Life on the Mississippi

But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty liar, but I did not know that; I believed everything he said. He was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. He was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences – confused and not intelligible – but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, ‘O God, it is his blood!’ I sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for I judged he was full of crime. At last he said in a low voice —

‘My little friend, can you keep a secret?’

I eagerly said I could.

‘A dark and dreadful one?’

I satisfied him on that point.

‘Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, I must relieve my burdened soul, or I shall die!’

He cautioned me once more to be ‘as silent as the grave;’ then he told me he was a ‘red-handed murderer.’ He put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said —

‘Look – with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!’

The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. He left generalizing, and went into details, – began with his first murder; described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. He had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me.

At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back. I sought him again and again, on my Saturday holidays; in fact I spent the summer with him – all of it which was valuable to me. His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder. He always gave names, dates, places – everything. This by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named Lynch. The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after Saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty – and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name.

My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. He had loved one ‘too fair for earth,’ and she had reciprocated ‘with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.’ But he had a rival, a ‘base hireling’ named Archibald Lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would ‘dye his hands in her heart’s best blood.’ The carpenter, ‘innocent and happy in love’s young dream,’ gave no weight to the threat, but led his ‘golden-haired darling to the altar,’ and there, the two were made one; there also, just as the minister’s hands were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done – with a knife – and the bride fell a corpse at her husband’s feet. And what did the husband do? He plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to ‘consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of Lynch.’

That was it. He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering them, from that day to this – twenty years. He had always used that same consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark – a cross, deeply incised. Said he —

‘The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America, in China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of Asia, in all the earth. Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a Lynch has penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, “It is his mark, he has been here.” You have heard of the Mysterious Avenger – look upon him, for before you stands no less a person! But beware – breathe not a word to any soul. Be silent, and wait. Some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, “He has been here – it is the Mysterious Avenger’s mark!” You will come here, but I shall have vanished; you will see me no more.’

This ass had been reading the ‘Jibbenainosay,’ no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book then, I took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist.

However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep. It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him – under strict secrecy. I advised him to ‘fly,’ and certainly expected him to do it. But he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter’s shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg – then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero.

The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known. The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details yet.

The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town. It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water-works, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south – where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now.

Bear Creek – so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears – is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. The chasm or gorge between Lover’s Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action. This is a mistake.

There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs. I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it.

Chapter 56

A Question of Law

THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or ‘calaboose’) which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, ‘Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?’

Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal – large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course – I with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man’s death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me.

I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself as guilty of the man’s death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that ‘murder will out!’ For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo.

All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing – the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep. But one night I awoke and found my bed-mate – my younger brother – sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. I said —

‘What is the matter?’

‘You talk so much I can’t sleep.’

I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end.

‘What did I say. Quick – out with it – what did I say?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘It’s a lie – you know everything.’

‘Everything about what?’

‘You know well enough. About that.’

‘About what? – I don’t know what you are talking about. I think you are sick or crazy or something. But anyway, you’re awake, and I’ll get to sleep while I’ve got a chance.’

He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge? How much does he know? – what a distress is this uncertainty! But by and by I evolved an idea – I would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. I shook him up, and said —

‘Suppose a man should come to you drunk – ’

‘This is foolish – I never get drunk.’

‘I don’t mean you, idiot – I mean the man. Suppose a man should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and – ’

‘How could you load a tomahawk?’

‘I don’t mean the tomahawk, and I didn’t say the tomahawk; I said the pistol. Now don’t you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious. There’s been a man killed.’

‘What! in this town?’

‘Yes, in this town.’

‘Well, go on – I won’t say a single word.’

‘Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it, because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol – fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk. Well, would it be murder?’

‘No – suicide.’

‘No, no. I don’t mean his act, I mean yours: would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol?’

After deep thought came this answer —

‘Well, I should think I was guilty of something – maybe murder – yes, probably murder, but I don’t quite know.’

This made me very uncomfortable. However, it was not a decisive verdict. I should have to set out the real case – there seemed to be no other way. But I would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. I said —

‘I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now. Do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?’

‘No.’

‘Haven’t you the least idea?’

‘Not the least.’

‘Wish you may die in your tracks if you have?’

‘Yes, wish I may die in my tracks.’

‘Well, the way of it was this. The man wanted some matches to light his pipe. A boy got him some. The man set fire to the calaboose with those very matches, and burnt himself up.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, it is. Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?’

‘Let me see. The man was drunk?’

‘Yes, he was drunk.’

‘Very drunk?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the boy knew it?’

‘Yes, he knew it.’

There was a long pause. Then came this heavy verdict —

‘If the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man. This is certain.’

Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and I seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. I waited to hear what my brother would say next. I believed I knew what it would be, and I was right. He said —

‘I know the boy.’

I had nothing to say; so I said nothing. I simply shuddered. Then he added —

‘Yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, I knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was Ben Coontz!’

I came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. I said, with admiration —

‘Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?’

‘You told it in your sleep.’

I said to myself, ‘How splendid that is! This is a habit which must be cultivated.’

My brother rattled innocently on —

‘When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about “matches,” which I couldn’t make anything out of; but just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches, I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Coontz two or three times; so I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew it was Ben that burnt that man up.’

I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently he asked —

‘Are you going to give him up to the law?’

‘No,’ I said; ‘I believe that this will be a lesson to him. I shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that I betrayed him.’

‘How good you are!’

‘Well, I try to be. It is all a person can do in a world like this.’

And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon faded away.

The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice – the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. I learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men – the colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. He was to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out. But he missed it considerably – did not arrive till ten. He excused himself by saying —

‘De time is mos’ an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in de town; you’ll be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out early for church, Sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de sermon. Diffunce in de time. A body can’t make no calculations ‘bout it.’

I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four.

Chapter 57

An Archangel

FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. The people don’t dream, they work. The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear.

Quincy is a notable example – a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.

But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked ‘city’ to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy. When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses. It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill.

In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand. There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale.

La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria; was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer.

Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857 – an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. The ‘boom’ was something wonderful. Everybody bought, everybody sold – except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks.

The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city. It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not retrograded, in that respect.

A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct. The work cost four or five millions.

After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him —

He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself – on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted.

His clothes differed in no respect from a ‘wharf-rat’s,’ except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.

He was an orator – by nature in the first place, and later by the training of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk’s late distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean —

The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in ‘61), and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum. A distinguished stranger was to address the house. After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant – the distinguished stranger had failed to connect. The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country.

Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody’s eyes sought a single point – the wide, empty, carpetless stage. A figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. It was the scarecrow Dean – in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of odd colors, also ‘down;’ damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob-tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of – whichever bump it was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. Another wave started – laughter, this time. It was followed by another, then a third – this last one boisterous.