I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead
at the wheel, from heart disease, in 1869. The
captain was on the roof at the time. He saw the
boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer;
ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor.
Mr. Bixby had been blown up, in Madrid bend; was not
injured, but the other pilot was lost.
George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis—blown
into the river from the wheel, and disabled.
The water was very cold; he clung to a cotton bale—mainly
with his teeth—and floated until nearly
exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands
who were on a piece of the wreck. They tore open
the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the
life back into him, and got him safe to Memphis.
He is one of Bixby’s pilots on the ‘Baton
Rouge’ now.
Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had
dropped a bit of romance—somewhat grotesque
romance, but romance nevertheless. When I knew
him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous,
goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty
conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities
away early, and come to nothing. In a Western
city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his
wife; and in their family was a comely young girl—sort
of friend, sort of servant. The young clerk of
whom I have been speaking—whose name was
not George Johnson, but who shall be called George
Johnson for the purposes of this narrative—got
acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and
the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them.
Being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married;
that they had been privately married. Then the
old foreigner’s hurt was healed, and he forgave
and blessed them. After that, they were able
to continue their sin without concealment. By-and-bye
the foreigner’s wife died; and presently he
followed after her. Friends of the family assembled
to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young
sinners. The will was opened and solemnly read.
It bequeathed every penny of that old man’s great
wealth to Mrs. George Johnson!
And there was no such person. The young sinners
fled forth then, and did a very foolish thing:
married themselves before an obscure Justice of the
Peace, and got him to antedate the thing. That
did no sort of good. The distant relatives flocked
in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness
and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune,
leaving the Johnsons very legitimately, and legally,
and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage,
but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves
withal. Such are the actual facts; and not all
novels have for a base so telling a situation.
