"Driftwood" (1921)
"DRIFTWOOD"
RAYMOND S. SPEARS
A black-headed, spreading-pronged horror of a snag … lunging at them like a living thing
"DRIFTWOOD"
ILLUSTRATED BY
GEORGE AVISON
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1921, by
THE CENTURY CO.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
"DRIFTWOOD"
Is dedicated to
Charles and John,
who camped from
the Atlantic to
the Pacific and
back by automobile
"DRIFTWOOD"
CHAPTER I
CARRIED AWAY IN A RIVER FLOOD
THE Mississippi River was in flood; the great spring tide had overflowed the natural banks for hundreds of miles below Cairo, situated in the forks of the Ohio. Three streams of monster size were contributing to the overflow—the Missouri River, with headwaters in the Rockies, the upper Mississippi, with its sources in six or seven states above the mouth of the Missouri, and the Ohio, draining a thousand majestic ridges, from southwestern New York, through Pennsylvania, down to northern Alabama. A million square miles of watershed poured millions of cubic feet of water an hour past Cairo, and for a thousand miles below, in all the great river bottoms, hundreds of thousands of people were waiting with anxiety to learn where disaster had fallen, and whether or not their efforts would avail to avert the destruction of property and loss of lives.
Sibley Carruth, alone on his parents’ cabin boat, which was moored in a narrow creek ravine just above Cape Girardeau, seemed to be in as safe a place as one could find. Up the creek, however, hard rains had fallen and some hundreds of acres were pouring off water in muddy streams, with a run-off which was strong enough to lift a big, dry dead oak-tree where it had fallen, and float it slowly down-stream, its snags of roots and branches sticking out in all directions.
Mr. and Mrs. Carruth had gone to town in the skiff, rowing over corn-fields, through a patch of woods, and to a street corner where the water had not yet submerged the lower stories of the buildings. Tying their boat to a hitching-post in a flooded side street, they went to the telegraph office to learn from the Weather Bureau bulletins whether or not the river was going any higher. They learned that it was, considerably, for rain had been falling almost continuously over thousands of square miles drained by tributaries of the Mississippi.
The Carruths were river people. Years before, Mr. Carruth had gone down the Missouri River on a hunting-trip, with a fellow sportsman. He had been so fascinated by the strange life aboard a shanty-boat that three or four years later he had taken Mrs. Carruth down the upper Mississippi for their honeymoon. His work of timber-looking for the firm of which he was the head enabled him to live where he wished and he chose a small house-boat from which he could go to seek especially fine trees to cut into furniture pieces, or extra-veneers, or high-grade sticks for unusual purposes. Thus the Carruths had become river people.
Sibley, awaiting his parents’ return, grew bored. The rain was still falling, and not caring to go out in the wet and have to change his shoes and stockings, and perhaps everything else if his mother on her return happened to find him damp—and she surely would!—he lay down on his folding cot in the kitchen of the two-roomed house-boat and soon was fast asleep.
The house-boat was a cabin built on a scow. The hull, constructed of good pine lumber, with a strong frame, was twenty-eight feet long, eight feet wide, and thirty inches deep. It was truss-braced to withstand strains caused by waves or by bumping against the bank or other obstructions. The cabin was eighteen feet long, as wide as the hull, and served as the house. The five-foot space at bow and stern was decked over so neither rain nor waves could leak through into the hull. Steps led down into the cabin, which was six feet high inside, but outside stood only a little more than four feet higher than the top of the hull, for the floor rested on the stringers along the hull’s bottom planks. The cabin, being low, with walls partly inside the hull, offered little resistance to the wind when the boat was floating down the river current.
Sibley slept soundly, for he had sat up later than his mother wanted him to, the evening before. And as he slept, and the afternoon waned, the boat worked in and out on the stretch and sag of the one line by which it was tied, from a bow cleat on the bumper, to a stake driven in the clay up the bank. The stake was of ash, three feet long and strong enough to stand any strain put upon it by the boat.
The creek current, swollen by rains, washed down the little valley with increasing force. The great low surges of waves that heaved out of the main torrent of the Mississippi worked against the flood in the creek-bed, so that the cabin-boat was washed back and forth, pulling the stake every time it sagged away. As it strained, the rain fell into the hole around the stake; as it eased up, the stake, springing, squeezed out the water, which at the next strain oozed down into the hole again. Of course, some clay washed out with the water each time, and before many hours had passed, the stake was just standing in the hole, surrounded by slippery clay.
Down the creek drove the great dry oak snag. As it went it broke off several smaller root branches which dug into the bank on one side, and once it caught crosswise in the current, from bank to bank. The top of the snag was broken away by drift that lodged against the trunk, pressing heavily. Down the lower end of the creek the snag moved slowly out into the great flood.
A fork of the roots pressed against the side of the little house-boat, so softly that the craft did not jar enough to awaken Sibley; but the whole weight of the oak snag was behind the touch. Irresistibly but slowly the current carried the snag and other drift against the hull, and with a sudden low pop the ash stake in the clay sprang up several feet and fell to the wet bank.
Sibley would certainly have heard the sound if he had been awake, but, being asleep, he merely changed in his dreams from trying to catch swimming rabbits by the ears to trying to shoot them with an absurd putty-blower, which he heard pop while the soft missiles merely made the rabbits turn and laugh at him.
Pushed by the oak log and the drift in the branches of the snag, the shanty-boat moved down the creek and out into the swift current of the Mississippi, not stopping at all in the little swirling eddies a few yards off shore. The snag was caught in the longshore eddy, and lodged there against several trees, with one long branch caught in a barbed-wire fence fifteen or twenty feet underwater at that point.
The shanty-boat whirled away from shore and out into midstream. There it became part of the miscellaneous collection of débris, drift, flotsam, and articles which a flood tide, forty feet higher than low-water mark, seizes in coming down the upper Mississippi.
Sibley slept as the boat drifted out into mid-Mississippi, in a vast torrent which was in places five or ten miles wide.
It was late in the afternoon; the rain was falling with a purring, splashing sound on the cabin roof; no other noise was audible, except that away off yonder, at intervals, there was the gurgling swishing of acres of drift coming together in a "squeeze," as a river whirl threw the masses of material into other acres of river loot.
The boat amid the scattering drift raced down-stream, the submerged bottom-lands on each side showing woods where the water hid the lower branches of the trees, while the foot of high cliffs in the distance were dimly seen through the rain. Out on the bottoms there were houses with water up to the second-story windows. On the roof of one of the houses a flock of chickens sat huddled together along the ridge-pole. A dog, sitting on a tree branch to which he had made his way, howled; but he was a long way off from Sibley and the howl but added another phase to the boy’s dreams.
It was the most dismal thing imaginable—that vast flood, with the rain spattering down on the surface and blackening the wet drift. The gloomy day ended, shade by shade, the distant woods blended into a dark mass and the far-off hills faded from sight.
Darkness fell upon the water, and the night was less gloomy than the dull and colorless day had been. It was a tremendous thing to fall so softly—that night! It was as silent as the passing of a whiff of fog. Its effect upon the terrible desolation of the flood was to make it seem almost friendly and pleasant.
Sibley, having made up for his loss of sleep on the previous night, stirred uneasily on his cot. He sat up and stretched, opening his eyes. Then he uttered an exclamation.
"Night, and the folks aren’t home yet!" he said. "I’ll bet they’ve gone to the movies,—and they didn’t ask me to go along! Wish they’d come home. I’m hungry!"
He put his feet into his slippers, and felt in his pockets for his match-box, consisting of a ten-gage and a twelve-gage brass shell pushed together. He struck a match on the bottom of his slipper, and lighted the big brass lamp on the table.
"I’m hungry!" he repeated. "Wish they’d come home; I want something to eat. It’s after seven o’clock. If they hadn’t had supper up town, they’d be home by this time. I’m going to have something; I can’t wait any longer!"
Thus communing with himself, he went to the cupboard, and opened it for inspection. There was plenty to eat there—bread and butter, cold biscuit, cold fried ham, and other good things.
"My!" he thought. "It’s nice to be safe and sound and dry in a little eddy where nothing can happen! I’d hate to be caught out on Old Mississip a night like this! Lots do get caught, though, ’count of their not tying in good, or not finding a good landing-eddy. It’s just as still right here, just as safe, as on the top of the highest bluff in the world!"
He ate most of a rabbit leg, then he had a piece of cheese, and a dried-apple turnover.
"Oh, I guess I’ll wait for them to come home!" he said at last. "I don’t feel very hungry, after all. I’ll just eat some cookies and wait."
He went to the bow cabin, took up a book, and began to read. The book was a large one, and not very amusing to judge from the title:
Report of the
Chief of Engineers
U. S. Army
1916
In Three Parts
Part III
To Sibley, however, it was absorbing; for he loved everything about the river. On page 3418 he found the statement:
Storms over the drainage basins of the White and Arkansas rivers during the last 10 days of January, 1916, had in the meantime produced record floods in both rivers. Gauges at the lower end of the White River and Upper Yazoo Basins accordingly exceeded by from 6 inches to 1 foot the stages attained in the flood of 1913.
Emergency measures were initiated about February 1, when a serious flood was recognized as being inevitable. Conditions quickly developed to a critical point in the Upper St. Francis Basin in the Vicinity of Moore’s Landing, Marshall’s Sewer, Big Lake, and Birds Point, and in the lower end of the White River district from about mile 28 south.
And so on. It was part of the Appendix, containing the Mississippi River Commission Report, and when one is on the great river it is interesting to read the government reports upon it which one gets as Mr. Carruth had gotten this, by going to the office of the River Commission in St. Louis, or to one’s Congressman.
"I believe they will have a regular old report about this flood!" Sibley thought. "My! It must be interesting working for the Government, and seeing one of these floods all down the river and all over, in the government boats, and helping the people in the overflow! I wish—"
He turned his eyes to the base of the big lamp, and dreamed of one day being a government worker on the river. He wondered how he would feel if he were the secretary of the commission, and could send a report with a thousands pages in it to the Government—to Congress!
"It’s almost time those folks of mine were home!" he thought, but when he looked at the clock he found it was only a little after eight.
He went over to the corner of the cabin and picked up his rifle, looked through the barrel, and saw that it needed cleaning.
"They’ve gone to the movies, sure enough!" he grumbled after he had cleaned it. "They wanted me to go to bed early to-night. How still it is!"
It had stopped raining. He could not hear a sound of any kind. There wasn’t even the splash of a wave against the side of the boat. Then, away off yonder, he heard something; it was one of those dreadful river drift squeezes, in which a hundred acres of all kinds of things—from a floating house to a floating straw-stack; from a wire fence to an old drift pile; from a dead fallen tree to sawlogs and squared bridge timbers and lumber piles—twist themselves together in a writhing mass, each thing trying to be in the place wanted by something else at the same time.
"It’s stopped raining, anyhow," he reflected. "If it clears up, perhaps the river will go down next month, and the bottoms—Whew! they’ll be muddy after this soaking! What’s that!”
A shudder ran through the boat, as of some thing dragging alongside. He stepped calmly out upon the stern deck, and closed the door behind him, that the light inside might not blind him.
He looked about, blinking. At first he could see nothing in the black darkness. Then he saw water, faintly luminous amid black masses lying low on the surface. He looked up quickly. There ought to have been trees against the gray sky, but there were none.
Miles away he saw a faint yellow light; no walls of clay sheltered the boat from the wind and there was no little bay! Gasping with astonishment, he climbed the six-round fixed ladder to the cabin roof and, standing there, looked around the horizon.
He was in the middle of the Mississippi River. Miles to the right, miles to the left, miles away in any direction he might look, he could see, beyond whole sections of open water and flat acres of drift, the submerged woodlands of bottoms, the river banks two or three or four hundred feet high—so they looked—and great expanses of open water in which lone trees stood to mark places that on a hot summer day must offer grateful shade to cattle, or to grain reapers, or whoever came there when those bottoms were not covered with ten feet or so of water.
"Why, I’m adrift!" he gasped. "Where am I? When did I start? Gracious! What shall I do?"
He stood there in the dark silence, and looked about with level eyes. The boat was in an acre of open water—no squeeze there!—and he could take time to think.
"That side’s nearest the shore," he considered. "I’ll pull that way—What’s that?"
From somewhere he heard a cry, distant, subdued, faint like an echo:
"Ha-a-a-y! Help!"
"Somebody’s caught!" he cried, taking out his match-box. Lighting one of the matches, he held it in the air, which was breathless.
"This way!" the voice shouted, and, turning, Sibley saw a pale yellow flare far away, and up the midstream of drift.
"E-yo-ou!" Sib yelled, and jumping down on the bow deck, he lighted a lantern, put it on the roof where it could serve as a mark, blew out the light inside the cabin, and set the big shanty boat sweeps on their pins. Then he began to row with these great oars against the current, in the direction from which the call for help had come.
CHAPTER II
WHEN THE RIVER SEPARATES ITS PEOPLE
MR. and Mrs. Carruth were in Cape Girardeau for some time. They had supplies to buy, besides being anxious to get news of the overflow. News was coming by telephone and telegraph every little while. In St. Louis there was a good deal of trouble, and East St. Louis was fighting the still rising flood. Soldiers were on guard to prevent any one cutting a levee in one place to ease the strain somewhere else. Thousands of men were working to fight the flood back, by placing bags of sand, layer upon layer, on the levee-top.
Rumors were flying that Cairo, the St. Francis Bottoms, Kansas City, and a score of other towns had suffered disaster. It was said that the rescuers were going out into the bottoms and finding people in the extremities of peril and destitution. Little groups of spectators stood looking down the half-flooded streets of the town on the bluffs, at the dark drift that flowed by.
"There’s a house! There’s a big barn!" some one cried.
"Look’t! There’s a barge torn loose!" said another.
Boxes and barrels, sections of fences squeezed upright into the drift, even a telegraph-pole, still erect, with wires dangling,—went by without causing comment. In a gray gust of rain the watchers saw a shanty-boat drifting down, turning around and around.
"Them shanty-boaters don’t care what they do, or where they go!" some one exclaimed. "They’d better keep a driftin’ by!"
Everything seemed brought to a standstill by the passing of the terrible spring tide. That night people who lived on the high rocky bluffs did not envy the owners of the rich bottom-lands, who saw their wealth submerged, and who could not know what trick the waters would play upon them. Perhaps a wave of sand would wash down over the most fertile of fields, and make it useless; perhaps the swirling sucks would bore deep pits into the level ground, "blue holes" an acre across and a hundred feet deep; perhaps the banks would be caved in, and where there had been a wheat-field or a corn-field the river itself would be flowing in a new channel.
"I remember the big flood that spring when Kaskaskia cut-off went across and the Mississippi took it down into the Kaw River instead of over on the west side, back in the old times!" somebody began, but people hadn’t the patience to listen to history when there was so much news at hand, and the narrator talked to deaf ears.
A few whispers, low-voiced remarks, and then steady silence for minutes at a stretch. People were so insignificant and unimportant in the presence of that phenomenon that most of them knew it, and if any one pushed his hat upon the back of his head and opened wide his mouth, to talk loud in order to attract attention, he was immediately punished as those near him would draw away and leave him to his self-importance.
The Carruths found themselves answering questions; they were river people, and when some one recognized them as such it was with curiosity and some irritation,—the usual attitude of "bank folks" towards shanty-boaters.
"Well, what’s she doin’ now?" one demanded.
"Still rising," the river-man said.
"Thought she’d quit makin’ for a while!"
"It’s that bulge out of the Illinois coming down, ahead of the big upper-river wave," Mr. Carruth explained. "She’s past thirty feet now, and still going up! Lucky place to be here; that big flat across the river lets the current run by fast. At Cairo the water goes away above fifty feet, and here you don’t go past forty feet—never did, except in eighteen forty four when you got to forty-two and a half. That’s the record here. In nineteen hundred and three you went to thirty-six, but I see the current is faster this year, and probably it won’t go so high."
Thus they talked in technical river phrase and compared the present with the past.
Mrs. Carruth had bought her supplies, and after a time she and her husband went down to the skiff moored in the side street, and Mr. Carruth rowed up one street, and out into the dead water above town. The back-wash from the flood was calm and glassy between rain gusts. A little drift specked the surface, but there were neither current nor waves to interfere with them. Of course, they had to row between the fence posts and in one place they held down the barbed wire so the skiff could Slide over.
Following along the shore, they rounded the point and started up the creek ravine, against the slight current. It was nearly dark. When they had gone some distance up the narrow waterway Mr. Carruth remarked:
"Why, I didn’t know we were so far up the creek! We’ve come some distance, haven’t we?"
"There are those trees—I thought—" Mrs. Carruth looked sharply around, but the place seemed strange.
It was strange! They found that their shanty-boat had disappeared, and with their observation sharpened by anxiety they soon located the trees opposite which they had moored it, and then they found the very hole into which the stake had been driven.
It was late candle-light by that time. The boat was gone, and the father and mother looked around in increasing fear and dismay. It had pulled loose, floated out with the current, and—Who could say what had happened to it?
"I don’t see how it could have happened!" Mrs. Carruth declared. "Sib’s a good riverman—as good as anybody of his age!"
"He may have gone ashore," the father suggested.
"We’d have seen him," she said. "He wouldn’t have gone after dark!"
"Perhaps he went to sleep, and—"
"Went to sleep!" She shrugged her shoulders. "You couldn’t make him take a nap in the afternoon; not for anything! I don’t know—I’m worried. I wish—What can we do?"
"We’ll drop down the edge of the current; he may have lodged or made fast somewhere down below, along the main current. You see, we came up inside, close to the bluffs. Perhaps he is tied to one of those trees."
They went down in the edge of the drift, but they saw no house-boat moored anywhere along there. They rowed up one of the Cape Girardeau streets, and talked to other boatmen, and to people who had been watching the flood that afternoon.
The hard rain had prevented any one’s having a clear view of the river, but two or three shanty~boats had been seen going down. They went to the River Tavern to await news.
"I don’t see how it could have happened!" the father said. Mrs. Carruth sat stifling the sobs that rose in her throat.
"My poor boy!" she whispered. "My brave son!"
The river had carried away her son!
"Oh, he’ll be sure to get out all right!" Mr. Carruth assured her. "All he’ll have to do is take the sweeps and row ashore somewhere. He’ll land in down below."
"If he isn’t caught in a squeeze," she suggested, "and the boat all smashed!"
"In a squeeze there are always lots of logs and things to ride on; in the morning, or perhaps to-night he may be taken off by a skiffman, or a drifter, or some one else. Perhaps he has been already."
So Mrs. Carruth worried and Mr. Carruth consoled her all that long dark night as they waited in the tavern at the edge of the flood’s waters, listening to the low thunder of the crashing of timber against timber out in midstream, or straining their ears to catch any unusual sound that rose above the murmurings of the restless current. Sometimes they slept a little, but before daylight they were awake and downstairs.
Just at dawn they sat down at the breakfast-table, where men who had been up all night, watching buildings and boats jeopardized by the rising tide, joined them. A minute later, others came in who had been down below Cape Girardeau in a gasolene-launch, to rescue a family reported to be lodged in the woods above La Croix Creek. They told how they had found a man and a woman in the trees, their house-boat having broken up against the woods in the bend, through the send of a floating island of drift.
"Didn’t see anything of my boat?" Carruth asked.
"You lost your boat, eh?"
"It drifted out. Boy’s on it, too!"
"That so? But he’ll be all right—right’s a muskrat’d be! I saw him and some other little chaps once riding logs in the back-water. Why, that boy’d walk across the drift!"
"You think so!" Mrs. Carruth exclaimed. "You really think he could?"
"Why, of course! You couldn’t get that boy under, light’s he is on his feet! Why, he spun the log right around, one of those white-pine poles, same as a log-driver would!"
The Carruths smiled. It was comforting to know that their son could do things with a skill he might need when the river caught him. He could swim, row a boat, make a landing, and read the river signs; and he knew a thousand things no Up-the-Banker need know, but which are vitally useful to one who goes shanty-boating.
Word that Sibley Carruth had been carried away in his father’s shanty-boat had been gossiped around town. Messages had been sent down the railway line, to be forwarded into the overflow, as opportunity offered, so that people would know about the matter.
"No word from down below," Mr. Carruth was told by the telegraph operator. "Our wires over Thebes bridge are open of course. He’ll be passing Cairo sometime this morning. It’s fifty-five miles down. They’ll see the boat from the levee, if it has’nt landed above there. Everything is under below Commerce and they think it’s caving fast at Saladin towhead; drift is piling in there, some—"
"Oh!" Mrs. Carruth caught her breath. "Suppose, Perry—"
"Don’t worry!" Mr. Carruth replied. "There’s a chance of the boat’s being carried into the trees by the drift, but you remember that time we tripped down tied to a big snag, for two days, right out in the drift? We didn’t think a thing—"
"Of course not!" she laughed, a little hysterically. "We didn’t know any better."
"It’s all right!" he declared. "You mustn’t worry. Every one knows Sib can take care of himself if any one is able to!"
"And he’s been wanting to go alone, too!" she recalled, with just a touch of asperity. "I hope he’s satisfied."
"Lots to eat, a good little boat that rows like a skiff, a brave heart—And he knows—Why, that boy has read River Commission reports clear through, and he’s always talking to shanty-boaters, asking them about the river and how to do things. I wish he had a skiff, though—in case—in case—"
"The drift should break the hull in, and sink it!" she cried. "If we could only do something! What can we do?"
"Just wait." He shook his head.
"Well, I won’t wait!" She announced. "I’m going over to see what I can do for the refugees!"
People who lived out on the near-by bottoms, driven from their homes, had flocked into the village. Some had remained too long at home, and had escaped only when their houses were rocked on the foundations. Some had even been taken from roofs, or off improvised rafts. Some women and children needed a great deal of help from others better situated. The Carruths did not feel quite so badly lost as some others. They had lived as shanty-boaters for several years, but they had the calm and poise of well-educated and intelligent persons. Mr. Carruth’s work of finding choice logs for extra fine lumber paid him well. Living in a house-boat on the rivers, he had been able to save money through the wise investment of which he received a considerable income in dividends and rents. He knew most of the ten thousand miles of navigable streams in the Mississippi basin, and had seen them in all their phases, from extreme low water, with the baffling changes of channels in quicksands, to great and overwhelming floods which devastated the bottoms from river ridge to river ridge.
During their years afloat Sibley had been growing up with his bright eyes filled with the wonders seen from the river, from miles-wide prairie to bad-land washes; from arid sage brush land to miles-square wheat-fields; from cattle herded by cow-boys to wild deer in the timber brakes along the river. The Carruths had entered the lower river, with its willow towheads, caving banks, dark swamp brakes, and settled territory interspersed with virgin wilderness.
Having learned to read, the boy had looked upon one of the old Missouri River Commission reports as a treasure of literature. The report told of the failure of men to cope successfully with the Big Muddy. The river maps, on a scale of an inch-to-the-mile, showed the twists and bends of the river, the islands and reaches.
Besides river reports, Sibley had read histories and stories, trappers’ magazines, biographies, grammars, and what not, when he must sit in the little cabin of the shanty-boat floating in a still sheltered eddy, with the rain pattering on the canvas-covering of the thin board roof.
So while, in this great emergency, Mrs. Carruth could not help worrying about Sibley, she knew that he had knowledge and training, experience and courage. Not only did he know books but he was river-wise. He pulled a sturdy stroke on the long, light shanty-boat sweeps as they swung on their iron pins in the tops of oak posts on each side of the bow deck. He could swim far in river currents. He had fished from skiffs in running water, and spent many a day earning money at busy river ferries, where he handled motor-launches carrying passengers across, while the ferrymen handled the slower, more difficult flat-boats with loads of cattle, horses, wagons, automobiles, and other vehicles.
"At least, he was prepared to take care of himself. He knows what to do!" Mr. Carruth assured her. "What boy has had better training?"
CHAPTER III
CAUGHT IN THE RIVER DRIFT
ALL thought of escaping to the edge of the mighty current and the safety of the long shore eddies suddenly left Sib Carruth’s mind as he started to the rescue of the person who had shouted for help, from the common peril of the river drift. He had a good, strong-hulled shanty-boat. It would row as easily as any twenty-four-foot skiff, for there was a three-to-one rake at bow and stern, and the boat slid over the water like a skimming dish yacht.
Rowing with the sweeps—oars fifteen feet long—he found that the light on the cabin roof blinded him, so he ran up on top and carried the lantern forward, where it could be seen by any one on the river, while he, standing in the shadow of the cabin, could not see even the reflected glow except where some drop of water out in the drift showed a sparkle for a moment as he passed in range.
He rowed slowly, his eyes growing more accustomed to the shades of darkness. The open places amid the drift were faintly shimmering, reflecting the feeble light that shone through the clouds from the stars; the drift itself loomed in fantastic shapes of pure black on the water. There were logs and patches of sticks and grass; lumps of straw-stacks; the rectangles and triangles of sides of buildings; barrels and hogs heads; tangles like jackstraws of lumber and trees. It was as if everything that will float had its kind in the masses, around which were straits and ponds and open waterways as smooth as blown glass.
He entered upon an acre of perfectly open water, and on the far side was running through a narrows hardly fifteen feet wide when he saw a black mass of drift shoving down across the way ahead of him. He heard the wet wood grinding and the dull snap of breaking branches.
Instantly he fell against the sweeps, to stop the boat in its course; he pulled out of the closing gap, and turned through the wide water to skirt around the moving mass—not for a moment worried, because he had seen in time the thrust of the coming squeeze.
At intervals he heard the shout from the drift, and he answered it. It was a long way through those low floating islands, over to the person who had called for help! He had to go in and out of openings that proved to be more bays; and then again, what looked like a solid mass ahead of him would drag itself asunder and a wide gate would open for him to pass.
His oars made a loud splash, and at times he heard nearer shore a roaring that told of a pile of drift, a clump of trees, or some other obstruction standing against the power of the torrent. In the most intense silence he heard beginning the far-away rasping and breaking and rubbing of floating islands crowding one another as two eddies of surface current flowed into the same suck.
What had seemed to be one great flow of water with a common course, when he regarded it from the safe harbor inshore, now proved to be a wonderful host of swirls, jets, masses, bulges, waves, and bodies of water, all going down the one channel, but changing and breaking up, gathering momentum. Sib was learning much about a flood that he had never known before!
"This way!" he heard a voice, suddenly very near, and over to his left he saw the flare of a match.
He pushed toward the figure he could dimly see standing on something. It was then as though the river were a perverse spirit, for out of the dark pressed floating islands of drift and right around them squeaked and ground one of those terrible squeezes which at their worst break tree trunks into slivers.
There was an uproar. Sib felt the bumping of heavy timber under his boat; he saw a snag limb thirty feet long whirling around not forty yards distant; he heard the rending of boards and the straining of acres of flotsam writhing on all sides. Logs pressed under the bow of his cabin-boat and lifted it; logs, pressed under the stern, and raised it too.
