CHAPTER VI.
BOAT LIFE AFLOAT AND AGROUND.
The day after the race our trio exhausted all usual resources of boat life. We lounged in the saloon and saw the young ladies manage their beaux and the old ones their children; dropped into the card-rooms and watched the innocent games—some heavy ones of "draw poker" with a "bale better;" some light ones of "all fours," with only an occasional old sinner deep in chess, or solitaire. For cards, conversation, tobacco, yarns and the bar make up boat life; it being rare, indeed, that the ennui is attacked from the barricade of a book. Then we roamed below and saw the negroes—our demons of the night before, much modified by sunlight—tend the fires and load cotton. A splendidly developed race are those Africans of the river boats, with shiny, black skins, through which the corded and tense muscles seem to be bursting, even in repose. Their only dress, as a general thing, is a pair of loose pantaloons, to which the more elegant add a fancy colored bandanna knotted about the head, with its wing-like ends flying in the wind; but shirts are a rarity in working hours and their absence shows a breadth of shoulder and depth of chest remarkable, when contrasted with the length and lank power in the nether limbs. They are a perfectly careless and jovial race, with wants confined to the only luxuries they know—plenty to eat, a short pipe and a plug of "nigger-head," with occasional drinks, of any kind and quantity that fall to their lot. Given these, they are as contented as princes; and their great eyes roll like white saucers and their splendid teeth flash in constant merriment.
As we got further down the river, the flats became less frequent and high, steep bluffs took their place; and at every landing along these we laid-by for cotton and took in considerable quantities of "the king."
Some of the bluffs were from sixty to eighty feet in height; and down these, the cotton came on slides. These, in most cases, were at an angle of forty-five degrees, or less; strongly constructed of heavy beams, cross-tied together and firmly pegged into the hard bluff-clay. A small, solid platform at the bottom completed the slide.
Scarcely would the plank be run out when the heavy bales came bounding down the slide, gaining momentum at every yard of descent, till at the bottom they had the velocity of a cannon-ball. The dexterity and strength of the negroes were here wonderfully displayed.
Standing at the edge of the boat—or at the foot of the slide, as the conformation of the landing indicated—heavy cotton-hook in hand, they watch the descending bale, as it bounds fiercely toward them; and just at the right moment two men, with infinite dexterity of hand and certainty of eye, strike their hooks firmly into the bagging—holding on to the plunging mass and going with it halfway across the boat. Full in front of it a third stands, like a matador ready for the blow; and striking his hook deep in the end, by a sudden and simultaneous twist the three stand the bale upon end. Once stopped, two or three more jerks of the hooks and it is neatly stowed away alongside, or on top of, its fellows.
One constantly sees huge bales of from five to six hundred pounds bound down a slide eighty feet high—scarcely touching the rail more than three times in their steep descent—looking almost round from the rapidity of their motion. Yet two negroes drive their hooks into, and spin along with them; visibly checking their speed, till the third one "heads up" and stops them still, in half a boat's width.
Sometimes a hook slips, the bagging gives, or the footing yields, when the mixed mass of man and bale rolls across the boat and goes under together. But frightful as it looks to unaccustomed eyes, a more serious accident than a ducking seldom occurs; and at that, the banks resound with the yells of laughter Sambo sends after his brother-in-water.