“Dat sounds easy,” Skeeter said, as he rose to his feet. “Less paddle out an’ take a look at dat boat.”
When they were all aboard and the engine was puffing laboriously up the river, Pipe Smash looked at the four grinning negroes with an air of triumph.
He knew his steamboat was sold.
They were traveling about as fast as a lame man could walk, but there was an exhilarating throb to the engine, and a cheerful slap-slap to the paddle-wheel, and the river went past them instead of taking them with it, and by shutting their eyes for five minutes and then opening them they could see that they were actually gaining on the scenery.
And the scenery would set an artist wild: a sky like a soap-bubble, and high in the dome a buzzard sailing like a speck of dust, a river like a broad, flowing ribbon of old gold, and close to the levees on each side the woods, dense, black, moss-hung and funereal, absorbing so little of the sun’s light that the negroes could hear the call of the night-owls and the voice of the whip-poor-will.
Suddenly Skeeter’s high soprano voice ran out across the water, the other voices joined, and the woods echoed back the music:
“When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrers like sea-billers roll—
Whutever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, wid my soul.”
“Whut is de name of dis boat called, Pipe?” Skeeter asked at the end of their song.
“’Tain’t got no name,” Pipe answered.