Now the fourth porter of the May Flower was a lazy, good-natured little pock-marked Irishman, whom I had no great difficulty in persuading to smuggle me to Buffalo, on condition that I should do the greater part of his work in the forecastle. I was glad, it will be seen, to make any port in the storm which at that time swept across my terrified imagination; Buffalo was not, of course, the best one for me, but anything seemed better, just then, than the prospect of that Cimmerian House of Vagrancy.
My friend, the fourth porter, was so well pleased with the skill and taste I displayed in the cleansing of his greasy dishes that he lent a degree of zeal to the carrying out of his part of the contract which wellnigh proved fatal to me. For, the next day, when we were out on the lake, and the fares were collecting, he hid me away between two mattresses, as black as the coal handled by the sturdy firemen who usually slept on them. I was already half smothered when the clerk and his satellites descended into the forecastle; but the fourth porter, to crush out, I suppose, the merest crease of suspicion, sat down on the mattress which covered me, and carelessly picked his teeth till the danger was past.
It was well that the forecastle was so uninviting a place as to detain the clerk but a short time, since I should have screamed or perished in a half-minute more. When drawn out, at last, by the party of the first part to our contract, I was very black in the face, not only from the smothering I had endured, but from the coal-dust I had taken from the mattresses.
CHAPTER X.
A FINAL TRIUMPH.
ARRIVED safely at Buffalo, I did not look much like the urchin who had left there several months before. Although I had conscientiously washed my solitary piece of linen every week, and tried to keep myself as neatly as I could, my clothes were greasy and ragged and my boots nearly off my feet.
I wandered about the wharves without any purpose that I can now remember, and might have been very disconsolate if it were not for the joy I felt at escaping from the danger which I considered so imminent at Detroit. This latter city, indeed, I came to look upon as a peculiarly unlucky place for me,—an opinion which I continued to entertain up to the time of a signal triumph I had there afterward as the juvenile prodigy of jig-dancing and negro-minstrelsy.
I was just on the point of turning away from the docks for a stroll up some of the neighboring squalid by-streets of Buffalo when I suddenly heard myself called by name. It would be hard to say when I was worse terrified. I was really afraid of my own name. No good could come to me, I felt sure, from any one’s knowing it. Gazing around toward the wharf, in the direction from which the sound had seemed to come, I saw nobody but some laborers unloading a sailing vessel, close at hand, and they took no notice of me.
Again I heard my name, which sounded this time as if it came mysteriously from somewhere up in the air. Sweeping the dingy heights of the masts and smoke-stacks and office-windows with my astonished eyes, I beheld, at last, a boy coming briskly toward me down a flight of steps that led from a commission-house.
It was my school-fellow, who had harbored me in the stable the first night of my run-away; and it was from the window of his father’s office, he told me, that he had first seen and called me. “How you look! but I am glad to see you!” and many other frank, kind things the generous little fellow said.
He prefaced his eager questions as to where I had been and how I came to spoil my clothes so, with the remark that he guessed it wasn’t so funny, after all, to go out in the world seeking a fellow’s fortune. My own plight at the time was better calculated, I think, than any moral observations I may have made, to fortify him in this opinion. If I did indulge in a few gravely eloquent words of warning, I have so far forgotten them that I cannot repeat them here for the benefit of thoughtless, adventure-loving boys of to-day.