CHAPTER II

Bright April sunshine, streaming in the window of the room, flooded the bare walls with matter-of-fact daylight. It shone in Tad’s eyes, and he woke up with a start.

The steamboat! It left at eight. He reached for his big silver watch under the pillow, and found to his relief that it was only a few minutes after six. At the same time he discovered the purse, still firmly attached to his hand. The terror of the night seemed ludicrous now. He chuckled at his own timidity and began dressing rapidly.

The two other occupants of the chamber were still heavily asleep when Tad doused his face and hands in the wash basin, strapped his traveling-bag, and went out.

In the front bar there was only a single customer--a humorous-faced little Irishman in brass-buttoned blue clothes, who sat beside a table with a glass of hot toddy in one hand and a pipe in the other.

He looked at Tad jovially. “Bedad, an’ it’s glad I am the last barrel is aboard!” he said, quite as if they had known each other for years.

“Are you one of the steamboat men?” the boy asked.

“I am that, lad--first mate of the _Ohio Belle_, an’ a terrible tired one. We’ve been takin’ cargo for two days an’ nights on end. An’ now I’ve got a half hour ashore while they’re a-gettin’ up steam.”

“Does she sail in half an hour?” asked Tad.

“Or sooner,” replied the Irish mate. “Th’ ould man’s a driver whin his cargo’s once loaded. If it’s breakfast ye’re thinkin’ of, wait and have it aboard with me. I take it ye’re bound down river. I’ve bread and butter and a cold chicken in me locker, and we’ll get coffee from that black son o’ Ham in the galley. The passengers ain’t supposed to begin gettin’ their meals aboard till dinner time. But we’ll have a breakfast, or my name’s not Dennis McCann.”

The plan sounded like a good one to Tad. He waited while the mate finished his glass and paid his score; then, shouldering the bulky portmanteau, he followed him down the hill.

“Ye see,” said McCann, “this steamboatin’ is only a bit of a change like, for me. Me real business is deep-water sailin’, as ye may tell by the roll o’ me legs.”

Already, by twos and threes and singly, people were going aboard. Tad and his companion shouldered through the crowd that had assembled to witness the great event of the week, and crossed the gayly painted gangplank.

Instead of climbing the broad stairway to the deck above, McCann led the boy forward through a narrow alleyway just inside the paddle-box amidships. A blast of heat struck them as they emerged, and Tad found himself facing a row of glowing doors, where sweating darkies fed the boiler-fires with cordwood.

“That’s prime, seasoned hickory,” shouted the mate above the roar of the fires. “Don’t take long to get a head o’ steam with wood like this. But wait till ye see the dirty green stuff they give us down along the lower river.”

They went through another passage where the heat was almost stifling and came out on the forward cargo deck, solidly piled with merchandise. Climbing a steep, ladder-like companionway, they reached the main passenger deck. Higher still, Tad could see the “Texas,” or upper deck, with the pilot-house perched atop, and just aft of it the two tall stacks, with clouds of smoke pouring from them.

“Rest here awhile, me lad,” said McCann, “whiles I rustle that breakfast.”

Tad sat down on his portmanteau, close to the rail, and watched the spectacle below. The passengers made a colorful assemblage. There were plain pioneer folk in linsey-woolsey and butternut cloth, going back to their homesteads in Indiana or Illinois. There were wealthy planters from the cotton States, resplendent in fine raiment and attended by retinues of colored body-servants. Small tradesmen, drovers and the like, from the nearer river towns, made up a fair proportion, and Tad saw two or three lonely-looking hunters in buckskin, with their long rifles and little packs of provisions, bound for the wild western country. One oddly dressed man, with an eyeglass, who was constantly asking questions and jotting down notes in a little book, Tad decided must be an English tourist.

There remained a little group which he found it harder to identify. Three or four men in fashionable frock-coats, their pearl-gray beaver hats cocked at a rakish angle, and clouds of smoke rolling up from their cigars, idled and jested by the landward end of the gangplank. Either they had no luggage, or it was already stowed aboard. Tad did not care for their looks, and he liked them still less when he saw them joined by a companion--the tall, dark fellow whom he had already encountered twice in his brief stay at Wheeling.

The friendly mate returned just then with a steaming pail of coffee and led Tad off to his bunk in the officers’ cabin. Breakfast over, McCann rose and put on his mate’s cap.

“There goes the ‘all ashore’ call,” said he. “I’ll take ye down to the purser, an’ ye can get yer room from him.”

Tad found the stateroom assigned to him and put his bag inside. It was a tiny cubicle with a single bunk, its window opening on the deck far aft. Outside, the boy joined a group of passengers at the rail.

The last hurried arrivals had rushed aboard, and final preparations for departure were now in progress. Negro deck hands stood by the mooring ropes at bow and stern. At a signal from the pilot-house the cables were cast off and the darkies burst into song as they hauled them in and coiled them down.

Bells rang sharply in the engine-room. With a creak and a splash the tall paddle-wheels began to turn, and the steamboat, catching the swift current, swept grandly out into the Ohio. A long, bellowing blast of the whistle bade farewell to the waving throngs astern.

