And with that the donkeyman staggered away to his room beneath the poop, sat over the edge of his bunk, and was snoring melodiously before his head and his heels were on the blanket.
Meanwhile, a mile lower down, a small center-board sloop was turning to windward up the river, but making little headway against the current. A negro stood in her fore-scuttle, with his elbows on the deck. Two others sprawled on either side of him. A big white man lay spread-eagled on the top of the coach-roof of the cabin, and another stood in the cockpit steering.
Of all the quintette, the man at the tiller was the only one who showed signs of energy, and his energy had sulphurous anger mixed with it. He was a bowed, shambling creature, with one eye red and the other missing, with long, hairy, ape-like arms, and with a dumb impediment of speech, which threw him into paroxysms of temper every second time he opened his lips. Once or twice, when his malady struck him voiceless in the middle of a sentence, the other white man laughed; and then, when his tongue served him again, the helmsman would break off from the text and rap out a stream of poisonous cursings.
At last he climaxed these by the only vituperation which no American can listen to unmoved, and the man on the coach-roof dropped his indolence like a flash, and was on him before he could resist. The aggressor was lusty, and he shook the steersman as a big dog shakes a rat, with ponderous wrenches; and because the sloop carried a strong weather helm, when the tiller was let go, she ran up into the wind with her canvas slatting wildly.
“You snake-mouthed little skunk! you’d say that to me, would you? I thought I learned you once before how far you might go. You’ve had one eye gouged for this game less’n a month back, and if you fling your twisted, stuttering tongue at me any more, by gum, I’ll pocket the other!”
The blacks on the fore-deck chuckled and spluttered; but the big man hove an iron bucket at them, with curt command to “quit that ye-hawin’,” which they did with a yell and a sudden veiling of ivory. Then, by an indolent sprawling of the arms and legs, he gained his basking-place again on the top of the cabin-roof, and once more the steersman got the sloop under command.
The next three boards were made in silence, save for the creaking of gear when she went about; and then the one-eyed man broke out again—
“You’re sure it wasn’t a Government bo-o-o-at, Hank?”
“Government be sugared! She wasn’t the right build, to start with. Besides, if Government knew this channel at all, you bet it’d be said so in all the papers. And she did know it, or she wouldn’t have gone buzzing past at six knots without a leadsman. Seems to me someone’s split, and she’s some darned Britisher come to cut out our game for themselves.”