“You jest watch that cookie coin pancakes!” exclaimed Sipes. “He jest whisks up the dope in the pan, an’ gives ’em a couple o’ flops, an’ they all come to pieces in yer mouth ’fore ye begin chewin’.”
He seemed to anticipate all our wants. He had evidently overheard what Sipes had said about telegraph wire, and the second morning afterward there was about a hundred feet of it in camp, with a pair of heavy wire-nippers, and other tools used by repair men on the lines, which he said he had found. The next night he came in with a half-grown turkey, which he claimed he had found dead in a fence, where it had caught its neck on the barbed wire. The unfortunate bird was roasted to a beautiful brown, and I noticed that the feathers were carefully burned.
The aspect of affairs was getting serious. I took Narcissus in hand and subjected him to a thorough cross-examination. I told him that we wanted to pay for anything we used, and that he positively must not find any more young turkeys in wire fences. The telegraph wire incident was perplexing. He declared that this stuff had been abandoned, and was far from the railroad. The fact that the tools and wire were somewhat rusty seemed to lend some slight color of truth to his statement, but we finally understood each other as to the rule to be followed in the future.
A cash allowance was made for the fresh vegetables, eggs, fruit, and other supplies, which he was instructed to buy around in the back country and along the river. I hoped later to discover the owner of the ill-fated turkey.
The old shipmates worked industriously. They took the Crawfish down the river to the village twice, and returned with cargos of second-hand lumber, with which they constructed a flatboat about ten feet long by six wide. Supports were put at the four corners, and railings nailed to the tops. They rigged a strong pole, the length of the platform, along which they attached four-foot wires eight inches apart. At the ends of these were the four-pronged clam-hooks. Lines ran from the ends of the pole to a centre rope, by means of which the device was attached to the flatboat and dragged in the river. When the hooks came in contact with the unsuspecting mollusks, lying open on the bottom, they were to close their shells on them tightly, and thus their fate would be sealed. When the pole was pulled out sideways, with the big rope, the bivalves would hang on its fringe of dangling wires, like grapes on pendant vines.
Our “cookie” was assiduous in his camp duties. He procured some flat stones, which he skilfully piled so as to confine his fire. Heavy stakes were driven into the ground, and another laid across, with its ends in the forked tops. The cross-piece supported the iron kettle, with which he performed mysterious feats of cookery. He improvised a broiler with some of the telegraph wire, and baked delicious bread and biscuits in a reflecting oven, made of a piece of old sheet-iron. He was very resourceful. From somewhere beyond the confines of the dark forest he obtained materials for menus that exceeded our fondest hopes.
He spent a great deal of time off by himself, and would often drop around where I happened to be sketching. We had many confidential talks. He confessed that drink was his besetting sin. He had generally been able to get good jobs, but invariably lost them when he drank. Some day he was “goin’ to sweah off fo’ good.” The poor fellow was floating wreckage on that poison stream of alcohol that our false conception of economics permits to exist. It was battering another derelict along the rocks that line its sinister shores.
He had attached himself to us like a stray dog. His moral sense had been blunted by his infirmity, but, under proper influences, his reclamation was possible. Narcissus was a strong argument in favor of compulsory prohibition, for he was beyond his own help.
The old shipmates agreed with me that he ought to be kept away from temptation as much as possible, “spesh’ly,” said Sipes, “as we ain’t got none too much in the jug. It ain’t fit fer nobody that’s under sixty-seven. Young fellers oughta let that stuff alone. They git filled up with it an’ it runs down in their legs an’ floats their feet off.”
Narcissus’s ancestry was mixed. He had some white blood, and one of his grandfathers was an Indian. Though the African characteristics predominated, there were traces of both the white man and the Indian in his face. It may have been a remnant of Indian instinct—a mysterious call of the blood—that lured him to the dune country, where the red men were once happy, when he got into trouble. Possibly it was the sixth sense of the Indian that led him up the river to the jug, on the night of our arrival, or, as Sipes remarked, “mebbe the perfumery got out through the cork an’ drifted over ’im w’en ’e was roostin’ on them rocks.”