"A good forty miles wide, no doubt," he remarked to the pair, and they assured him he was right.
"What piece of river is this?" he inquired, and was told that they were in the long, winding, desolate sixty-mile stretch between White River and Horseshoe Bend; that they had just put Islands Sixty-two and Sixty-three astern and would be more than two hours yet in reaching Helena.
"Arkansas your State?" he asked. "Helena your town?"
"No," they said, they were of the "hoop-pole State," meaning Indiana. He knew better but changed the subject. "The Ohio," he remarked, "must be up on her hind legs."
"Yes, everything was up: the Saint Francis, the Tennessee, Cumberland, Illinois, Wabash, Kentucky, Miami, Scioto—" The pair did not talk like men narrowly of the hoop-pole commonwealth. Modestly speaking on, they seemed to know the whole great valley quite by heart.
So the senator, to show how quite by heart he knew this whole little world, said affably: "The pan-fish ain't biting so very lively this trip."
The reply was as flawless for candor as though they had the same hope to use him which he had to use them. Said one:
"No, we ain't paying expenses."
And his mate: "We've caught a few little flappers."
"Captain's son make it hard to do business?"