Driftwood (Spears)/Chapter 1

HE 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:

To Sibley, however, it was absorbing; for he loved everything about the river. On page 3418 he found the statement:

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.