way with that barkeeper for a pack of cards.”

“Let me alone, Charlie,” said Sandy, testily. “You haven’t got to pay for these cards. I’ll manage it somehow. Don’t you worry yourself the least bit.”

“Serves you right for gambling. What would mother say if she knew it? If you hadn’t been so ready to show off your whist-playing before these strangers, you wouldn’t have got into such a box.”

“I didn’t gamble,” replied Sandy, hotly. “It isn’t gambling to play a hand to see who shall pay for the cards. All men do that. I have seen daddy roll a game of tenpins to see who should pay for the alley.”

“I don’t care for that. It is gambling to play for the leastest thing as a stake. Nice fellow you are, sitting down to play a hand of seven-up for the price of a pack of cards! Six bits at that!”

“A nice brotherly brother you are to nag me about those confounded cards, instead of helping a fellow out when he is down on his luck.”

Charlie, a little conscience-stricken, held his peace, while Sandy broke away from him, and rushed out into the chilly air of the after-deck. There was no sympathy in the dark and murky river, none in the forlorn shore, where rows of straggling cottonwoods leaned over and swept their muddy arms in the muddy water. Looking around for a ray of hope, a bright idea struck him. He could but try one chance. The bar of the “New Lucy” was a very respectable-looking affair, as bars go. It opened into the saloon cabin of the steamer on its inner side, but in the rear was a small window where the deck passengers sneaked up, from time to time, and bought whatever they wanted, and then quietly slipped away again, unseen by the more “high-toned” passengers in the cabin. Summoning all his courage and assurance, the boy stepped briskly to this outside opening, and, leaning his arms jauntily on the window-ledge, said, “See here, cap, I owe you for a pack of cards.”

“Yep,” replied the barkeeper, holding a bottle between his eye and the light, and measuring its contents.

This was not encouraging. Sandy, with a little effort, went on: “You see we fellows, three of us, are sparring our way down to St. Louis. We have got trusted for our passage. We’ve friends in St. Louis, and when we get there we shall be in funds. Our luggage is in pawn for our passage money. When we come down to get our luggage, I will pay you the six bits I owe you for the cards. Is that all right?”

“Yep,” said the barkeeper, and he set the bottle down. As the lad went away from the window, with a great load lifted from his heart, the barkeeper put his head out of the opening, looked after him, smiled, and said, “That boy’ll do.”

When Sandy joined his brother, who was wistfully watching for him, he said, a little less boastfully than might have been expected of him, “That’s all right, Charlie. The barkeeper says he will trust me until we get to St. Louis and come aboard to get the luggage. He’s a good fellow, even if he did say ‘yep’ instead of ‘yes’ when I asked him.”

In reply to Charlie’s eager questions, Sandy related all that had happened, and Charlie, with secret admiration for his small brother’s knack of “cheeking it through,” as he expressed it, forbore any further remarks.

“I do believe the water is really rising!” exclaimed the irrepressible youngster, who, now that his latest trouble was fairly over, was already thinking of something else. “Look at that log. When I came out here just after breakfast, this morning, it was high and dry on that shoal. Now one end of it is afloat. See it bob up and down?”

Full of the good news, the lads went hurriedly forward to find Oscar, who, with his friend from Baltimore, was regarding the darkening scene from the other part of the boat.

“She’s moving!” excitedly cried Oscar, pointing his finger at the “War Eagle”; and, as he spoke, that steamer slid slowly off the sand-bar, and with her steam-organ playing triumphantly “Oh, aren’t you glad you’re out of the Wilderness!” a well-known air in those days, she steamed steadily down stream. From all the other boats, still stranded though they were, loud cheers greeted the first to be released from the long embargo. Presently another, the “Thomas H. Benton,” slid off, and churning the water with her wheels like a mad thing, took her way down the river. All these boats were flat-bottomed and, as the saying was, “could go anywhere if the ground was a little damp.” A rise of a very few inches of water was sufficient to float any one of them. And, in the course of a half-hour, the “New Lucy,” to the great joy of her passengers, with one more hoist on her forward spars, was once more in motion, and she too went gayly steaming down the river, her less fortunate companions who were still aground cheering her as she glided along the tortuous channel.

“Well, that was worth waiting some day or two to see,” said Oscar, drawing a long breath. “Just listen to that snorting calliope, playing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ as they go prancing down the Big Muddy. I shall never forget her playing that ‘Out of the Wilderness’ as she tore out of those shoals. It’s a pretty good tune, after all, and the steam-organ is not so bad now that you hear it at a distance.”

CHAPTER XX.

