The answer I got was a horse-laugh from a score of backwoodsmen.
"Much noise about nothing, dear Louise."
And we were on the point of descending the stairs again, when we were detained, and our attention riveted, by the picturesque appearance of the deck—I should rather say of the persons grouped upon it—seen in the red, flickering, and uncertain light of sundry lamps, lanterns, and torches. Truly, the night-piece was not bad. In the centre of the steamer's deck, at an equal distance from stem and stern, stood a knot of fellows of such varied and characteristic appearance as might be sought for in vain in any other country than ours. It seemed as if all the western states and territories had sent their representatives to our steamer. Suckers from Illinois, and Badgers from the lead-mines of Missouri—Wolverines from Michigan, and Buckeyes from Ohio—Redhorses from old Kentuck, and Hunters from Oregon, stood mingled before us, clad in all sorts of fantastical and outlandish attire. One had a hunting-shirt of blue and white striped calico, which made its wearer's broad back and huge shoulders resemble a walking feather-bed; another was remarkable for a brilliant straw-hat—a New Orleans purchase, that looked about as well on his bronzed physiognomy as a Chinese roof would do on a pigsty. Wiñebago wampum belts and Cherokee mocassins, jerkins of tanned and untanned deer-hide, New York frock-coats, and red and blue jackets, composed some of the numerous costumes, of which the mixture and contrast were in the highest degree picturesque.
In the middle of this group stood a personage of a very different stamp—a most interesting specimen of the genus Yankee, contrasting in a striking manner with the rough-hewn sons of Anuk who surrounded him. He was a man of some thirty years of age, as dry and tough as leather, of grave and pedantic mien, the skin of his forehead twisted into innumerable small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his bright reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in reality, perpetually shifting their restless glances from the men by whom he was surrounded, to some chests that lay upon the deck before him, and again from the chests to the men; his whole lean, bony, angular figure in a position that made it difficult to conjecture whether he was going to pray, or to sing, or to preach a sermon. In one hand he held a roll of pigtail tobacco, in the other some bright-coloured ribands, which he had taken from an open chest containing the manifold articles constituting the usual stock in trade of a pedlar. Beside this chest were two others, and beside those lay a negro, howling frightfully, and rubbing alternately his right shoulder and his left foot; but nevertheless, according to all appearance, by no means in danger of taking his departure for the other world. As the Yankee pedlar raised his hand and signed to the vociferous blackamoor to be silent, the face of the former gradually assumed that droll, cunning, and yet earnest expression which betrays those double distilled Hebrews, when they are planning to get possession, in a quasi-legal manner, of the dollars of their fellow-citizens; in a word, when they are manœuvering to exchange their worthless northern wares for the sterling coin of the south. Presently his arms began to swing about like those of a telegraph; he threw a long and loving glance at the two unopened chests, which had apparently slipped down from the top of a quantity of merchandise piled upon deck, and fallen on the foot and shoulder of the negro; then measuring the latter with a look of reproach, he suddenly opened his compressed lips, from which a sharp, high-toned, schoolmasterlike voice issued.
"Sambo, Sambo! What have you done? Sambo, Sambo!" he repeated, while his voice became more solemn, and he raised his hands and eyes as if appealing to heaven for justice. "Sambo, you onlucky nigger, what have you been a doin'?"
"A 'sarve,' a wonderful 'sarve!'" screamed the man, pointing to the chests with an appearance of the profoundest grief.
"Heaven forgive you, Sambo! but you have endangered, perhaps sp'iled, a 'sarve,' compared to which all the 'intments and balms of Mecca, Medina, and Balsora—of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, or whatever other places they may come from, air actilly no better than cart-grease. Ah, Sambo! if you were twenty times a nigger, and could be brought twenty times on the auction table, you wouldn't fetch enough money to pay for the harm you have done!"
"Boe! Boe!" howled the negro by way of parenthesis.
"Ah, Boe! Boe!" screamed the Yankee, "you may well say Boe, Boe! And you ain't the only one as may say it, that's sartain. There be ladies and gentlemen here, as respectable ladies and gentlemen as can be found any where—ay, even to Boston, the cradle of our independence—and they might say Boe! Boe! if they knew all. In them two chests are a hundred tin boxes and glass phials; and if only twenty of them are damaged, there is more injury done than your hide could pay for, if it were twenty times as thick and twenty times as vallyable as it is. Your whole carcass ain't worth one of the boxes of that precious 'intment. Ah, Sambo!"
"Boe! Boe!" howled Sambo in reply.