Life on the Mississippi eBook

I saw many poor fellows removed to the ‘death-room,’ and saw them no more afterward.  But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once.  His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds.  He was clothed in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.  He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and shout and sometimes shriek.  Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, ’Hump yourselves, hump yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be all day getting that hatful of freight out?’ and supplement this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty.  And now and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view.  It was horrible.  It was bad for the others, of course—­this noise and these exhibitions; so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him.  But, in his mind or out of it, he would not take it.  He said his wife had been killed by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it.  He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his water—­so he ceased from putting either to his lips.  Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him.  Three times I saw him carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back.  He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.

But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.  Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help.  On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away, and his nerveless fingers ‘picked at his coverlet.’  His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.

Chapter 21 A Section in My Biography

In due course I got my license.  I was a pilot now, full fledged.  I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements.  Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed—­and hoped—­that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended.  But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone.