Driftwood (Spears)/Chapter 14

HE 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’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:

"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.