By appointment they called at the office of Mr. Kennedy, the commission merchant, the next day, for a settlement. He furnished them with carefully detailed accounts, made out by his bookkeepers, and gave them drafts on New York for the money coming to them.
“You’d better send your drafts by mail to your home bank,” he said. “If you need any money for your expenses while here, I’ll furnish it, and you can remit it from home.”
“Thank you!” responded Phil. “We shan’t need any money for expenses here. We’ve enough left of the money we started with, which we call our ‘campaign fund,’ for that. But how about our passage home? Do you happen to know, sir, about how much that will cost us?”
“Whatever you choose to make it cost you, from nothing at all up,” answered the merchant.
A query or two brought out this explanation:—
“You’ve dropped some hints in our conversations”—for he had talked with them at their hotel the evening before—“concerning your educational plans, and I gather that you want to keep all you can of the money you have made.”
“Precisely!” said Phil. “Except that we mean to stay here for a week to see all we can of the city, we don’t intend to spend a dollar that we can save.”
“So I thought,” said the merchant. “I have therefore taken the liberty of making some inquiries for you. It happens that I am freighting a steamboat with cotton, sugar, molasses, coffee, and fruits, for Louisville. The captain is a good friend of mine. As he will have no way-freight,—nothing to put on or off till he gets to Louisville, where the stevedores will unload the boat,—he has very little for deck hands or roustabouts to do. But there will be some ‘wooding up’ to do now and then,—taking on wood for the furnaces,—and there will be the decks to keep clean, the lanterns to keep in order, and all that sort of thing. Now as you young men are stout fellows and pretty well used by this time to roughing it, he has agreed, if you choose, to take you instead of the roustabouts and deck hands ordinarily carried. There won’t be any wages, but you’ll have your meals from the cook’s galley and your passages to Louisville free. Passage from there to Vevay will be a trifle, of course.”