A big passenger packet, hailing from up-river, swept into view. Ablaze from her bow to the churning stern wheel she bore down like a floating villa strung with yellow gems. A band blared “Dixie” from somewhere amidships. I was young enough to have some degree of enthusiasm for such spectacles, and I turned onto a long half-lighted wharf and walked to its outermost tip to get a better view of the puffing river monster with its thousand gleaming eyes.
Until she came abreast and passed, I stood there watching. In a careless way I became aware of two men strolling out on the wharf; in fact, I had passed them near the entrance gate. I remember that the swell from the big packet was beginning to slap against the wharf wall when one of them edged over and asked me the time.
Like a simpleton I hauled out my watch to tell him. It did not occur to me that there might be any purpose behind the question. The river-front in St. Louis was not a place where one could safely exhibit signs of affluence in the way of cash or jewelry—and I knew it. I hadn’t grown up in a city without knowing some of its ways. No doubt it looked like an easy game, out there on the end of a deserted wharf.
My watch was a plain hunting-case affair, with a fob. Without an inkling of what was to come I turned toward the dim light as I sprung the case open. In that instant the fellow struck the watch out of my grasp with one hand, and smashed me full on the jaw with the other—a vicious, pugilistic punch. I went down. Curiously, I didn’t lose consciousness; and the blow gave little pain. But it paralyzed my motor nerves for a few seconds, gave me a queer, helpless feeling in my legs and arms, such as one has in a nightmare. It passed though, and the pair of them were just going through my pockets with a celerity that bespoke much practice when I recovered sufficiently to jab my fist into a face that was bent close to mine—at the same time driving both heels against the shins of the other fellow with what force I could muster.
This instinctive outbreak rather surprised them, I think. Anyway, they gave ground. Only for a moment, however. I made one valiant effort to gain my feet, and they were on me like twin wolves. Kicking, striking, struggling like primal beasts we three lurched this way and that on the brink of the wharf. A hundred yards away people were hurrying by, and if I’d had sense enough to realize that a shout was my best weapon I could easily have routed the thugs. But I was too frightened to think.
And in a very short time sheer weight of numbers decided the issue. One of them got a strangle hold about my neck. The other clasped me fervently around the waist. Thus they dragged me down. For one brief instant I rested on the hard planking, my head in a whirl, their weight like a mountain on my heaving chest. Then, with a quick shove they thrust me over the edge of the wharf.
Undertaken voluntarily, a twenty-foot dive is no great matter, but it is a horse of quite another color to be chucked into space and fall that distance like a bag of meal. I struck the water feet first, as it happened, and came to the top spluttering, half-strangled, but otherwise none the worse. Right quickly I found that I’d merely exchanged one antagonist for another. The current set strongly out from the wharf, and it cost me many a stroke to get back to it, and then I saw that I was no better off. Contrary to the usual thing the piles offered no avenue of escape, for they were planked up, a smooth wooden wall that I could not possibly climb. I felt my way toward shore, but the out-sweeping current was too strong. So I hooked my fingers in a tiny crack and proceeded to shed what clothing still burdened me. Of my coat only a fragmentary portion remained. It had been ripped up the back in the fracas above, and the side containing my ticket and most of my money had been torn clear off me. There was little left save the sleeves. My shoes and shirt and trousers I cast upon the waters with little thought of their return; and then, clad in a suit of thin underclothes I struck out for the next pier below, thanking my stars that I was a fair swimmer.
But I could not make it. The channel of the Mississippi threw the full head of a powerful current against the St. Louis side at that particular point; it struck the wharf-lined bank and swerved out again with the strength of an ocean tide, and I was in the out-going curve of it. The next wharf was not for me nor yet its fellow beyond. Steadily I was carried into mid-stream. Shouting for help across the black space that lay between me and the wharves soon exhausted what wind and strength I did not use up in a footless attempt to swim against the current. I stopped yelling then; it seemed to be sink or swim, and I began to conserve my energies a bit. Slipping along in plain view of myriad lights, hearing the fiendish screaming of steamer whistles, seeing the moving bulk of them dimly in the night, I felt in no immediate danger—not half as much alarm disturbed the soul of me as when the fingers of those night-hawks were clawing at my throat. I knew I could keep afloat an indefinite length of time, and some craft or other, I reasoned, would pick me up if I failed to make shore.
By and by I rapped my hand smartly against some hard object as I cleft the water, and gripping it I found myself the richer by a four-foot stick of cordwood on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. This served to bear me up without any exertion on my part, and gave me that much better chance to buck the current. I was now well out from the wharves, and straining my eyes for passing boats.
Far down the river the piercing shriek of a siren split a momentary silence that had fallen on the stream. A drumming noise was borne up to me on a fitful night breeze. From behind the black loom of a jutting wharf a steamer appeared, and came throbbing upstream. Now she was almost on me, the heart-like pulse of her engines and the thresh of her great sternwheel deadening all the other sounds which that vast river surface caught up and bandied back and forth.