"A hundred months," says the love-song that beguiled so many thousands of hearts throughout the Mississippi Valley in those old "Lily Dale," "Nellie Gray," "What is Home Without a Mother?" days, when the lugubrious was so blithely enjoyed at the piano. Its first wails date nearly or quite back to October, 1860.
"A hundred months had passed" since that first up-stream voyage of the Votaress, or, to be punctilious, something under a hundred and two. It was the opening week of that mid-autumn month in which it became evident that Abraham Lincoln would be the next president. Another new boat, new pride of the great river, the fairest yet, still in the hands of her contractors, and on her trial trip from Louisville to New Orleans, was rounding, one after another, now far in the east, now as far in the west, the bends nearest below Memphis: Cow Island, Cat Island, St. Francis, Delta—so on.
The river was low. You would hardly have known a reach, a cut-off, a point of it by any aspect remembered from that journey of April, '52. Scantness of waters appeared to contract distances. "Paddy's Hen and Chickens," just above Memphis, were all out on dry sands and seemed closer under the "Devil's Elbow" than eight years before. Every towhead and bar and hundreds of snags were above water and as ugly as mud, age, sun bleach, and turkey-buzzards could make them. Many a chute comfortably run by the Votaress was now "closed for repairs," said one of the pilots of the Enchantress. He was the whilom steersman we knew as Watson's cub; a very capable-looking man now. At the moment, he was off watch and had come out from the bar to the boiler deck with a trim, supple man of forty, whose shirt of fine white flannel was open at the throat, where a soft neckerchief of red silk matched the sash at his waist: "California," eight years older and out of the West again despite his "never" to Hayle's twins.
"I like to change my mind sometimes," he explained. "It shows me I've got one."
A towering, massive, grizzly man several years older than the Californian, with a short, stiff, throat-latch beard and a great bush of dense, short curls, stood by the forward guards, a picture of rude force and high efficiency. At every moment, from some direction among the deck's loungers a light scrutiny ventured to rest on him, to which he seemed habituated, and the lightest was enough to reveal in him a striking union of traits coarse and fine. He wore a big cluster diamond pin, a sort of hen-and-chickens of his own, secured by a minute guard-chain on a ruffled shirt-front of snowiest linen, where clung dry crumbs of the "fine-cut" which puffed the lower side pockets of his gray alpaca sack coat. His gold-headed cane was almost a bludgeon. He had come aboard at Memphis, having reached that city but a few hours earlier by rail-way train from White Sulphur Springs, Va., where he had had the good fortune to find great relief from rheumatism. The young lady in his company, now back in the ladies' cabin, was his daughter, they said, beautiful and all of twenty-two, yet unmarried! This man the pilot and the Californian approached and waited for his attention. When he gave it the pilot spoke.
"Commodore," he said, "welcome back to the river."
The big man grew bigger and his shaggy brows more severe.
"I feel welcome," he said. "Only place under God's canopy where I can breathe down into my boots."
"And you want the roof for it here, don't you? I do. Roof or wheel. Commodore Hayle, my friend Mr. So-and-so, from California. He's your brand; Kentuck' born and raised."
The two shook hands, scanning each other's countenances. The eyes of both were equally blue, equally intrepid.