couldn’t remember which; and by and by his father
died and his mother seized the property and ‘shook’
him as he phrased it. After his mother shook
him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted
used their influence to get him the position of ‘loblolly-boy
in a ship;’ and from that point my watchman
threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched
out into a narrative that bristled all along with
incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking
with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes
and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies,
that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering,
worshipping.
It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he
was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted
humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois,
who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated
its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends
of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling
it to fledglings like me, until he had come to believe
it himself.
What with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville,
and some other delays, the poor old ‘Paul Jones’
fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from
Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me a chance
to get acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught
me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination
of river life more potent than ever for me.
It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a
youth who had taken deck passage—more’s
the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me
on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back
to me the day after we should arrive. But he
probably died or forgot, for he never came. It
was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents
were wealthy, and he only traveled deck passage because
it was cooler.{footnote [1. ‘Deck’
Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]}
I soon discovered two things. One was that a
vessel would not be likely to sail for the mouth of
the Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the other
was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket
would not suffice for so imposing an exploration as
I had planned, even if I could afford to wait for
a ship. Therefore it followed that I must contrive
a new career. The ‘Paul Jones’ was
now bound for St. Louis. I planned a siege against
my pilot, and at the end of three hard days he surrendered.
He agreed to teach me the Mississippi River from New
Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred dollars, payable
out of the first wages I should receive after graduating.
I entered upon the small enterprise of ‘learning’
twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi
River with the easy confidence of my time of life.
If I had really known what I was about to require
of my faculties, I should not have had the courage
to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to
do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not
consider that that could be much of a trick, since
it was so wide.
