"Now, lad, that's your side, and this is mine; that's your bunk. I am given to tidy ways, having all my life lived in small places, and I hope as you will fall into my ways; I keeps the cabin tidy myself, and Pete never comes aft here except to bring the food and take it away again; I can't a-bear niggers messing about a place. Victuals of all sorts is provided. You can do as you like about liquor. I keeps a keg of rum on board, and I likes my glass at night; if you likes to join me at that you can pay for half the keg, it has not been broached yet. If you want to drink more nor two glasses a night, ye had best get in yer own stock; if ye don't want to touch it at all, just leave it."
Frank said he liked a glass of grog at night, and should be glad to join in the cask, and that he would do his best to keep his side of the cabin as tidy as the other. In a few minutes the negro brought in the meal, which consisted of a steak fried with onions, followed by a large bowl of oatmeal, with a jug of molasses, and the whole was washed down with tea.
"The stream does not seem to run very rapidly," Frank said, as he and his companion, having lit their pipes, sat down on the deck above.
"It varies," Hiram replied; "sometimes it's sluggish, as you see it here, sometimes it runs like a mill-stream. The art of sailing here is to know the river; for what with its back currents and its eddies, its channels behind islands and its sandbanks, one who knows it can manage to make his way up, while one who didn't know would be drifting backward instead of getting forward. That's what you have got to learn. Fortunately the wind generally blows up the stream; when it don't it's a case of down anchor. There are places where one can hardly get along unless the wind happens to be unusually strong, and there I generally get a tow. The boss has got about twenty steamers on the river, so we don't generally have to wait many hours before one comes along. The tugs is gradually doing away with sailing boats, and in time there won't be many of our kind of craft left; but they are useful, you see, for small places where the steamers don't stop, and for the rivers which run into the Mississippi."
The next morning at daybreak the sail was hoisted, the hawsers thrown off from the shore, and the flat made her way up the river. Frank was surprised to see how fast she sailed, although the wind was but light. The work was easy, for the wind was steady and they seldom sailed at night, the wind generally dropping at sundown. They touched at numerous little settlements, and gradually got rid of the cargo with which they had started.
Sometimes they left the main river and sailed for many miles by narrow channels, where the current, for the most part, was almost imperceptible. They were more than a month from the time they started before they reached the spot at which they were to take in the cargo for their return voyage. The flat was then loaded up with grain, which was put in in bulk and covered with tarpaulin; the boat was now laden down nearly to the water's edge.
The downward voyage differed widely from that up the river; the sail was now seldom used, and instead of skirting the shores they kept in mid-channel, from time to time directing the boat's course by the use of the sweeps. The moon was nearly full when they started, and they continued their voyage by night as well as day. Hiram and Frank took it by turns to be on watch; but the former was seldom down below, except on the rare occasions when the river was free from shoals.
Frank had by this time learned by the ripples on the water to detect the shallows, and could direct the course without assistance; but as soon as the splash of oars was heard on the water, Hiram was sure to appear on deck, however short the time since he had retired to rest.
"You are seeing the river at its best," he was saying one day. "It is about half-full now; when the water's low, the channel where we can pass loaded is often only fifty yards wide, with the water running through it like a sluice. When the water is in flood there is no fear of shoals, but you have got to look about, for it is full of floating trees and logs; when these get stuck we call them snags, and if you were to run on one of them the chances are it would knock a hole as big as a cask in her bottom, and down you would go in two or three minutes."