Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/215

 Twenty minutes later they were standing on the river-bank watching the approach of the mammoth white boat. Handkerchiefs were waved, and in answer to this primitive signal the huge craft, cleverly handled as an Indian's canoe, drew along-side the levee. The gangway was thrown, and while the monster held its breath for a moment, the friends were safely transferred to the lower deck; another sixty seconds, and the steamer was on her course again, the group of new passengers in her stern waving a last greeting to the spare old man standing hat in hand beneath a giant live-oak gray and venerable as himself.

The steamer had a fair number of passengers, and was heavily freighted with cotton. Groups of men smoking, talking, and playing cards were collected on her decks and in the after-saloon.

Most of them were rough-looking fellows enough, drovers from Texas, horse-traders from everywhere, rancheros from the Far West, and a gang of Chinamen bound for South America to labor in a climate too deadly even for the negro. Railroads must be built, rivers must be spanned, mountains must be tunnelled for the march of commerce; and for these things, which the American covets but cannot achieve, the despised Mongolian is imported, and treated as the African never was, execrated and scoffed