Life on the Mississippi eBook

crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase ’as dark as the inside of a cow,’ we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment.  These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it—­both sexes and various ages—­and cursed us till everything turned blue.  Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow place.

Chapter 11 The River Rises

During this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance.  We were running chute after chute,—­a new world to me,—­and if there was a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water.  And then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged.

Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap knives, but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way!  One doesn’t hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steamboat when he can get excused.

You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed steamboating days.  Indeed they did.  Twenty times a day we would be cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small-fry rascals were drifting down into the head of the bend away above and beyond us a couple of miles.  Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting its laborious way across the desert of water.  It would ’ease all,’ in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would shout, ‘Gimme a pa-a-per!’ as the skiff drifted swiftly astern.  The clerk would throw over a file of New Orleans journals.  If these were picked up without comment, you might notice that now a dozen other skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything.  You understand, they had been waiting to see how No. 1 was going to fare.  No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars and come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would heave over neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles.  The amount of hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature will command when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen’s crews, who have pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply incredible.