“What do you want to do that for?” queried the other, with a sort of astonished amusement.
“Why, I wanted to get to St. Louis, and after that up to Pittsburg or Cincinnati.”
“If you want to get there easy, and get there alive, I don’t see why you don’t swim,” remarked the stranger, dryly. “You don’t know much about these river boats, do you? Man, they’re floating hells. The crew is all niggers, and the toughest gang of pirates in America. They knife a man for a chew of tobacco. The officers themselves don’t hardly dare go down on the lower deck after dark,—but, Lord! they do take it out of the black devils when they tie up at a wharf and start to unload. If you can’t work for ten hours at a stretch toting a hundred-pound crate in each hand, live on corn bread, and kill a man every night, don’t try the boats. A white man wouldn’t last any longer in that crowd than an icicle in hell.”
“The deuce!” said Elliott, disconcerted. “I’m very anxious to get to Cincinnati, anyway, and the fact is I’m sort of strapped. I thought I’d be all right when I got to the river.”
“Tried freights?”
“Yes, and they don’t suit me too well.”
“I’m going to St. Louis,” said the stranger, after a pause. “I’m going to leave early in the morning, and I expect to get there in three hours, and I don’t intend that it shall cost me a cent. To tell the truth, I’m in something of the same fix as you are.”
“How’ll you manage it?” Elliott inquired, with much curiosity.
“Ride a passenger-train, on the top. I’ve just come from Seattle that way,” he continued, after a meditative pause. “There’s no great amount of fun in it, but I did it in six days.”
“The deuce!” exclaimed Elliott again. “Do you mean to say that you came all the way from Seattle in six days, beating passenger-trains?”