STRANDED NEAR HOME

It was after dark, on a Saturday evening, when the “New Lucy” landed her passengers at the levee, St. Louis. They should have been in the city several hours earlier, and they had expected to arrive by daylight. The lads marvelled much at the sight of the muddy waters of the Missouri running into the pure currents of the Mississippi, twenty miles above St. Louis, the two streams joining but not mingling, the yellow streak of the Big Muddy remaining separate and distinct from the flow of the Mississippi for a long distance below the joining of the two. They had also found new enjoyment in the sight of the great, many-storied steamboats with which the view was now diversified as they drew nearer the beautiful city which had so long been the object of their hopes and longings. They could not help thinking, as they looked at the crowded levee, solid buildings, and slender church spires, that all this was a strange contrast to the lonely prairie and wide, trackless spaces of their old home on the banks of the distant Kansas stream. The Republican Fork seemed to them like a far-off dream, it was so very distant to them now.

“Where are you young fellows going to stop in St. Louis?” asked the pleasant-faced young man from Baltimore.

The lads had scarcely thought of that, and here was the city, the strange city in which they knew nobody, in full sight. They exchanged looks of dismay, Sandy’s face wearing an odd look of amusement and apprehension mixed. Charlie timidly asked what hotels were the best. The young man from Baltimore named two or three which he said were “first-class,” and Charlie thought to himself that they must avoid those. They had no money to pay for their lodging, no baggage as security for their payment.

As soon as they could get away by themselves, they held a council to determine what was to be done. They had the business address of their uncle, Oscar Bryant, of the firm of Bryant, Wilder & Co., wholesale dealers in agricultural implements, Front Street. But they knew enough about city life to know that it would be hopeless to look for him in his store at night. It would be nearly nine o’clock before they could reach any hotel. What was to be done? Charlie was certain that no hotel clerk would be willing to give them board and lodging, penniless wanderers as they were, with nothing but one small valise to answer as luggage for the party. They could have no money until they found their uncle.

Before they could make up their minds what to do, or which way to turn, the boat had made her landing and was blowing off steam at the levee. The crowds of passengers, glad to escape from the narrow limits of the steamer, were hurrying ashore. The three homeless and houseless lads were carried resistlessly along with the crowd. Charlie regretted that they had not asked if they could stay on the boat until Sunday morning. But Sandy and Oscar both scouted such a confession of their poverty. “Besides,” said Sandy, “it is not likely that they would keep any passengers on board here at the levee.”

“Ride up? Free ’bus to the Planters’!” cried one of the runners on the levee, and before the other two lads could collect their thoughts, the energetic Sandy had drawn them into the omnibus, and they were on their way to an uptown hotel. When the driver had asked where their baggage was, Sandy, who was ready to take command of things, had airily answered that they would have it sent up from the steamer. There were other passengers in the ’bus, and Charlie, anxious and distressed, had no chance to remonstrate; they were soon rattling and grinding over the pavements of St. Louis. The novelty of the ride and the glitter of the brightly lighted shops in which crowds of people were doing their Saturday-night buying, diverted their attention for a time. Then the omnibus backed up before a handsome hotel, and numerous colored men came hurrying down the steps of the grand entrance to wait upon the new arrivals. With much ceremony and obsequiousness, the three young travellers were ushered into the office, where they wrote their names in a big book, and were escorted to a large and elegant room, in which were ample, even luxurious, sleeping accommodations for the trio.

The colored porter assiduously brushed off the clothing of the lads. “Baggage?” the clerk at the desk had asked when they registered. “Baggage, sah?” the waiter asked again, as he dusted briskly the jackets of the three guests. Neither Charlie nor Oscar had the heart to make reply to this very natural question. It was Sandy who said: “We will not have our baggage up from the steamer to-night. We are going right on up north.”

But when Sandy tipped the expectant waiter with the long-treasured silver quarter of a dollar, Charlie fairly groaned, and sinking into a chair as the door closed, said, “Our last quarter! Great Scott, Sandy! are you crazy?”

Sandy, seeing that there was no help for it, put on a bold front, and insisted that they must keep up appearances to the last. He would hunt up Uncle Oscar’s place of abode in the city directory after supper, and bright and early Sunday morning he would go and see him. They would be all right then. What use was that confounded old quarter, anyhow? They might as well stand well with the waiter. He might be useful to them. Twenty-five cents would not pay their hotel bill; it would not buy anything they needed in St. Louis. The darky might as well have it.

“And this is one of the swellest and most expensive hotels in the city,” cried Charlie, eyeing the costly furniture and fittings of the room in which they were lodged. “I just think that we are travelling under false pretences, putting up at an expensive house like this without a cent in our pockets. Not one cent! What will you do, you cheeky boy, if they ask us for our board in advance? I have heard that they always do that with travellers who have no baggage.”

“Well, I don’t know what we will do,” said Sandy, doggedly. “Suppose we wait until they ask us. There’ll be time enough to decide when we are dunned for our bill. I suppose the honestest thing would be to own right up and tell the whole truth. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people have to do that sort of thing when they get into a tight place.”

