CHAPTER XI

The storm struck hard, lashing the muddy water high along the levee and tossing the broadhorns at their moorings. After the furious wind came rain in a deluge that drenched the boys under their hastily erected tarpaulins. And after the rain a pitch-black, sodden night.

A few lights glowed feebly in the town, and the music struck up again after a while, but even Allen was too damp and dispirited to feel like going ashore. They got a fire started on the wet hearth, and huddling around it, finally went to sleep.

The sun was shining in the morning and all along the water front a bustle of activity began. Boatmen clambered across the decks of neighboring craft to buy or sell goods or visit acquaintances. There was a constant noise of laughing, shouting, swearing, and fighting.

The fiddles began their monotonous squeaking once more in the levee saloons, and Allen began to cast a restless eye shoreward, but Abe found plenty for them all to do aboard the _Katy Roby_. They cooked and ate breakfast, swabbed the decks, and spread out their bedding to dry in the sun. They watched a big, new steamboat, the _Tecumseh_, swing in to the landing, her bow a bare thirty feet from them when she made her mooring.

“That’s the fastest boat on the river,” they heard a near-by ark-captain say. “She’s got new-fangled boilers with more steam pressure on ’em than the _Amazon_, even. An’ they say her cap’n is out to break all records to Louisville this trip.”

From the speed with which her darky deck hands rolled molasses hogsheads aboard, it could be seen that some of the excitement of her race up river had got into their blood.

A group of fastidiously dressed passengers, thronging her upper decks, looked down with laughing interest at the scene on the landing. The men were holding watches and laying wagers on the time of the steamer’s departure. In less than half an hour the last huge barrel was in place on the forward cargo deck and the mate cried his “All aboard,” as the negroes ran the gangplank in. With a clang of bells the big boat’s paddles churned the water and she backed out, wheeling into the current.

Tad, looking up a little wistfully at her gleaming brass and freshly painted upper works, watched her whole magnificent length sweep by. And then suddenly he gripped the gunwale of the flatboat and stared open-mouthed. For high up on the hurricane deck, astern, he had seen a solitary figure--a big middle-aged man with a beaver hat and a familiar set to the shoulders. The man was just turning to leave the rail and he was unable to get a good view of his face, but he was almost sure.... “Dad!” he screamed, with all the voice he could muster, “Dad!”

There had been a feather of white steam up aloft on the _Tecumseh’s_ funnel when he started to shout, and as he launched his cry a deafening blast of the whistle came, drowning him out.

Another long-drawn hoot and two short ones followed. Before they were finished, the steamboat was a hundred yards away, and the man who looked like Tad’s father had vanished down the companionway. The boy had a great lump in his throat as he turned away. He stumbled aft and sat down beside Poke, blinking his eyes fast to keep back the unmanly tears.

Abe had heard him shout and now came over to stand behind him, dropping a big hand casually on his shoulder.

“Reckon that was your father?” he asked.

Tad nodded. “I couldn’t be sure,” he answered, “but it looked a lot like him.”

“Wal,” said Abe, “I know how ye feel, right enough, but don’t take it too hard. He’ll be back in New Orleans to meet ye. Didn’t ye tell him in yer letter that we’d be thar next week?”

“Sure,” Tad replied. “Only he must be pretty worried, or he wouldn’t be on his way up to try to find me, now.”

Allen had been up on the levee, watching the _Tecumseh’s_ departure and chatting with a crowd of flatboat men. Now he returned with the look of one bearing news.

“Hey, Tad,” he called as he jumped aboard, “what was the name o’ that boat that was expected in Shawneetown--the one the postmaster said he’d mail yer letter by?”

“The _Nancy Jones_,” said Tad.

“That’s what I thought,” Allen nodded. “Wal, they tol’ me up on the bank jest now that the _Nancy Jones_ was blowed up two weeks ago in Vicksburg bend, an’ lost with more’n half her passengers an’ crew.”

Tad’s jaw dropped. “Then--then Dad doesn’t even know I’m alive,” he stammered. “No wonder he’s on his way up the river.”

