His thirsty senses soon discovered a spring on the hillside. Reaching down to the deck, he picked up a light-weight wooden bucket by its woven-willow bail, resolving as soon as the boat docked to run up the hill and get a drink from the spring. The taste of river water was becoming tiresome to him.
"The landing looks like a hay-field," he laughed as the people bobbed about. Every woman and child and nearly every man wore a straw hat, the first ones he had ever seen. Skill in weaving straw was another art introduced by the clever Swiss. In the May sunshine this entirely new style of head-covering suggested comfort. "Take off your 'coonskin, Doby," said the boy to himself. "Its season is over. The Swiss are weaving the left-over straw-stacks into a millinery show."
He examined the faces under the hats. It was easy to pick out the Swiss from among the New England emigrants and the roustabouts of the river. They were more graceful and shorter of stature. Indeed, the Swiss were so compact in physique that the master of the wagon-train who freighted them from their port at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1801, across the Alleghany Mountains to the flatboats at Pittsburg, complained that six and one-quarter cents a hundredweight was not enough money for the women and children who rode, since it took more than one person to make a hundredweight and little people were as much trouble as big ones.
The Swiss used French words. And because the French were always friendly to Indians, the squaws of the region seemed to feel sure of the hospitality of this village. They hung about the Swiss like bees about the grape blooms.
"Beggars, beggars, beggars!" sneered Doby. "They beg for themselves and beg for the pappooses slung up behind them. They beg for their families and beg for the dogs at their heels."
He scowled at our native red race as it filed along below him on the wharf. "They can't be made to work and the Swiss will have to feed 'em or the braves will threaten war." Some idea of ultimate justice stirred in Doby's mind, for he shook his head at a fat pappoose as he reflected: "We have taken their hunting-ground without their leave. They are making us pay for it without our leave."
Moving about with the crowd was one figure more uncouth than the squaws. It was a ragged, blanketed, straw-hatted creature. Doby noticed it. On its feet were mismatched gear, a torn moccasin for the right foot, a broken leather boot for the left. No scarecrow could have worn worse clothes.
As Doby leaned over the edge of the boat and stared, the shapeless thing raised its head and returned the gaze. Then he saw that it was a man, a white man, whose face was sodden with gin and lined with evil; a degraded outcast deported from some Old World prison.
Numbers of such wretches were dumped on Eastern coasts. Few wandered so far inland as Vevay. Doby recoiled from the threatening leer the drunkard threw at him. Instinctively he laid his right hand on the hilt of his stone knife, for he had the same sense of danger approaching that the man has who claps his hand to his sword.
The steamboat was already loading with produce for the up-river trip. Piles of new straw hats were tossed aboard. Skins of grape-juice, protected by straw cratings, were stacked on deck. Firkins of marmalade were handled carefully. Straw boxes of raisins were properly stowed. A few bottles of delicate home-made wine were handed as compliments to the officers of the boat.