He would break from his captors and rushing to the stream plunge in and swim for the opposite shore. Which, had he done, he might quite possibly have reached New Orleans, but it would have been in a very unenviable state. This desperate notion was forming itself into a determination when his attention was arrested by the voice of the officer in charge of the squad.
"Men," said that official, "yonder's St. Louis, where you all want to go. Remember, if you are caught on this side again, up you go for sixty days. Here are your ferry tickets. Now git!"
It was tit for tat. "Illinois Town" was paying St. Louis in her own currency. That morning the "Future Great" had shipped, by rail, half a dozen of her paupers to Chicago. That afternoon the "Future Great" received a consignment of sixteen tramps from "Illinois Town."
CHAPTER XX.
OUR HERO REACHES ST. LOUIS.
As Ben placed his foot on the Missouri shore, he cried aloud with an exultant thrill vibrating every fibre of his body: "St. Louis! Ten days and ten hundred miles from New York! Hurrah for New Orleans!" and his emotions were such that he could fairly have turned a double somersault and cracked his heels for joy. Then as his feelings quieted down, "Now for New Orleans," he said. But how? That was the rub.
The levee was lined with steamboats. Boats with wheels behind them like aquatic wheel-barrows, and boats with wheels at their sides like folded wings. River crafts piled deck upon deck until the pilot-house, perched on top of the "Texas" looked like a bird cage. A forest of black smoke stacks interspersed with golden balls and gilded figures of eagles, horses, cotton-bales, barrels, and various devices. Some of the stacks belching forth smoke like the nostrils of a live monster; others silent and grim. Light draught stern-wheelers in the Big Muddy trade, that ran way up into the mystic region of the Yellow Stone in the spring and came down in the fall, taking up with them Indian annuities and government supplies, and bringing down bullet-holes in their pilot-houses from the rifles of ungrateful savages who cannot understand why white men should take their land from them and pay them in phantom beeves and unkept treaties. Ohio river tow boats—stern-wheelers also—but aquatic giants. Boats that think nothing of butting their square heads against four solid acres of coal flats, twelve feet deep, and shoving the whole field to the lower river coaling grounds—their very machinery a load sinking them deep in the water, and well worthy of their names, "Ajax," "Hercules," "Colossal," and so on. Raft boats from the St. Croix, Black River and Chippewa, with their holds stowed full of great coils of rope. Trading boats from the Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas, White and Red Rivers—boats that somehow bore about them a romantic aroma of travel and adventure. Wrecking boats and stump-pullers—that dredge the bottom of the river from St. Louis to the Gulf. Vast floating palaces in the Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans trade—their long, fairy-like and gorgeous cabins elevated on stilts, way high up above the hulls. Boats that could laugh at sixteen hundred tons of freight, and stow five thousand bales of cotton! A solid two miles of these crafts, thick as they could lie, all with their great round blunt noses hanging on the levees.
And then the humanity gathered about them—Diego and African, native and foreigner—people from all over the world. Acres of cotton-bales, regiments of hides in bundles, barricades of salt, ramparts of sugar hogsheads; all being constantly added to by a supply from the bowels of the monsters on the levee, while down their capacious maws was poured a stream of flour in barrels, grain in sacks and other productions of the stomach-supplying north. It was a scene of life and activity, such as Ben had never before witnessed. A wonderful picture of commerce proving in stronger tongue than any wordy argument the necessity of an undivided North and South—a UNION!
Ben gazed and wondered, and wondered and gazed, and the more his eyes discovered, the more they sought for; while up against the sky loomed that chef-d'œuvre of modern engineering, the famous bridge. He leaned against a cotton-bale and gave his eyes a holiday. And well he might, for the picture has not its equal in all the world.
A light touch on his arm aroused him. He turned and saw—Tommy! Little Tommy whom he felt he had known for years, instead of days.