Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/19

. 27, 1863.]

2em

was a soft, bright, warm evening in March (which corresponds to the June of our colder clime) when I took my way down the broad streets of Mobile, bound up the Mobile and Alabama rivers to Montgomery, the beautiful capital of the state, and, for a time, of the Southern Confederacy.

As I approached the pier, the air was filled with the music of a steam organ on one of the boats, which was played by a German musical artist, engaged by the year, at a handsome salary. It is a strange music that fills the air with a vast body of harmony, carrying with it the impression of the power that gives it birth—in the range of long cylindrical boilers—of which the organ is the melodious collection of escape pipes and safety valves.

The Mobile river, which is but an extension of the deep bay, into which flow the Tombigbee and the Alabama, is broad and deep, and was now bank full. There were scarcely any visible shores. We steamed through a vast forest, which opened before us in picturesque reaches of the richest semi-tropical foliage, and the air was thick with the odour of the orange-blossom and the jessamine. The two fine rivers which unite to form the Mobile, have, like it, preserved their Indian names, but how the tribe that found for two of them such musical designations as Mobile and Alabama ever came to name a river the Tombigbee, I shall leave to some Choctaw or Cherokee to find a satisfactory explanation. Perhaps I do the aboriginal savages injustice. The Americans are not slow at corrupting names when they can make them sound more familiar. Thus a point on the Mississippi, which the French named Le Bois Brulé, is known to all the boatmen as “Bob Ruly’s Woods.”

The captain of our steamer was an Irishman, tall, handsome, eloquent, and thoroughly and enthusiastically Southern American in his views and feelings. For twenty years he had steamed up and down the Alabama, and he could not have been more devoted to his adopted country, or the section to which he belonged, had he been born upon the banks of the river.

As we sat forward of the pilot-house, on the promenade deck, enjoying the soft and perfume-laden evening breeze, he told me his story. When a boy of nineteen, he found himself, a raw immigrant, with five dollars in his pocket, on the banks of this river, looking for work; and the first, hardest, and roughest he could find was that of a deck-hand on a steamboat. He became one of a gang of white and black, who stood ready to land and receive freight, take in wood, and feed the furnaces. This hard and rapid work came at all hours of day or night, and the fare was as hard as the work. I have seen the men, a group of negroes on one side of the boat, and of the white hands, mostly Irish or Germans, on the other, eating their bread and bacon, and drinking black coffee from an iron pan, seated on piles of wood or bales of cotton.

But the wages, to a poor Irish boy, were a strong inducement. They gave him eight pounds a month, and found, in a rough fashion, bacon for food, and for his bed a dry goods box or cotton bale. He went to work, and was so sober, active, and intelligent, that the mate had no excuse to knock him into the river with a billet of wood, as was the custom.

He had been a week on the boat, when, one dark night, a fire was seen, and a cry heard, on the bank of the river. The mate would not land, but sent Patrick ashore in the yawl. Standing by the signal fire at the river side, attended by two or three grinning negroes, was a planter, who handed him a package, and said, “Here is thirty-four thousand dollars. Give it to the captain or clerk, and ask him to deposit it for me in the Planters’ bank, as soon as you get in. Tell them not to forget it, as it is to pay a note that falls due day after to-morrow.”

Patrick put the money into his bosom, and pushed off into the dark and lonely river. Doubtless he might have got ashore, and away; and doubtless he thought of it, as he felt the fortune in his bosom, but he pulled straight for the boat, as she lay, blowing off steam in mid-channel. And while he rowed he thought of what he must do.

“What was it all about?” asked the mate, as he sprang on the low deck.

“A message for the captain, sir,” said Patrick.

“Then go into the cabin and give it to him, and be quick about it,” said the not over-polite officer.

Patrick went up the companion way to the cabin, where he found the jolly captain, with a group of planters and merchants, busy at a game of poker, and more busy with the punch. He turned to the clerk, who was deeper in both punch and poker than the captain.

“Faith, an’ this will never do,” said Patrick. “If I give them the money to-night, they will lose it at poker, and never remember it in the morning.” So he went forward on deck again, and stowed the package of bank notes at the bottom of his clothes-bag in the forecastle, if so small a hole can be dignified by any such an appellation.

In the morning, when the officers were awake and sober, Patrick handed over his money and message.

“What is all this?” said the captain; “where did you get this money?”

“I went ashore in the yawl for it last night, sir.”

“And why did you not bring it to the office at once?”

“I did, sir; but you and the clerk were both very busy.”

The passengers, who had been engaged in the same line of business, had a hearty laugh.