We left for St. Louis in the ‘City of Baton
Rouge,’ on a delightfully hot day, but with
the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished.
I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen,
but got so pleasantly involved in the social life
of the town that I got nothing more than mere five-minute
talks with a couple of dozen of the craft.
I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed
out and ‘straightened up’ for the start—the
boat pausing for a ‘good ready,’ in the
old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of
the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way.
Then we began to gather momentum, and presently were
fairly under way and booming along. It was all
as natural and familiar—and so were the
shoreward sights—as if there had been no
break in my river life. There was a ‘cub,’
and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and
he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot-house.
Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships.
He made me nervous, for he allowed too much water
to show between our boat and the ships. I knew
quite well what was going to happen, because I could
date back in my own life and inspect the record.
The captain looked on, during a silent half-minute,
then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat
in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth
of the ships. It was exactly the favor which
he had done me, about a quarter of a century before,
in that same spot, the first time I ever steamed out
of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great
and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated—with
somebody else as victim.
We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two
hours and a half— much the swiftest passage
I have ever made over that piece of water.
The next morning I came on with the four o’clock
watch, and saw Ritchie successfully run half a dozen
crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked
chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself.
This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the
chart.
By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed
that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water
of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was
stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself.
The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the
shredding fog, were very pretty things to see.
We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at
Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below
Memphis. They had an old-fashioned energy which
had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm
was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up
to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody
left the pilot-house but me. The wind bent the
young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the
leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession,
thrashing the branches violently up and down, and