He ran up on the roof, caught up the lantern, and jumped down to look overside, to see if the bottom of his boat was torn off.
"Why! I’m lifted clear out!" he cried aloud. "That’s what comes of having a long rake to the hull!"
"Mister! Mister!" the voice shouted, "we’re breakin’ up!"
Sib held up the lantern, and threw the bull’s eye beam in the direction of the shout. On a pile of drift fifty or sixty feet away stood a boy about the size of Sib. He held another smaller boy in his arms. The space between was filled with a mass of sticks, planks, corn-stalks, branches, logs, and what not. It looked firm enough for the moment, but Sib knew what it was—a place full of pitholes and bottomless wells—and that in a minute it might break up into mere match-stick scum upon the surface.
"Come on!" Sib cried.
"I can’t!" the other choked. "He’s caught his leg into a crack—"
"I’m coming!" Sib shouted, catching a coil of rope from its hook on the stern and hanging it on his arm. He threw two half-hitches and took a bite over the stern bumper cleat, and then with the lantern in one hand, and playing out the rope from the coil with the other, he ran from chunk to chunk till he reached the two boys on the drift.
"I’m coming!"
"Our boat tore up!" the speaker said. "Jep and me got onto a log raft, and he went to sleep—his foot’s caught—or we could’ve got a-goin’. Help, can you? He’s fainted!"
"Hold the lantern!" Sib said, and catching up a pole six feet long and three inches through, he jammed it down into the crack where Jep’s foot was caught. He set his shoulder to the pole and twisted it, and then the other boy took hold and together they pried.
Catching the imprisoned leg by the knee, Sib suddenly felt it ease out, and with a cry he caught Jep up on his shoulder and started for the shanty-boat over the floating island. The other boy followed him.
"Keep hold of the rope!" Sib warned. "Hold the lantern so we’ll see where to step!"
"She’s strainin’!" the stranger gasped, as the rope rose from the drift ahead of him.
"Hold ’er!" Sib exclaimed, setting down his burden and catching the rope. "I’ll snub it on this snag branch!"
The drift was twisting all around them, and they could see the big logs crawling through the mass, could feel them straining underfoot; and between them and the boat water appeared among the flotsam. It was a fearful moment, for the squeeze had ended, and the mass of drift was breaking up and separating in little lumps. They saw the house-boat settling down as the logs rolled and floated from under her. Their own island began to flatten down and spread out. Sib caught the unconscious boy in his arms, and held to the branch that he had used for a snub. He could hear the light rope whimpering under the terrific strain as the boat tried to drift one way and the great snag to which she was fastened pulled the other.
Then suddenly the rope sagged.
"Hold ’im!" Sib exclaimed, and the other youth caught the helpless burden while Sib, inch by inch, foot by foot, stole the slack of the line from the river. The shanty-boat swung around, pulled away like a colt, drew a little nearer, and then worked away again.
At last, when there was only open water around it, and when all the other drift had left the big snag, the stern of the shanty-boat came to them. They hoisted their burden up on the deck, and Sib clambered after.
The other boy held with both hands to the cleat and stared, white-faced. Sib caught him, and dragged him on board.
"I’m all in. I can’t lift a pound!" the boy said in a low voice as he fell forward on the deck. "We’ve ben comin’—a long time—an’ we’ve ben fightin’ Ole Mississip, night ’n day!"
He was no older than Sib, if as old. The lad he had stood by to the end was two or three years younger. What they had endured showed in part in their white, pinched faces. Sib, after a few hours on the river, was already tired, while these two had been fighting the river night and day!
"Hungry?" he asked.
"Hungry!" the other gasped. "We’ve ben eatin’ tree bark, stranger. They ain’ much eatin’, ’ceptin’ the mud, out o’ the Big Muddy—is there?"
He smiled.
"My brother—he’s just fainted. He wasn’t scairt—just worried, some—an’ his leg hurt, too! It held right there ’most all day! Must be near mornin’ now, ain’t it?"
Sib looked around. They were in open water. Little sticks of drift and a chunk or two of wood were within the radius of the light. The drift had gone away off somewhere. There was a little time for refreshments.
He carried the two boys into the cabin, and laid one down on his own cot; the other he placed in the rocking-chair by the coal stove. Then he made tea. The younger boy, with a little tea in his throat, began to stir. The older boy stopped drinking his own, to watch anxiously.
"He’s all right!" Sib exclaimed. "Just tired out—worn out!"
"He couldn’t stand it," the elder brother explained. "We had two nights of it, besides this one. Somebody tried to git to us, up to Chester, but they got squeezed off. Comin’ through Grand Tower it was—"
"What! from above Chester!" Sib exclaimed. "Why, that’s sixty miles!"
"Yes, sir; we was tore out at Meramec River. Dad was driftin’, an’ we was helpin’ him. All of a sudden our skift was busted. Dad jumped. We did, too, but not far enough. Dad romped it down the bank lookin’ for a skift, but, shucks! we was comin’ down eight miles an hour, and he was behind a mile. We ’lowed we’d git drifted in, but we didn’t have a chanst."
"Two nights and two days!" Sib exclaimed. "And nothing to eat! Say, we’ll have some supper, now!"
"You just trippin’?" the boy asked.
"No; I was carried out of a creek. Was asleep on the cot, and the stake we tied to pulled out, and let me float down. I didn’t know it till just a little while ago. Whew! it’s after midnight!"
"It seemed a long time, stranger, when you was comin’, but you come!" the boy said gravely. "Who-all mout you be?"
"Sibley Carruth."
"I’ve heard about you; you come down the Missouri; Dad was trappin’ below Kansas City on those old river lakes there. You come clear down from Fort Benton. I’d like to do that. We started to Kansas City. My name’s Jimmy Veraine; he’s Jepson Veraine. Ho law! I never saw so many books onto a shanty-boat before!"
"We use them when we’re tied in," Sib explained. "Father and Mother are great hands to read."
"Dad’s that-way, too," Jimmy said. "He don’t ever stop in anywheres but what he buys a newspaper. We was to St. Louis a week, and Dad bought two newspapers there. He never misses a word. Everytime he reads a piece, he marks it with a pencil, so’s he’ll know he read it. He don’t b’lieve in wastin’ any time, readin’ the same thing twicet. Paw don’t. This stuff’s awful good drinkin’; what is it?"
"Tea."
"Paw always drinks coffee, but this is good. Seems like this bread an’ butter’s got more taste to hit than any cake or pie I ever ate!"
"I could eat a barbecued cow!" the other boy said from the cot. "I was so dog-goned tired I hadn’t a squawk left in me!"
"Then you never had none in you!" Jimmy grinned. "He never said a word, but I could see he was worried some, the way he set his jaws."
Sib was working fast; he threw some cold rabbit, a few sliced potatoes, a cut-up carrot, two onions, salt, a half-turnip, and two cabbage leaves into cold water in a kettle. He covered the kettle and put it on the kitchen stove, over a good fire.
"A little soup will taste good to you," he said. "You don’t want to eat too hearty, after ’most starving!"
"I won’t eat any more than one spoonful after another," Jimmy grinned. "We found somethin’ to eat, there in the drift, I forgot to tell you. There was three oranges; they was tol’able old, kind o’ soaked, and wa’n’t what you’d call pretty to look at, but they was good!"
"I never ate nothin’ so good!" Jep declared.
"How is the leg?" Sib asked.
"The ankle’s sore, but the thick sole o’ my shoe sort of held the log off."
"You’re lucky!"
While the soup was boiling, Sibley went out on the bow to look around. Jimmy followed him. They were still in the middle of the current. Blackness shrouded the sky and the surface of the river. It was beginning to rain again.
"We’re all right!" Jimmy remarked. "It’s only when the squeeze gits you that there’s trouble! This is a nice boat, too! She rose right up when the logs come in under ’er. If we could see, we mout pull in, but it’d be better to wait for day, ’count o’ sawyers and drift piles and things along the edge. Dad said that next to bein’ up the bank, bein’ out into the middle of it’s safest. We wa’n’t only just in the edge, and it snatched us out, and you—you drifted out of a creek!"
"Your father’ll worry."
"Not any more’n your folks will. You got a mother, ain’t you?"
"Yes."
"I ’lowed you had; you don’t never see any boat like this ’n, ’less there’s one o’ them females on board. Take it when Maw’s to home, you git so you wash your neck every day. When she’s away takin’ care of your aunt, prob’ly you ain’t so dog-goned particular."
"I hope she won’t worry!" Sib exclaimed.
"Well, she will; bet your boots she’ll think everything in the world’s happenin’ to you. I know them women. Maw’s that away. Say stranger, if you’ll let me git to lay down there by that stove, I’ll—"
"Not much!"
"Yes, sir! I won’t sleep on no bed; that bed’s so dog-goned clean an’ I’m what Maw’d call so mussed up—"
They compromised by swinging a hammock across the room, with a blanket in it.
"Call me purty soon, and I’ll spell you!" Jimmy suggested sleepily, and Sib said he would. But he blew the lights out, and went up on the roof, with his heavy shirt and a waterproof coat on, to keep watch. They were in the midst of open water, but at intervals from both sides of the current came the roar of water rushing through woods or against banks or over shoals.
"Come day, and we can make shore somewhere," he thought.
He could see dimly, when his eyes became accustomed to the dark. The falling rain made the distance invisible, and drowned all sounds while it lasted. Out of the gray mist of a downpour he saw something approaching. He lighted the lantern. Then sprang down and caught up a pike-pole, to fend the thing off.
"Why, it’s a boat!" he cried. "It’s a motor-boat!"
Instead of fending it away, he reached with the pike-pole and drew the two boats together, side by side. He made them fast at the bows with what was left of the launch’s mooring-line, which had chafed off somewhere up-stream. Running through the cabin, he made the two boats fast with a rope across the stems, from cleat to cleat on the decks.
It was an open launch, covered from end to end with a canvas tarpaulin, and it stood high in the water, showing the hull was dry. It was four feet longer than the twenty-eight-foot shanty-boat. Sibley raised the canvas and found the motor covered with a box. On raising this, he saw a fine heavy-duty engine, with reverse gear, storage-battery, starter, and lighting-wires. It was a new boat, with strong towing-bitts. Even the gasolene tank was full, and there was motor oil in a five-gallon can ready for use.
"When it comes day, I reckon this’ll drive us ashore!" Sib grinned, "and the salvage will be worth a hundred dollars to us!"
For "findings is keepings" down Old Misissip, against all claims but that of an owner. If one rescues a boat, a log, or other valuable drift, the finder is paid for his trouble by the owner—the salvage fee varying according to circumstances. "Drifting" for logs and boats is a regular flood-time occupation.
CHAPTER IV
A BABY AFLOAT
DOWN the Mississippi, amid the thousands of tons of jagged, menacing drift, floated a baby-carriage. Its wheels were under-water; its body was half-submerged; its handles stood up in a graceful curve behind.
Strapped into the seat of the carriage was a blue-eyed, fair-haired baby, in a short dress and thick worsted jacket and cap, bright red in color. Over the little buggy swung a parasol top.
All night long the strange little ark had floated down the river, the baby sleeping, with a milk-bottle in its hands. Perhaps the baby had waked up and cried, or perhaps its instinct had been to keep still in the black gloom. After daybreak, when the sun came out, the child sat up and looked around from under its canopy. A hundred yards away was the shanty-boat, with the big motor-launch lashed alongside.
"Da-da!" the baby cried, waving its hands.
The three boys burst out upon the stern deck and stared at their fellow-voyager! Never in all their born days had they seen such a thing. They were sweeping down the long bend that touched the river bluffs toward the east, where there was a town they could have reached. For hours they had been coming down between rows of submerged trees, with occasional glimpses of a levee toward the westward, working through the drift, making ready to dash ashore at some good point, but they were more than willing to miss their first real chance in order to get the baby. They couldn’t think of leaving it to be rescued by some one else—or perhaps not to be rescued at all—and so, with one regretful glance at the shore and the people on the banks, they started back into the drift.
"Dog-gone it!" Jep exclaimed. "A fellow can’t let that kid go on down! Somethin’ might happen to it!"
Thus they abandoned their good landing and edged their way among the floating chunks, at last arriving within arms’ length of the drift baby, who laughed and "gooed" at them as Sib and Jimmy caught the handles and the body of the strange little ark, to lift it out.
On the deck they solved the mystery of the buoyancy of the cart; the baby was sitting on a thin cotton mattress on top of one filled with air.
"Now we’ve got him, what’ll we do with him?" Sib grinned.
"I ain’t never tended him," Jimmy remarked, squinting one eye, "but if he’s the same’s most babies, I can look after him, and so can Jep. We’ve had experience, right in our family, Jep and me has. He’s hungry, but glad to have company. That bottle’s plumb dry! That’s more’n he is, comin’ down Old Mississip a hundred miles! Wish we had some dif’rent clothes for him."
"My mother has some old clothes for babies, in one of her trunks!" Sib recollected: "some old bloomers and one thing and another, she’s been saving. Somehow, she hated to throw them away. They’ll be some use, now, maybe!"
"You take a woman, and they always save them things up," Jimmy said. "I bet my mother’s got a whole clothes-basket full o’ such things, baby stockin’s and that sort o’ junk. Say, Jep, mix up some o’ that condensed milk in warm water, and so on—you know how!—and me’n Sib here’ll sort o’ look after this kid. You hold him, Sib! Then I’ll—"
Very practical river boys, they proceeded to give first aid to the youngster who had come floating down the river all night, and wasn’t crying in the morning! How the baby had gone afloat they could but imagine; it might have been that a house had fallen apart and a balcony had floated from under the carriage; or the carriage might have run down some village street into the river, or a ferry-boat might have been crushed, or some little bridge on a tributary stream carried away. The boys could think of lots of things that might have happened!
Sibley brought out what seemed in their judgment enough clothes to keep the baby warm after its bath, but they didn’t put on dresses. Instead, they put on bloomers, and when it had fed a while, lying on its back on the cot, the baby sat up and laughed. It rolled over and landed on the floor, with a bump that made the three boys start.
"Ain’t hurt a bit!" Jep said. "Take one o’ these kids, and their bones bend around, soft and rubbery. If one of us fell around that away, we’d bust an arm!"
Sib could see no place to land, out there in the bottoms. Trees were up to their branches in water, and on both sides of the flood were great wildernesses. He was captain; on him the responsibility fell. It would do no good to land in such wild places; he must watch for a chance to get in among people. He could not tell where he was, but they were going down at the rate of about seven miles an hour; in fifteen hours they had come, probably, a hundred miles, at least.
"We’re below the Ohio," he reflected. "Hope the folks aren’t worrying!"
Clouds were scattering in the sky, and there were patches of sunshine, which made the day a pleasant, balmy one. Birds were singing in the woods, despite the overflow; but everywhere was the desolation of danger, damage, and the flat, menacing drift. Six or eight houses and barns were in sight, floating down; on one of which several chicks were huddled along the ridge-pole. Half a mile away an animal of some kind was running up and down on what had been the side of a house—perhaps a dog, or a wild coon. Flocks of ducks were flying overhead, or stretching their wings in slack water.
Sibley went over the side into the motor-boat, and rolled the canvas back to clear the engine. He looked it over, and then turned on the spark, threw on the gas, and stepped on the starter. Instantly the motor responded. It started like a skiff motor, with which Sibley was familiar.
He warmed the motor up for a minute, and then threw over the reverse, to engage the propeller. The big launch began to press ahead, and Sibley steered, working slowly to the westward, where the edge of the drift was at a safe distance away.
"I got some breakfast for us!" Jimmy announced, and Sib stopped the machine and went aboard the shanty-boat.
"I don’t know where we’d better land in," Sib said. "Everything is underwater, down here. New Madrid is somewhere below; probably that will be as good as any place. We’d only be in the way in the overflow, on the levee."
"New Madrid would be as good as any place!" Jimmy admitted. "Glad my mother ain’t home! I bet she’d fret and stew, if she knew we two was floatin’ off down-stream, and Paw didn’t know where we was!"
"We’ll telegraph soon’s we find a place," Sibley promised. "I bet that kid’s mother is wondering where he is, too. Nice-looking baby."
"Yes, ’bout two years old, too, ain’t he, Jep?"
"Just about!" Jep agreed. "Kind o’ oldish to be eatin’ out of a bottle, though. Might try him with somethin’ with some heft to it."
"Yes, and then he’ll git the stomach-ache! I don’t want any stomach-achin’ kids this trip!" Jimmy declared, with decision.
"I’ve got some eggs, and we’ll soft-boil them," Sibley remarked. "But he’s sleepy, now; sleep’s good for babies!"
After breakfast, when Driftwood, as they called the baby, was asleep, the three took note of their condition. They had edged over to the west side of the current, and they were approaching a great bend in the stream, the drift all throwing against the left-hand side, and running in a narrow ribbon—a ribbon a half mile wide, instead of nearly a mile, as before.
A few turns of the launch’s wheel took them out of the drift into open water. The current, which had been going straight south, took a turn and headed almost due north.
"Why, I believe that’s Slough Neck!" Jimmy declared. "Look’t that! There’s a levee over there. That’s the only east-side levee along here. That was Hickman we passed up there, and where we got the kid was Columbus. Now I know where we are. Last time I was down through here, the old creek was three feet, and the steamer Kate was aground on a sand bar, and you couldn’t hardly get down some crossin’s in a shanty-boat. Now look at it!"
"That’s what it is!" Sib agreed. "Why, we’re about thirty feet over Island Number Ten sand-bar. Used to be a fort here in the Civil War. And this is Watson’s Point, and that’s where Winchester Chute goes through! It was right along here that that big feud was, back in the old days, that Mark Twain tells about in ‘Huckleberry Finn’!"
"I know that book!" Jimmy said. "It’s real natural—just the way it happened. But I don’t care much for history."
"There’s New Madrid!" Jep pointed. "See the sawmill? Whew! but the water’s gettin’ up, along here! Away back yonder there used to be ten or fifteen feet o’ land above high-water mark; but the mud an’ gravel an’ sand out o’ the Missouri’s fillin’ the river-bed all up—"
"Bringing down four hundred million cubic yards of silt past the mouth of the Ohio every year," Sib said. "I’ve a book in there that tells all about it. It’s the ‘Survey of the Mississippi’—"
"They’ll have to survey it all over again, after this flood," Jimmy observed. "If it hadn’t been for the government revetment works over on Slough Neck, the river’d cut through there five years ago. It’s only a mile across there, now, and she’s cavin’ on the lower side." .
"It shows on the inch-to-the-mile maps," Sib said. "The eighteen-ninety survey and the nineteen-hundred-and-six survey in red show a lot of difference. We’d better start that motor; there’s a four-mile eddy along here, almost slack water, and we’ll never get down to the city landing if we don’t drive some."
Slowly, because they wanted to pick their landing on the New Madrid waterfront, they worked down the edge of the main current along the outer side of the dead water. As they moved down, a skiff left the bank and came to meet them, a man pulling the oars stoutly.
"Howdy!" he hailed. "Where’s your daddy?"
"Up to Cape Girardeau," Sibley replied.
"Will you go back on rescue work?"
"Tripping down alone? Say! you’ve a good motor-boat there! Will you go back on rescue work?—back in the swamps?"
He pointed with a sweep of his arm into the back country of southeastern Missouri.
"Why—" Sibley began.
"You’re needed, boys! Every boat’s needed! Every one who can drive a boat is out—and you’re river boys and know the water!"
"Well—sure!" Sibley exclaimed. "You’ll go, Jimmy? We’ll take the motor-boat."
"Yes, sir!"
"I’ll have to watch the kid and shanty-boat," Jep said.
"Good boys!" the man exclaimed, with a catch of his breath.
"Where’ll we go in?" Sib asked, looking along the bank that was above water.
"You can make it around the head of the levee, down in the bend, there. Portage Bayou heads there, and you go down that, or go west over the bottoms. You can’t fail to find work to do, but specially down along Little River’s a lot of trouble. The river’s on the rise, and another foot, on top of what’s coming through those low levees above Cairo. Go to it!"
"After I’ve sent a message," Sib said. "I’ll tow the shanty-boat in to a landing, and we’ll start in the launch in ten minutes—down Portage Bayou?"
"You can’t miss it through the brake. ’Course, out in the fields you’ll have to feel along. There’ll likely be boats down there, telling you which way to work. Anyhow, anybody on a roof, take ’em in!"
They ran the boats out of the river into Sawmill Bayou, where other shanty-boats had moored. They landed against the bank, and made fast to a stump and a fence post that were just being surrounded by the rising tide. As they cast off the motor-boat lines, a man in hip boots, a broad-brimmed hat, and black frock coat came down to them.
"Going out, boys?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good! Take some grub with you—"
"That’s so!" Sib gasped.
"You can’t go wrong, back there. If they’re reasonably safe, go after those that won’t last!"
Sibley’s message to his parents read:
- Landed at New Madrid, with two Veraine boys and unknown baby. Sib.
"I won’t tell them I’m going into the overflow," Sib mused. "Mother’d worry worse than ever!"
"I’ll deliver it to the telegraph office," the man said. "The wires are down, though, and they can’t send it, yet. You’re Sibley Carruth, eh? We had word to watch out for you. Good-by!"
Sib and Jimmy backed out into the bayou and, turning around, headed down the New Madrid waterfront, which was only a few inches above the level of the flood. They could look the length of the main street as they ran down, with the bank on one side and the black drift a few yards distant on the other.
Below town the high ground dipped down under the water surface, and they saw the end of the levee, around the head of which the water was sloping and rocking in a current out into the vast stillness of the overflow.
"There’s not much water across," Sib said. "We must be drawing—how much?"
"Eighteen inches. There’s two feet o’ water across there. See the way it flows?" Jimmy pointed.
Then, in silence, with the motor almost stopped, they shot down the current from the river around the levee-head, into the water that had come down the bottoms from the broken levees above the Ohio.
Houses half submerged stood in the midst of great lakes, but rowboats fast to the balcony posts showed that the people there had means of escape. It was when they skirted around flooded woods, followed a road cut through the timber, and entered the clearings in the wilderness miles from the town that they found their work to do.
"Oh-h! Mister! Mister!" a voice shrieked. "This-yeah house is twistin’, an’ we ain’t no boat!"
CHAPTER V
THE CROWDED HOURS OF FLOOD TIME
ALL that Mr. and Mrs. Carruth could do was done. Telegrams, telephone messages, word to the river people were sent out, and the whole world of Mississippi Valley rumor was notified to watch for Sibley Carruth, who had disappeared with the family shanty boat in the rising tide.
When the river is low, and in its banks, the shanty-boaters who go dropping down from bend to bend have little in common with the stay-at-homes behind the levees. At some landings river-men may not land at all, because a few reckless river-rats have done things at those landings that have given all of the river people a reputation some of them by no means deserve. There is many a landing where any shanty-boat that tries to land is "shot up." This is due to the river pirates, who are as bad as their name. They make free with cane-rooters, the little black-and-white hogs of the brakes and bars; they kill cattle where the woods are dense and the owners far away; and their lawlessness extends even to burglary and other crimes in large cities.
In time of flood a few of these bad river-men prove that they are not entirely vicious, by entering into the great rescue work, which satisfies their hunger for excitement. Most of these are just ignorant, or mentally sick—not knowing how to find thrills in the heroism of peace, or unable to distinguish between right and wrong.
The Carruths, shanty-boaters, working out in the refugee camps, saw other shanty-boaters moored in the back-water of the overflow. After passing the time of day they begged them to send word to the Cape if any news were heard of Sibley.
Motor-boats, driven by river navigators of all kinds, brought in victims of the flood who were found marooned on mounds, on cabin roofs, and even in the trees, all waiting for some one to come and find them. Dozens of these motor-boats went up and down from Cape Girardeau and whenever a boat landed in with its list of people from the bottoms, the Carruths tried to see that special word went to the captain, asking about Sibley.
They were not alone, however, in seeking news of missing people. There were men who on crude rafts had set out from their homes to get help and who had found their houses washed away when they returned. Had their families been rescued first? There were men who had returned and found their houses intact, but the family gone, and no word left as to where, whether up to Chester or down to Cairo, or across to Cape Girardeau. If a boat were heavily laden, it might land anywhere against a bluff and send its passengers ashore three miles from a house "over in that direction, some’rs!"
Down the river were coming daring navigators, some in private craft, and some in government boats, that braved any danger in order to deliver thousands of bags to hold dirt to stack on top of levees, or food for the marooned or for the refugee camps, or small boats to distribute for the service in the overflowed woodlands and isolated clearings, or for back-water service, or where not enough gasolene boats could be had. The great beautifully painted, high standing government boats loomed majestically upon the flood, and landed against the second story of some of the buildings. The smoke stacks, standing as high as the hills, showed how huge they were compared with the dwellings of mankind.
Commercial craft had to seek refuge with the rest. Boats exposed to the drift were carried away, and some went down the river in it. Barges and other craft for towing went by, but the people alongshore could not swing them in with lines or tow them in with boats, though they would have been rewarded by payment of salvage—what the Government allows for the rescuing of a boat adrift—amounting to thou sands of dollars. There was no time, or else the danger was too great for such work, even had it been feasible to dislodge the valuable craft from the vast jackstraw masses of swirling, floating driftwood.
Down the river came a few hardy voyagers. They were river people about their own business. Some were fishermen going down to new locations in which to place their nets for market fish; some were trappers in a hurry to carry their winter catch of furs to the markets; some were "drifters," who caught logs, lumber, runaway boats, and anything else they could sell or hold for salvage money; others were traders seeking bargains in merchandise; still others were pirates looking for loot in the abandoned homes in the overflow. Lunch-room boats sought places where their owners could serve meals to the refugees marooned on levees or hills. Many a river tripper was looking for work that would pay him high wages, such as driving cattle across the flood, swimming them from mound to mound toward the highlands.
Some of these venturesome travelers were in skiffs or jon-boats, rowing in and out among the driftwood; some were in motor-boats which they steered down the lanes between the masses of flotsam that swirled in the river; some dropped down in their shanty-boats, with a line fast to some great snag that towed them down the current, no matter how hard the wind blew. All were in dire danger of being caught in a squeeze and left afloat on a snag or a log or a bale of hay, but they gambled their safety against the chance of reward or profit somewhere downstream.
The voyagers made fast time with the current, running night and day. They were some times hailed from the bank, or an eddy, and asked by some fellow river-man to carry a message, shouted out to them, to others far away on the lower river, and word thus sent with them would pass Cairo, and go even to New Orleans, a thousand miles away, being delivered at its destination as a favor. Of six or eight boats carrying such a message, one was sure to pass it on to its destination. So when Mr. Carruth sent word down to Sibley, he had hopes it would reach the boy’s ears at last.