That day and those that followed were full of experiences for Tad. Hour after hour he sat by the rail, or stood on the Texas with his friend the mate, watching the valley unfold. The river was running bank-full, fed by the April freshets; and added to the eight or ten miles an hour of which the steamer was capable, the strong current gave them a speed that seemed almost dizzying.

They shot past dozens of loaded broadhorns and keel-boats, drifting down with a single long steering-oar directing their course. The boatmen would cheer the _Ohio Belle_ or curse her, depending on their humor and whether or not their craft misbehaved when her wash hit them.

Some of these rude arks held all the worldly possessions of a family--homesteaders setting out to conquer the wilderness in Missouri or Iowa. Many of them had chicken coops on their half-decks, and once Tad saw a yoke of red steers chained to a post amidships and watching the water with rolling, frightened eyes.

He tried to imagine what sort of life the people led, aboard those homely, slow-moving boats. Almost he envied the freckled youngster he saw fishing over the side of one weather-beaten broadhorn. If he weren’t going to New Orleans to see his Dad--well, he couldn’t help thinking what a lazy, carefree, interesting voyage one could take in an Ohio River flatboat!

To Tad, raised in the more thickly populated country along the Atlantic seaboard, the forest-covered hills that rolled back from the river as far as the eye could see were satisfyingly wild and mysterious. And yet he was surprised at the feeling of bustle and activity that pervaded the valley.

Little settlements of new log houses were continually appearing along the shore, and in many places sheep and cattle were grazing in freshly cleared pastures. Ferry-boats, rowed by lusty river-men, plied back and forth between the West Virginia and Ohio villages. Trading scows, loaded with calico, tools, and manufactured goods from the East, put in at the farms and hamlets to exchange their merchandise for produce.

“This is a great country, lad--a great country,” Dennis McCann would say. “Some day, belikes, ’twill be almost as great as Ireland!”

Tad watched the pilot spin the huge wheel to left and right, as the _Ohio Belle_ splashed her way down through the shallows. There was plenty of water and fairly easy steering, but the skill of the gray-bearded old keel-boat man in the pilot-house seemed uncanny nevertheless. He could sense a sunken snag farther away than Tad could see a floating one. And he seemed to mind steering at night no more than in the daytime.

They stopped at Marietta and later at Parkersburg that first afternoon, and as darkness fell, the chief pilot came up to relieve his assistant, who had had the wheel most of the day. Tad, before he turned in that night, had the thrill of standing in the pilot-house and watching the old-time river-man take his craft down through the inky blackness, swinging the bends like a race horse.

The little stateroom was clean and comfortable in spite of its tiny size, and the boy slept so soundly that not even the hoarse wail of the whistle awoke him.

The _Ohio Belle_ made a stop of several hours at Cincinnati to load and unload freight the morning of the third day. And again the following forenoon at Louisville there was a long delay.

The weather, which had been fine up till then, turned cloudy with spits of rain that morning, but Tad, as usual, spent his time on deck with the mate. The river was high enough to make the passage of the Falls a possibility, and the _Ohio Belle_, shallow of draft like all the river steamers, took the white water safely.

The rain increased in the afternoon, and Tad was finally driven inside out of the wet. He had paid very little attention to his fellow passengers on the voyage so far. But now, for something to do, he strolled down the inside passageway to the main saloon. It was just before he reached the cabin companion that he passed a door standing ajar and heard men talking angrily. Suddenly one voice rose to a shout and a chair was pushed back with a violent scraping noise. Then the door opened, and in it, with his back to Tad, stood a tall man in shabby, well-cut clothes. The fellow swayed a little and caught the door-jamb with one hand. With the other he flung a pack of dirty playing-cards back into the room. Then he spoke in a thick, choking voice.

“You’ve cleaned me,” he said. “You’ve got my last cent, curse you! But I’ll be back, and don’t you forget it!” As he turned to leave he almost fell over Tad, and the boy was startled by the look of ferocity on his white, drawn face--a face he knew and had begun to fear.

With long strides the man reached the end of the passage, then checked himself in the act of turning the corner, and glanced back at Tad as if he remembered something. An instant later he was gone.

The other gamblers in the stateroom were silent for a moment after his departure. Then one of them burst into a loud guffaw.

“So he’ll be back, eh!” he cried. “That’s a good ’un. Who’d lend him a plugged nickel on board here?”

They resumed their game, and some one slammed the door shut. Restless, Tad roamed about the interior of the vessel, went down to watch the darkies firing the boilers on the lower deck, watched the Indiana bluffs to the northward slide past in the rain, ate supper with the other cabin passengers, and finally went back to his stateroom. When he had undressed he bolted the door, opened the window a few inches for fresh air, and went to bed. Lulled by the steady beat of the rain, he was soon asleep.

It must have been hours later when he woke, for the downpour had ceased and a gusty wind was blowing. Was it the wind rattling his door that had wakened him? Rubbing his eyes he rose on one elbow and peered over the edge of his bunk. And there, just climbing through the window, was the black, looming figure of a man.