Up the stairs, leaving a mud spoor behind. One hand raised to lift the hatch; wondering, meanwhile, to find it closed. A mighty heave; a pounding with the great fist; another heave, then, with the powerful old shoulder.
“Nailed,” said Windy aloud to himself, mildly. Then, still mildly, “The old hell-cat.” He spat, then, on the hatchway steps and clumped leisurely down again. He leaned over the boat rail, looking benignly down at the crowd of idlers gathered at the wharf to watch the show boat cast off. Then he crossed the deck again to where a capacious and carpet-seated easy chair held out its inviting arms. Into this he sank with a grunt of relaxation. From his pocket he took the pipe so recently relinquished, filled it, tamped it, lighted it. From another pocket he took a month-old copy of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, turned to the column marked Shipping News, and settled down, apparently, for a long quiet day with literature.
Up came the anchor. In came the hawser. Chains clanked. The sound of the gangplank drawn up. The hoarse shouts from land and water that always attend the departure of a river boat. “Throw her over there! Lift ’er! Heh, Pete! Gimme hand here! Little to the left. Other side! Hold on! Easy!”
The faces of the crowd ashore turned expectantly toward the boat. Everything shipshape. Pete in the engine room. Captain Andy scampering for the texas. Silence. No bells. No steam. No hoarse shouts of command. God A’mighty, where’s Windy? Windy! Windy!
Windy lowers his shielding newspaper and mildly regards the capering captain and bewildered crew and startled company. He is wearing his silver-rimmed reading spectacles slightly askew on his biblical-looking hooked nose. Andy rushes up to him, all the Basque in him bubbling. “God’s sake, Windy, what’s . . . why don’t you take her! We’re going.”
Windy chewed rhythmically for a moment, spat a long brown jet of juice, wiped his hairy mouth with the back of one gnarled hand. “We ain’t going, Cap’n Hawks, because she can’t go till I give her the go-ahead. And I ain’t give her the go-ahead. I’m the pilot of this here boat.”
“But why? What the . . . Wh——”
“The hatch is nailed down above the steps leading to the pilot house, Cap’n Andy. Till that hatchway’s open, I don’t climb up to no pilot house. And till I climb up to the pilot house, she don’t get no go-ahead. And till I give her the go-ahead, she don’t go, not if we stay here alongside this landing till the Cotton Blossom rots.”
He looked around benignly and resumed his reading of the New Orleans Times-Democrat.
Profanity, frowned upon under Parthy’s régime, now welled up in Andy and burst from him in spangled geysers. Words seethed to the surface and exploded like fireworks. Twenty-five years of river life had equipped him with a vocabulary rich, varied, purple. He neglected neither the heavens above nor the earth beneath. Revolt and rage shook his wiry little frame. Years of henpecking, years of natural gaiety suppressed, years of mincing when he wished to stride, years of silence when he wished to sing, now were wiped away by the stream of undiluted rage that burst from Captain Andy Hawks. It was a torrent, a flood, a Mississippi of profanity in which hells and damns were mere drops in the mighty roaring mass.