“Promptly, as if glad of the call to duty, the deck hand was up and ready for the work of loading. In those days he was a trusty machine, and was proud of his great strength, of his boat, and even of the rich vocabulary of his mate. He loved, when ashore, to talk of the big towns he made, and of the way-up people he knew in them. He had a sweetheart in every place where his boat put up over twelve hours, and his standin was good until she was courted by a man from a bigger and faster boat.
“A large and fast boat never had had much trouble in securing plenty of deck hands. But there was no prestige in accepting employment on a small stern-wheeler, devoted mostly to freight traffic, although the wages might be better. The aristocratic travelers patronized the fine side-wheeled boats, with their white-and-gold cabins, and the roustabouts liked best to work where they could be seen by patrician eyes.
“Like everybody connected with the boat, from cabin boy to pilot, he thought he was the whole show. He liked to show his strength, and the ease with which he could carry a coffee sack or a pig of lead. Yet he would permit a little, one-gallus mate, whom he could pick up and shake like a mouse, to make public reflections on his family tree in words that sizzled. The roustabout supposed the mate was hired for his proficiency in that particular line, and if he hadn’t kept it up it would have meant to him that the mate was ailing or neglecting his employer’s interest.”
Confesses Wrecking Train.
William Davis, twenty-three, a farmer of Jasper, Ala., has confessed to wrecking the Seminole Limited train near Nauvoo by putting a spike on the track. Davis declares he put the spike on the track “just to see it get flattened out,” and had no idea the train would be ditched.
Hen and Chicks in Cyclone.
A cyclone played a freakish trick on the farm of John Burns, near Perry, Mich., when it picked up a coop of chickens and the old hen and carried them forty rods over a fence into another field, where it deposited them without any damage being done.
A New Saddle Invented.
A saddle has been patented by a New Jersey inventor which includes leather flaps to cover the buckles which frequently wear out riders’ clothing.