Driftwood (Spears)/Chapter 15

HEY 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:

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.