‘Everything. just a fifteen-minute job.’ or such a matter.  Didn’t leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one brick chimney.  This boat is paddling along right now, where the dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney-all that’s left of Napoleon.  These dense woods on the right used to be a mile back of the town.  Take a look behind you—­up-stream—­now you begin to recognize this country, don’t you?’

’Yes, I do recognize it now.  It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of; by a long shot the most wonderful—­and unexpected.’

Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain’s news.  Thompson put a half-dollar in my hand and said softly—­

‘For my share of the chromo.’

Rogers followed suit.

Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago.  Town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights—­an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley; town where we were handed the first printed news of the ‘Pennsylvania’s’ mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no more—­swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!

Chapter 33 Refreshments and Ethics

In regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men and made them a vanity and a jest.  When the State of Arkansas was chartered, she controlled ’to the center of the river’—­a most unstable line.  The State of Mississippi claimed ’to the channel’—­another shifty and unstable line.  No. 74 belonged to Arkansas.  By and by a cut-off threw this big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi.  ‘Middle of the river’ on one side of it, ‘channel’ on the other.  That is as I understand the problem.  Whether I have got the details right or wrong, this fact remains:  that here is this big and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres, thrust out in the cold, and belonging to neither the one State nor the other; paying taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither.  One man owns the whole island, and of right is ‘the man without a country.’

Island 92 belongs to Arkansas.  The river moved it over and joined it to Mississippi.  A chap established a whiskey shop there, without a Mississippi license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under Arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required).