“But I’m really afraid, Sandy, that they won’t believe us,” said the practical Oscar. “The world is full of swindlers as well as of honest fellows. They might put us out as adventurers.”

“We are not adventurers!” cried Sandy, indignantly. “We are gentlemen when we are at home, able to pay our debts. We are overtaken by an accident,” he added, chuckling to himself. “Distressed gentlemen, don’t you see?”

“But we might have gone to a cheaper place,” moaned Charlie. “Here we are in the highest-priced hotel in St. Louis. I know it, for I heard that Baltimore chap say so. We might have put up at some third-rate house, anyhow.”

“But it is the third-rate house that asks you for your baggage, and makes you pay in advance if you don’t have any,” cried Sandy, triumphantly. “I don’t believe that a high-toned hotel like this duns people in advance for their board, especially if it is a casual traveller, such as we are. Anyhow, they haven’t dunned us yet, and when they do, I’ll engage to see the party through, Master Charlie; so you set your mind at rest.” As for Charlie, he insisted that he would keep out of the sight of the hotel clerk, until relief came in the shape of money to pay their bill.

Oscar, who had been reading attentively a printed card tacked to the door of the room, broke in with the declaration that he was hungry, and that supper was served until ten o’clock at night. The others might talk all night, for all he cared; he intended to have some supper. There was no use arguing about the chances of being dunned for their board; the best thing he could think of was to have some board before he was asked to pay for it. And he read out the list of hours for dinner, breakfast, and supper from the card.

“There is merit in your suggestion,” said Charlie, with a grim smile. “The dead-broke Boy Settlers from the roaring Republican Fork will descend to the banquet-hall.” Charlie was recovering his spirits under Oscar’s cool and unconcerned advice to have board before being in the way of paying for it.

After supper, the lads, feeling more cheerful than before, sauntered up to the clerk’s desk, and inspected the directory of the city. They found their uncle’s name and address, and it gave them a gleam of pleasure to see his well-remembered business card printed on the page opposite. Under the street address was printed Mr. Bryant’s place of residence, thus: “h. at Hyde Park.”

“Where’s that?” asked Sandy, confidently, of the clerk.

“Oh! that’s out of the city a few miles. You can ride out there in the stage. Only costs you a quarter.”

Only a quarter! And the last quarter had gone to the colored boy with the whisk-broom.

“Here’s a go!” said Sandy, for once a little cast down. “We might walk it,” Oscar whispered, as they moved away from the desk. But to this Charlie, asserting the authority of an elder brother, steadfastly objected. He knew his Uncle Oscar better than the younger boys did. He remembered that he was a very precise and dignified elderly gentleman. He would be scandalized greatly if his three wandering nephews should come tramping out to his handsome villa on a Sunday, like three vagabonds, to borrow money enough to get home to Dixon with. No; that was not to be thought of. Charlie said he would pawn his watch on Monday morning; he would walk the streets to keep out of the way of the much-dreaded hotel clerk; but, as for trudging out to his Uncle Oscar’s on Sunday, he would not do it, nor should either of the others stir a step. So they went to bed, and slept as comfortably in their luxurious apartment as if they had never known anything less handsome, and had money in plenty to pay all demands at sight.

It was a cloudy and chilly November Sunday to which the boys awoke next day. The air was piercingly raw, and the city looked dust-colored and cheerless under the cold, gray sky. Breaking their fast (Charlie keeping one eye on the hotel office), they sallied forth to see the city. They saw it all over, from one end to the other. They walked and walked, and then went back to the hotel; and after dinner, walked and walked again. They hunted up their uncle’s store in one of the deserted business streets of the city; and they gazed at its exterior with a curious feeling of relief. There was the sign on the prosperous-looking outside of the building,–“Oscar G. Bryant & Co., Agricultural Implements.” There, at least, was a gleam of comfort. The store was a real thing. Their uncle, little though they knew about him, was a real man.

Then, as the evening twilight gathered, they walked out to the borders of the suburb where he lived. They did not venture into the avenue where they had been told his house was, vaguely fearing that he might meet and recognize them. As they turned their steps towards the hotel, Oscar said: “It’s lucky there are three of us to keep ourselves in countenance. If that wasn’t the case, it would be awfully lonely to think we were so near home, and yet have gone ashore, hard and fast aground; right in sight of port, as it were.”

The parents of these boys had been born and brought up near the seacoast of New England, and not a few marine figures of speech were mingled in the family talk. So Charlie took up the parable and gloomily said: “We are as good as castaways in this big ocean of a city, with never a soul to throw us a spar or give us a hand. I never felt so blue in all my life. Look at those children playing in that dooryard. Pretty poor-looking children they are; but they’ve got a home over their heads to-night. We haven’t.”

