Mr. Gray did not raise any objections when Rodney and Dick made ready to accompany Jack to Baton Rouge on the following morning, for he knew that if he were a boy he would want to go himself. He went with them to the city, and stood on the levee when the Venango backed away from it and turned her head up the river. When the boys could no longer distinguish him among the crowd which had assembled to see them off, they went into the cabin that Jack occupied in common with the river captain whom he had hired to run the vessel, and sat down to wait for dinner.
“This looks to me like hunting for a needle in a haystack,” said Rodney. “How are you going to manage? Do you intend to keep on up the river until someone hails you with the information that he has cotton to sell?”
“Not precisely,” laughed Jack. “We don’t do business in that uncertain way. My first landing will be at a plantation ten miles above Bayou Sara, if you know where that is, and there I hope to find cotton enough to load this boat about four times.”
“Why, how did you hear of it?”
“I received my orders from our agent in New Orleans, if that is what you mean; but how he heard of it I don’t know, and didn’t think to inquire. I wish this steamer was four times bigger than she is.”
“Why didn’t you charter a large one while you were about it?”
“I couldn’t, for their owners were too anxious to have them go back to their regular trade, which has so long been interrupted by the blockade at Vicksburg. They can make more money at it.”
After dinner had been served and eaten in what had once been the Venango’s passenger cabin, but which was now given over to the use of the officers of the boat, the boys walked out on the boiler-deck and saw a stern-wheeler coming toward them with a big bone in her teeth. She was painted a sort of dirt color that did not show very plainly against the background of the high bank she was passing, and it was a long time before the boys could make her out; but they told each other that she was the oddest looking craft they had ever seen. She had no “Texas” (that is the name given to the cabin in which the officers sleep), and her pilot house stood on the roof of her passenger cabin. Her main deck was not open like the Venango’s, but was inclosed with casemates provided with port-holes, two in the bow and three on the side that was turned toward them. She was following the channel in the right of the bend while the light-draft trading boat was holding across the point of the bar on the opposite side, so that there was the width of the river between them; but when they came abreast of each other, the stranger’s bow began swinging around, and in a few minutes she was running back up the Mississippi in company with the Venango, and only a few rods astern.
“She must be one of the mosquito fleet—a tin-clad,” exclaimed Dick. “They say the river is full of them, but I didn’t happen to see one on my way down. She and her kind are intended to fight guerillas.”
“That’s what she is,” said Jack. “And she’s the first I ever saw.”