The telegraph and the telephone hourly brought messages to Cape Girardeau and all other towns whose communications had not been washed out, and the bulletins were posted where a crowd of tens or scores constantly turned the papers on the hooks.
The Weather Bureau reports commanded first and universal attention. More rain meant, perhaps, another inch or two of rainfall on ten thousand square miles, and that meant millions upon millions of cubic feet of water to run off into brooks, creeks, rivers, and at last down the narrow channel of the main outlet, at the rate of a million feet or more a second.
There were reports in the air that levees had given way, and some at least of these reports were true. Out on the bottoms rescuers found places where houses had been swept from their foundations, and no one knew whether the occupants had escaped or not. Children were taken sick in the refugee tents and had to be gotten into warmer, better quarters. Pneumonia caught some of the people who had been exposed to the rigors of the weather.
Mr. Carruth went out with another man in a motor-boat, and roamed a long way into the back country, to make sure that all those in jeopardy had been taken to safety. His wife went into the temporary hospital, to help look after sick children. When they could, they went to the bulletin board and the telegraph office, to see if any one had reported their own boat as salvaged down the river. A bundle of St. Louis newspapers arrived in town, and all the flood news was read aloud to groups of people in the stores or the camps, or wherever there were listeners.
"St. Francis Bottoms all under water," was one item. "Memphis flood pumps are working top speed," was another. For hundreds of miles down the river the workers were gathering to fight the river at the levees, building up the long dirt embankments and strengthening them. "New Madrid, Point Pleasant, and Tiptonville are isolated, and no word can be had from them till boat communication is established," the paper reported. "Floods are meeting at Cairo, and all industries have stopped, to put the men on the levees," was another item. From Helena, Arkansas, came word that thousands of head of cattle had taken refuge on Crowley’s ridge, and that rescue work in the plantations and settlements was going on as rapidly as possible.
So many people had been brought to safety that it was impossible to give their names. Only when some accident or tragedy had occurred, some feature of special purport or interest or of general value appeared, did the reporters try to give names. Many times they spoke of the "people of Gum Brake Ridge," or "the Marked Tree residents," or some other group, as all being affected by the same flood wave or rescue.
From up-river Cape Girardeau heard appeals to watch for scores of people, whose names were given. Families sought families, individuals sought their relatives, and among the last was a river-man named Veraine.
"I had two boys," he told sympathetic listeners. "They was carried out onto a raft, and was gone before I could get a skiff, or anything, to them. Our skiff was caught in a squeeze."
"Probably they’ve landed on the other side."
"There’s hope!" The man shook his head. "I’d come down sooner, only I found two-three people up above, and had to row ’em back to a camp. It’s Grand Tower Suck that I’m afraid of. Laws, laws! You never saw anything like it is, now. I saw a two-hundred-foot barge drawed in there; she went around and around, an’ the bow went down and the stern went up, and she went around and around, on her nose. Then down she went, way down into the eddy, out o’ sight, and that’s the last o’ that barge. Everything sucks down, there. They say a steamboat went in there, one time, and never a stick of her come out again. I hope that old whirlpool didn’t get my boys."
There was not a word of comfort for him, there at the Cape. He knew that it would take thirty hours or more for a drift to come down from where his boys had gone out into it. He thought there was no use in looking farther. If they hadn’t found a haven—he turned disconsolately back up the river, and returned to his own eddy, to gather in timber, drift logs, and other salvage, resuming thus the occupation at which he made a part of his living.
Every hour was crowded in Cape Girardeau, which was almost wholly undamaged by the flood. Its people turned out to help those who had suffered in the bottoms, and scores of other towns were helpful in the same way. The most active of the workers, coming in sight of the river, would stop and gaze at the passing volumes of water and the acres and acres of black drift, going irresistibly down the valley. It looked as though whole forests, towns, and grain-fields must have yielded their all to make that raft of débris and flotsam that went by at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour, night and day, during the rise of the river from the time it went over its banks and the river ice ran out.
Worst of all, the water crept farther up the inclines and ascended the emergency gage inch by inch, so slowly that the gaze could hardly see a change at the water’s edge; in driblets it filled hoof-marks in the mud; it washed across the levels in little wavelets and did not recede.
"She’s booming! Old Mississip’s booming!" people whispered, and old men told tales of 1844, 1882, 1898, and 1903. There were many things, in between, to remember about the great river!
Patiently the Carruths did what they could, waiting for word—if ever word should come!—of Sibley.
CHAPTER VI
RESCUE WORK IN THE OVERFLOW
TO Sibley Carruth and Jimmy Veraine it seemed the most natural thing in the world to swing their big launch about and drive across a submerged field of some kind, skirting around wandering floating islands and running up to the edge of a cabin roof, along the ridge of which were a man, a woman, and two small boys. A dog with a great head and shoulders, small hips, and hardly any tail walked down the split boards to greet them with friendly growls as the bow of their boat grated on the building.
The shock of the contact made the cabin shiver, and the four humans hurriedly slid down to the boat. As they stepped aboard, the building seemed to rise up out of the depths and then it rolled over, flattening out like a cardboard shack.
"Shu-u-u!" the man cried. "Theh she goes!"
Their weight had kept the shanty down.
"We ’lowed hit wouldn’t git much higher, so we didn’t git to go, but lived theh in the rafters; but come yesterday, an’ seemed like the water raised right up," the man said. "Come two feet in less’n half a day. She raised all the evening, stiddy, and come dark, last night, we had to climb out on the roof."
"Any others near here?" Sibley asked.
"Right theh, through those woods, if you can make it, about two miles, theh’s the Cronleys. They wouldn’t go, nuther, they said. Likely they’ll be glad to go, now!"
So the launch steered in the direction pointed out, following a channel through the branches, stopping when the man was in doubt about the course, till he could get his bearings. He recognized a big cottonwood, and a strip of tupelo gum and cypress trees in a lowland, and then they found a gap through cane whose little fish-pole tops were two or three feet above the surface on each side of the submerged wagon road, in which the water was ten feet deep.
"This’d make good cotton land," the man said. "It’s a good ridge, along here for a mile. Flood hadn’t been over hit for a long time till this tide; but this overflow’d cover anything, ’count o’ the levees breakin’."
The Cronleys’ house was gone. The clearing was surrounded on all sides by trees, and when the rescuers emerged from the roadway, a glad yell echoed over the waters. They turned down the slight current that swept slowly from north to south through the woods and over the clearings, except where some eddy worked, and found the family clinging to tree branches.
"Hyuh we be!" a man yelled, and the boys ran their launch down to him, his wife, and his three children,—two girls and a boy.
Against the tree in which they were perched was the half-submerged board shanty.
"Didn’t I tell you I built that shanty stout!" Cronley cried to his rescued neighbor. "Look at it! The boards ain’t loosened a bit! I truss-framed that shanty, so ’f a flood did come an’ it floated away, we could pull it back. Say, Mister! ’low you could spare time to tow that house up theh to that shade-tree? If I could anchor hit theh, come low water hit’d be right by those foundation piles, an’ hit wouldn’t be any trouble at all to h’ist it back onto hits place. Trouble was, I didn’t guy-line hit, or that shanty’d never floated away. How’s your house, Druse?"
"She flattened right out when we got off, but I expect I’ll save the sides and roof. She was floating down to the lower edge o’ my farm, and she’ll lodge there. I see you got most o’ your furniture out into the trees."
"Yes, I’m forehanded thataway. Soon’s we see the overflow was a reg’lar one, we rafted most o’ the stuff down and h’isted ’em into the big trees. Our kitchen stove’s there by the upside o’ that shade-tree, too!"
With a rope run through the up-stairs window and fastened to a stick ten feet long and six inches in diameter, Sibley headed the launch up the current and towed the little house back to the shade-tree beside which was its foundation, consisting of poles driven into the ground and now over eleven feet under the surface. The owner made the rope fast to a branch of the shade-tree.
"I’m leavin’ slack," the man said, "so when the water falls it won’t break the rope, or pull anything apart."
From there the rescuers went to another neighbor, Blawall, down the current to the south.
"I don’t b’lieve he’ll need to come," Cronley declared. "He’s forehandeder than any body, almost. He had some cypress logs into his yard, there—old and dry, and on skids, so they wouldn’t water-log from the ground. When he knowed the flood was comin’ he just made a raft out o’ those logs, and soon’s it floated, he run fence wire up to his shade-trees, and eased the raft under his garret window. Then all he had to do, if anything happened, was to climb out the window, or jump off the roof, and they’d be all right. Theh! I told you so!"
Blawall had been obliged to move out on his raft, as Cronley had anticipated. He had a tent on one end, which Cronley hadn’t known about, and there was a big dirt-box in front of the tent, on which a fire was burning. Over the fire was an iron kettle, stewing. Two mules were on the other end of the raft, standing on the logs and poles that leveled up the surface. They were eating brush, and flapping their long ears. A dugout canoe was just coming to the raft, and in the canoe was a sixteen-year-old youth with two wild turkeys which he had killed.
"Howdy!" Blawall greeted them, coming out of the tent.
"We come to git you," Cronley said.
"No, I don’t need to be got," the man said. "We’re all right. I hate to leave home, ’count o’ shiftless fellers comin’ around. They see anything handy, and they mout take it—window lights or somethin’. We took out all the glass and hung it, safe in the garret, theh. I declare, I believe I’d better build a two-story house; I been layin’ off to do it, for I’m dog-goned if I’m goin’ to move out every time the water rises thisaway! Then I could just move upstairs. How much higher is she goin’?—did you hear?"
"They think about four feet more, on the river," Sib replied.
"Sho! Then we’re likely to git some more here! It’s those plaguy levees above Cairo that’s to blame for this. If they’d been high and wide enough, instead o’ little private no-’count banks, we’d had less’n we got now. Why, we mout of been on the first floor yet, or maybe only in the garret. Now look’t us!"
"I ain’t no faith in levees!" Cronley snorted. "If they was high as the moon, they’d undermine and crevasse, and then the water’d all come at once, a wave ten feet high, an’ everybody been rolled over into their houses."
"Generally they saves us bad overflows," Blawall declared. "I wonder has any one been over to that new-married couple by Tupelo Bayou."
"We’ll go thataway, if these young gentlemen’ll go."
"Certainly!" Sib said. "Which way?"
"I’d better take you," Blawall remarked, thoughtfully. "A stranger in hyah, if he don’t know the lay o’ the land, mout git twisted, less’n he knowed the sets o’ the currents, and kinds o’ trees. If you know what kind o’ land the trees grow on, you can tell where the trees are—whether it’s hills or ridges or hollows. Cypress, ’course, grows on low land. Tupelo-gum grows in awful low, mucky ground. But you take cane, now, and it’s on the backs o’ high ridges—two or three feet or maybe ten feet higher than other bottoms. If you know trees, it’s mighty nice to he’p find your way around, tellin’ where you are thataway."
When the launch arrived at the place, the house of the newly married couple was nowhere in sight. Blawall and Cronley felt round in the water with long poles, about where they thought the foundations ought to be, but they couldn’t find them. Neither could they find any wreckage from the house caught in the trees in the half-acre clearing. The couple were gone.
"You don’t reckon anything happened to ’em, do you?" Cronley asked the other swamp people. No one answered. The launch ran down the bayou to another house, and this one contained a happy family.
The building was of huge logs, and it had been built on a ridge. As the rescuers drew near it, they saw that the flood had not yet reached the level of the balcony floor, which was at least six inches lower than the floor of the big room inside. Smoke poured out of the chimney, and children swarmed over the roof, and out at the windows. Three or four rough board skiffs and several log canoes swung by lines down the slight current.
"He must be built on an Indian mound," Sibley suggested.
"Mound nothin’!" Blawall exclaimed. "That man’s rich, and he’s got a two-story house, onto a good cane ridge. When the water comes in downstairs, he just moves upstairs, same’s you see him now. And if it raises four feet where I am, it won’t go more’n six-seven inches higher here. That’s on account o’ the strong set to the current down here. Where the water runs faster, it won’t get so high. But this house is in an eddy, and over there’s Little River, and on that side is Bayou Crane, and he’s got three hundred acres o’ good cotton land here, as good’s ever you see. But only his family’s to home. He’s savin’ cattle over west o’ here prob’ly."
The rescue party cut up through the woods, among the tree trunks, and returned Blawall to his raft. Then they worked eastward toward the Mississippi, and picked up another family, who felt obliged to abandon their home, but not without taking a crate of chickens and two dogs with them.
It was nearly dark when the launch brought its passengers to the New Madrid highland, where hundreds of refugees had already gathered, and were being cared for by the community. Rain had turned the low eminence into muddy thoroughfares and mire, but it was above sea-level, and would be safe even if the water went four or five feet higher. Only two feet or so of water on the highlands would do no harm; one could wade from house to house, or to the stores, or anywhere. And it would really be easier to get around if one could go in skiffs or small launches, or canoes.
The people who were having the hard time were those who were fighting the flood at the levees. If a levee broke, the water would pour through and the swift rush of the torrent would cut out the softened ground; swirls would dig deep blue holes, and probably great sand and gravel bars would wash over land worth a hundred dollars or more an acre, and ruin it—by the hundreds of acres.
Having landed their refugees, Sibley and Jimmy ran around to the river front, and went up into the bayou, where they found their cabin boat. As they entered it Jep laughed, and the baby, sitting at the table playing with a handful of blocks, jumped up and down and begged to be taken.
"Fine!" Jep replied. "In five minutes I’ll have supper on for you. We’ve eaten!"
Sibley and Jimmy were sitting at the table, eating their supper when there was a hail from a skiff alongside:
"Aboard there, boys!"
"Yes, sir!" Sibley replied, opening the bow door.
"The levee below Hickman has broken, and we’ve got to get over into those bottoms; you know what they are! The wind washed waves over the top, and they couldn’t save it. It’s sixty feet wide, now."
"The levee … has broken!"
"Why, yes. You want us to go?"
"You’ve a good boat, boys!"
"We’ll go. But first we’d better fill up with gasolene."
"It’ll be mean, getting across through the drift, but lives depend on it—and you can’t get over too soon!"
The man came aboard the shanty-boat. He was Tabron, of the River Commission. He sat down and drank a cup of coffee. His face was thin and drawn. There were black shadows under his eyes, and his eyelids were red.
"We’ve been going night and day," he said. "I see you landed a load of refugees to-night. Where from?"
"Out in the bayous, and toward Little River. They’re pretty well looked after over there."
"Yes; the overflow came up slowly. But it’s different around the head of Reelfoot. I don’t know where you’ll get across. There’s no water coming across Slough Neck. You’ll probably have to go down to Tiptonville, and haul across into Reelfoot Lake, and go up that way."
"Couldn’t I go up the levee, and go around through the crevasse?"
"You could. It’s an open field where there are no trees, but there’s an awful current down there, now, and houses right in the way. We don’t know whether they’ll stand against the flow at all. The worse the current, the more need of you boys!"
"We can go up the New Madrid eddy and through by Winchester Chute, and then work down across the drift. We ought to get over by the time we get to the lower Neck landing," Sibley said.
"That’s the best way. But look out! Got lights?"
"There’s a small search-light on our launch, and I’ll try that. If we had an oil lantern or two, it’d help. We have the required lights on the boat."
"Life-preservers?"
"I didn’t look. It’s a salvaged boat—"
"There’s two lockers full of ’em," Jimmy answered.
"Stop at the fish-dock for your gasolene. I’ll tell them you’re coming down, and that you will go across."
"We’re going right down," Sib said, and as it was raining again, he put on his rain-coat and gave Jimmy an oilskin jacket.
The man and the two boys went out into the night and at the floating fish-dock the launch tank was filled and two five-gallon cans of gasolene and two gallons of engine oil were given to the boys.
"Good luck, boys!" some one shouted, and there was a cheer as the motor-boat backed away from the fish-dock, and, turning sharply, headed up-stream in the reverse current of the miles long New Madrid eddy.
The town lights were soon but a blur in the falling mist, and the launch ran on its errand into the darkness. It must cross the drift, and it must go down through that raging crevasse.
"Better get into the bow, with me, Jimmy," Sibley said. "We’ll need four eyes to see the drift!"
Suddenly they heard a loud cry.
"Hurry, boys!" some one shouted. "We’re shaking."
Sibley gave more gasolene to the motor, and headed between an open gap in a row of posts. Beyond the posts the search-light showed a house, partly submerged.
"Look out!" Jimmy exclaimed. "Maybe hit’s a wire fence!"
They heard a crash, and Sibley cried out with relief: "A board fence! Hear it break?"
They plowed through the fence to the house. As they bumped into the back porch a man handed over two children and his wife, and then himself stepped over the bow. They heard boards splitting and the uptilted search-light showed the front end of the house to be settling.
"The foundation posts up front are washed out!" the man exclaimed. "Back out—’fore she comes down on us!"
There was no room for turning in the little yard, and Sibley eased the boat stern first into the current toward the fence, having run down to the steering-wheel in the engine-pit to control the boat. There was a great crash, and the homesteaders cried: "Here she comes!"
But Sibley did not look at the house that was caving in. Somehow, by steering right, he backed the boat between two posts and as she smashed into the fence stopped the motor to save the propeller. The boat backed clear through, and Sibley stepped on the balance wheel, to turn it over. It turned freely, and he switched on the spark, to start the boat under power.
"Our propeller’s all right yet!" he exclaimed, and looked over the bow along the search-light beam.
The house had settled down, the sides spreading out, and the roof falling flat upon the water. It was all coming down the current out of the crevasse, but a turn of the wheel took the launch across the current, out of the way. They went off to the left of the crevasse and into the dead water against the bank.
"You sure did us a good turn to-night, boys!" the homesteader cried, as he lifted his family over the side and up the levee.
"I’m sorry about the house," Sib replied.
"That’s all right. We carried flood insurance, and I’ve brought the papers in my pocket!"
"Hi-i!" shouted the men who had come to help the refugees up the levee to the top, but there was no time for congratulations. Sibley Carruth and Jimmy Veraine had their work cut out for them that night!
Off across the flood waters they could see yellow lights flickering in all directions. People were waving lanterns, and when the boys tried to go out to them, they sometimes found their way barred by fences, by stumps in new fields, or by drift that was picked up by the water coming through the widening break and carried down the swift current. But they made their way through.
Where the current was rushing there was danger to the homesteaders and the launch went to such places first. The boys ran up the current to the buildings, or laid their boat alongside them. When they had a load, they returned to the levee, the only high land near by, landed the refugees, and returned for another load.
Before daybreak a launch from Hickman appeared, coming to help, and two or three brave men in skiffs rode down through the break. It was wider now and as the bottoms were deeply overflowed, there was only a small pitch compared with that first plunge through the gap, which Sibley and Jimmy had made just in time to save the family in greatest danger.
The crevasse opened rapidly, and before it stopped caving it would be more than a mile wide. The flood filled the Reelfoot Bottoms, raised Reelfoot Lake far out of its natural shores, and spread over thousands of acres of cotton and timber land, but the rescuers had come in time, and those in imminent danger were carried up to the levee, or out to the high land toward Slough Neck and Tiptonville.
All night long, and all the following day, without rest, and with only a snatch of corn pone or cold bread to eat, and a cup of hot coffee, given them on the levee, to drink, Sibley and Jimmy worked. What if they were tired? What if they were sleepy? Lives depended on their keeping at work, and the rescuing depending on their staying awake.
All night long, and all the following day … Sibley and Jimmy worked
It was almost midnight when they ran into the levee with a load, and asked, "Where next?"
"You can’t do any more to-night, boys. There are people over in the clearings, but they’re out of the send of the current. To-morrow’ll be time enough for them!"
"Sure?"
"Sure’s you’re born!"
"Well, we’d better—"
"Swing off to that tree out there, so you won’t rub or pound," a man suggested.
They floated out from the levee, and made fast to the tree by a bowline. They spread the tarpaulin over the boat, on its hoops, to keep the rain out. They rolled up in their coats, and the heat of the engine, which had pounded faithfully all day and all night and all day again, kept them warm.
They slumped down, relaxed, with no more than a splash of a dream, before they were in the deep sleep of the utterly exhausted.
CHAPTER VII
NEWS FROM THE FLOOD VICTIMS
DAYS had gone by and no word had reached Mr. and Mrs. Carruth about the whereabouts of Sibley. From all along the valley, where the rains had fallen and the streams were still rising, there was news of the fight to save people and property. It was a terrific struggle, taxing the strength and resources of whole states, and the National Government itself was making special efforts, Congress having passed an emergency appropriation to rescue those in jeopardy and help the sufferers.
There was plenty of work for Mrs. Carruth in helping to care for refugees who had been brought away from their homes, and were now weak and suffering from exposure and illness. Mr. Carruth, a practical river-man, was needed in the toilsome work of driving cattle from mounds where they had taken refuge, across to the river ridges.
As long as the upper Mississippi continued to rise, skiffs and launches were kept busy in the inundated territory, moving cattle and furniture and farm implements. The flood had begun in March. Moderately high waters, which covered lowlands but jeopardized few people, had appeared in the Missouri, the upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee rivers.
Little by little, the flood waves joined at the stream forks, and the stream channels could not carry away the volume of water fast enough, and so the high water spread out across the wide bottom-lands and pressed against the levees raised to protect valuable farm fields from inundation and washes, as well as to prevent waves of sand and gravel from flowing over the rich soil and ruining it.
Inadequate private or local levees above Cape Girardeau gave way before the upper Mississippi tide, and below the Cape the flood swept through the insecure embankments on the west side, spreading over the cleared or wooded bottoms on the way into the swampland streams, Little River, the St. Francis, Lake Nicormy Swamps, and a hundred tortuous bayous and wide waters.
The floods of the great tributaries of the Mississippi flowed together in the main channel and made the highest overflow ever known below the forks of the Ohio. More than seven hundred thousand cubic feet of water in the upper Mississippi flowed past Cape Girardeau in a second. More than nine hundred thousand cubic feet of water poured in a second out of the Ohio River into this upper river flood. The vast tide swept down into the lower-river bottoms; most of it was in the main channel, but there were currents out in the overflow, pouring down through the woods, across fields, and in the channels of bayous and stream-beds sufficient to supply a hundred lesser rivers with flood waters for many a day.
Crowley’s Ridge in the Mississippi bottoms formed the western limit of the flood tide as far down as Helena, Arkansas, and shunted the overflow torrents back into the main channel of the Mississippi there, where the Tunica County levee held the flood to a width of less than two and a half miles. Through these narrows the mighty volume of water rushed at the rate of twelve miles an hour in midstream. The water was a hundred and thirteen feet deep, and the cross-section of the stream was two hundred and thirty-eight thousand square feet. In one second over two million cubic feet of water rushed by the Helena gage, when the flood rose to a height of forty-six feet above low-water mark—say about four stories high!
The flood threatened fourteen hundred and sixty-six miles of levee below Cairo, along more than a thousand miles of river. The levees, containing more than two hundred and forty million cubic yards of dirt have been built to keep floods off the lowlands and out of the towns and plantations, and Bermuda grass has been planted on the levees to protect them from the water-wash. But now whole armies of men were fighting on the levee-tops against the attack of the flood.
Year after year, since 1717, when De la Tour, the French engineer who planned the city of New Orleans, built the first protection along the city’s waterfront, the struggle against the annual flood has been waged on its top, as the levee has been extended up the bottoms. Men, settlements, states, and at last the United States have fought for mastery over the Mississippi, with the issue always doubtful. Sometimes it has been victory for the humans, and sometimes for the river, when a break in the earth barrier let the water through to inundate the backlands with the overflow.
Year after year a hundred thousand levee builders, with forty thousand teams of mules or so, and operating huge dredging-machines, repair the damage of the spring tides, build new levees, raise old ones, and pave the banks with revetment—great Willow-tree carpets or rugs covered with broken stone to keep the flood in bounds by stopping the washing away of the soft river banks and the undermining of the protection.
Despite all efforts, crevasses occur and sometimes a mile or so of the levee is washed out, and must be rebuilt, like the break at Reelfoot through which Sibley Carruth and Jimmy Veraine rode to rescue the homesteaders in the Reelfoot Bottoms.
The levee-builders, when the spring tide came booming down, that memorable March, were too few to cope with the flood along the fourteen hundred and sixty-six miles of jeopardized bottom-lands; so sawmills were shut down, farm work was halted, logging-camps were deserted, and all efforts were diverted from private tasks to the common cause. Thousands of teams of mules and horses were brought, where the ground was firm enough to bear them, while on the levees where the weight of animals might weaken or disturb the top, the broad backs of men carried the burdens of cotton sacks filled with earth, to build up the bank, to stack around the boils, and sipe-holes or leaks and to partition off the areas of slough.
Little armies of convicts from the prison farms and jails were marched out on the levees and put to work in sections where their toil was needed. Railroads sent their section gangs and bridge-builders, and brought crews from cities back in the hills and uplands. There could be no idlers when the year’s income of thousands of square miles depended on the levee holding in the districts, protecting whole counties—the whole geographical division of river-bottoms.
Mississippi River Commission engineers, levee boards, and local authorities took charge of the levee system, district by district. The districts were broken up into sections, and over each section some one stood in command. Assistants had charge of little crews who worked where they were needed.
Long stretches of levee were firm and high, but guards patrolled them to watch for boils where the water worked through under the levee foundation, or sloughed off the back of the levee, or siped through soft places, or washed through muskrat or crawfish holes. The guards carried guns, and if they found a leak, fired a shot to summon help. And they had to guard against treachery, too, for in times of peril and stress, with fortunes threatened and lives jeopardized, the men on a weakening levee have been known to seek to relieve the strain on their own side of the river, by breaking a strong levee opposite, shoveling through, or even blowing it up with dynamite.
Not all the workers could be spared for fighting at the levee, however. There must be rescuers to go out into the bottoms, to get those in imminent peril, to carry food to those marooned on house-tops or mounds, or ridges, and to swim or ferry thousands of heads of cattle, hogs, mules, and horses to the highlands. The property in abandoned houses, and the heaps of household and other goods, the live stock and the other portable property had to be protected against river pirates as well as against destruction by water.
Millions of people were affected by the flood, and the newspapers and magazines of the whole world recorded its incidents and features, though none, nor all of them together were able to give an adequate impression of the spectacle of power, the fearsomeness and the grandeur of that majestic flow of water.
When the refugees began to return to their abandoned homes, as they did the moment the water began to fluctuate at what the Weather Bureau said was the crest, Mr. and Mrs. Carruth had more time to think of their own trouble. They decided that the best thing to do was to get a small house-boat and go down the river, seeking along the way any bit of information that might have been caught at some town, or fisherman’s boat, or drifter’s eddy.
The local papers carried page after page of accounts of the flood. From every town and almost every levee section came word of incidents and jeopardies, disasters, crevasses; frightened appeals for help; grim announcements that "The levee still holds!" But there was nothing the Carruths could do to help, at the moment. They had taken their share of the burden as their kind always do in any emergency. It did not occur to them that their own worry could be made an excuse for neglecting the obvious things to be done. Some people who had lost horses or hogs might wonder how the Carruths could bear their son’s disappearance with so little display of emotion; but some could understand.
Captain Tracone had thanked them both for their instant willingness in joining his corps of flood-workers. He was reading the St. Louis paper, only a few hours old, one evening, when he discovered a paragraph in the flood items that startled him. It read:
BRAVE BOYS IN RESCUE WORK
New Madrid—Sibley Carruth and Jimmy Veraine, river boys, volunteered last night to go over to the Reelfoot levee, which is crevassed, to help in the overflow rescue work. They had been working in the New River swamps in their big open launch, and had brought out many refugees. They started last night to cross the river above Slough Landing, and it is believed they made it all right, though the drift was heavy.
Captain Tracone leaped to his feet and hurried to search for the Carruths. He found them in a boarding-house where they were staying till they could secure a house-boat.
"Look at this, folkses!" Tracone cried. "Look here!"
"New Madrid—a motor-boat!" Carruth exclaimed, and Mrs. Carruth sobbed with joy.
They read the second paragraph of the item:
Sibley and Jimmy came into New Madrid eddy with a story of strange adventure. They told how the Carruth boat, moored in a creek above Cape Girardeau, had torn loose, and Sibley had awakened to find himself in the drift. A little later he had rescued Jimmy and Jep Veraine, who had been carried for two days in the drift. Then they found a baby, whom Jep is taking care of while his brother and his pal are in the rescue work.
Mr. and Mrs. Carruth were suddenly comforted. Sibley had escaped, then! Sibley was away down the river at New Madrid!
"Wonder where he found the motor-boat!" Mr. Carruth exclaimed. "Probably he drifted it!"
The Veraine boys, too, were found, and Mrs. Carruth thought of the father who had come down the river, through the terror of Grand Tower Suck, and, heartsick, with no word of his two sons, had gone back up the river.
"If we could only get word to him—to Veraine!" she said, and Mr. Carruth ran his thoughts up to the mouth of the Meramec, where that other river-man was patiently at work.
"I could probably run up to Kimmswick, and then walk up to the Meramec," Carruth mused. "It would be only a hundred miles by train and two or three miles’ walk. I’d be glad if some one else did that for me."
"That’s what I was thinking!" his wife exclaimed.
So Mr. Carruth went by train up through the mountains to Kimmswick, and walked along the railway track till he could see a little house boat out in the overflow, with a man rowing up the eddy ready to dart out after any bit of salvage. A river yell brought the man over to the embankment, and Carruth called:
"News for you!"
Veraine pulled ashore, where he heard that his two sons had landed safely at New Madrid, in the Carruth house-boat, and that Jimmy was doing rescue work with Sibley in a launch.
"Jep’s taking care of a baby they caught in the drift," Carruth added, and then read the item from the St. Louis newspaper.
"Thank you," the man said, controlling his voice. "They’re good kids, my boys, and Jep—You never saw anybody could take care of a baby better than he can! His mother says so, too. Seems like he knows what to do. And they’re at New Madrid?"
"Jep is, according to this. Sib and Jimmy, are—They went over to the Reelfoot levee. It’s crevassed. They were asked to go there."
"Yes, sir. I understand. Come over to my boat. I’ve a good fire, and it’ll be right warm and comfortable. Stranger, a man cain’t exactly thank anybody—not right!—for this favor. A man thinks more about such things than he can talk."
"You’d have done it for me," Carruth reminded him.
"Yes—likely. River people are apt to carry good news, thataway. Sho! And they landed at New Madrid? That’s two hundred and forty miles down—and through Grand Tower Suck! Seems like Old Mississip must have been feelin’ friendly towards us all, eh?"
They drew up at the shanty-boat resting in the back-water, moored to Chesley Island willow-trees, which were half their height under water. It was a comfortable boat, and clean. A soft coal fire was burning in the heater, and Veraine, looking at his watch, decided it was time to have a snack. Carruth, hungry enough, did not object to the meal in preparation.
"I had great luck yesterday, somebody’s bad luck," Veraine declared. "I picked up a case o’ canned goods that was just awash. I swung in that log raft, too. There’s fifty-five good logs. I’ve got more ’n three hundred logs, now, and several skiffs, and one twenty-foot boat with a two-horse-power motor in it. There’s quite a bit o’ salvage lumber, too. But the best thing I’ve caught is a big barge. It come down the edge the current, and I got a handy-line on it, and snubbed it into the willows all the way down the island, and I swung it across the current at the foot of First Island. I landed it right against the railroad bank, there. Likely you noticed it?"
"I saw it—with a hawser made fast to a stump?"
"Yes; that rope was on board. I’ll get some good money for that barge, perhaps, two or three hundred dollars, on account of its bein’ so far down. It’s one o’ those railroad sand barges from up the Missouri."
After eating their snack Veraine rowed his visitor down the island chutes to the foot of the slack water, as Mr. Carruth wished to catch the train to the Cape.
"It sure was friendly, comin’ to tell me about those boys!" Veraine declared. "I hadn’t writ and told their mother about it, yet. She’d prob’ly worried, the way women do when their little chaps turn up missin’ or anything; and now maybe I won’t have to tell her much about it till they get home. I hate to write to her, and I’m glad I didn’t. Well, s’long!"
Thus they parted. There was more news in the St. Louis papers that Mr. Carruth bought on the train. The rescue work at the Reelfoot levee crevasse had been difficult and required skill and courage. The trouble had been overcome, and good work had been done.
"The first boat down through the gap was an open motor-launch driven by two river lads, volunteers in the rescue work," the Hickman report said, "and they saved many families, the first one as the house collapsed on its foundations before the rushing waters. The rescuers, Carruth and Veraine, were sent over from New Madrid, after an appeal had been gotten across the river to the telephone from some point up the river, and they worked all night and all day, without rest, not stopping till all those in jeopardy from the swift current had been taken out."
Carruth read the account with misty eyes, and wondering. It seemed unbelievable that his boy—that jolly, book-reading lad who had been such a little boy just the other day, or not so very long ago, anyhow—had stepped into a man’s task!
"He always did like river work," he mused; "always wanted to know about it, and he must be happy, now, being sent out to special work, rescuing! And I know his mother will be proud!"
CHAPTER VIII
RIVER PIRATES
WHEN Sibley and Jimmy awakened from the exhausted sleep which followed their toil, they found that the line by which they had moored their launch to a tree, tied nearly as high as they could reach from the bow of the boat, was now only two feet above the surface. During the night the water behind the levee, damned partly by the railway embankment back on the bottoms, and checked partly by the woods at the edge of Reelfoot Lake, had risen five or six feet.
The two ends of the broken levee had been lumping off, too, and the gap between them was hundreds of feet wide, and still cutting away rapidly. The current through was no longer the cascade of the night before, when they had run down into the bottoms to begin the rescue work among those immediately in front of the break; instead it was a wide, smooth sheet, with long, low undulations, broken where a tree stood against the current, and swirling, back on the bottom, where bores, or sucks, were already digging through the soft silt and cutting out deep pits, which would be "blue holes" when the water settled and the flood had gone by.
Day was breaking. The sky was clouded, but there was a sparkle of sunshine for a few minutes, and the bright, gay beams flickered on the glassy surface of the flood. One could hardly realize that the pretty running water, the singing birds in the trees, the coming green of spring, were so close to the scene of desolation which meant suffering and destitution for tens of thousands of people and destruction for none could tell how many tens of thousands of animals.
As we have seen, other boats had come down and were ready to take care of the people in jeopardy out on the Reelfoot Bottoms. The fact that they had gone through in the black night, and had risked tearing the bottom out of their launch, with the certainty of utmost peril to themselves, had given the two youths a certain distinction, and Mr. Kalas, the engineer who had been trying to build up the Reelfoot levee when the overtopping came for lack of help, asked them ashore to eat breakfast with him out of a little iron kettle simmering over a driftwood fire on the levee-top.
There was a reason for his asking them there. He needed them.
"Can you get up into the main river?" Kalas asked.
"It’s a swift current out there," Sib replied, "but if you’ll tie a handy line to a tree and float the other end down Jimmy and I can tie to it and put on our power, and pull ourselves up!"
"You’re off the river, all right!" Kalas laughed. "There’s a light line on the commission steamer coming in now, and we’ll float the rope down, tied to a keg."
Immediately Sib and Jimmy ran around into the middle of the gap in the levee. The current was too swift for them to stem it and work up through, though they could get nearly up to the line of the levee that had washed out. From a skiff, manned by three men, a keg was floated down to them with a half-inch rope tied to it. They caught the keg, and the skiffmen made the other end fast to a little gum-tree. Then Sibley and Jimmy hauled in the line, hand over hand, and, with the power of the motor behind them made the slope of the running torrent. Once over the low crest, the motor picked up and they could hardly pull in the line fast enough. They slowed the push of the motor, and as they reached the tree, the line was taken into the skiff, and the launch swung out around and down to the levee, where Kalas was waiting for them.
Kalas was one of the old, famous river engineers, who for years had studied the Mississippi, fought it, planned campaigns against it, and through it all had kept his love for the magnificence of that great flood, the might of which makes the efforts of men seem so puny and ineffectual at times, but which at other times responds to the restraints of revetments and levees.
Sibley had read his reports in the Mississippi River Commission documents. They had shown, those simple words of the man who knew the river, what must be done, what should be done, what ought not to be done. If he read the reports of some men twice, he read those of Kalas a dozen times.
Now Kalas, the great river scientist, had asked Sibley Carruth to help him and take him down the flood, because Sibley was a regular river boy, and knew the handling of a first-class motor-boat. Kalas did more than that. As they cut loose from the levee to go down the stream, he turned his bright eyes under their shaggy gray brows, upon Sibley, who stood at the wheel.
"I’m glad they sent you over," he said. "When you went down last night through that gap, all dark so that you could see, I said to myself you knew something about the river. Then you turned on the lights—your searchlight! I tell you, that was fine!"
Sibley couldn’t speak after that. Kalas was praising him! By and by he blurted out:
"I like the river!"
Kalas looked at him and smiled.
"So do I!" he exclaimed. "I wasn’t abusing the river, you know; Old Mississip’d be all right if we only knew how to get along with him! It’s like lots of things. You know, in the old days kerosene lamps used to explode and explode, and everybody wondered what on earth was the matter with them, and if they’d never be safe. Well, by and by, somebody came along and separated the gasolene from the kerosene, and now we’re burning the kerosene in the lamps and the gasolene is exploding, the same as always, but it’s in the motors, where it’ll do some good! It’s that way with lots of things we don’t know about, or understand. Look at that flood out there! Millions of horse-power—and next summer we’ll not have enough water in that channel to float a steamboat. Now an ocean steamer would have enough water under it. Some day, boys, some day, some of us’ll get things right with the old river, and we’ll be good friends, the Flood Spirit and we humans."
As he ceased speaking he looked out at the flood tide and his sharp glance softened into a bright, friendly gaze. Sibley couldn’t imagine him cursing the river, as he had heard men along the levee and out in the overflow curse it. Kalas knew in his heart that the real trouble is that people have not really learned to get along right with the monarch stream.
They went down the Reelfoot levee and around the long bend, out of the woods into the open of Slough Neck bend, opposite Island No. 10 and Donaldson Point. The spectacle that met their eyes was most wonderful, for right there the river was going out of all bounds, and cutting across the neck with the long-drawn thunder of river rapids. It was only a mile across the low land from bend to bend of the mighty flood, which was going around ten miles to gain the mile. It was running down a grade of six feet or thereabouts in the ten miles—or six feet in the mile across.
When he saw the jumping, rolling, darting little flood across the neck, Kalas stood up to look at it. He sprang upon a locker, and then he stood erect on the bow of the boat. One of the great river phenomena was imminent there, and he studied the situation as Sibley slowed the boat down to give him time.
"It may cut through there!" the man said. "You can see by the way the water bounds that it’s scouring down there. Yes, sir! We’re lucky if it doesn’t go through, and leave New Madrid six miles away from the river on a blue horseshoe lake. I’d like to go down. I might—but—"
"It may cut through there! Yes, sir! We’re lucky if it doesn’t go through"
He looked at Sibley. It was Sibley’s boat and there would be risk in going down through there. However, Kalas needed to take a close look at those waters. So Sibley gave the motor a little more gasolene, and running down the edge of the main torrent, he turned a long curve and started down the midst of the romping, bounding, jumping, sliding waters that were rolling over Slough Neck.
They had to go between two patches of woods; they crossed another wood lot, through an old road, and came about in the slackening water below the woods, where Kalas studied the outlook, and felt of the bottom with the pike pole. Sounding along, he found deep scours, deeper than the length of the pole, and he had Sibley heat back and fourth across the current, so that the work of the water could be judged.
"It’s all right, boys," he said at last. "Much obliged for taking me through here; it’ll save me coming back. There won’t be a cut-off this year—that’s that streak of heavy land, like Crowley’s Ridge and the soil at Tiptonville; it isn’t regular silt and dry mud, but a harder, firmer deposit. If it wasn’t. we’d have a cut off in this tide. Gracious! Look at New Madrid!"
The town was underwater, and skiffs were rowing up the main street between the rows of houses, whose foundations were submerged. New Madrid was a famous trading-station and river town in the old days, and the long continued series of earthquakes in those bottoms that startled the country from 1812 during several years were known by the name of the town the Spanish had settled. In former times none had dreamed that Old Mississip would ever submerge that ridge, but hundreds of millions of cubic yards of gravel, silt, and sand flowing down the channel had changed conditions, to the discomfort of the village. However, as the Government had protected the river bank from the current’s attacks, there was little danger there.
Kalas laughed when he told the boys that the town had voted "dry" by several hundred majority a day or two before. He had them land him in against the foot of Main Street, Tiptonville, on the east bank. Here there was a tent city, sheltering refugees from the overflowed bottoms.
Word had come from out in the overflow that miscreants were abroad, and that river pirates were raiding the abandoned homes, stealing cattle and other animals marooned on the ridges, and even floating away rafts of logs which had been cut by loggers for towing down Old River, the St. Francis, and other streams to sawmills.
"Hello, Colonel Kalas!" a man hailed the engineer. "I want to borrow your launch. All right?"
"What for? You see, Sheriff, I’m using it!"
"A dugout canoe just brought word that river pirates are raiding down the Bend. Yours is a strong boat, and shallow draft. See how it is!"
"All right, Sheriff! How about it, boys?"
The two river lads well knew what this meant. Sibley, especially, had heard many stories of the desperate work of the river bad-men, and in the overflow they were sure to be more reckless than ever. An expedition with a sheriff’s posse against a crew of pirates might be a dangerous one if the pirates were found at work or caught while trying to make their escape with booty.
Sibley, however, replied promptly. "If you want us, we’ll go,"
"Good boys! You know how to drive the boat better than any of us!" the sheriff, John Tainell, exclaimed. He waved his hand and four of his special deputies ran over to the launch and climbed into it. They carried two rifles and two shot-guns, and they brought with them two soap-boxes filled with things to eat. All five of the men wore heavy leather belts with leather holsters swung on them to hold revolvers.
In three minutes the launch had backed into the longshore eddy, swung around, and headed down-stream toward Cypress Log landing.
The three hours that had elapsed between the time when the messenger left Cypress Log to find the sheriff and the arrival of the posse, had enabled the pirates to make their raid and scurry away in their boats. But a frightened boy, lying quiet and undiscovered in the garret of the Tiplon mansion, had heard one of the miscreants say to a mate that they would run down to Obion River.
It was a slender clue, but Sheriff Tainell went down the edge of the river drift and turned into Obion River. All the bottoms were covered deep with water. The flood level was among the tree branches. Obion River, itself, was only a narrow lane between two lines of partly leafed tree branches, with the current flowing across the lane.
Night was approaching when the posse’s launch turned up the lane, and with muffler closed and motor running at half-speed, almost noiselessly, entered the wilderness where the pirates might have taken refuge from pursuit.
The launch passed a shanty-boat, on the bow deck of which a bee-hunter sat, comfortably smoking.
"See any motor-boats going up Obion?" Sheriff Tainell asked.
"I mind my own business," the man replied imperturbably.
Sheriff Tainell shrugged his shoulders and the launch continued up the river lane.
"No use trying to make a river-rat talk about his own kind!" he remarked.
They rounded one of the innumerable bends and Sibley saw a lane through the trees on the left. On one of the tree-trunks he saw a place where the bark had been knocked off, and a scraggling, paint-stained dry-stub just above indicated a collision of a boat with the trees.
"There’s a track!" Sibley said. "Somebody was carried wide against those trees when they tried to steer up that bayou! It’s fresh, too, for the sap’s running!"
"Think they’ve gone thataway?" the sheriff asked.
"Looks like!" Sibley replied, and the deputies agreed as to the indication of the river sign.
Accordingly, they steered up the bayou. Night had now fallen, and keeping in the bayou’s winding course was difficult. But Sibley knew the river night, and he had good eyes for the opening through the forest. He had steered up the bayou only three miles or less when suddenly, with a low exclamation, he pointed through the standing timber.
"A light! There’s a light!" he said quietly.
In a minute, the distant yellow light, with its reflection on the surface of the flood, was visible to all. Just making steerage way against the slow current, Sibley headed for it. Only a shanty-boat or other craft could be in those woods; no house or cabin was within many miles of the place. None but a fugitive was likely to have chosen such a retreat for a mooring-place, for the sudden lowering of the flood level must have held the boat behind snags and other obstructions.
As the launch approached nearer and nearer to the light, the sheriff and his party discerned a large house-boat afloat in the nearly sub merged woods. They saw several launches swung by lines from the stern deck, down the current. They heard voices—laughter and singing.
"Hi-i, Red!" one shouted. "We sure made a haul to-day!"
"You fool!" a sharp voice replied. "They’d hear you four miles, echoing over the water!"
"An’ nobody’s within ten mile of us!" the shouter retorted.
The posse’s launch struck a submerged log. There was a low, scarcely audible boom as the thin dry sides quivered. At that sound, however, there was a sudden hiss of warning on board the big house-boat.
"Sh-h-h!" some one ordered.
The next instant the house-boat light went out, and Sheriff Tainell caught Sibley by the shoulder and whispered:
"Drive her, boy! Full speed ahead!"
Sibley, as the launch swerved along the log, turned in more gas for the motor, and the boat quivered as the propeller speeded up. All hands crouched lower as they drove straight for the black rectangle that marked the position of the pirate lair.
For a minute there was only the throbbing of the motor, as it drove the launch with increasing speed toward the pirates. Whether or not the pirates would open fire on the posse was a question. The sheriff, after a few seconds of suspense, turned on the powerful little search-light in the bow of the boat.
The blue-white beam revealed the launches and the house-boat in bright relief against the wilderness background. All was perfectly silent, and there was no sign of life on board. Rapidly turning the search-light on and off alternately, Sheriff Tainell sought to blind the pirates, so that they would not be able to aim accurately if they decided to make a fight against the forces of the law.
As Sib ran the launch alongside the big craft, which was at least seventy feet long and twelve feet wide, the sheriff shouted:
"Hands up! We all are the sheriff and his posse."
For reply there was an echo from the woods, and then from somewhere, apparently a long distance away, there sounded a mocking laugh. As the launch rubbed along the house-boat’s side, the sheriff sprang to the stern deck with two of the deputies; the other two, when Sibley had steered to the bow, sprang aboard. Jimmy caught a cleat with a stern-line loop, and, Sibley having stopped the motor, jumped aboard with a bowline, and made fast.
The posse, dividing in two, charged each end of the house-boat, meeting face to face in the big bow cabin. There was no one else on board, but the table was heavily laden with roast wild turkeys, slabs of beef, and roast hams. Open fruit-cans, vegetables smoking in dishes, and plates of bread hot from the kitchen oven stood about among the larger dishes.
"Just in time for supper!" Sheriff Tainell remarked dryly. "Look at the loot!"
Relighting the big swinging oil lamp over the table, and looking about, they saw trunks, boxes, bags, and bundles which had been brought on board. Perhaps a hundred mansions and other smaller bottom-land homes had been raided, and the loot brought to this big house-boat. On the table were silver, cut-glass, and old French and Spanish china. On a silver server where the light shone on it, was a heap of jewelry, which some one evidently had intended to take but had forgotten when the pirates fled. A wall safe which had been pried out of a wall with crowbars was on a box of soap awaiting the convenience of the thieves.
The house-boat was laden with valuables and edibles which the pirates had selected with care and greed. The miscreants, however, had made their escape. Perhaps they had run out on the bow deck and, slipping overboard in the shadow, swum away among the trees, river rats that they were. But more likely they had jumped into pirogues—dugout canoes—or skiffs and paddled swiftly away, to disappear easily in the wilderness shadows.
Six or seven of them had been sitting at the table. Only two had had time to cut slices of meat and spread gravy on their hot biscuit. The sheriff and his posse, with the two youths who acted as boatmen, sat down in the places of the pirates and supped in their stead. They ate with solid silver forks and spoons, from thin, beautiful china, some of which was of almost inestimable value. There were tumblers of colored glass which must have been hundreds of years old—stolen, no doubt, from some old mansion on a great cotton farm.
"The pirates knew better than to make a fight," one of the deputies remarked. "They knew what they’d get if they did!"
"We’re lucky that they didn’t, though," Sheriff Tainell added. "We’d had a bad time boarding them. Look at their guns!"
A score of shotguns and rifles with twice as many revolvers and automatics—nearly all new and the loot of a sporting-goods store in some submerged village—stood in a corner or were heaped on the floor. Several thousand rounds of ammunition were packed in boxes near by. It was a fine meal for the representatives of the law. They ate their fill, and drank coffee from a large nickel percolator boiling on the stove. After supper they examined the capture more thoroughly. It was a new boat, freshly painted and tight, without a leak any where. The hold was full of goods,—trunks, wearing apparel, blankets, and canned fruits and vegetables. A thousand pounds of bacon was stacked like wood in one of the state-rooms. Enough motor-boat accessories to stock a store—doubtless the stock of some store!—was in an other small room, all stowed away, to take up as little space as possible.
There were hundreds of bolts of cloth, and clothes from many a mansion closet. Two barrels of green cane molasses, a tank of gasolene, a few fine pieces of furniture, some old beveled mirrors, several paintings, a case of beautifully bound books, three baby-carriages, a mile or two of handy-line or half-inch rope, bedding, and carpenter tools were among the things discovered. But most valuable of all was a trunk which held at least a hundred pounds of silver tableware, thrown in helter-skelter and doubtless intended for the melting-pot.
"Can we make it out to-night?" the sheriff asked Sibley.
"I don’t think we’d better try," the boy replied. "This boat is drawing two or three feet of water. She lies deep with all this cargo. We might stave a hole in the bottom, and she would sink from the weight of the hardware. By daylight we’d have some chance of seeing which way they towed into this snug berth."
"That is what I was thinking," the man admitted. "We’ll have to turn in here. There isn’t much danger of any one being cold with all these blankets!"
"Some one will have to keep watch," Sibley suggested. "They might come slipping back, looking for one of the boats."
"We’ll stand watch and watch, every one having an hour on duty," and so it was ordered.
Sibley was given the first trick, Jimmy the second, and after that the sheriff and his men were to be called, one by one.
Sibley … went up on the roof … to watch for the pirates
CHAPTER IX
SIBLEY TAKES COMMAND
SIBLEY, with a repeating twelve-gage shotgun loaded with BB shot, went up on the roof of the house-boat to watch for the pirates in case any of them should venture to try to recover one of the motor-boats or other craft which they had abandoned so precipitately.
Owls hooted at intervals; wild geese, flying overhead on their way north, showered the flood with the music of their hoarse voices; a wild turkey called from a tree at some distance from the house-boat; a tree swaying on loose roots in the current that flowed out of the foot of Reelfoot Lake through the Shakes, as this part of the bottoms was called, sawed a branch against another tree with a screaming, fiddling sound; a low undertone, part noise, part shuddering of the wilderness in the current of the inundation, filled the night with sensation which was thrilling to the brave youth.
At the end of an hour Sibley awakened Jimmy and gave him the gun. Five minutes later Sibley was sound asleep, while Jimmy went about the decks, over the roof, and along the narrow running-board which he found on each side of the house-boat, at the deck level. He, too, listened to the throbbing of the flood as it ran through the standing timber, shaking the trees and eddying around the trunks with low whispering chuckles and the swishing of twigs and branches dragging through the surface.
The pirates did not return, however. They knew better than to try to raid the posse. Having lost the thousands of dollars’ worth of things stolen from abandoned houses and stores, they did not dare risk a fight which would probably mean injury or loss of liberty. They had lost not only what they had stolen but all their own launches, arms, and supplies. The only thing they could do was go out into the river, drop down to some refugee camp, and beg for something to eat.
Before dawn the members of the posse were up and cooking breakfast from provisions they found on board—bacon, ham, even a crate of eggs! As soon as it was light enough to see plainly, the two launches which the pirates had used were made fast, one on each side of the house-boat. Then Sibley’s boat was laid across the bow of the boat, and made fast there.
On Sibley’s suggestion, long lines were run to trees near by, and with the aid of these the men warped the house-boat around so that its bow was headed down the current in the bayou. As it swung there in the two-mile current, Sheriff Tainell turned to Sibley and said:
"Well, Captain, when you’re ready we’ll cut loose and trip down this bayou!"
"What! Why?" Sibley exclaimed.
"You’re off the river, and you know more about boats than all the rest of us, I know," Tainell smiled. "Tell us what to do, and we’ll do it!"
Sibley hesitated, but only for a minute. He had helped to navigate a raft down a narrow creek, and he had managed a small shanty-boat many times. He had often assumed responsibility when the need demanded. He had never been in command of men before, but working with the boys, and, especially driving into the crevasse flood, he had learned self-confidence.
"All right, Sheriff, if you say so!" he said, with the skin tightening around his lips. "Let go the stern-line, please! Start the motors!"
The rope which was snubbed around a timber head was released and one end started up the current and around the tree as two men hauled in the other. The house-boat started, with all three of the motors running, the gears in neutral.
The bayou wound in and out, twisting in almost complete circles. The current, holding the same direction through the trees, threatened at one bend to carry the boats against the woods to the right, and in the next it seemed as though they would crash into the tall gray columns on the left. But Sibley had Jimmy, in the "bug," as the launch across the how was called, throw the propeller into reverse, or ahead, so that that end of the house-boat was thrown to right or left according to the drive of the propeller. The two boats on the sides served to hold the house-boat back when both were in reverse gear, or to turn when one was in reverse, the other driving ahead.
Sibley, standing on the cabin roof, watched the current ahead. The three in the motor boats listened keenly for his quick orders, and obeyed on the instant. Drifting astern in a skiff, with a big coil of inch-line in it, one end of which was fast to a timber-head on the stern deck, were the sheriff and another man, ready to rush to a tree and make fast, if need be to snub up the house-boat and keep it from crashing into the trees down the steady, powerful current.
They floated down, always slower than the current and often just making headway as Sibley held off the woods in bends, but in straight reaches, of which there were several hundreds of yards long, he drove faster, with the boat hugging the up-current side.
"Snub her!" he shouted, suddenly, and Sheriff Tainell bent the ash oars of the skiff, rowed to a ten-inch gum-tree thirty feet distant, and took a double loop around it. The line snapped up with a loud, fiddle-string twang, but it was new rope and did not break with the weight suddenly sprung against it.
Sibley, standing tense, at the wheel of the launch watched the fleet swing slowly to the left. Not ten feet ahead, as they looked, the men saw the black nub of a snag as it sawed up out of the current.
"Ease!" Sibley called, and the sheriff let the line slip; the big launch, backing, carried the boats clear and they floated on down-stream. Sibley flanked a sharp, swift bend by sending the sheriff with his handy-line down to a tree on the point, where, having made fast, he took in the slack till the boat was in the turn. There the handy-line held the stern of the boat and the bow swung around, a few yards from the trees in the narrow way.
The Obion River was wider than the bayou, and they ran down it to its mouth without much difficulty. There they were obliged to anchor the big craft, in the shelter of the woods. No boat could be towed up the Mississippi with that mass of black drift running. Accordingly, Sheriff Tainell left three men on board to guard it until the craft could be moved down to Caruthersville, or up to New Madrid or Tiptonville, to await the making of an inventory of the stolen goods and the advertising necessary to bring their owners to identify the recaptured booty.
Leaving one of the launches with the house-boat, the sheriff took one for his posse and Sibley drove his own up the river, in and out among the fleets of drift. Thus they arrived at Tiptonville. There was no rest for the boys there. Mr. Kalas had organized the refugee camp at Tiptonville, and he now left it in charge of the state troops, who had been summoned to guard property and keep order in the river towns and settlements.
"I’m taking you away from home, boys," he said. "As soon as you’ve filled your tank with gasolene and taken on a stock of oil, we’ll have to be moving on! It’s an emergency, and you’re needed! The sheriff tells me you are the greatest pilots ever. We’ll see! I hear that your partner’s looking after a baby you picked up."
"Yes," Sibley said.
"Well, they’ll be all right, there in New Madrid. We’ll go down to Caruthersville. The place used to be called Little Prairie, in the old days, but people hated to keep that name: you see, it isn’t sufficiently up-to-date. Some day they’ll have to change the name of this creek. Mississippi is an Indian name, you know. Really, it isn’t dignified. Davis River would sound pretty nice, or Jefferson Flow. I believe it’s ’most time to make a change; the only trouble is, what to call it. When I hit a name that sounds just right I’ll put it onto the next map I draw, and—my!—won’t people be surprised and glad!"
He chuckled, under his breath, and the two boys looked at him. They didn’t know exactly what to think, but somehow, as they looked at the great flood, they felt what a fine thing it was that it had the name it had, and they saw, at last, that what the old river-man had said was really meant as a protest against changing the picturesque and significant names of places to something that suggests nothing and means nothing to seers of maps.
"It’s a sight!" Kalas said, looking out over the driftwood as they worked through it. "It’s a big flood, and she’s going higher than any flood we’ve ever had! About all the stock that grazed out on the bottom below Reelfoot levee have been drowned. A woman walked twelve miles to Hickman, up the levee, with six children—one in her arms—and after she’d got by, the levee broke. Over at Ridgley there’s a big colony out of those bottoms. More have come to Tiptonville; and wherever there’s a levee, people are perched on it. Over on Crowley’s Ridge, which is two hundred feet high or so, there are thousands and thousands of people; and they’re swimming cattle over to it. Those Swamp Angels call that ridge the Poor Man’s Levee. Everybody that owns land in there which is ten or twenty feet underwater, on account of a levee crevasse, is wondering what profit he got out of the taxes he paid to build those levees. Sand and gravel will ruin much land."
He could talk to the boys. Among men, among the Up-the-Bankers and land-owners, he would not talk, except on the stand and under oath—and then he was sparing with his words. But these youths who had stepped into the river work, who knew and liked the river, who were unafraid in the drift, and who had no big ideas to back up, regardless of the facts or theory—he could talk to them! Many a man would rather talk to intelligent boys than to the wisest men in the world.
The levee for miles along the front above and below Caruthersville was swarming with refugees, workers, guards, and sight-seers. The water behind the levee was twelve or fifteen feet lower than in front of it. The big gap up at Point Pleasant, where the skeptical land-owners had refused to have levees cutting their farms in two, with the best acres rendered worthless outside the protection, was pouring down acres of water, yards deep. But only two or three feet of water was a good deal better than ten or fifteen feet, rushing through a crevasse in a raging torrent. A dozen levee sections were in peril. Those at Golden Lake, Pecan Point, Lambville, Mound City, and Holly Bush were all struggling with the relentless pressure of the coiling, insidious, penetrating waters. Mr. Kalas landed at Caruthersville and walked along the top of the levee, studying it, stamping on it, and listening to the sound it made, feeling the very texture of the fill.
"Still holding," he said to the boys. "Its shoulder is against the shove of the river! But look at the way the flood comes worming and squirming down along that waterfront! We’ll go on down—"
"I want to mail a letter," Sibley said, and Kalas took the sheet of paper the boy offered him, put it into an envelop, and sealed it. Sibley addressed the envelope to Mr. Carruth.
"You’re on government business, now," Kalas smiled as he gave the envelop to a section guard, who sent it over to the post office. "Now we’ll go on down. We’ve just begun!"
CHAPTER X
KALAS PICKS HIS HELPERS
ON government business!" Sibley stared at Mr. Kalas in astonishment.
Sibley had done well the work that had appeared for him to do. With Jimmy he had braved the overflow, dared the drift, gone through the Reelfoot crevasse, and then had undertaken to pilot Mr. Kalas down the flood; but it had been merely a case of going from one task to another. Never had he been under greater strain than when bringing the captured pirate boat down the bayou. There had been moments of excitement, long hours of weary endurance and care, and occasions for quick, irrevocable decisions. Now the man whose big hands had toiled for years on river work, and who had told his doings in the annual reports, had somehow read through the unspoken hope in Sibley’s heart and said:
"You’re on goverment business, now!"
What did it mean? Sibley could not ask the question. He had to think that matter out for himself. Was taking Mr. Kalas down the river government business?
Of course it was. The services of Sibley and Jimmy had been requisitioned, and their knowledge of the river used. The good motor-boat had had a good deal to do with it. But Sibley felt that there was something more to the quiet remark Kalas had made. The engineer was a tall, grim, gnarly man, who sometimes looked at people sideways, and smiled, and who sometimes looked at Old Mississip out of the corners of his eyes—and smiled—and who said things without smiling that made one feel warm and happy for half a day.
By and by Kalas grinned a little.
"When you are helping somebody else, in times like these especially, it’s government business. We drop all our own little personal affairs, and everybody, black and white, young and old, turns to tasks for the common good. You don’t know the names of half the people you brought out of the overflow yesterday, do you?"
"Why, no!" the two youths admitted with quick surprise.
"Exactly. We’re working night and day for people we never have seen, nor heard of, and never shall see again, probably. It’s often that way with big work; the best you do is often for people who don’t know you did it. Just look down that reach!"
They had dropped below Caruthersville and turned the bend. They could see fifteen miles straightaway down-stream in the clearing air. Five miles away were some flickering branches in midstream—the trees of the towhead of Island No. 18, all submerged except the tops. The black drift rested on the surface, in a long wavering line that flickered in the daylight.
Stopping the motor, to drift in a closed pool, waiting for an opening through the drift, they floated in silence that was broken by the cheery songs of birds in trees along shore—yellow hammers, robins, orioles, jays, mocking-birds, and many others. These song-birds were piping away with their heads thrown back in an ecstasy of spring joy, in sharp contrast to the terror of a million humans caused by the frightful flood.
Spring green was in the tree-tops, and many fruit-trees were blossoming. The fragrance of the flowers floated in waves out over the flood, and it seemed almost as though in the presence of the magnificent display of Nature’s power, the river-rise, there ought to be full happiness instead of discomfort and actual suffering and deadly peril.
"If it wasn’t for that little dirt bank over there," Kalas said to his companions, pointing to the levee, "we’d like this sight, wouldn’t we?"
"There’s an awful lot of it!" Jimmy exclaimed, awed.
"Yes, sir—kind of introduction to what will come, some day, when instead of three little floods out of the Missouri, upper Mississippi, and Ohio valleys we have three maximum floods meet at Cairo and sweep down through here! That’s what we old river engineers are thinking about. Suppose the river goes to forty-five feet at St. Louis, instead of around thirty-odd, where it is now; suppose the Ohio goes to seventy-five feet at Louisville, instead of forty five or fifty; suppose both those maximums come down to Cairo. Sho-o-o! How high would the levees have to be to hold it? Why, there isn’t a hydraulic engineer in the world who would dare to tell you! And if the Missouri sand and gravel are filling up the lower river-bottoms, the way some claim—um-m!"
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The idea of puny humans having the ambition to put that mass of water in a strait-jacket!
"But we’re going to do the job!" he suddenly declared grimly. "We keep gaining. It’s only once in a while we lose nowadays. I don’t believe there’ll be more than two dozen crevasses this year! And this year we’ll not have to abandon more than five million cubic yards of levee, on account of cavings and washing out and new projects and changed river régime. The people will see after a while that spending two hundred million dollars to prevent damage like this—which may amount to fifty million dollars this year—would be a good investment at an average expenditure of ten to thirty millions a year. There’s one thing certain: if you don’t throw Old Mississip and put him flat on his back, he’ll throw you—same as he’s doing this year!"
He talked in enormous figures, and they seemed small enough as the boys saw the thing those figures related to. He told them that two million cubic feet of water was pouring down with them, every second. They knew that they were part of the great spring tide phenomenon; they were in the scene, and never had they felt so much a part of anything as at that moment they felt a part of the river. Kalas gave them the idea.
"We’ve our parts to do, boys;" he said solemnly. "I could have gone down in one of the big steamers, of course, but you want to get down close to the water, in a motor-boat or a skiff, to get the feel of it, and to learn what the big brute has on his mind. They’re afraid of that levee over there, but there the pressure isn’t so bad, in proportion, as in some other places. About seventy or eighty miles below here let the people look out! But there are some weak places right over here. You see, the best land’s right up next to the river bank. They build the levee close to the bank, and then the water sipes under, or it overtops; or it just opens a passage like a pair of folding doors. Then there are people who have to be taken care of, too. Um-m! You’ve no idea what a lot there is to some of these things. Over there’s Duer County. It’s all woods. The people on the west side can build their levee right up to the river bank, and we can revet it, to keep it from caving, but that crowds the current over into those woods, there, and wears away those banks—and look at it! See that current coming out of the woods over there? Well, that’s where Reelfoot crevasse waters are coming through Reelfoot Lake, through the Scatters.
"They’ve brought their guns," Kalas remarked, as the night watch of the levees came on duty. "If they hadn’t, that levee wouldn’t last through the next night, because somebody would blow—um-m! Jimmy, I wonder if you’ll do something for me."
"Yes, sir!"
"I knew you would. I want to know what some people are talking about down below a way. We’ll be across pretty quick. A friend of mine’s in a shanty-boat over in those trees at Rosa Lee landing. We’ll run in there. Then you’ll go over on the levee and walk down to Badoria. Talk around among the little chaps, and see what they say about the levee holding. Find out if they think their levee is stronger than that one across the river, and if they have any ideas about it. You understand?"
"Yes, sir. I’ve been on the river a long time, Mr. Kalas," Jimmy said, "and I guess I know what you want. You want to find out if those Badoria fellows, or any of them, just hate the levee across the river."
"Saw right through me, didn’t you?" Kalas laughed. "That’s another reason I wanted to drop down with you. But remember, if they’ve a scheme on foot, and they know you know it, and that you’re a friend of mine—"
"I understand," Jimmy nodded. "I’ll go down."
"Here’s some money, if—"
"I have sixty-nine dollars in my money-belt," Jimmy grinned, "from drift I caught myself, or whacked up with Jep."
"You are all right, aren’t you?" Kalas exclaimed, staring at the youth.
They managed to drive over as they ran down the crossing from Gold Dust into the foot of Ashport Bar Chute. Up inside the old levee they found shanty-boats moored in the cotton field bay, and Jimmy clambered out on the old levee and started off with his coat collar up, his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders humped over—for all the world like a homeless refugee.
Kalas made the boat fast to the stern of a shanty-boat, and with Sibley went over to look at the levee up the line. Kalas opened a book he carried, which contained inch-to-the-mile maps of the Mississippi. Sheet No. 5 covered the place where they had landed in, and the red levee line was shown coming straight down through Mississippi County, Arkansas, until within five miles above Round Lake landing. There the red line swerved toward the river, making a reverse curve more than two miles out toward Ashport Bar, right up to Island No. 28 Chute. A straight levee would have been five miles long across that section; but about nine miles of protection had been built, so as to surround about four miles naturally outside the levee line.
"You see that?" Kalas pointed to the great loop. "There’s a lot of caving bend in Canadian Reach, and by and by it’ll come down to that levee in the woods. I wonder why they built the levee out that way. There are many things down the river we can’t explain, yet, but I want to tell you there’s strategy in the way levees are located. If we built them according to the best way to hold the river floods, and protect the land and at least expense, there’d be more war with local levee boards and politicians and land-owners, and—well, and everything! You can’t go ahead just exactly the way you want to, but must consider the power of certain people and follow the line of least resistance."
When they had walked six or seven miles up and down the levee, Kalas took Sibley into one of the house-boats and they had a river supper with the shanty-boater, a short, chunky river-man who could cook as well as a woman, and who listened more than he talked, at first.
"Any news around?" Kalas asked.
"No." The man shook his head. "A few thousand head of cattle drowned out in the bottoms, and a shot-gun levy on labor to make ’em work, and everybody sure the levee is going to break if something isn’t done."
"That’s all, eh?"
"Everything worth mentioning."
"What do they think ought to be done to prevent a break?"
"I value my life," the shanty-boater grinned.
CHAPTER XI
JIMMY VERAINE ON SECRET SERVICE
JIMMY VERAINE, going down the levee, passed guards and little groups of men and women who were watching the river, and who paid no attention to him as he went by. If any one had seen him get out of the boat Mr. Kalas had arrived in, nobody thought anything of it. Certainly, no word reached Badoria of his having come with Kalas.
This little settlement behind the levee was raw and weather-beaten. Water that had siped through the levee or fallen in rains or come back from the overflow in the brakes stood in the level bottoms, with scarcely a bit of ground showing above it. The houses, built on piles and high foundations, were above the flood. People went around in hip-boots or in skiffs, according to their circumstances.
Reaching the Badoria section, Jimmy felt the sullen suspicion of some of the people who noticed him. He glowered as surlily as the least pleasant of the levee-roosters. He was stopped at last by a burly, scowling man.
"Where you goin’?" the man demanded.
"I’m off the river," Jimmy answered. "I was tore up, and I ’lowed maybe I’d get a snack down thisaway."
"We got all we can tend to, without feedin’ a lot o’ river-rats," the man said.
"I wondered if a river-rat wouldn’t be good for somethin’, seein’ ’s there’s so much river around," Jimmy said, insolently.
"Hi-i!" the man laughed. "River-rats is all that’s got much show now!"
Jimmy made no comment. The man gazed at him sharply for a minute or two, considering, then turned and walked down the levee to a little group standing on the top, talking in low tones. Jimmy waited. Kalas had sent him down there to find out what men like this one were thinking and talking about. He had assumed the manner of a homeless, reckless river boy, and the man had instantly recognized the type he was portraying.
By and by, a big man beckoned to Jimmy, who strolled over to the little group. They were gruff, husky fellows and as he looked at their faces Jimmy realized the kind of men they were. A little way beyond them were an other kind of men in another group—"honorble citizens" Jimmy called them in his thoughts.
"Off the river, eh?" the man demanded.
"Yas, suh!" Jimmy admitted.
"Always lived on the river?"
"Oh, I been to St. Louis, an’ Louisville, and around," Jimmie replied, in the bored manner of a river pirate.
"Makin’ easy money?"
"I make a livin’," Jimmy retorted, "but I never found an easy one."
"That’s right!" some one chuckled.
"Lookin’ for a job'!"
"I never found one I didn’t look for."
Jimmy shrugged his shoulders.
"Maybe there’s one comin’ to you."
"I ain’t seen hit yet!"
The men laughed shortly, and overloud.
"You-all partic’lar about what you do!" one asked in a low voice.
"Yas, suh; I’m partic’lar. What I want’s a job that ain’t too hard work, an’ which has enough spondulics into hit to pay my time and trouble."
Still the men hesitated. They studied the river lad sharply, and in silence. They looked at one another, while Jimmy nonchalantly looked at the river. These men had something on their minds. Mr. Kalas wanted to know about them. At once Jimmy had found that the people were in a desperate frame of mind, and he had seen river pirates in a swaggering mood, needed for criminal work and waiting for their price.
"Take ’im home, Talkron," one suggested. "Give ’im a snack."
"Come on, you!" Talkron ordered, and Jimmy went down the back of the levee and into a clinker-built skiff with the man, who rowed him into the settlement of Badoria.
They entered a yard, through the gateway in the fence, and tied the boat to a gallery post of a little house. Inside, a wan, worried woman greeted them:
"The levee goin’ to hold, Drurin?"
"I bet hit’ll hold," the man declared. "Set up a snack for us, Jane."
He went out into the kitchen with her, and talked in a low voice. When he returned, he sat down and talked to Jimmy, asking him question after question,—where he was from, where his people were, what he did for a living. Jimmy evaded all the questions by giving answers that were half truth.
"You see," the man said cautiously at last, "us folks on this side the river are all pore folks. I got some cattle back there in the bottoms, an’ if we overflow, they drown. That big feller, he’s got a lot o’ cattle, too, an’ he’ll be a pore man if the levee breaks. Besides, there’s all our fam’lies and chilluns. You can see we’re worried a lot. What use’d it be to build our levee away up, an’ them fellers on yon side with a new levee an’ lots o’ money an’ workin’ the way they be to keep hit from overtoppin’?"
"Rich fellers always has the highest levees," Jimmy suggested.
"An’ poor fellers on t’ other side—look what they got!"
Jimmy could hardly keep from laughing. From Badoria to Gumbo few volunteers appeared on the levees to help fight the rising waters in the time of high tide. Up and down the river, people said that Badoria was hard hit by the hook-worm, and was too lazy to help itself.
"They’re a tricky set, down thataway, and mean!" river people said.
"Some of us has got together," the man went on cautiously, "to see ’f we couldn’t do some thin’. We kind o’ chipped in together, us fellers you was talking to, to get somebody to hep us out. We need somebody that’s a lot o’ nerve. You’re a smart-lookin’ kid, quick-actin’. Likely you’d open up yer eyes at a chanst to earn—ah—fifty cart-wheels, eh?"
"There’s some jobs pays bigger," Jimmy sniffed, and the call to the snack gave the man a chance to revise his estimate of the river youth.
"Maybe it’d be a hundred—two hundred," the man hinted darkly.
"What for?" Jimmy demanded bluntly.
"Why, you see, if that levee over theh should happen to break—why that’d lower the water on this side the river two-three feet, prob ’bly, and then we’d be safe."
"An’ anybody done that—if I considered that," Jimmy said scornfully, "they’d shoot me, er they’d put me in jail for a thousand years!"
"But—’course! They’s mean over that side the river," Talkron admitted. "But—hit wouldn’t take but a minute, in the fog. You’re off the river! You know how to use fog—and night!"
"I ben out in the fog," Jimmy said.
"We’d look after you!" the man exclaimed. "We got a lot o’ people around here—our kind! We looks after our friends! Look’t!"
He held up his hand and counted off seven or eight names, cotton-raisers, cattle-men, land owners, and the like, he said. It was a little clique, and though a moment before he had been pleading the poverty of the Badoria side of the river, now he discoursed on how they would take care of their friends.
Jimmy listened. This was something to know—this list of men conspiring to hire some one to destroy the levee on the other side of the river, in order to save themselves from the consequences of their own failure to go to work and make an honest fight against the flood. Jimmy nodded his head wisely, and after supper he went up on the levee with the man.
Eagerly Talkron’s cronies gathered around. They whispered without disguise now. They told Jimmy all about how he could go over to the other side and break the levee; they told him where to strike, and what to do. They said they’d give him everything to work with—dynamite, fuses, and all the rest. They told him where they had the things stored, and that they would have used them long before, but they didn’t know the river well enough themselves, and they thought it would be better for some one from somewhere else to do the actual work.
They patted Jimmy on the shoulder, and praised him, as evil men do when they want some youngster to do something they are too cowardly to do themselves and yet by which they expect and long to profit. Jimmy listened, made clever replies to comment, and then said:
"I got the idea. I heard likely there’d be somethin’ down thisaway for a man to do and prob’bly you’ll hear from me again, see?"
"Good! Say—that’ll be fine! Here’s good faith money onto it."
Jimmy hesitated. There was the evidence, binding him to the bargain—and binding them. It was a roll of damp, dirty bank-bills, and a stack of silver,—one hundred dollars in all. Jimmy counted the money.
"You can look for me, to-morrow, if not to-night," he said, tucking the money into a five-pound sugar bag—of which he carried several in which to "tote" purchases—and went back up the levee in the gathering night. He had not dared refuse this evidence of a wicked plot.
Jimmy plodded up the spur levee, and saw the motor-launch swinging from the stern of the shanty-boat. He went out and hailed the boat, and when the door opened he saw Kalas sitting with Sibley before a warm fire.
"I want to talk to Mr. Kalas," Jimmy said, and when the engineer came out on the levee, Jimmy told what had taken place. He gave the engineer the hundred dollars in bills and coin.
"They paid you good-faith money—a hundred dollars!" Kalas gasped. "They sure are anxious down there, aren’t they! Well—leave it to me."
Kalas went over to the main levee, ran down the back slope to a skiff, and rowed out into the bottoms, to a commissary. There he called a landing by telephone, and talked for a time about the flood, and raiders in the swamps, and other things which every one was talking about. But in what he said was a cryptic phrase full of meaning.
He returned to the shanty-boat and sat a long time without speaking, while the shanty boater played his victrola. At half-past eight o’clock Jimmy and Sibley made a bed in the launch bottom, and Kalas lay down to rest on a folding cot in the shanty-boater’s cabin.
Before daybreak a motor-boat ran down the river and swung in to the landing. Two rough men were in it, and they whispered with Kalas a while. Then they went out and brought Jimmy in to talk. Pretty soon Jimmy and the two men went on down the river, in the men’s semi-cruiser motor-boat, and they landed at Badoria just at daybreak.
"Hello, you!" some one greeted Jimmy. "These your pals!"
"Yas, suh," Jimmy nodded.
"Come," the man beckoned, and they all went down the back of the levee and rowed over to a house. They hailed the occupants, and were quickly admitted. Others were sent for, and the group around the stove was augmented by new arrivals, until all the chairs and several boxes were occupied.
Talkron and the big fellow did most of the talking, in low whispers. They were willing to pay well, and they wanted a good job done; they would furnish the tools, and they brought in a box of dynamite to prove it. They had a lot of fuse, too, and they told how the stuff could be sunk at a certain critical point, and how the explosion would surely open up that levee on the other side, like barn-doors.
It was a villainous idea. All they had to do was to destroy the work of the energetic and capable people across the flood, and the pressure would be relieved on their own side. Down on the Arkansas River dynamite had lately been used with great success, by people who had the nerve.
"We’re willin’ to pay for it, too!" Talkron declared, showing the money.
The two rough men took charge, now, and Jimmy saw and heard the bargain made, saw the dynamite and tools and fuse delivered, heard the "Good lucks!" and final instructions. He heard the chuckle of the conspirators as they thought how they would be benefited though they knew that their own neighbors, reputable people, would rather have their very homes destroyed than profit by crimes of river desperadoes working for cowards, for hire.
Jimmie and his companions returned to the levee, and went aboard their own launch. Casting off and turning out into the river, they steered around, up-stream, and out of sight in the gray day. That night, the Badoria people, who knew what was expected, listened for the explosion,—the roar that would spell safety for themselves and disaster for the victims on the other side of the river.
They heard no such roar. Some looked out into the night. They were sure it was a good night for the "job." They waited in vain for the destruction of the levee over the way. In the middle of the morning a big steamer appeared out of the upper river, and stepped off shore from the levee, and two or three boat loads of men came ashore. These men went around among the bystanders and touched certain of them on the shoulders.
"You’re wanted," they said. "Don’t make any fuss. Arrested on charge of conspiracy to break a levee."
Some protested; some merely turned gray with terror. And well they might be frightened.
Meanwhile Kalas, with Sibley and Jimmy, had gone down past Badoria, without stopping, to Luxora, where the engineer took a look along the levee and examined the loops and main levees, to make sure everything was being done there as it should be.
"We’re riding the crest down," he told the two, as they ran out into the flood clear of the levee. And then with one of his big laughs he turned to Sibley.
"We’ll have to watch this fellow here!" he said, with a nod toward Jimmy. "He’s a regular detective."
"Why—that’s so!" Jimmy gasped. "I—I never thought of it!"
Then the three laughed together. One learns to be many things, has many adventures down the Mississippi—and doesn’t know it till afterward!
CHAPTER XII
JEP FORESTALLS AN ADOPTION
“WELL, Driftwood!" Jepson Veraine remarked to his charge, "seems to me we’re a pretty happy family. What do you think about it?"
Driftwood opened wide his blue eyes and smiled a reflection of the bright face of his companion and care-taker. Raising both his hands, he rocked and bounced about, and Jep picked him up.
"Now, let’s see," Jepson considered: "these little chaps have got to have fussin’ and fixin’. I’d better wrap somethin’ around him, and I’d better put somethin’ on his head. That’ll fix him right!"
He slipped Driftwood feet first into a cotton meal-bag and tied the string about the baby’s waist. Then over the little fellow’s ears he pulled the knitted woolen cap he had worn the day the boys found him.
"There!" Jep remarked. "He won’t take cold now." Jep drew on a pair of long-legged rubber boots belonging to Mr. Carruth; then, with Driftwood in his arms, he went over the bow of the shanty-boat, and waded up the street toward the shops, to make some purchases. He needed provisions, extra clothes for Driftwood, and some one to tell him the news. Jep had waited patiently, expecting Sibley and Jimmy to return in a day or two at the latest. But neither appeared, and the next he knew they were reported by river gossip to have gone down across Slough Neck, and to be working for Mr. Kalas of the River Commission.