“Oh, pshaw, Charlie!” broke in Sandy; “why will you always look on the dark side of things? I know it’s real lonesome here in a strange city, and away from our own folks. But they are not so far away but what we can get to them after a while. And we have got a roof over our heads for to-night, anyway; the Planters’ is good enough for me; if you want anything better, you will have to get outside of St. Louis for it; and, what is more, they are not going to dun us for our board bill until after to-day. I’m clean beat out traipsing around this town, and I give you two fellows notice that I am not going to stir a step out of the hotel to-night. Unless it is to go to church,” he added by way of postscript.

They did go to church that night, after they had had their supper. It was a big, comfortable, and roomy church, and the lads were shown into a corner pew under the gallery, where they were not conspicuous. The music of choir and organ was soothing and comforting. One of the tunes sung was “Dundee,” and each boy thought of their singing the song of “The Kansas Emigrants,” as the warbling measures drifted down to them from the organ-loft, lifting their hearts with thoughts that the strangers about them knew nothing of. The preacher’s text was “In my father’s house are many mansions.” Then they looked at each other again, as if to say, “That’s a nice text for three homeless boys in a strange city.” But nobody even so much as whispered.

Later on in the sermon, when the preacher touched a tender chord in Oscar’s heart, alluding to home and friends, and to those who wander far from both, the lad, with a little moisture in his eyes, turned to look at Sandy. He was fast asleep in his snug corner. Oscar made a motion to wake him, but Charlie leaned over and said, “Leave the poor boy alone. He’s tired with his long tramp to-day.” When they went out after the service was over, Oscar rallied Sandy on his sleeping in church, and the lad replied: “I know it was bad manners, but the last thing I heard the minister say, was ‘Rest for the weary.’ I thought that was meant for me. Leastways, I found rest for the weary right off, and I guess there was no harm done.”

With Monday morning came sunshine and a clear and bracing air. Even Charlie’s face wore a cheerful look, the first that he had put on since arriving in St. Louis, although now and again his heart quaked as he heard the hotel porter’s voice in the hall roaring out the time of departure for the trains that now began to move from the city in all directions. They had studied the railroad advertisements and time-tables to some purpose, and had discovered that they must cross to East St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, and there take a train for the northern part of the State, where Dixon is situated. But they must first see their Uncle Oscar, borrow the needed money from him, settle with the steamboat people and the hotel, and then get to the railroad station by eleven o’clock in the forenoon. It was a big morning’s work.

They were at their uncle’s store before he arrived from his suburban home; and, while they waited, they whisperingly discussed the question, Who should ask for the money? Charlie was at first disposed to put this duty on Sandy; but the other two boys were very sure that it would not look well for the youngest of the party to be the leader on an occasion so important; and Charlie was appointed spokesman.

Mr. Oscar Bryant came in. He was very much surprised to see three strange lads drawn up in a row to receive him. And he was still more taken aback when he learned that they were his nephews, on their way home from Kansas. He had heard of his brother’s going out to Kansas, and he had not approved of it at all. He was inclined to think that, on the whole, it would be better for Kansas to have slavery than to do without it. A great many other people in St. Louis thought the same way, at that time, although some of them changed their minds later on.

Mr. Oscar Bryant was a tall, spruce-looking, and severe man in appearance. His hair was gray and brushed stiffly back from his forehead; and his precise, thin, white whiskers were cut “just like a minister’s,” as Sandy afterwards declared; and when he said that going to Kansas to make it a free State was simply the rankest kind of folly, Charlie’s heart sunk, and he thought to himself that the chance of borrowing money from their stern-looking uncle was rather slim.

“But it doesn’t make any difference to you boys whether slavery is voted up or down in Kansas, I suppose,” he continued, less sternly. “You will live to see the day when, if you live in Kansas, you will own slaves and work them. You can never clear up a wild country like that without slave-labor, depend upon it. I know what I am talking about.” And Uncle Oscar stroked his chin in a self-satisfied way, as if he had settled the whole Kansas-Nebraska question in his own manner of thinking. Sandy’s brown cheeks flushed and his eyes sparkled. He was about to burst out with an indignant word, when Charlie, alarmed by his small brother’s excited looks, blurted out their troubles at once, in order to head off the protest that he expected from Sandy. The lad was silent.

“Eh? what’s that?” asked the formal-looking merchant. “Busted? And away from home? Why, certainly, my lads. How much do you need?” And he opened his pocket-book at once. Greatly relieved, perhaps surprised, Charlie told him that they thought that fifty dollars would pay all their bills and get them back to Dixon. The money was promptly handed over, and Charlie, emboldened by this good nature, told his uncle that they still owed for their passage down the river from Leavenworth.