“If it were anybody else but Jimmy Claiborne”, he thought, “it would not so much matter.” There were the twenty barrels of peach brandy and whisky—the Claibornes’ share of the cargo—and in the long monotonous days and nights only ceaseless vigilance would keep the men from broaching them. If Jimmy were in the crew, his sense of proprietorship in this portion of the cargo would make the danger of it very much greater.
It was a voyage of untold perils. Every year an increasing number of white outlaws, hidden in the caves along the river, harried and robbed the boatmen who floated down from the upper settlements. There were lurking bands of hostile Indians. And there was the river itself with its treacheries; its snags; its mud bars and its floods. It was no unusual thing for an ark to set out as this one was about to do, provided against all foreseeable disasters, and never be heard from afterward. Some were wrecked, some were robbed and their crews obscurely murdered. But no tidings of their fate came back to the solitary homes on the upper Ohio.
To set out on such a voyage with a single man or boy who could not be trusted, might mean the loss of the boat or even of every life on board of her. Marion Royce looked ahead of him, suddenly throwing back his shoulders and breathing deeply.
“It’s got to come, and it had better be over with at once,” he said aloud. “Oh, Uncle Amasa! Ho, Uncle Amasa! Hold on and let me catch up with you!”
The old man could be seen through the thinning trees that covered the slope leading down to the creek’s mouth. He stopped and waited for the captain to come up to him.
“We’ll get them twenty barrels down from the still this afternoon, son,” he began, as Marion joined him. “It’s time to get your cargo collected, and them casks will do just as well down here at the shed where there’s room for ’em. We’re pretty crowded with them up to the still.”
“It isn’t the cargo I’m worrying so much about,” said the captain slowly. “It’s the supercargo.”
The old man looked at him shrewdly. He understood as well as if Marion had told him in so many words that he did not want to take Jimmy.
“It’s a rough voyage,” the captain said. “If I thought it would help to make a man of Jimmy I’d take him and risk his stirring up a feeling of insubordination in those Marietta fellows that he knows better than I do. But my feeling is that Jimmy ought to stay at home. There’s plenty of chance for him to show what stuff he’s made of, and if we get back all right we may be able to take him next year. The boy’s a little wild, and it won’t do him any good to go to Natchez—all devildom is loose at Natchez. And then there may be a French fleet at New Orleans. There may be fighting. The Spaniards may have shut the city in our faces. We may have to fight to be allowed to land, but if we do have to, I guess ten thousand or so rivermen will help us to show the Spanish governor whether he can shut the gate of the world to us Americans.”
“Ye think there’s any truth in that tale of Bonaparte’s seizing the Mississippi, son?”