"We’re plumb orphaned!" Jep declared. "I don’t care; do you, kid?"
The kid laughed aloud. Perhaps he had never before had a big, jolly person of his own sex, and only two or three times his own size, to play with. Jep seemed to know all about drift babies and what they needed in the way of amusement, care, and food. Other shanty-boaters along that bayou mooring remarked that Jepson Veraine sure took to it naturally.
River women came over and offered their services, and Jep was very glad of all the advice they gave him, and their warnings about what babies should and shouldn’t eat. Some said one thing, and some another, and Jep, taking his own counsel, and remembering his mother’s ideas regarding her babies, struck an average. And as the women exclaimed, "How well he looks!" Jep felt pretty safe, though he didn’t try any experiments to speak of.
As he waded around into the main street, two city women passed him in a skiff driven by an out-board motor. They stared when they saw Driftwood and one of them exclaimed:
"Why, what a lovely baby!"
They steered their boat around, and asked Jep to show them the baby. Jep was proud of Driftwood, and didn’t mind having the ladies smile at him. He had the feeling, too, that probably Driftwood needed more or less of the company of ladies, anyhow, to keep him from growing up too rough and independent.
"Mercy!" one of the ladies exclaimed. "What in the world have you got on this child?"
"Just a meal-bag," Jep replied. "He didn’t have enough o’ his own things, and it’s chillin’ a bit, to-day, so I bagged ’im."
"I should say you did! Is he your brother?"
"No." Jep shook his head. "We found him, Sib, Jimmy, and me did, trippin’ down the Mississippi in his own ark. It was a wooden baby-buggy. So, ’course, we took him in with us."
"Just boys," the woman gasped, "taking care of this beautiful baby!"
"He ain’t the first one I’ve took care of," Jep replied, tartly. "I’ve helped raise lots of kids."
"Do you live in New Madrid?"
"No; I’m from Meramec River."
"Oh, a shanty-boater!"
"No, ma’am," Jep replied blandly: "We live in a cabin-boat."
"Oh!" the two women exclaimed, looking at each other, and exchanging glances full of meaning.
"This child ought to have the best of care!" one said.
"He’s gettin’ it," Jep declared stoutly.
"Do you give the baby paregoric, or any other opiatical compound?" the other woman asked keenly.
"I take such good care of him I don’t have to have any dope for him," Jep replied, feeling that a net was being spread for him.
"Just you boys alone taking care of him?" the first woman asked.
"Oh, my, no!" Jep shook his head. "We’ve—we’ve four ladies visits him every day, mornin’ an’ afternoon—reg’1ar,—besides two—two that’s grandmothers."
"But he isn’t yours."
"I’m just keepin’ him for his folks," Jep replied. "I’m goin’ up-town now, to buy some milk and things for him. Is there any good milk place here?"
"Why—I believe he does know!" one looked at the other.
"It’s awful!" Jep remarked. "You know what changing a baby’s milk does to him. It’s pretty near time to feed him again. I use condensed milk just now, as it’s more reg’lar. But if I could find some good real milk, I’d try him on that. But I reckon milk’s tol’able scarce, now, in the overflow. Well, good-day ladies!"
"You live in that shanty-boat down there at the end of this street?"
"Yes," Jep answered, and waded away with Driftwood.
For a little while the two women held their boat to a hitching-rail, talking with significant earnestness, and Jep, having bought a few sup plies, slipped down a side street, and cut across to his shanty-boat. Those two women didn’t seem to think much of boys, as a general proposition, for taking care of babies.
"Sibley and Jim’d never let up on me, if I let any o’ these Up-the-Bankers grab Driftwood!" Jep thought to himself. "I bet those women’d like to git him themselves. I guess I’d better do some thinkin’ on my own hook. Take a woman, and she sees anybody with an awful nice baby, and she don’t think much of who’s got it, and you can’t tell what she’ll do about it. I’ll take a little trip, and find out."
He cast off the lines of his shanty-boat and drifted out clear of the mooring-place, and then rowed with the long sweeps toward the main Mississippi. Often, when a shanty-boater gets tired of having to watch the big river, he’ll go away back somewhere, but when it begins to look a bit dubious around, a river-man heads right for the main Mississippi channel, just as Jepson Veraine was doing.
It was growing dark, and if any one noticed what he was up to, nothing was said to him. River people mind their own business. Having found another mooring, he made a one-line hitch. Driftwood was sound asleep, his little stomach comfortably full, and Jep, looking the stove over to make sure that the boat was safe, slipped up-town.
Sure enough! Passing the city judge’s house, he saw the town marshal’s launch tied to the front porch, and heard two women talking, inside, in earnest voices.
"Now be sure, Marshal!" one urged. "You must rescue that baby! Why, the little darling has the sweetest face I’ve ever seen! He’s just a baby of the overflow, and probably his people aren’t anybody in particular, but he’s beautiful! And I want him. I must have him!"
"Indeed! The idea of a river-rat having a baby like that to look after! Just a little boy, too, and he talked as he’d heard women talk, about milk for babies, and that sort of thing. Why, being brought up in those surroundings would—Why, you couldn’t tell what it would do to a baby like that!"
"You say he’s around on the bayou—"
"Yes, in a shanty-boat, right there at the foot of Cypress Log Street."
"What color boat?"
"Lemon yellow."
"I’ll sure bring that baby right away!" the marshal declared stoutly, and started for his boat.
Jepson could not run in the water, and he knew better than to try. Instead, whistling cheerfully, he strolled nonchalantly along the sidewalk deeply overflowed. He heard the marshal’s motor start, and, glancing back, saw the dark bulk of the launch approaching.
"Have a ride, boy?" the marshal asked kindly.
"I’m only goin’ down three squares," Jep said.
"I’m turning down the second corner," the man said. "Jump in!"
Jep jumped in, rode to the corner, and then jumped out. For a moment he watched the launch as it started away, and then, plowing along as fast as he could, he went to his own shanty-boat and cast off the line.
"There ain’t much hurry," he said to himself gravely. "I’m glad those women thought the yellow boat was mine. I bet Mrs. Torkly and her man’ll sit up a-rearin’ when the marshal comes in with a baby requisition, and starts to take theirn! He didn’t know what those women was drivin’ at. Ho law! I bet Mr. Torkly’ll come pretty near shootin’ the marshal. That Torkly kid’s got black eyes, yellow cheeks, and a yell like a parrot. Driftwood’s worth two-three o’ that kind."
He eased his shanty-boat out into the current. The wind had blown the flotsam off the channel, and there was hardly any drift in midstream. Standing at his sweeps, Jep looked into the darkness down the river. He glanced up at the reflection of New Madrid’s lights on the sky. Then he laughed aloud.
"When them women see the baby the marshal requisitioned! I wish I could be there to hear ’em! Laws! lawsy! If I can find Sib and Jimmy, they’ll sure holler. Hey, Driftwood!"
Driftwood had awakened. He had sat up and looked around, and then rolled off the folding cot to the floor. When Jep saw him, the baby was just coming through the doorway onto the bow deck, on his hands and knees.
"Hold on, you!" Jep shouted, catching up the boy, who laughed with glee. "You’d be all wet if you fell overboard! Besides," he added gravely, "if you was to fall into Old Mississip prob’bly you’d crowd the water all over the levee-tops, and onto the bottoms, too! You’re an awful size, the way you fill up the wash-tub!"
Fetching a woolen blanket, Jep wrapped Driftwood in it and seated himself on the bow deck in the dark with the baby in his arms. The shanty-boat was now miles below New Madrid, but he didn’t want to take any chances on the sheriff or any one else pursuing him and Driftwood down the flood tide. He heard the water roaring through the levee gap above Point Pleasant, and then listened to the low murmuring and hissing of the over-bank current among the trees of longshore timber.
"No, sir!" Jep declared grimly; "no women is goin’ to take this Driftwood away from me! ’Course, if I couldn’t handle him and lick the stuffin’ out of him if he didn’t behave, and if I humored him about his eatin’s, not knowin’ any better, it’d be best for some female to have him. But seein’ as I know how to manage one o’ these little chaps myself, I just reckon I’ll hang onto him. ’Course, they meant all right by him, but, rightly, it takes a man to bring up a big fellow like this; hey, Driftwood?"
"Ya-goo!" Driftwood exclaimed, dancing by wriggling his back and raising his elbows.
"How does the panther kill the porcupine?" Jep demanded, as a matter of natural history information, and then answered: "Why, he bites him in the—" and Jep buried his face in the youngster, at the waist line, growling and shaking his head, and Driftwood chuckled and shouted with laughter.
Jepson looked about in the dark, shimmering night. The wind of the day had died into puffs of breeze, and no stars were in sight, although the surface of the river was luminous enough for masses of woods to be reflected, and occasional patches of drift to be revealed. From Jep’s shoulder, his arms around Jep’s neck, Driftwood looked about, too. The dark, the flood, the loneliness had no terrors for the baby who had floated down the river in the drift. Jep wondered who Driftwood was, and what had become of his parents. Sometimes, hugging Jep close, the baby looked around as though he wished some one else were there. At night, he would start up suddenly from his dreams wide awake, and cry for a little while, but when Jep talked to him he would quiet down and go back to sleep.
Jep wouldn’t give him up to strangers; he was running away from any such suggestion as that! But he could not help wishing the little fellow’s mother knew that her baby was safe, and that somehow they would be brought together again. Jep knew that if he should have to give up Driftwood, even to the mother, he would miss the brave and happy youngster.
They passed Point Pleasant. The last time Jep had been there he had seen a man tearing down a house and barn from before the wear of the caving bank. At the foot of the crossing, Tiptonville lights shone across the water from the streets and buildings. Pale yellow glows showed where tents had been erected in a regular town, and hundreds of refugees cared for. He could hear music, and so could Driftwood.
"Ay-ay-ay-ay!" Driftwood cried out, reaching toward the shore. "Da-da-da!"
It was a victrola, and Jep’s breath caught as he realized the significance of the baby’s desire to get ashore. He thought of running in there, but he knew that New Madrid would send word there to intercept him and capture the baby.
"If they was only his own folks!" Jep exclaimed. "But he ain’t from there! He’s from up in Illinois somewhere. Those buggy wheels were run on stone pavements, the way they’re worn. Dirt roads and wood walks don’t wear a buggy the way stone does."
Driftwood could not understand. When he saw the village lights disappearing, and heard the music growing fainter, he began to cry, and he clung to Jep’s neck, and Jep felt a lump in his own throat. He tried to tell the baby all about it, and Driftwood tried to understand, but tears were in his brave eyes, and he kept saying emphatically:
"Dada-da-da! Ma-ma-ma! Da-da!"
He threw his arms up, swelled out his chest, threw out his hands, and tipped back his head to speak those big syllables. Jep understood perfectly, and by the light he had lit on the table in the cabin he explained to Driftwood that they must find Jimmy and Sibley, and then go to Jep’s own father and to the father and mother of Sibley, away back up the river, and then tell everybody, all over Illinois, and Indiana, and Missouri, and everywhere that a great big chap known as Driftwood wanted his father and his mother, and wouldn’t they please come, and hurry up? for it was hard for so small a boy to have such a great, big, lonesome hollow inside him!
"I bet your mother and daddy are fine people!" Jep said to Driftwood. "It takes good, nice folks to have babies like you! Take a mother that’s kind and a reg’lar understander, and she’s sure to have a baby like Driftwood, who is brave and a game little sport! And that kind of a mother, that’s pretty and all smilin’, just naturally has married a man that’s strong and brave and behaves himself. I reckon you are quality folks, kid!"
The baby laughed and jumped as Jep expressed these sentiments, and it was so amusing that Jep nearly forgot his own supper. After supper, when Driftwood was once more asleep, Jep went out to look at the river. The water pouring out of the woods to the left was carrying the shanty-boat swiftly down mid-river—it was the overflow from Reelfoot crevasse—and they were far away from the woods on the right. They were booming down the middle of the Mississippi tide, in the gray night, and Jep’s heart was heavy as he pondered.
"I sure hope I get to find those pals o’ mine!" Jep thought. "I’ll run in, somewhere, and ask along. Somebody’s surely heard of Sib and Jimmy down here!"
He looked in the night for a light, or a sign of people. There was no glimmer of a lighted window or a lantern in any direction, up or down. It was as if the whole world had been covered by the flood, and Jep, with little shivers along his back, went inside.
He looked in the night for a light or a sign of people
CHAPTER XIII
AN ENIGMA
THE newspaper reports showed undiminished anxiety behind the levees, from Cairo to the Gulf. Everywhere hosts of men were fighting against the peril, which in some places grew more and more imminent, until, as at Reelfoot levee, the crevasse opened the way to disaster from which the people had hoped to protect themselves by enormous expenditure in heaping up banks of earth.
At Reelfoot, Sibley Carruth and Jimmy Veraine had won their way into the news by being first to go through the gap and rescuing the people in the immediate sweep of the torrent released from the main flood. The next day it was recorded that Kalas had requisitioned the river youths’ launch, and enlisted them to carry him down the river just ahead of the flood crest, to give the fighters along the line the benefit of his unrivaled river lore and experience.
Kalas had stopped at Tiptonville to consult with the captain of the National Guard company stationed there; he was spoken of as having stopped at Caruthersville, with the result that certain unsavory saloons had been closed so that honest lives need not be imperiled by the insanities due to liquor.
Knowing that Sibley and Jimmy were with Kalas, the Carruths were able to keep track of their son, through published reports of what the great engineer was doing, they were proud that Sibley’s ability to assume responsibility had won him notice and opportunity. When they were feeling reasonably safe about Sib the following news caused them new uneasiness:
BOY ESCAPES WITH BABE!
New Madrid—This city is greatly exercised over the sudden disappearance of a youth known as Jep Veraine, whose boat landed in on the Bayou several days ago. He had with him a very beautiful baby, with blue eyes, light hair, plump cheeks, and bearing every appearance of being a child of the very best breeding. He was seen by Mrs. Hatlet and her sister, Miss Tarwal, and they immediately took steps to adopt the child, and rescue it from the unnatural shanty-boat surroundings.
In some way, and probably to obtain the reward for rescuing the foundling from the drift, the boy Jep escaped from the landing. City Marshal Choper, when he went to serve a requisition and adoption papers, in behalf of the Children’s Society, unfortunately served them on the wrong boat, and incurred the wrath of Mr. and Mrs. Torkly, respectable river people whose baby he attempted to take away. Mr. Torkly held Mr. Choper up with a double-barreled shot-gun, and Mrs. Torkly threw him into the river.
Later, the affair was amicably adjusted in the city court, and notices were sent out to apprehend the two fugitives, Jep Veraine and the baby.
Neighboring shanty-boaters, including the Torklys, declare that the baby desired by the New Madrid ladies was found in a baby-carriage floating down the Mississippi in the drift, so it is a genuine foundling, and it will go hard with the youth who is keeping the child merely for a reward, accordng to the belief of the authorities. A reward of one hundred dollars had been offered by Mrs. Hatlet, who has no children of her own, and who desires to bring the child up in a manner becoming to so fine and likely a baby.
"Mercy!" Mrs. Carruth exclaimed, when Mr. Carruth had read the account aloud, "I’d almost forgotten about Jep and the baby! The idea of those boys trying to take care of a baby, anyhow! You’d think Jep would want to be rid of the little thing. He must be a perfectly dear boy, to want to take care of it! I hope he doesn’t get into any real trouble!"
"I’d better write to Mr. Veraine," Mr. Carruth said thoughtfully. "And I’m not sure but that we’d better go down there and take a hand in that matter ourselves. Why, they’ll run our cabin-boat clear down to New Orleans if we don’t stop them! If I’d been sure about the boat’s being at New Madrid, I’d have gone down there, of course. But, the way things are, I know the New Madrid people don’t want strangers coming in, making more mouths to feed, and more beds to furnish. I wonder where Jep will go."
"I wish we could find out whose baby it is they’ve found. I haven’t heard anything about a baby being missing," Mrs. Carruth observed.
"Oh, there have been a good many children separated from their parents." Mr. Carruth shook his head. "The boys just left the baby to Jep, so they could do rescue work. And Jep won’t give the baby up to any one."
"He’s grown fond of him, taking care of him," said Mrs. Carruth. "It often happens that way. People who take care of babies for parents find they love them as much as the parents do."
Boys were an enigma to Mrs. Carruth. She professed not to understand them at all. Sibley possessed for his mother the attraction not only of a good son, but of a fascinating puzzle, or rebus. How many boys would be interested in Mississippi River Commission Reports, and would pore over the "Summary of Cost" of a revetment, "Cost per Unit Statement," "Material per Unit Expended"?
She had worried a good deal lest Sibley should grow up in ignorance, because he lived on a shanty-boat and attended no school; but she had found time to teach him to read, write, and study. Without urging, he had accumulated an enormous fund of information about the river.
The government workers crossing the river, back and forth, heaving leads and signaling with flags from the banks, sending the tin cans afloat with markers on them, squinting through surveying instruments, measuring caving banks, and making notes in yellow-backed books about everything that was done, seemed to Sibley wonderfully endowed human beings, who were learning to know the Mississippi River, and who would at last shackle the mighty torrent in the service of mankind.
As Sibley talked about these things with his mother, his face would light up at the wonder of some one man’s idea going out to hundreds and thousands of other people, resulting at last in holding a river bend against the encroachments of the sawing current, or in converting the whole current of the upper Mississippi into a force to furnish power for machinery, to run cars, to supply cities with light—as at Keokuk.
"Mamma!" Sibley had asked, "was it an awful big man who thought of it first?"
He had felt that any one with so big an idea must be nine feet tall at least, and for a long time he had puzzled over the fact that men of the largest size do not necessarily have the most valuable thoughts. Boys had sometimes had ideas or made observations that changed the whole world, as the youth who discovered that steam in a boiling kettle raised the cover and pushed strongly from the spout, and after thinking about it for many years at last made an effective steam-engine. Mrs. Carruth, when she had explained that fact and told that anecdote to Sibley, wondered if there was already in his head some glimmering of an idea that he would work over and study and learn all about, and at last—What might not Sibley do some day? Mothers like to think that their sons will become useful citizens!
Now Sibley was taking part in the control of the flood that was sweeping down the Mississippi. He was going down the river with the engineer whose knowledge of the river was superior to that of any other man. Every one knew that Kalas had fairly attacked the river with his bare hands, going up and down the levees in the making, glaring at the right of way, peering into the trench, picking up clods of dirt used, and paying such strict attention that the contractors would have been glad to have him a thousand miles distant—till they learned that his interest was due to some fact or idea that, like the levee dredge, would save them huge sums, enable them to do their work better, and at the same time reduce the cost to the Government.
Sibley seemed to understand the "feel" of the river and the people who were working to use or control it. Mrs. Carruth realized that now. Suddenly, and without warning, the son of her heart had stepped out from the protection of his parents, and was doing his own work in his own way. The more she thought about it, the more wonderful it seemed that Sibley should have read those volumes of governmental adventure, the commission reports, and thus prepared himself for the emergency.
Mrs. Carruth felt that the accident of the little house-boat being carried adrift had been arranged by the river,—as she preferred to say,—so that Sibley should ride the great flood in the company of the most competent of the river engineers, seeing the whole thing from the best possible vantage-point, the little motor-boat which, the newspapers said, was going down just ahead of the crest.
The terrible doubts which had possessed her when she did not know what had become of her son were replaced by contentment and happiness. Steadfastly, she had led Sibley through the years, step by step, from little one-syllable story-books, to the River Commission Reports, which she did not pretend to understand. Mr. Carruth had taught his son ax-craft, rifle skill, river navigation, mathematics—as needed!—carpentering, and even hydraulics.
Sibley had trapped wolves in Montana and otter in Louisiana, but all the attractions of woodcraft and bird life had been as nothing to him compared with the fascination of running streams the most wonderful of all, the swaggering Mississippi.
To Mrs. Carruth it seemed as though she were sitting at the threshold of her son’s career. Literally, she gazed down the river reach. Her son, her splendid boy, had embarked there to do his life’s work.
CHAPTER XIV
"ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD"
THE levee had breached at St. Claire on April 6th, and the terminal levee above the mouth of the St. Francis had been broken at several places below Whitehall. Coming down St. Francis Bend Kalas and the boys saw Crowley’s Ridge toward the southwest, rising out of the area of the flood, a safe refuge in the midst of the inundation.
At the end of the great hill the little city of Helena was fighting the tide to save itself, and taking up collections of food-stuffs for the hungry refugees down the river. Perhaps no town knew the river better than Helena. Some of its old-timers harked back to the days when pirates had their rendezvous just below the St. Francis mouth, and used a steamer to carry their loot from the ricer craft down to New Orleans. On the bluffs overlooking the town were graveyards where the monuments bore witness to the explosions and fires on river craft. Along the levee below the town were great sawmills, closed down in order that the men might fight the flood.
Here Kalas listened to the news and views of the levees and flood down-stream. It was wonderful that this the greatest flood ever known had been so successfully resisted. With 1466 miles of levee to be watched, only five crevasses had occurred in the upper third of the river bottoms, where there had been fewer scores of years of experience in constructing and maintaining them.
Here, too, the sheriff handed him the notice of a reward that had been offered. He glanced carelessly at the notice and then raised his brows and stared.
"I ’lowed you might catch sight of ’im," the sheriff said. "Picking up a hundred dollars in flood times is easy, sometimes."
"I ’lowed you might catch sight of ’im," the sheriff said
"I’m interested," Kalas admitted, folding the handbill and tucking it into his pocket with care.
When he went on board the open launch again, he handed the notice to Jimmy, and leaned back against the splash-board to enjoy the effect. Jimmy unfolded the paper curiously, and read the notice with increasing interest:
REWARD!
The Sum of $100
Will be Paid
For the Capture of
THE YOUTH
Who Escaped from
NEW MADRID, MISSOURI
With a Pretty Blue-eyed Baby
About TWO YEARS Old
Baby, Rescued from Overflow
Is Wanted by Local Lady
for Adoption
GONE DOWN RIVER!
Arrest: Jep Veraine
Shanty-Boater Boy
&
Notify at My Expense
CITY MARSHAL
April 6th, New Madrid, Mo.
"Wha—wha—wha—" Jimmy stammered. "Reward for Jep!"
"Looks like!" Kalas remarked, glancing at Sibley, who read the notice.
"Why, that’s our baby!" Sibley declared angrily. "Jep’s got a right to him! We found him first!"
"Let’s see," Kalas calculated: "that is dated April sixth, and we are two hundred and seventy miles below there. If he’s on the run and in a hurry he’ll make seventy miles a day. You can look for him any time now!"
The three looked up the river, and there was no place where a better view of the majestic flow could be had than from the Helena levee crest. The surface sloped up a miles-long grade, and the rise of the distance was clearly seen—up and up till the surface disappeared around the bend to the left.
They watched all the rest of the day, and just before sunset the two youths caught a flash of window-glass. Taking the binoculars that Kalas had left in the launch, Sibley examined that distant shape, which might be a house that had drifted from its foundations, or might be any one of several thousand shanty-boats.
"We can run out and see!" Jimmy suggested, and while one cast off the line the other started the motor.
In a minute they were clear of the levee and edging out to the current, where they drifted for a few minutes, and then boldly breasted the flood and worked out into the way of the cabin boat. They had calculated well, and they again saw a reflection, this time as the window caught the rays of arc-lights over the top of the levee.
With their search-light beam they picked up the dark shanty-boat, and as they approached it both boys exclaimed:
"Our boat, sure!"
Then Jimmy hailed:
"Wu-hoo! Jep!"
There was no answer. They ran alongside and found a line leading from a timber-head to a willow-tree that was floating in the current. While Sib cast his line off the willow and made fast to the shanty-boat, Jimmy boarded and ran into the cabin.
In vain he called and in vain he lighted a lamp to look about! The boat was empty, deserted. He looked under the cots, behind the hanging clothes, under the bow and stern decks, and even on the roof. Neither Jep nor the baby was there, although baby-garments and even Jep’s cap were in the cabin, as though the two had stepped out only for a minute.
Jimmy, his face blanched by worry, called to Sibley, who was towing the house-boat ashore, and told him—what Sibley already knew from Jimmy’s exclamations—that it was deserted.
They reached the eddy below the town, where the levee protected the waterfront, and returned up the waterfront with the reverse current. Kalas met them below the sawmills, having seen them go out and suspected their reason for going. He hailed them with pleasure, but when he discovered the fact that Jep had disappeared, he was perturbed.
"The river’s played another prank on us!" he exclaimed. "You never know what to expect next. I thought everything would be all right, but I’ve been on the river long enough to know better than that. I’m afraid the reward has worked!"
"But they wouldn’t leave the shanty-boat floating in midstream!" Jimmy declared. "They’d ’a taken it ashore, anyhow."
"You can’t always tell what a sheriff from behind the levees would do to a shanty-boater." Kalas shook his head. "I think I’d better try my luck, now. They’ve telegraph communications up and down from Helena, and I’ll see. Your folks are at Cape Girardeau, Sibley?"
"Yes, sir."
"I’ll telegraph them we’ve got their cabin-boat, and then we’ll get in touch up the line, to see about Jep and the baby. Personally, I’m interested in that drift baby. Seems to me you are rather unusual youngsters, adopting a baby like that!"
"We found him, and we couldn’t very well let him go adrift again," Jimmy grinned.
"You might have turned him over to the authorities," the man said.
"They had their hands full; and, besides, Jep knows more about babies than lots of people!"
"I should say yes, if he has taken care of that baby since you began to help me."
Even a surly telegraph-operator stirred quickly at the sharp demand of Kalas and made haste to connect the wires still up, with Cape Girardeau. Word was sent to the Carruths that their boat was at Helena, with Sibley, and instructions were asked as to what was to be done with it.
Then, while waiting for the reply from the Carruths, Kalas sent out feelers, to learn if he could what had become of Jep and his charge. Between New Madrid and Helena are hundreds of miles of river, by this time a score of miles wide in places, with the inundated forests and overflowed back country and the mighty main current pouring down the channel, following the twists and turns and straightaways, as in a groove.
At times river people link the river from bend to bend with unending grape-vine telegraph, which makes it possible to learn the whereabouts of friends. At other times the river hides the passerby, and even a steamboat has been known to disappear, almost between landings, never to be heard of again. The river’s frankness and freedom cover ten thousand mysteries, some innocent and some guilty beyond mentioning.
Kalas was like these two youths who had put themselves wholly at his disposal and worked without a questioning doubt under his orders. They had saved him a good deal of time which he might have wasted, waiting for a commission skiff or launch; for no one left a government craft idle in the imminence of peril and the necessity of overflow rescue work.
Now it was necessary that he go aboard one of the big government steamers and carry supplies and skilled workers down to the vicinity of Vicksburg, where his special knowledge was needed. While citizens in Helena loaded the steamer and prepared it for the cruise, Kalas searched the bottoms by telegraph and telephone; but when he returned to the boys on the levee, he could give them only half-good news.
