Life on the Mississippi eBook

extending upwards from the foundations.  Stranded and discarded scows lay all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing; the board sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous,—­a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man think a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and deep, and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing.  A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire.

We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday:  two full hours’ liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight.  In the back streets but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored folk—­mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut—­a glaring and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles.

Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population—­which is placed at five thousand.  The country about it is exceptionally productive.  Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories—­in brief has $1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries.  She has two railways, and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region.  Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New Orleans ‘Times-Democrat’ at $4,000,000.

Chapter 31 A Thumb-print and What Came of It

We were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas.  So I began to think about my errand there.  Time, noonday; and bright and sunny.  This was bad—­not best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand.  The more I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me—­now in one form, now in another.  Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:  is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and no inquisitive eyes around.  This settled it.  Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon.  Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous.  Their main argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface, in such cases, since the beginning of time:  ’But you decided and agreed to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make two unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination.

I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success:  under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it, I presently drifted into its history—­substantially as follows: