The Way of the Mississippi/Chapter 4

Y chance, merely, a number of shanty boats had landed in the eddy where merry-making had instantly sprung up, the arrival of the Whispering Shoals, a ninety-foot amusement craft, making the inclusion of dancing perfectly inevitable.

Painted along the proportionately low cabin's side of the huge ark were the words;

A year or two previous to this day the Whispering Shoals had come down the river with a troupe of song birds on board, stopping at landings and giving entertainments that neither love nor money would supply in any ordinary theater up the banks. Several were actually members of church choirs, and others were trained stage singers. It was a great lark, this trip down the Mississippi, and audiences at plantation landings heard music they would remember many a day. Now the boat belonged to the Frindals, who threw the craft wide open to whatever merriment was in the wind. Dick Frindal looked on all the doings with half closed blue eyes, while his wife exchanged with him looks of humor at some river antic or exploit on their hospitable floor. They had two hired deck hands and a woman cook—wife of one of the hands. Rumor said they were just a couple of rich folks, seeing the river; other whispers said that they were living out, scouting down till some ill wind blew over. At least, they were good sports and no one would ever forget the winter the Frindals tripped the Whispering Shoals out of Evansville down to N'Orleans.

With her bow to the bank, and bow and stern lines run off to port and starboard, steadying her, held off by a long, wheeled and banistered gangplank, the concert boat was the nucleus of a shanty boat town, or Duck Nest. Other boats were moored along the bank, up and down the eddy, and there were two or three more boats against the sand bar a hundred yards or so away, and nearer the main river current.

Having danced the dark into day again, the river trippers emerged from the dance hall and walked up onto the bank, there to turn to their own craft. The spirit of merriment had hardly flagged at all; the women were laughing and talking, the men were still stepping to the tunes that ran in their heads. When a great fox squirrel suddenly scampered up a tall cottonwood in alarm, seven or eight of the men snatched out revolvers or automatics and began to shoot a wild fusillade that chipped twigs, gashed the bole bark and plugged into the body wood. In chittering fear the squirrel raced madly up and along a diminishing branch, leaped a dozen feet out and down, caught another branch, and having lost four or five inches of its tail, which fluttered down, it made its frightened way to safety, while one of the shooters picked up the fluffy trophy, plucked out the bone and handed the plume to his companion.

Denton Rillard, strolling along with Dona Voane, "seeing her home," after the manner of the world-wide privilege, found her boat nearly half a mile downstream at the very foot of the eddy, and where occasional swirls of the main current swung in far enough to press the hull more firmly against the bank.

It was a house boat, about thirty-six feet long, ten wide, and the hull was at least three feet above the water surface. On the roof were elk horns and a wild mountain sheep's head. Under the cabin porch roof hung some ears of corn braided in their shocks. Along both sides of the boat were two running boards, relic of old keel-boat days, at least twenty feet in lodge-pole length.

A far traveler, this boat! It looked the journey it had made down the great length of the Missouri. That two women had floated it down most of the way was almost incredible, but such was the fact. The mother of Dona walked out on the bow deck as the two approached and fixed Rillard with the squinting stare of her suspicious eyes—her visage was dark, aquiline and betrayed the faintest dash of Indian, and a great deal of Latin—probably French.

"Mr. Rillard, mother!" Dona introduced them. "He's the sport we heard about—coming down out of the Ohio."

"Glad to met you, Mr. Rillard," the elder woman nodded, not ungraciously. "I expect you-all think shanty boating is right amusing, don't you?"

"It's a liberal education, I should say," he said, and at that the girl laughed lightly, saying:

"Mad Tom Maiton's pirates were mostly there, and Mr. Rillard—sho, mother, he was there first and it left me nothing to do!"

"You had it out?" Mrs. Voane inquired quickly.

"Mad Tom was mean—and fell overboard; Jim Taken and Date Imsal grew impudent, but went and sat by their lady friends when Mr. Rillard told them to."

The sharp suspicion in Mrs. Voane's eyes relaxed, and her lips smiled sincerely. There was relief in her expression, too, and Rillard, unable to conceal his wonderment, was invited on board their boat to breakfast, ostensibly, but in fact to hear the brief narrative of the mother.

Over their buckwheat cakes and pork sage sausage Mrs. Voane said:

"It's real friendly of you, taking up this matter for us; Mad Tom's always been mean about Dona here; he 'lowed he'd sure get to marry her when she was only ten-twelve years old, and we were on Illinois River. Daddy sent her to school, thinking that scoundrel would sure forget, but he never did—and account of Dona growing prettier, nobody could rightly blame him. But Dona feared and despised him. Last night, knowing they'd be coming down—for they've trailed us a thousand miles—she went to the dance. I dassent to leave the boat alone, for they'd pirate it, just to worry us, and leave us begging for a night aboard some friend's boat. Dona carried her daddy's gun—I see you're wearing it, Mr. Rillard. Is Mad Tom daid?"

"He went a-swimming," Dona laughed "Came charging like a buck deer, with his head down— Lawse! Mr. Rillard stepped to one side and hoisted him—up and out—"

"He could swim like a fish! Like an otter!" Mrs. Voane exclaimed, disappointed.

"But before letting him go he twitched his neck," Dona added.

"An' he drowned!"

"If he came up, he didn't come flashing." Dona shook her head. "It 'd be like old Mississip' to drown him—but he's a fish in the water."