"Your father and mother are coming down to get the shanty-boat," he told Sibley, "but it probably will take some time to get them through. If I can make connections right, they’ll catch a government boat that is coming down to help just below Memphis, and they’ll have to take their chances about getting through from there to Helena."
"But Jep and the babe?" Jimmy asked.
"Not a word, yet," Kalas shook his head. "I’m sorry."
"He’d tied to a willow-tree," Sibley reminded them. "It was pulled up by the roots. It may have washed out and let the boat drift."
"And he made a run to jump ashore?" Kalas suggested.
"He’d never leave his boat that way," Jimmy said. "There’s something wrong."
Guessing what has happened to any one tripping the Mississippi when the surface is below the level of the banks is difficult enough; and when the whole valley is covered with water in three different levels on the east side, middle, and west side, with crevasses connecting the levels, and back-flow from stream mouths, and the only land above the flood and safe from its encroachments, a few bluffs and the thin streak of the levee-back, eight feet wide where it holds—how can any one guess where a baby and its youthful caretaker might have stepped out of a shanty-boat, which would itself be invisible across or along three miles of flood?
Sibley went aboard the shanty-boat and looked it over with pleasure. Kalas, coming on board, discovered the book-shelves immediately. When he saw the Reports of the Mississippi River Commission, the Reports of Surveys, of Inland Waterways, and even a copy of Ellet’s original study of the river’s habits, and the Humphreys and Abbott "Levees of the Mississippi," he turned and glanced oddly at Sibley, who was looking about as though glad to be at home again.
"Where’s the baby-carriage?" Jimmy demanded, breaking into whatever vein of thought his two companions might have been following.
"That’s so!" Sibley looked around. "It’s gone!"
"Then—then—?" Jimmy dared not hope.
"He must have gone to town, somewhere, for a fact," Kalas assured him.
"But where?"
"I don’t know of a place, from New Madrid to Helena, where you could run a baby-carriage now, except—"
"Memphis!" the boys exclaimed together.
"I’ll notify Memphis," Kalas said. "I’ve asked them already, but I’ll warn them particularly. And now you’ve turned another bit of detective work, haven’t you, Jimmy?"
Jimmy blinked with surprise, and Sibley chuckled. The absence of the baby-carriage had revealed a definite clue as to where to look for the missing brother and baby.
"I don’t know whether we’d better give Memphis a clue like that or not," Kalas reflected, after a minute. "If Jep’s ashore, he’s probably all right. I don’t think he’s having fair play, when they offer a reward for him because they want that baby. I think you’d better go up to Memphis, Sib, and meet your folks there. I’ll have this cabin-boat put in with the government fleet here, under our watchman. Then you can go safely, if you keep out of the draw in the bends where the current sets into the woods."
"We’ll hate to see you go!" Sibley exclaimed.
"I expected to go all the way down with you, but this call from Vicksburg is mandatory. I built a levee section down there, and understand it, and when the crest of the flood comes I’ll have to be there to look after it. There’s a bayou we crossed, and there’s something wrong there—softening under the foundation, probably; or the sand is washing out from under, as the bank has caved up close. I don’t know whether it can be saved or not. But you are river people. We’ll look out for one another, won’t we?"
"Yes, sir!" the boys declared in unison.
Then, when Kalas had notified Mr. and Mrs. Carruth that Sibley would meet them at Memphis, he and the boys parted. The steamer with Kalas on board drew out from the eddy with its company of specialists, and at the same time Sibley and Jimmy started up-stream in their launch, bucking the current. Kalas, in the pilot-house of the steamer, blew the whistle, and Jimmy blew the launch signal. Immediately they drew apart, and the great white steamer, with the huge red stern paddle-wheel roared away down-stream, swaying in the jets of mid-river eddies.
Beating their way up the river flood was very different from coming down, and it was awe inspiring to the boys to press against the vast current, winding and curving to miss the onrushing chunks of drift. In eddies they could swing out into the reverse current and run with the circling waters, but at the heads of eddies they had to put on all their power and nose into the swirling sucks where the fast main flow insolently turned the eddy back into the true direction again.
The average slope of the flow was only five or six inches down-stream to the channel mile, but in steep crossings it was several inches more than this, while in long reaches, above crossings, it was less. This slope of water was steep enough to send the hundreds of millions of cubic feet, the billions of gallons, impetuously and irresistibly down; and where there was a long, sharp bend of six or eight miles, the water tipped, jamming up against the unseen, submerged channel bank and against the levee; and though the measurements were inches, the eyes plainly saw not only the slope of the river surface from up the long reaches but the slope across the channel, where the surface on one side was higher than on the other.
Looking down-stream, in the misty distance, it was as though one might fall over a brink but the prospect up-stream gave one the feeling of the necessity for tremendous effort—of climbing up and up against that monstrous on rush, though gasolene would do the work.
In some places the current was so swift that they could make no headway against it, but had to swerve to one side or the other, till they found slack water where the speed of the boat was greater than that of the current.
They saw, too, a more menacing aspect of the river drift. Running with the current, they had merely to keep out of squeezes, and out of the way of snags or chunks thrown by jets or eddies. Now all the drift was running at them, and vigilance was more than ever necessary. It was like darting up through a stampede of monsters of many shapes and kinds, some soft and flabby—such as stacks of straw and hay, likely to entangle the propeller and leave the launch to the current’s whim—others more fearsome and deadly.
Hardly had they passed the mouth of the St. Francis when they saw ahead of them acres of coiling, writhing current, with hardly a stick of drift in it the size of their hands. Cheerfully they steered up into this, to go through the less powerful current inside of Shoo-Fly Bar.
Suddenly, without warning, there rose out of the deep a black-headed, spreading-pronged horror of a snag thirty or forty feet from horn to horn, lunging at them like a living thing. With cries Sibley pulled hard down and turned so sharply that the next moment they were headed down-stream. Looking at the frightful thing, they saw it sinking again out of sight in the foaming yellow water.
"What an awful sawyer!" Jimmy gasped, as they started up-stream once more.
They watched ahead for hundreds of yards, warned of those jumping snags in the sand-bar crossing of St. Francis Bend. After a few minutes, they saw the thing that had nearly caught them, rear up, shaking the water from its black prongs and actually throwing a stick of timber clear of the water as a bull might have tossed a sheep. Then with surly grouching splash it drew down into the coiling waters to lurk there unseen and without a sign for minutes at a time.
"There’ve been hundreds and hundreds of steamers snagged on those sawyers down this river!" Jimmy said. "Before the Civil War ten thousand steamers were snagged, or blown up, or burned—"
"That was what men had to pay to learn steam-navigation," Sibley remarked, "just as we’re paying now for knowledge of river floods!"
When night fell they did not know how far they had come, nor where they were. Mr. Kalas had left his book of river maps with them, and they studied it by the electric battery light to discover their whereabouts. It was hard to distinguish one submerged wood clump from another, one bend from the next. But they knew that they had passed through one of the most difficult parts of all the Mississippi River.
They had passed Walnut Bend; Commerce Cut-Off, Bordeau Chute were somewhere beyond there. Here in ten or twelve years the Mississippi River had carried away by caving bends, more than ten million dollars’ worth of land, destroying thousands of acres of cotton fields and ruining the hopes, if not destroying the lives, of hundreds of people. It had even threatened to leave its own high-banked channel and cut across down to the lower bed and channel of the St. Francis River to the westward, along the foot of Crowley’s Ridge.
When supper-time came Sibley and Jimmy were astonished to find how weary they were after that long, exciting river day of constant vigilance and effort. They ate their supper, which they cooked over an oil stove in a box shelter on the stern, clear of any possible gasolene fumes, and then slung their canvas hammocks, rolled up in their blankets, and were soon asleep.
CHAPTER XV
JEP LOSES HIS SHANTY-BOAT
“THEY sha’n’t take Driftwood!" Jep said to himself, and he went into the dark of the Mississippi River, scornfully turning his back on New Madrid.
A brisk little breeze springing up caused Jep to take a turn with the line around the root of a big dead-tree snag, but he tied a slip-knot which he could throw off by jerking the free end of the light line—a bit of super-rivermanship and seamanship. Jep had heard of a Great Lakes captain who always made his boat fast to a dock or mooring with fastenings that could be cast off from the deck of the boat, so that in an emergency the vessel could be set clear without loss of time. By that bit of nautical foresight the captain had saved his boat from a sudden burst of flames in a warehouse, which he could not have escaped had he not been ready at a moment’s notice to set his craft free.
Except for the wind, and the danger of a squeeze in the drift, there was little to worry about that night of flight down the river. Every minute, however, Jep was being carried away from his family mooring—so to speak—in the mouth of the Meramec. He had not hesitated a moment in choosing between losing the charge, given into his care by the river itself, or going farther down.
The old river seemed companionable and friendly that dark night. The size of the flood, the vastness of the surface, made the fugitive boy feel trivial and insignificant, and hidden from every one’s sight—as indeed he was. When Driftwood had had his supper, and was sound asleep in warm night-clothes which the shanty-boat women had given him, Jep turned the light in the brass lamp low, and, putting on a heavy woolen shirt, stepped outside to keep vigilant watch and guard.
There was no shore in sight that night—just the faintly glimmering, drift-shadowed gloom of wide surfaces and dark-softened, half-submerged woods. He could see a gleam of light at long intervals, but it vanished quickly, as though unable to cope with the night. He could hear the wash of the current among the tree trunks of forests, but the low murmurings were quickly passed and left far behind.
Resting, ready, on the handles of the shanty boat sweeps, he kept ceaseless watch ahead and to right and left, constantly vigilant for the safety, even the very existence, of the boat and Driftwood and himself, which depended on his quick recognition of one or other of many river perils. But the river mood that night, as regards the tripper and his charge, was gentle and kind.
The great snag, to which he had tied up, sunk low in the water and weighing tons, like a tug carried the shanty-boat down, bend after bend, unstirred by the pressure of the wind against the sides of the unwilling craft, which dragged first one way in one bend and then another way in the next as the winding current led in and out of the steady breeze. Higher, lighter drift was blown to the leeward, where huge masses of the flotsam crashed into the standing forests with a terrific roar of rending wood, but the low-lying chunks and snags held true to the channel like a sea-anchor to the wind.
It was a long night, and he saw Caruthersville, with the lights of levee guards alongshore, then the long miles of wilderness as he approached the bend of Needham’s Cut-Off, where the Obion River mouth appeared soon after dawn. A few miles below he saw where the caving bank had undercut a levee, leaving two ends at the edge of the flood, and behind it the loop that had been built to maintain the continuity was already in jeopardy.
He was coming now into the famous, or infamous, Plum Point Reach neighborhood. There the river and humanity both had displayed their most distressing qualities for time out of mind. Pirates had had their rendezvous at that point, and old river guide-books had warned keel-boat men and ark men to prime their guns, and keep their ammunition handy, lest they be captured by pirates, and to watch with care the ever-shifting channel ahead, lest they be snagged.
The pirates had long since lost most of their aggressiveness there, though Yankee Bar, just below, was still, during the autumn and winter hunting season, a favorite resort of questionable characters and the river had lost not a whit of its sinuous treachery. Miles of sandbars were shifting in those wandering undercurrents at that very moment; in low water the wind would blow the sand about in flying clouds like snow, while the falling particles gathered in waves and swells and drifts, yellow as new gold in the sunshine, with rare and wonderful purples and blues in the shadows under the crested reefs.
Now everything was covered with fathoms of yellow flood. Towheads with willow-trees thirty feet high were clear out of sight under the surface, and a full-grown forest on the islands was more than half submerged. The shanty-boat passed Ashport and Elmot bars, skirted Island No. 30, and was swept grandly around the Plum Point Bend and down past the narrow streak of almost vanished Bullerton Towhead, along famous Yankee Bar, to the high, dark earthern Chickasaw Bluff No. 1, on the top of which, two hundred feet above the river, Fort Pillow’s embankment and trenches had been built to guard the passage there in the Civil War. The last of the old fort caved into the river, and whenever there is a land-slide a huge wave of displaced water rises out of the bounds, and pours up- and down-stream and over the bottoms for miles.
A few miles farther and the inconspicuous little craft had safely passed Fulton, and then Fort Wright, but Jep was too tired and sleepy by this time to keep running, so he cast off his line and blew into the Chute of Island 35, where he moored to the limb of a tall gum-tree, mostly underwater, out of wind and current.
Driftwood was sleeping soundly, and Jep threw himself down for a little rest. He could not delay long, for if he wished to overtake Jimmy and Sibley in the motor-boat, he must keep going. At the same time, he dared not sleep while floating down, for he might at any moment drift into a bend or reach of a thousand dangers, especially with the wind blowing.
It was nearly noon when Driftwood awakened Jep and be cast loose from the gum-tree simply by jerking a slip-noose end, and floated down the chute, while he prepared dinner. After dinner he wrapped Driftwood up and sat on the bow deck, in a little rocking-chair, and whispered a song to the baby, who rested in easy comfort on his lap. Toward night Driftwood went to sleep again and Jep put him tenderly on a cot and resumed his vigil.
No wind was blowing to-night, and he did not need to use a snag to tow him down. Instead, he floated in a lake covered with floating islands, with the whispering of falling rain all around, and all the rest of the world screened from his view by the darkness and the mist.
He was approaching a locality of great change, he knew. Maps in the Mississippi River Commission Reports enabled him to identify his whereabouts in the bottoms. Having passed the head of Barney Chute, once a steam-packet thoroughfare, but now a mere bayou behind Dean’s Island, he entered the Centennial Cut-Off, so-called because in 1876 the river had cut through a peninsula neck there, and abandoned by a short cut some twenty miles of main channel around Centennial Island. Just below was the old Fogleman Chute and below that the chute of Beef Island. Here in about twenty miles, as a crow would fly, a hundred miles or so of river channel had been cut, abandoned, caved in, and washed out within fifty years or less; and the changes were still taking place.
Centennial Island was now being washed away. Beef Island Chute was a main channel, instead of a byway, and in one place where the current had flowed east the river changes had started it flowing west through the same channel. Just above Memphis changes were taking place that would eventually carry away the Old Hen and Chickens Islands, do away with the channel of Hopefield Bend, and send the whole river at full depth along the Memphis water front.
Jep knew that locality, for he had been down there twice with his father. Ahead of him the glow of Memphis lights grew steadily brighter, and he shot out of the main current and floated down the narrow lane between two clumps of tree-tops, miles long, which marked the course of Ash Slough, and led to the Memphis shanty-boat town at the Ridge, near the mouth of Wolf River, across from the city.
He moored to a willow-tree and a friendly shanty-boater carried him, Driftwood, and the baby-carriage over to Ferry Street, to the side walk near the level of Main Street. There was hardly a place in the river-bottoms where a baby-carriage would be of any use. Memphis, however situated as it is on one of the series of Chickasaw Bluffs, had pavements and side walks; and Jep, when he went to shop, rather than leave the baby alone, or with strangers, took him up-town.
Jep bought condensed milk, a bottle of "regular cows’ milk," some bacon, fresh meat, and other supplies. In a ten-cent store he bought Driftwood a train of tin cars and some stockings; for the baby crawled around a good deal, and wore out stockings fast.
Toward sunset Jep strolled with his little charge back toward Ferry Street. He stopped to purchase an evening newspaper and looked at the head-lines. Almost the first thing he saw was a New Madrid item:
NO TRACE OF BABY FOUND
There was a paragraph telling how he had run away with Driftwood, and how watch was being kept for him down hundreds of miles of river. Trembling with excitement and worry, he nevertheless nonchalantly—to all appearances—wheeled Driftwood toward home. He had had his mind so crowded with the river, the flood, the night-and-day navigation, that he had forgotten he was a runaway, sought by a city marshal!
As it all came back to him, he rejoiced in the sudden fall of night. He scurried along the sidewalk, not knowing at what moment some policeman or plain-clothes man would let fall on his shoulder a heavy, grasping hand.
"If Jim or Sib was here, they’d know what to do!" he gasped. "I want to git to them, before anything happens!"
He turned down Ferry Street, where were a number of skiffs being watched by a youth of sixteen or seventeen years.
"I want to go to my boat," Jimmy said. "Will you take me?"
"I ’low I will!" said the boat-guard, who was the son of the man who ran the ferry to the islands. These were little visited except by shanty-boaters, who were moored to the tree-tops in these times.
So the baby-carriage and baby and Jimmy went aboard a fisherman’s good flat-bottom skiff, and were rowed down the street between the houses along each side, and out into Wolf River.
"It’s up there, in the forks o’ the river an’ slough." Jep pointed.
The ferry youth rowed that way across the slack water of Wolf River, which was eddied. They went on and on, and Jep looked around, but could see no sign of his boat.
"Why—why—I don’t see it!" he gasped.
"Holler an’ your folks’ll answer," the ferryman suggested.
"I’m alone—I ain’t got any folks!" Jep exclaimed.
"Sho—alone?" the ferryman asked, shrewdly. "Huh! Then you’re that kid that kidnapped a baby out ’n the drift, an’ the New Madrid Up-the-Bankers tried to get it, ain’t you?"
Jep settled into a tense readiness.
"They rewarded you for a hundred dollars!" the boatman continued.
"Sho!" gasped Jep.
"And now your boat’s tore loose—too!" the ferryman added in a low voice.
CHAPTER XVI
KEEPING FAITH WITH RIVER FOLKS
THE telegram from Mr. Kalas telling about the finding of the shanty-boat at New Madrid found the Carruths ready to hurry to their son. Then, when the other telegram came, saying they would meet at Memphis, was another detail settled. The big government steamer Tupelo, one of the craft of the greatest fleet on the Mississippi—a fleet probably numbering more boats than all the privately owned companies’ fleets put together,—came down the river to Cape Girardeau that evening. and Sib’s parents took passage to Memphis.
They ran down to Cairo, past the Forks, into the lower river. At Hickman the steamer stopped to take on a crew of bridge-builders needed by a railway whose embankment had been washed out over in the St. Francis Bottoms west of Memphis.
A man and a woman came aboard the steamer and stood talking to the captain. Then they went ashore, the woman crying, and the steamer went on its way down the flood. Fair weather in the lower Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys had given the outpour of run-off waters a check, and the flood showed signs in the Cairo district of receding as much as three tenths of an inch.
They tied up at New Madrid for a little while. There too, the situation had changed for the better, as the people adapted themselves to flood conditions, and became reconciled to the largest flood in the recorded history of the river. In mid-morning the steamer stopped at Tiptonville to unload supplies; and at Caruthersville a few hundred cotton bags to be filled with earth were thrown off to be added to the supply there, ready to surround sand boils.
That evening, as they sat at the supper-table with Captain Prendal, the Carruths told him of their errand down the river.
"Our boy was carried away in our house-boat," Mr. Carruth said, "and we didn’t know what had become of him till we read about his working with Kalas in the overflow."
"Kalas just told me to take you on at the Cape," the captain said. "I didn’t know you’d lost anybody down the line. There’s been a lot of people missing, and families broken up, this tide. There always is in a big overflow, and it stands to reason it would be worse this flood, when the river has gone so high out of its banks. A man and woman, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Brail, came aboard at Hickman and asked me to watch out for their boy. I told them I would, but what’s the use? There’s no hope for them. They might better make up their minds."
"What happened?" Mrs. Carruth asked.
"The foundation of their house just above Cairo, in the back-wash, gave way all of a sudden. Brail saved his wife—that’s all. The baby was sunning in the baby-buggy on the gallery. The building collapsed, and the parents rode the drift and found high ground. They heard the baby call, they said; but they imagined that! They even thought they saw him, but there’s not a chance in a thousand that they did. And what chance would a kiddie have floating down the drift in a baby-carriage, the way it was running on the rising waters a week ago? They owned thousands of acres of land and a big sawmill, too!"
Mrs. Carruth listened breathlessly. Her eyes sought her husband’s.
"Can it be that the boys have found him?" she asked.
"It’s barely possible, but you know all that’s happened!" he replied, referring to the uncounted mysteries of the great river tide.
Tears flooded Mrs. Carruth’s eyes. Herself a mother, she knew what that other mother was feeling, what hopes were fighting against the fear, even the certainty, that her child was gone.
The steamer rushed swiftly down the current, throbbing and almost alive in its send and turn, swerve and hold. Sometimes it would strike a submerged log, and they would hear the thump and rolling thunder of the wood as it bumped along the bottom, a distant bell ringing and the engines stopping their soughing and sighing, that the stern-wheel might not be torn to pieces by a timber in the buckets. All clear, they would go on again, stopping the next time to drift by when a signal from a levee alongshore warned them that the wash of the steamer’s swell might overtop the dirt bank and make a crevasse.
They landed at the wharf-boat in Memphis, and when the gang-plank was run out, Sibley and Jimmy Veraine were waiting at the hand-rail for them to come down. Never had the Carruths seen Sibley so straight and sturdy looking, nor had they ever seen his face happier than when he sprang to catch them in his arms, as though he were large enough to hold them both.
Then he turned and introduced Jimmy, his river partner.
"And we’ve lost Jep—and the baby!" Jimmy exclaimed; for nothing else interested him so long as his brother was missing.
"What happened?" Mr. Carruth asked.
Sibley told everything that had taken place.
"Somebody wanted to adopt the baby up there. I read that," Mr. Carruth interrupted.
"I wish we hadn’t gone to them!" Sibley exclaimed angrily. "As soon as they found out that—who we were looking for, they sicked a lot of detectives and deputy sheriffs on us, to find out what we knew about Jep getting away with the baby. They’re hunting all over the city, now. You see, Memphis is about the only place anybody could run a baby-carriage, so we thought he might be here. If he is—There!"
He turned and glared at two keen-eyed, intensely preoccupied men who had drawn near and were straining their ears to hear what Sibley was saying. Mr. Carruth looked at the two.
"You are city detectives?" he demanded.
"Why—well, yes, sir!" one replied.
"What can we do for you?"
"Why—er—we were just walking around."
"Nonsense!" Carruth exclaimed. "Where is headquarters, Sibley? I’ve forgotten!"
"Up-town, there."
"We’d better go up and talk to the chief of police, or the sheriff, I think," Mr. Carruth declared. "Jep is not a criminal, and perhaps it would have been better if he had not run away when the authorities tried to take the baby from him. He had as good a right to it as any one, and it is our baby as much as anybody’s. I’ll find out what they mean by offering a reward for him."
Mr. Carruth had studied law, though he was a business man now, and they all started up town together—the detectives, the two youths, and the father and mother.
"It’s like this, Chief," Carruth explained to the chief officer. "My son here, and James and Jepson Veraine were caught in the drift and as they came down the river they rescued a baby about two years of age who was floating in a baby-carriage. Somebody in New Madrid wanted to get that baby to adopt, but it belongs to us—"
"Well, I don’t see but what respectable town people would make better parents and associates than shanty-boaters," the officer remarked rather superciliously.
"Oh, I beg your pardon, Chief! Where is the mayor’s office?"
"What’s the matter with you?" the chief demanded, uneasily.
"I want to talk to some one I consider my equal" Mr. Carruth declared sharply. "Here’s my card; if money will make any impression on you, I may tell you that I own Sibley Carruth Timbers, Incorporated, which is rated in the commercial agencies at a million dollars."
"Oh-h!" the officer cried. "Say! I understand, now! Say! you leave it to me! I’ll find that kid—those kids of yours! Sure I will! Right away! Hey-y outside there! Captain—"
The door opened and a police captain appeared.
"Hey, Captain!" the chief said. "Send out the motor-cycle squad, looking for that—what’s his name—you know, boy and baby——Jep Borum—or—"
"Jepson Veraine," Jimmy corrected him.
"That’s it! Jepson Veraine! Go get ’im, see? But don’t hurt ’im! There’s been a mistake. We thought he was a crook, but he’s the son or friend of this gentleman, Mr. Carruth!"
So the Police Department bestirred itself: from headquarters a dozen policemen of the motorcycle squad, and two yellow roadsters started forth to search for the missing boy and the river foundling.
"We’ll get ’im!" The chief nodded his head wisely. "We get anybody we want, if we want ’im bad enough. Why, we’ve arrested nine hundred people here in a month—I think! That’s counting speedsters and misdemeanors, of course. The only crooks that really bother us around here are pickpockets, and sometimes hold-ups, and so on. Yes, sir! If we get after anybody, we get him! Why, we make this city safe to live in! If it wa’n’t for us police, you’d never know what’d happen, one day to the next. Now you can generally tell, for we’ve got this town spotted, and spotted right!"
The chief was an enthusiastic officer. To his mind, the whole city revolved around the Police Department, just as, probably, the mayor or the political boss, or the chairman of the Board of Trade, or any other important citizen would be sure the city revolved around him.
Mr. Carruth stopped at a cigar store and sent a box of cigars to the chief and he and his party went to the hotel for lunch. The police had been looking for Jep and the baby, but had failed to find any clue. It was doubtful that the two were in Memphis, or had been there.
After lunch the Carruths and Jimmy walked up Main Street till they arrived at Ferry Street, where they made their way down to the water’s edge, and looked at the skiffs and small gasolene-launches along the pavement. Sitting on the bow of one of the boats was a youth of sixteen years, playing a French harp—and making it sing!
The boy didn’t look at them, but recognized their presence by a little exaggeration of his shrugging and swaying to the time of his harmonies. When, with a flourish, he ended "Shooting Pigeons," the musician drew a long breath and patted his eloquent little harmonica fondly.
"Say, Buck!" Mr. Carruth approached him, "you off the river?"
"I am now," the boy replied evasively.
"So am I," the man replied, looking up the street. "My shanty-boat’s down to Helena," he went on, falling into the speech of the river people, "but Sib, here, salvaged it. It came by here, about four or five days ago—dropped out of New Madrid between days—understand? Friend of ours had it, but he turned up missing. He wasn’t on the boat when Sib, there, hooked on to it. We’re kind of wondering could we get word to him."
"You river folks?" the boy demanded, with a shrewd, sidelong gaze.
"Yeh!" Mr. Carruth looked around as though to learn whether or not any one were within ear-shot; "out the upper Mississippi. Carruth’s my name. That’s my wife, theh. Sib’s my boy. The other boys are Jimmy and Jep Veraine.
"I heard—don’t know, though—that somebody was rewarded out o’ New Madrid t ’other day—um-m—kidnappin’, or somethin.’"
"Likely," the man admitted, "though he hadn’t done anything."
"Yeh; an’ theh’s two rewards, now—a hundred an’ a thousan’!"
"What!" Carruth gasped, losing his air of caution.
"That’s right. Feller was down yeah just fore you come—one o’ those foxy wise ones down to headquarters!" the boy sniffed. "’Lowed ’f I’d get him next, he’d gimme a hundred!"
"Shucks! And he take a thousand?"
"Looks like!"
"Well?"
