“But what is she following us for?” asked Rodney. “Perhaps she wants to see your papers.”
“Then why doesn’t she whistle five times to let me know that she wants to communicate?” answered Jack. “She is giving us a convoy.”
“It’s very kind of Admiral Porter, or whoever it was told her to do it,” said Rodney. “If we are to be protected in this way we shall never have anything to fear from guerillas. She has six broadside guns, two bow-chasers, and a field howitzer on her roof, nine in all. She ought to make a good fight.”
“Oh, she will do well enough for guerillas,” said Jack, “but how long do you imagine she would stay above water if a battery should open on her?”
Jack Gray was not the only one who had little faith in tin-clads, but some of the most desperate engagements that were fought in Western waters were fought by these very vessels. If they wanted to go anywhere they did not stop because there was a battery in their way. Take one exploit of the Juliet as a fair specimen of what they could do as often as the exigencies of the service demanded it. When this fleet little gunboat was commanded by Harry Gorringe, the man who afterward brought over the Egyptian obelisk that now stands in Central Park, New York, she carried Admiral Porter past a long line of Confederate batteries, which poured upon her a fire so accurate and rapid that thirty-five shells were exploded inside her casemates in less than three minutes. The engineer on watch was killed with his hand on the throttle, but her machinery was not touched; and finding that she had come through the ordeal safe if not sound, she rounded to and went back to help a vessel which had not been so fortunate as herself. The Venango’s escort kept company with her until she turned in to the plantation where Jack hoped to obtain his first load of cotton, and then turned about and went down the river again, Jack and the boys waving their thanks to the officers who stood on her boiler-deck, and the Venango’s pilot wishing her good luck and warning the master of the plantation at the same time by giving a long blast on his whistle.
Sailor Jack began his trading at a fortunate time and under the most favorable conditions. Not only was he one of the first to enter the field after Vicksburg fell, but the men with whom his mother’s thirty thousand dollars enabled him to form partnership were so influential and shrewd, and had so many ways of finding out things which no one inside the Union lines was supposed to know anything about, that Jack never left port without knowing right where to find his next cargo of cotton. That is to say, he knew it on every occasion except one, and then he was ordered into a trap which he would have kept out of if he had been left to himself.
The cotton he found above Bayou Sara was on what was known as the Stratton plantation, and there was so much of it that he had to make four trips to carry it to New Orleans, where it was loaded into the Hyperion’s hold. One day when his own deck-hands and all the plantation darkies were busy loading for the last run, Jack was approached by three men in butternut, who wanted to know what he was giving for cotton, whether he paid in greenbacks or Confederate scrip, and if he would be willing to run up the river two hundred miles farther and get a thousand bales that several citizens up there were anxious to sell.
“Which side of the river is the cotton on?” asked Jack.
“Over there,” said one of the men, pointing toward the opposite shore.
“Too many rebs,” said Jack shortly.