After breakfast Rillard went to his own craft, a pretty, cruising motor boat, model hull and driven by a screw propeller. It was swinging from the stern deck of Charlie Books's pink storeboat, because the draft was pretty deep for landing against the bank. As he approached the storeboat, Mrs. Mamie Books opened the door for him, and closed it behind him as she beckoned him into the cabin behind the store, with its shelves and counter.

"Mr. Man!" Charlie Books whispered. "You've sure done something. Don't you know that Jim Taken and Date Imsal will kill you-all in cold blood? Why, they're"—his voice lowered—"they're riveh pirates of Mad Tom's crew! Lawse—nobody knows how many or who's of them! If Mad Tom 'd be'n theh you'd neveh left that boat alive—"

"Well, Mad Tom wasn't there," Rillard suggested.

"Sho—what!"

"But he was!" Mrs. Mamie turned to her husband, her eyes widening. "'Long early, he w'as theh—I danced with him."

The two turned to look at Rillard. He made no comment, and they dared ask no questions; yet they were alert to the possibilities of the situation, to the subtle hint in his one statement that Mad Tom was gone when he defied the two river scoundrels.

"Have a cup of coffee?" Mrs. Mamie suggested, and he assented, but explained that he had just eaten breakfast on board the Voane boat.

"You di-id?" Mamie cried, once more surprised. "Ho, law—man! You're flying high, but coming down to light where Mad Tom sure 'lowed is his own country!"

Then, rather than embarrass their visitor, they told what a fine dance it had been, how they enjoyed the music, and how the winter down the river was going to be like old times, as in the days when anybody could kill all the wild fowl he wanted, and when every brake and bayou was alive with fur and game. Then Rillard went home to his boat to rest.

Late in the day, when he awakened, most of the shanty boaters were up and busy; blue smoke poured out of the stovepipes in the roofs, and there was wood-chopping on the bank; there was high-pitched, feminine singing, a weird, low strain of a fiddle, several whistlers vying with one another in their warblings and thrills and piercing shrills. The sky was a bit misty, and the sun was shining with diffused whiteness upon the tawny flood, the downstream reach thickening till the faraway bend was but a faint, hardly visible hue of pale blue.

Mad Tom, Charlie Books said, had disappeared. His gang were together on their gasolines and shack boats against the sand bar, talking among themselves. Their surly aspect, and their low growling as they looked out at the sport's motor boat Jungle left little to the imagination.

"They're mean,” Books declared, “When you get down the river alone, look out! Keep yo' eyes open, Mr. Man! They 'low you tricked them. But if Mad Tom's daid, they'll scatter. An' they's afeared of you—yes, indeedy! Five, ten of them saw saw yo' bluff down Jim Taken an' Date Imsal. Ho, Law, I wouldn't o' missed seein' that, not fo' a bale of beaver skins! Lawse! They'll neveh front yo' to yo' face—no, indeedy! But bushwhackin'—shootin' from behind! Don' yo' turn yo' back on any man yo' don't know—and neveh follow the same road twice: neveh tell any man where yo'll step, where yo'll go, or when yo'll come back an', come night, pull down yo' curtains, shut the do'r, and when yo' step outside have no light behind yo'!"

Rillard looked up and down the river; he went out on the bank and talked the tune of day with his fellows; he strolled down the bank with an assumption of ease that he did not feel, and sitting on the bow deck of the Voane boat, heard from Dona's own lips a repetition of the warning that Books had given him. It thrilled his love of venture to hear her concern about his jeopardy; as a boy he had dreamed of fronting desperate and treacherous enemies; now the reality was all that his boyish imagination had pictured to him. It was quite as incredible, but the reality was not to be questioned.

He was a participant in a river feud.

One other thing struck his fancy with satisfaction: it was all a river affair. He was more than a thousand miles from home. He was with a kind of people of whose existence he had never read, though he had heard occasional rumors that river shanty boaters were a strange class; certainly, there was hardly a chance of the rumor of anything he did down there reaching his faraway home town to alarm his friends and delight his few and unimportant enemies.

The feeling that he would never be found out threw a glamor over his condition, and added to the discomfiture of his conscience. No harm could come of this affair. He would not be shot, or killed—he would attend to that; courage and alertness would be with him, and when, toward sunset, he saw the dirty little shanty boat, the two stern wheel scows and the old, weathered gasoline launch of the pirate fleet pull out into the eddy and turn across into the main current he was completely satisfied.

They had not remained, there to have it out with him; the eddy was not large enough for  them, the Voanes and  himself. The pirates had fled, and it was a real psychological victory. When the pirates were vanishing in the thickening down the reach, the shanty boaters gathered in groups and exclaimed among themselves. Dona turned and laughed as she looked with roguish frankness into Rillard's eyes.

"They've gone. Yo' sure scairt 'em out, Mr. Man! Mother an' I sure must thank you, suh! They 'lowed yo' came down here to ask how yo' could help us—"

"I was really wondering just that," he admitted.

"And they knew it. You're being friendly with us. If Mad Tom's daid, it 'll stop any one from pesterin' mother and I any more. I wish I could do as much for you stranger."

The word stranger gave the wish just exactly the right balance; the visitor returned, with the coming of dusk, to his own boat and pondered on the ways of the Mississippi with all its people.