At last the long voyage began. The horses were fresh, the gear worked well, and the little craft plowed her way gallantly up the river, making fairly good time for many days, with few accidents.
Besides Lieutenant Grimsby, and Napoleon, twelve still remained from the crew of seventeen, which gave four shifts of three men each for duty—the lookout, the steersman, and the driver for the two horses.
Wary in all matters that touched the safety of his boat, Captain Royce had protected the horse-power on each side with thick planks, that no Indian or outlaw bullet might disable his team when at work. The stalls aft, where the resting animals stood, as also the cabin for the crew, were likewise covered in.
Twelve hours a day was the usual traveling time. They then tied up to the bank for the night, at some point chosen with an eye for defense and shelter.
Commanded with such sagacity and prudence, the Milly Ayer reached the confluence of the Ohio with the Mississippi on February 22nd, having lost but four days, which had been spent in fishing and hunting to replenish the food supply, and in foraging for the horses.
Here for once Marion Royce seems to have departed from his usual rule of carefully avoiding quarrels. He had never forgiven the brutal assault upon Corson at “Cairo.” Corson’s sightless eye had been a constant reminder of the indignity.
The evening they reached the confluence of the rivers it was agreed to give Cairo a surprise. We are at liberty to surmise, however, that the waggish Lieutenant Grimsby had something to do with this practical joke. His record afterward would seem to justify such a conjecture.
During the small hours of the night, after the thin mists began to rise from the river and lowlands, the Milly Ayer, using its sweeps instead of the horse-power, approached where the big “broadhorn”—which still sheltered Cairo and its queer population—lay moored to the muddy bank. Charlie Hoyt then quietly boarded it from the skiff.
At that hour every one appeared to be asleep. Stepping aboard cautiously, Hoyt first secured his skiff, then made one end of a hawser, which he had brought along, fast to the foot of a stanchion. This done, he crept along the shoreward rail, and with a large, sharp knife, severed the two old cables which held Cairo to the shore; then decamped in the skiff as silently as he had come, paying out the hawser.
This was some three hundred feet in length, and as soon as Hoyt got back to the keel he and his friends made the other end fast inboard, poled off from the bank, and then, heading down-stream again, set the horses at work with a free application of the whip.