"If I was him, an’ they’d rewarded me, I’d keep my mouth shut to anybody," the boy declared. "But I ain’t him. I’ll go see Paw; likely he’s heard somethin’. I’ll let yeh know. You watch these boats, will yeh?"
"Sure thing!"
The boat-watcher jumped into a motor-skiff, backed out, and headed down the stream toward Wolf River. He rounded the corner and disappeared toward Ash Slough, where the shanty-boat town was located for the period of high water. He was gone only a few minutes, and returned with a lank, keen-faced river man.
"Why, howdy, Carruth!" the man grinned. "How y ’am?"
"Fine!" Carruth smiled. "How’s Crimson?"
"Silky as a thoroughbred. That’s the missus, eh? Hi-i!"
They shook hands around, and after commonplace greetings, and the remark that the Mississippi was rambunctious, Crimson and Carruth drew off to one side.
"The boy says you got a int’rest in those kids that New Madrid’s been rewardin’."
"Yes; one’s that boy’s brother. Sib, there, was toted off by the tide, out the creek above Cape Girardeau. He picked the two brothers out the drift somewhere down below, and come day, they found a baby in a baby-carriage, and took him on. ’Cording to the papers, they want the baby up to New Madrid."
"A blockader dropped down last night," Crimson said; "they’d heard at Caruthersville about it. Seems they had an awful row up to New Madrid about it. They grabbed off the wrong baby, and the city marshal got in Dutch with a double-barrel shotgun. It was Torkly’s gun. You know him?"
"Sure—and he’s an awful temper, too!"
"Wonder he didn’t blow the marshal’s head off, but they’d always been friendly, and Torkly give him a chance to explain. Ho law! Mrs. Torkly wouldn’t take any explanations, and she grabbed the marshal and drapped him off the bow in five foot o’ water. An’ she wouldn’t ’pologize, neither, when she found it were all a mistake, and the baby they was after was blue-eyed, and not black-eyed like hers."
"The boy had escaped?"
"He cut loose right away; bright boy, that! He knowed when trouble was comin’ was the time to begin to evade it. He just dropped out. He wouldn’t ’a’ done it, ’course, only he hadn’t no friends there, and he wanted to see somebody before he let go. Possession’s nine points o’ law, you know,’specially regardin’ river waifs. He knowed he had no legal claim, and he knowed those women hadn’t any, neither, and just wanted it ’cause the kid was a clever little kid, to look at."
"He’s safe, then?"
"Prob’ly," Crimson replied blandly.
"We’d like to find him," Carruth remarked.
"You ain’t the only folks that would," the river man grinned. "The boy tells me there’s ’leven hundred into it, now."
"Why, if it’s the reward you want—"
"Just stop right there, Carruth!" the river-man exclaimed angrily. "I don’t take some things from any man; remember that! Us river folks sticks together, and if there’s traitors that would give anybody up, I ain’t that kind. I know you, an’ I’ve seen you, but you’re so respectable I don’t know, yet, whether to trust you or not. Those detectives around are always comin’ some new game or other. If you are all right, ’course I ’pologize to you for suspicionin’ you, but if you ain’t all right, why, you can go right plumb down Ole Mississip into the Gulf o’ Mexico!"
"That boy there is his brother." Carruth nodded, for he understood the river point of view. "His name is Jimmy. The missus, Sibley, and I’ll go back up-town. You talk to Jimmy. They’re out of the Meramec River, above Cape Girardeau. I’m going up to the Natchez House. When you can, let us know what we’d better do, will you?"
"’Course I will! But I can tell you this much, without violatin’ any confidence: when the police and plain-clothes men and deputy sheriffs began to run up and down and around, and searchin’ our cabin-boats, there was a grand old skedaddle—just for a hundred dollars. You know us river folks! Those kids ain’t here, consequently. Now that they raised the bid, we got to be an awful lot more partic’lar! But we’ll leave it to Jep. He’s likely, that boy! Personally, I’d just soon talk to you, myself, but it’s his secret, not mine. You understand that?"
"Why, of course! I’ve lived on the river quite a few years."
"I remember your first trip down. ’Course, nobody that hasn’t lived on the river all his life can ever get to be a reg’lar right-down river man, but you can kind o’ get the hang of it, after a while—sort o’ understand. If I get a chance, I’ll get a word to Jep. I’ll take his brother over to my shanty-boat, too. He’ll be all right over there."
"Hey, Jimmy!" Mr. Carruth called, "Mr. Crimson, here, wants you to go with him. We’ll wait up-town till we hear from you at the Natchez House."
The Carruths went up-town, and as they went they talked over the question of the whereabouts of Jep and the baby. They laughed at the care taken by Crimson not to betray the boy "rewarded" by Up-the-Bankers, who often bothered river folks. Although they laughed, they understood the faithfulness to their own kind—the sometimes misdirected friendliness to fugitives as evil in their ways as Jep was good in his.
CHAPTER XVII
"HOW’S THE KID, JEP?"
“I’LL take you over to talk to Dad," the ferry boy had told Jep, and with the baby, the baby-carriage, and Jep in the skiff, he rowed over to the house-boat where the ferryman lived.
Crimson was the man’s name, and he listened to the story Jep told, a frank narrative, including the reason why he had run away from New Madrid. The story excited the indignation of the man.
"They hain’t no right to take that baby away from you ’ns!" he said. "But you can’t stay here. The rewarders’ll be tearin’ down around these boats, now, lookin’ for you. They’d like to pick up a hundred dollars reward money. They’ll search for you all along the river, at towns and eddies. A kid like you, with a baby, is a pretty easy mark to spot. Funny they didn’t pick you up-town to-day, but your nerve goin’ right around the way you did saved you. Let’s see."
"But you can’t stay here"
The man thought a while, and his wife served supper for the family. He had noticed the house-boat moored to the willow, but hadn’t happened to see it float down-stream. At the same time, he thought probably it had pulled the tree along with it.
"That willow’s just a drifter," he said. "It come down and lodged there among some brush-stumps. A little strain, and the boat’d float out. It’d been caught down below, only there’s no boats tied along the Ridge, and nobody’d notice a shanty-boat goin’ by, anyhow, thinkin’ somebody was inside, watchin’ through the window."
After supper he put Jep and the baby into a hunting cabin-launch, and drove up Ash Slough. Two hours later he left them in a fisherman’s cabin-boat moored in the woods along the banks of Beef Island Chute.
"Si Drury here’ll take care of you, and I’ll keep you posted about them tryin’ to find you," Crimson assured the boy. "Us river folks takes care o’ one another, for if we didn’t stand by one another, the Up-the-Bankers’d drive us off the river, and then where’d we be? I used to know your dad in the old days. We whacked up together, one time driftin’ a hundred-and eighty-seven log raft, good pine logs, that we landed in the Hickman eddy, after fightin’ the current all one night, and for about fifty miles. We made a hundred and eighty-seven dollars doin’ it, and ate a dinner with the odd dollar. You ask him! He’ll remember it. I’ll smell around down below, and see what I can do; and I won’t tell anybody or do anythin’ without I tell you first!"
He kept his promise literally, too. For after days of waiting, late one evening there was a hail from the chute, and Crimson came aboard.
"They’ve rewarded you two kids for ’leven hundred, now," the man said. "We can’t take any chances of any kind. Looks like you-all must be a powerful bad pair of river pirates, specially that kid there! If ever I did see an ornery, no ’count, mean-lookin’, desperate river rat, that little un shore is bad!"
The baby, feeling that he was being talked about, threw up his hands and laughed aloud.
"’Leven hundred reward!" gasped Jep. "What—what they got ag’in me?"
"Reckon those adoptin’ females up there wants that baby powerful strong, youngster. If you wanted easy money, now, likely you could get it just by givin’ up the kid, eh?"
"What!" Jep demanded, his eyes narrowing and his face setting.
"Hi-i! Look ’t the man in him!" Crimson laughed. "He’d never go back on any pal o’ his, not for money—not for anything!"
"I’d do anything if I thought it’d be best for Driftwood," Jep returned. "I wish I mout find my folks—and get to talk to ’em!"
"’Course, I don’t know," Crimson shook his head. "I ’low maybe Jep Veraine may be your name, and likely ’t isn’t. Anyhow, there’s a fellow says his name is Jimmy Veraine, out in the boat here—"
"What!" Jep shouted, jumping to his feet, and at his cry the stern door opened and Jimmy bounded into the room, then stopped and blinked in the bright light. The two boys, six feet apart, looked at each other, and glanced around at the two men and the fisherman’s wife, controlling themselves with visible effort.
"Howdy, Jim!" Jep greeted.
"Howdy, Jep!" Jimmy replied as gravely. "How’s the kid?"
"Oh, all right! Where you been?"
"Trippin’ down. We got to Helena. Found your boat driftin’ down, so we sort o’ thought maybe we’d better come up and look for you."
"I stopped to Memphis," Jep explained. "Boat tore loose."
"It was tied to a willow ’bout four inches through. Pulled out by the roots."
"I was just wishin’ you’d come along."
"Mr. Crimson said so. You’re rewarded!"
"Yes."
"Mr. Carruth’s down to Memphis. Perhaps he could fix it up. It’s about the kid, you know. You ain’t done nothin’ wrong."
"’Course I haven’t! They hadn’t any right to take Driftwood, there!"
"Poor kid!" Jimmy said as he lifted the baby to his knees. "I bet your mother probably ’d like to git you back."
"I’ve seen women rear around a heap about lots less likely kids than that one," Crimson said.
"’Course you have!" the fisherman’s wife exclaimed. The two men laughed.
Jepson Veraine stared into space. Forces that he couldn’t understand were compassing him about. A reward was offered for him—eleven hundred dollars to be paid for his capture. It was the grimmest fact he had ever faced, and it took all his courage to sit there, as he was doing, thinking things out.
The two men and the woman looked at him curiously. Jimmy glanced at him, but played with the baby on his knees. It seemed as though Driftwood knew that something momentous was about to happen. He waved his hands toward Jep, who had been caring for him so long. Getting no response, he slid down from Jimmy’s lap, and toddled over to the menaced youth, who took him upon his lap, and wrapped him in his arms.
Still Jep thought, resting his cheek on the baby’s head. After a long time he straightened up and his grave eyes met Crimson’s own clear gaze.
"I think I’d better go down to Memphis, Mr. Crimson," Jep said. "I don’t know what they want me for; I haven’t done any wrong; I’ve done the best I knew how. But Driftwood and me’ve just got to go and face the music! I don’t know what’s the matter, and I don’t care—much!—for I’m through runnin’ away!"
The three grown people stared for a minute in silence. Jimmy clicked his teeth.
"That’s right!" he said. "We don’t have to run from anything!"
"Good boys!" Crimson shouted. "That’s the way to do it! Face the music!"
The woman wrapped Driftwood up till she was sure he would not catch cold, and Crimson, Jimmy, Jep, and the baby went into the cabin-launch, to return to Memphis. The boys did not know what they were facing, but they would face it man-fashion, sure in their hearts that they had done no evil.
Crimson, that night, had seen something that he would always tell about—a river lad who would not be daunted, and who turned to face whatever a reward of eleven hundred dollars might mean, for that sum was too large to have been offered for some whim, as a mere hundred dollar reward had seemed to be.
Quietly they drove down the long bend, turned safely into Ash Slough, and dropped down to Crimson’s boat. But Jep would not stop there, even to have a cup of coffee.
"We’ll go straight to headquarters!" he declared, now that his mind was made up. "You’ll get Mr. Carruth, won’t you?"
"You may believe me I’ll do that! And I’ve got five hundred dollars to help pay for the best lawyer in the State of Missouri for you, too!" the ferryman exclaimed with enthusiasm. "We’ll stand by you—yes, indeedy!"
So they walked up Ferry Street, with Jep pushing the baby-carriage before him, refusing to let any one deprive him of that consolation at the most doleful moment of his life. For himself he did not worry so much; but he could not speak at the thought of having Driftwood taken from him.
"Laws! Laws!" he whispered to himself. "He’s sure good company! But prob’ly—likely they can educate ’im, and make ’m rich, or somethin’! But he ain’t theirs. Those women haven’t got any right to him! I’ll fight ’em. I’ll spend all the money I’ve got—Work a hundred years to get more money—but what I’ll keep him, same’s my blood brother!"
In just that little while Driftwood had won his way into the boy’s heart, and only two things could have persuaded Jep to go back—the fact that there was no wrong in his own heart, and the desire to give the baby a fair show according to the law.
That was the way Jep figured it all out. He couldn’t let the disgrace of a reward for him stand; he must be cleared! He would demand that the court and justice and the Government give him what he had earned by honest care and right of possession; and he knew that Jimmy and Sibley Carruth would waive their claims in his favor.
It was after two o’clock in the morning when the four entered the police station—Jep, Driftwood, Mr. Crimson and Jimmy. With the baby in his arms Jep walked up to the big desk where the captain sat. The policeman looked curiously at the little group, and nodded to Crimson, whom he knew.
"Well, what’s the idea?" the captain asked.
"I’m rewarded, and I’ve come to give myself up," Jep answered.
"I’ve come to give myself up," Jep answered
"What? Who are you? What’ve you done?"
"I’m—I’m Jepson Veraine, and I’m wanted—at New Madrid!"
"Oh—yes! So—so you’re the kiddnapper, eh?"
"No, sir!" Jep shook his head stoutly.
"That’s the baby, though?"
"We found him in the drift!" Jimmy declared. "We—"
"Eh? That’s the way of it, eh? Well, all right! I know somebody that’ll be mighty, mighty happy to hear from you—I do, indeed!" the policeman nodded as he reached for the telephone.
"Howdy, Central!" he called into the instrument. "Give me toll!"
CHAPTER XVIII
WHAT THE RIVER DID FOR BOYS
SIBLEY CARRUTH stirred uneasily in his bed, and sprang up, suddenly awakened; for the door of his room was being pounded. It was still a black night, and for a moment he stood confused by his strange surroundings, not knowing what was happening or where he was.
"Sib! Sibley!" his father’s voice cried. "Come out! Jep’s found!"
In three minutes the youth emerged, fully dressed, into the hallway, and a minute or two later he and Mr. and Mrs. Carruth hurried along the hotel corridor and down to police headquarters. A telephone message had summoned them there with word that Crimson and Jimmy wanted them to come to the rescue of Jep and the baby.
"Oh! What a darling baby!" Mrs. Carruth cried when she saw Driftwood in Jep’s lap, looking about with wide owl-eyes. Then Jep yielded the small refugee to Mrs. Carruth with a smile that was a little wan.
"They were with a fisherman," Crimson said. "We found ’em directly. Jep said it’d be the best way to come and face the music. He’s the doctor!"
"It is, too!" Mr. Carruth declared. "What have you heard? What do they want him for so strong?"
"It’s New Madrid," the police captain replied. "We’ve had messages from there and along up-stream for days. Wire service is pretty bad. There’s so much water in the overflow that we can’t quite make out what they’re saying. But they said for sure, ‘Hold him!’"
"That means—?"
"We’ll have to look after the two of them. Of course, they’ll be all right. The boy tells a straight story, Mr. Carruth. If there’s anything we can do for you, why of course—"
"I think the best thing would be to give them something to eat."
"They’ve had all they want!"
"Then they’d better go to sleep," Mrs. Carruth declared.
"They can go to the dormitory; you can see for yourself it’s all right!" said the police captain.
"And we’ll be around the first thing in the morning, Jep!" Mrs. Carruth promised. "The little darling! What do you call him?"
"Driftwood," answered Jep.
"What a name for such a baby!" she cried. "The idea!"
"He’ll like it when he’s a little older," the police captain smiled.
"A good nickname’s half a boy’s life!" Mr. Carruth declared, and the four youngsters laughed—Sib, Jimmy and Jep because they understood the remark, and Driftwood because he saw that the others were amused.
"You’ll be comfortable. You won’t worry?" Mrs. Carruth asked keenly, and Jep looked at her bravely.
"I’ll be all right," he said. "We’ll stick together, Driftwood and me."
"Good boys!" The men smiled.
That was all they could do that night. Crimson, the Carruths, and Jimmy left Jep and Driftwood at Police Headquarters. It seemed best to have it so, although Mr. Carruth could have found in Memphis a dozen men to come to headquarters to give bond. The few hours’ delay seemed unimportant in view of the countless things they had already experienced and endured. They were too happy to be exacting or particular.
Jep was glad to keep the baby with him, to care for him, and to put him to bed in the comfortable crib provided for him. He would not even let the police matron do anything for Driftwood.
"Likely I mightn’t have another chance!" he gulped as he tucked the baby in, in the long warm nightie from the police emergency supply.
Before nine o’clock the next morning they were all together again. No word had come to Memphis from New Madrid. Nettleton had reported wire service interrupted, and a crew of linemen had gone out into the overflow from a camp station north of Faragould on the Texas road, to establish direct wire communication over the flood. But stringing wires and repairing breaks in an overflow through a wilderness, by motor-launches and skiffs, is a precarious and uncertain operation. They had a good wire to Little Rock, if that would do any good. But what they wanted was New Madrid!
Sibley and Jimmy went down to the wharf, where they took their launch up to the forks at the junction of Ash Slough with Wolf River, the Memphis shanty-boat town, and moored it in Crimson’s fleet of ferry, livery, and other boats. The exciting activities of many flood days had now settled into the difficult waiting for the solution of the mystery of the reward increase. The hundred-dollar reward was due to the desire of a woman to adopt an attractive baby, but the thousand-dollar addition to the reward could not be explained in the same way. They worried over the ominous threat.
At least Jep had kept his trust. They would stay with him till the questions raised were answered. Driftwood was a great baby, and Mr. Carruth had procured one of the best attorneys in Memphis to look into the right and wrong of the affair and to advise what it would be best to do.
"No crime is apparent, whatever the charge," the lawyer declared. "The question of the responsibility of the youth Jepson Veraine is all the issue there is, and in view of your guarantee, Mr. Carruth, I don’t see where any one could deprive the three youths of their first claim to the baby, Driftwood, who was found in the river flotsam. The thousand-dollar reward—we’ll have to have details about that!"
The river, still running at almost crest height, and destined to remain in flood for upward of two months before the crisis definitely passed and the wave ran out into the Gulf, kept all the lines of communication breaking one after another. Steamers could not run regularly, because of the jeopardy of drift, the lack of car goes, and the difficulty of making landings. The touching of a levee by the bow of a steamer might break open the barrier and let the flood through.
Railroads were out almost everywhere in the bottoms. Some lines were several feet underwater, and others were cut through their fills; and even places like Cairo, not distant from high land, were a week without train service. Tap-line reads out in the timber bottoms would have to be abandoned for a month, or perhaps two months. Even the telephone and telegraph lines were cut by the washing out of poles, resulting in the breaking of wires, or at least their inundation. Places ordinarily within two or three hours of one another, now were separated by wild torrents, and it was easier to go two hundred miles around than twenty miles across.
Sibley went to the district headquarters of the River Commission in Memphis, to get a government document which Mr. Kalas said he would find there, and which Sibley needed. The document was a roll of fourteen-foot water way survey maps, showing the topographical contours of the river bottoms and adjacent ridges.
"So you’re Sibley Carruth?" a man said to him. "You did good work in the rescue at Reelfoot and back from New Madrid. Kalas said you saved him days of time, taking him down the line when everything and everybody else was busy. As soon as he’s escorted the flood into the Gulf he’ll have time to find your place in the government work."
"What!" Sibley stared with wide-eyed surprise.
"Oh, the Government just has to take on those who make a specialty of any kind of work the way you’ve studied the Mississippi River. You’re the kind we can train up to know the real inwardness of the Old Boy!"
"The Government just has to take on those who make a speciality of any kind of work the way you’ve studied the Mississippi River"
With his big roll of maps under his arm, Sibley went to the hotel in a dream. He hardly knew what he did. Instead of letting him drop out and disappear, they were going to take him right into that great force of workmen who were, step by step, bend by bend, reach by reach, taking hold of the Mississippi and controlling it.
Just that way, probably, Kalas had been enlisted years before, away back in the eighties or nineties, and he had grown up with the commission, broadened with it; dredging crossings one season; laying out levee rights of way another; surveying head-water streams another; attending to irksome office details—compiling statistics, drafting maps, making records so that what the commission learned every one might know for the reading.
As he walked along, Sibley saw opening before him the way of his future, for which unknowingly he had been getting ready.
He found that Jep and Driftwood had come over to the hotel with Jimmy and his parents, reward or no reward. No word had yet come from New Madrid that would explain matters, but the responsibility of Mr. Carruth had been established by men who knew him, and the attorney had provided the legal way for the present to keep Driftwood with them. In any event, there would be no more flight, no more questionable procedure; for now the matter was one in which the courts would show the way. Jep had found the friends and advisers he had needed and sought.
"No wonder people wanted to adopt him!" Mrs. Carruth exclaimed, when she found that Driftwood was as adorable in disposition as he was attractive in appearance. She envied Jep the cry of delight with which the baby greeted him when he appeared after telling the attorney all there was to tell about his experiences at New Madrid.
The boys all went to the motion-picture theater that afternoon, and saw a play with shooting, daring escapes, and great horsemanship in desert, mountains, and forests. The three watched it with calm, unthrilled interest. Sibley noticed that one of the men carried his rifle around cocked and liable to go off and kill somebody unintentionally. The carelessness was of a kind of which no hero would in fact be guilty.
"And that fellow tied the villain up with a granny-knot he could slip out of in two minutes," Jimmy declared with a sniff.
Jep made no comment. If he could follow the thread of the story he did not say so. He had many things to think of, and he gazed with darkening thoughts at the scenes of artificial life. He was living his own great romance of youth; he had to endure doubt and anxiety which were worse than he had ever known before, as he could do nothing, and must await the outcome.
Then the news-service film pictures were thrown on the screen, and through the camera lens they saw the Mississippi flood. That they had experienced themselves. They had seen the refugees in their flight, and the overflow at its worst. The running drift; the cattle helpless on a mound, up to their knees in water, doomed! the men carrying cotton bags full of dirt to build up the levees; the fight around a sand-boil to well it in, were all comprehensible and wholly natural to them.
Then they saw a motor-boat coming down the flood, and it rounded up to land at a levee.
"Why—it’s Kalas!" Sibley exclaimed.
"And you—me—us!" Jimmy cried out.
The picture was broken for a legend:
RESCUERS’ LAUNCH
Engineer Kalas, Sibley Carruth, and James Veraine, after working on Reelfoot crevasse, come into Caruthersville on their way down with the Flood Crest.
"Why, I didn’t see them taking it!" Sibley said.
"Too busy to be posin’ around!" Jimmy suggested.
It was true: they had been so intent on making the landing and attending to their own work that they had not noticed the picture machine that had been set up in the crowd, among the levee-back material. A sensation of listless fatigue now seemed to overcome them, as they relaxed, little by little, from the intense strain of long-continued excitement.
Thus they waited to hear from New Madrid, and soon after ten o’clock on the following morning an automobile dashed up to the Natchez House, and a man and woman sprang from it, their faces white with excitement and expectancy. They reached the clerk’s office in a flash.
"Carruth?" the man demanded.
"Yes, in a moment," the clerk replied. "The reception room—if you will!"
A bell-boy rushed to the suite the Carruths occupied.
"Somebody from New Madrid!" he announced.
Mr. Carruth went downstairs, and immediately returned, followed by the strangers. They burst into the presence of Mrs. Carruth, Jep, and Driftwood.
Jep and the baby were playing on the floor, running tin trains around and under the structures built with wooden blocks. A cry from the woman made Driftwood sit up staring.
"Ma-ma!" he cried, throwing up both arms, and the woman, dropping on her knees, caught him to her, sobbing wildly. The man dropped beside them, patting both of them and biting his lips to keep from breaking down.
"My baby! My baby! My precious baby!" the woman cried, and the Carruths stole from the room.
Jep rose to his feet and stood looking at such happiness as he had never seen before; and then, unnoticed, he, too, turned and walked slowly out, his head bowed and his hands clenched.
There were claims to Driftwood greater than any he could advance. He went downstairs and out into the street, and down to the custom-house, where he could see the Mississippi flowing past, huge and majestic, a coiling, writhing, menacing thing; bringing much to countless people—not all evil, not all good—and to him a few strange and happy days, with now the greatest disappointment he had ever known.
"He’s such a good little kid!" he choked. "I’d ’a’ stole him from anybody; but, dog-gone it, you can’t take a baby from his own mother!"
He watched the river for a long time. The tense, gripping, lonely feeling that had made his heart ache at first gave way little by little to a better mood. His feeling of bitterness did not last, but yielded to the generosity that was ever foremost in his character. It seemed a hard thing to have to give up Driftwood, but after he had looked at the Mississippi for a while, and thought it over, he knew that what he had dreamed, could not possibly be.
He rose at last and walked slowly back to the hotel. He had thought it all out, given over the most delightful dream of his life, and was ready, now, to return to the old way of living.
When he entered the hotel, three bell-boys rushed to claim the honor of having found him, but he had, as usual, found himself. The clerk called the bell-boys off and Jep went up to the Carruths’ rooms alone.
He walked in, looking for his hat, really. But there swooped down upon him the woman who had snatched Driftwood from him. She threw her arms around him, greatly embarrassing him, as though she had not already caused him suffering enough for one day.
Then the man came, and patted him on the shoulder, hardly able to speak.
Jep didn’t see why they should make such a fuss over him, for of course they had a right to the kid, and they might as well take him and be done with it! But they not only wanted the baby: they declared that they must have Jep, too, now, and that astonished him. What for? Oh, because—and so on!
What followed couldn’t all be told on one page. After all, what had passed was only a kind of introduction to a lot of things that Jep, Sibley, Jimmy, and the rest had never dreamed of, but which became facts. And out of the river Driftwood had brought a whole train of events which would change what had seemed their destiny, more than the Mississippi will be changed after Slough Neck cuts off, or even if the banks of Atchafalaya River cave in and let the main river into the short cut to the Gulf.
"You dear boy! taking care of my baby for me!" Mrs. Brail said. "And just loving him so! He has never looked better in his life! And you didn’t let him catch cold, or anything! It’s splendid! And we’ll never forget—never cease to try to show our gratitude to you—you great, fine boys, you!"
She swept the three youths with a tender and happy glance that they never would forget. Mr. and Mrs. Brail were fine, like their son!
"You knew so much—so well what to do!" she said to Jep. "I believe you’d be a wonderful doctor—a baby-specialist!" she added, and at that the boy straightened up, fairly frightened to have his inmost heart laid bare to that startling mind-reader.
"Oh, I knew it!" she laughed delightedly. "And you shall! You shall be. Sha’n’t he, dear?"
"Anything in the world that he wants, my girl!" her husband replied. "And the three shall divide the thousand-dollar reward, to start with!"
And Driftwood, waving his arms, laughed aloud.
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Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the
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