In a few words Abe told Allen of Tad’s momentary glimpse of the man on the steamer. “Now the thing fer you to do,” said he, turning to the boy, “is to send another letter post-haste to New Orleans, so the folks thar kin reach him whar he’s gone.”

“I’m goin’ ashore,” Allen volunteered. “He kin come along an’ fix up to send his letter whiles I transact some business.”

Abe looked doubtful. “All right,” he agreed finally. But to Tad, as they prepared to leave the boat, he whispered, “Keep an eye on him now, an’ don’t let him go in any places he shouldn’t.”

They clambered to the levee top and walked through the thick black mud up the main street of the lower town. It was nearly noon, and Natchez was waking up for the day’s work. Patrons by ones and twos were entering the various barrooms they passed. Gambling joints were rolling up shutters and dusting off tables. A few women, hard-faced and heavily painted, leered at them from doorways, and the dance-hall music droned on unceasingly.

A negro teamster directed them to the post office on a side street a few blocks from the river.

“Here you are,” said Allen as they reached the entrance, and Tad would have gone in at once if his eye had not been caught by a notice posted in the dusty window. With growing excitement he stood before it, staring at the boldly-printed words. What he read was this:

To Whom it May Concern

A _REWARD OF $5,000_

(Five thousand Dollars) will be paid for _Information_

leading to the recovery of my son, Thaddeus Hopkins, if alive, or of his body if dead.

This boy is 15 years old, of medium height and weight for his age, with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion.

_DISAPPEARED_

from his cabin on the Steamboat _Ohio Belle_, somewhere between Owensboro, Kentucky, and the mouth of the Wabash River, on the night of April 8th, 1828.

Any one having news of his whereabouts should communicate immediately with

JEREMIAH HOPKINS, 26 St. Louis Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.

“Allen!” Tad gasped. “Look at this!”

There was no answer. Swinging about in surprise, he found the street behind him empty. Only a lean yellow dog scratched for fleas in the middle of the dusty road.

Tad stared up and down the straggling rows of houses, bewildered at his companion’s disappearance. Then his eye lit on two saloons across the way, and he knew at once where Allen had gone.

With Abe’s parting injunction still fresh in his mind, he darted to the other side of the street and stood a moment in hesitation before the two doors. There was no way to tell which place Allen had entered except to go in himself and find out. He decided to try the right-hand building first.

The swinging half-door gave easily under his hand, and he stepped into a square, half-darkened room, with stained wooden tables and a long mahogany bar. There was no one in sight, and Tad hesitated a moment in the middle of the sanded floor, looking about him, disappointed. Then he caught the sound of voices and low laughter and saw that the door leading into the rear room stood slightly ajar. He fancied that it was Allen he heard, laughing over having given him the slip. Quickly he crossed the floor, pushed open the door, and walked through.

A glance showed him that there were only three men in the room, and that Allen was not one of them. At the right of the table was a broad, thick-necked, powerfully-built man with a tight stock and a red, angry-looking face. Next him sat a thin, sallow, rat-eyed fellow with a nervous affection that twitched one corner of his mouth downward into a sneer every second or two. The third member of the party slouched in his chair, a long, slim figure with a dark mustache, the upper part of his face shaded by the broad brim of his hat.

Each of the three had started slightly at the lad’s abrupt entrance, and they now sat watching him with hostile eyes.

“I--I beg your pardon,” said Tad. “I thought a friend of mine came in here.” And he started to back out.

Suddenly the tall man with the black mustache was on his feet.

“Wait!” he ordered in a husky voice that struck terror to Tad’s heart. “Stay where yo’ are, suh.”

But waiting was the last thing in the boy’s mind. He had caught a glimpse of the man’s face and his long, slim hands. It was the Wheeling gambler who had thrown him overboard from the _Ohio Belle_. With a sense of panic he turned and darted for the door, but he never reached it. A stool came whirling through the air and struck him in the back of the head, and down he went, his mind blanked out in a roaring gulf of darkness.