Читать книгу The Long Rifle - Stewart Edward White - Страница 31

Table of Contents

Joe Crane and Andy lived during that voyage on the flat lower deck, next the water. Their sleeping accommodations were where they chose to spread their blankets—for Joe now possessed such a luxury, thanks to his discovery of Andrew’s affluence. At the sound of a gong they rushed into line to receive food dished out at a galley door. The rest of the time they could do what they pleased—on the lower deck. Above—the second story—it could hardly be called a deck—was reserved for slow-moving, low-voiced, well-dressed people. The men wore tall beaver hats and ruffled shirts and blue coats and light pantaloons: the women floated wide in crinolines. They leaned on the rail occasionally to look down with faint supercilious curiosity on the lower deck. And above them again were the pilot deck and the captain and the pilots and other ship’s officers remote as gods.

With these inhabitants of the upper worlds Andy was little concerned. But the lower deck was occupied by as weird a hodgepodge as one could imagine—wood choppers, backwoods settlers, peddlers, raft men, boatmen, bullwhackers, a rough, tough lot. They nearly all chewed tobacco; they all swore, and most of them quarreled gustily over the slightest difference of opinion. Nobody interfered with them save when, on rare occasions, the customary turbulence threatened to develop into a riot. Then from the engine room emerged a colossal Swede armed with an iron bar who restored order in a most businesslike and impersonal fashion, and at once disappeared.

Joe Crane fitted at once into this motley disorder. He was, when he so chose, the center of a group. The rough men listened to his tall stories of the prairie and the mountains; they listened, though many of the hat-tilted tough boys, by their attitude of having paused in the group for but a moment, and by an expression of half-sneering amusement, tried to convey their general skepticism of Crane’s validity. But it was to be noted that nobody opposed or quarreled with the Mountain Man. The latter thought nothing of them. He laughed at Andy’s first awe of them as frontiersmen.

Some of the time Andy listened, or stood by watching the interminable card games on a spread blanket; but what he liked best of all was to huddle in a place he had discovered behind two bitts near the bow. He watched the river glide by.

Separated thus from the human microcosmos of the ship, Andy seemed to enter an aloof and hovering detachment. In after life, though his memory for event was always remarkably clear and detailed, this interlude of voyage never defined itself as something in which he had actually taken part. It was like a dream, having neither the dimensions of space nor time. The water swished from the blunt bow; the walking beam swung up and down, up and down, its gilded Indian pointing his arrow now low, now high; the banks glided by. Against this monochrome things appeared as shadows on a screen; and vanished again.

They stopped at Cincinnati, and went on. The hills became lower, the houses and the settlements farther apart. Occasionally they drew up at a wharf, and freight or passengers debarked or were taken on. More often they merely shoved the blunt bow against the bank and held it there until necessary business was transacted. At such times, often, the gangplanks were thrown out, and long lines of passengers working out their part fare carried aboard the long sticks of cordwood from the piles maintained by the steamboat company’s wood choppers. Now Ohio lay astarboard and Kentucky aport. They differed completely in character. On the Ohio side were cleared farms and farmhouses, neatly painted, and in the New England style; on the Kentucky side were ragged fields and the large log cabins of planters and the smaller log huts of the slaves. Between them and back of them gathered close the green forest down to the water’s edge. Cool and dark and mysterious it lay; and Andy saw flashes of red as the tanagers and cardinals took wing. And the rolling clouds of wood smoke from the twin stacks broke against it and eddied between the trees.

They passed the rapids at Louisville on the flood; and stopped; and many of the ship’s company ended their journey there; and the most of the rest came back only at the urgent and repeated summons of the whistle, and some few were left behind, for the rougher element became unanimously drunk, and there was considerable quarrelsome disorder. Crane was drunk with the rest, and came back alone in a very disdainful mood that even included Andy.

“If yo’re goin’ to be a Mountain Man you got to learn to liquorize,” was the grieved burden of his plaint.

A raftsman agreed with him profanely, adding embellishments. Crane instantly veered. Since when had a mere alligator horse acquired the right to criticize a friend of Joe Crane’s? Joe offered to cut his liver out to see if it was white. Offer declined; but if Joe would lay aside his knife the raftsman would ... They drifted away, squabbling. Andy leaned his back against the bitts. All this seemed to pass him by, could not touch the waiting suspension of his westering spirit. The journey seemed to march by him as a pageant. The stream broadened; the bluffs fell away; the country spaced to broad undulations clothed always in the now almost unbroken forest. Next the river were low, alluvial flats, with marshes and swamps and the wild cryings and uptiltings of innumerable water fowl. The farms had been left behind. The wilderness was broken only by the rare huts of the wood choppers set on blocks or piles against high water, and the stacked cordwood. The bosom of the river was wide and glassy. One would have said it was as still as a lake were it not that here and there the slow powerful turning of oily eddies, the veer of the ship against its rudder, the hastening of the shore, betrayed its strength. As afternoons drew to a close the sun turned it to the red of dark wine and the air filled with gold, into which the steamer glided as into a mist.

And at night was the suspension of quiet. The blackness of the forest met the blackness of the river; and the dark blue-spangled sky overhead; and the rare twinkle of lights ashore, repeated waveringly in the water; and the refraction against the stillness of the blatant lights and sounds of the steamer; and the unintermitting pouring of bright sparks from the funnels that rushed up so powerfully as though with purpose, and eddied, and wavered uncertainly, and died against the evening as though rebuked.

At this time the Mountain Man took to deserting his other companions to stand silent near Andy, his elbows leaning on the muzzle of his long rifle, his eyes, unblinking, staring straight ahead, his head raised, as though he snuffed for something in the breeze. He seemed at last caught in the younger man’s hypnotic suspense of waiting. They exchanged no words.

The river widened. The banks fell away. To the right a point defined itself, against which lay moored a strange structure. As the steamer swung in it became clear that this was a huge flatboat, a hundred feet or more in length, supporting several log houses—a store, a saloon, a gambling house: Cairo, the delta of the Mississippi. Almost as far as the eye could see rolled the breadth of the Fathers of Waters, the farther shore line dim and low in the distance.

“We’re gittin’ thar! Wagh!” cried Crane.