The Boys' Life of Mark Twain Part 9

Henry had started when Brown seized him by the collar and struck him in the face. An instant later Sam was upon Brown with a heavy stool and stretched him on the floor. Then all the repressed fury of months broke loose; and, leaping upon Brown and holding him down with his knees, Samuel Clemens pounded the tyrant with his fists till his strength gave out. He let Brown go then, and the latter, with pilot instinct, sprang to the wheel, for the boat was drifting. Seeing she was safe, he seized a spy-gla.s.s as a weapon and ordered his chastiser out of the pilot-house.

But Sam lingered. He had become very calm, and he openly corrected Brown's English.

"Don't give me none of your airs!" yelled Brown. "I ain't goin' to stand nothin' more from you!"

"You should say, 'Don't give me any of your airs,'" Sam said, sweetly, "and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction."

A group of pa.s.sengers and white-ap.r.o.ned servants, a.s.sembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor. Sam went down to find Captain Klinefelter. He expected to be put in irons, for it was thought to be mutiny to strike a pilot.

The captain took Sam into his private room and made some inquiries. Mark Twain, in the "Mississippi" boot remembers them as follows:

"Did you strike him first?" Captain Klinefelter asked.

"Yes, sir."

"What with?"

"A stool, sir."

"Hard?"

"Middling, sir."

"Did it knock him down?"

"He--he fell, sir."

"Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?"

"Yes, sir."

"What did you do?"

"Pounded him, sir."

"Pounded him?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you pound him much--that is, severely?"

"One might call it that, sir, maybe."

"I am mighty glad of it! Hark ye--never mention that I said that! You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but--lay for him ash.o.r.e! Give him a good, sound thrashing, do you hear? I'll pay the expenses."

In a letter which Samuel Clemens wrote to Orion's wife, immediately after this incident, he gives the details of the encounter with Brown and speaks of Captain Klinefelter's approval.[4] Brown declared he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens remained on it, and the captain told him to go, offering to let Sam himself run the daylight watches back to St. Louis, thus showing his faith in the young steersman.

The "cub," however, had less confidence, and advised that Brown be kept for the up trip, saying he would follow by the next boat. It was a decision that probably saved his life.

That night, watching on the levee, Henry joined him, when his own duties were finished, and the brothers made the round together. It may have been some memory of his dream that made Samuel Clemens say:

"Henry, in case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the pa.s.sengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane-deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. When the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. Don't get in yourself. The river is only a mile wide. You can swim ash.o.r.e easily enough."

It was good, manly advice, but a long grief lay behind it.

[4] In the Mississippi book the author says that Brown was about to strike Henry with a lump of coal, but in the letter above mentioned the details are as here given.

XV.

THE WRECK OF THE "PENNSYLVANIA"

The "A. T. Lacy," that brought Samuel Clemens up the river, was two days behind the "Pennsylvania." At Greenville, Mississippi, a voice from the landing shouted "The 'Pennsylvania' is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island. One hundred and fifty lives lost!"

It proved a true report. At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning, while loading wood, sixty miles below Memphis, four out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded, with fearful results.

Henry Clemens had been one of the victims. He had started to swim for the sh.o.r.e, only a few hundred yards away, but had turned back to a.s.sist in the rescue of others. What followed could not be clearly learned. He was terribly injured, and died on the fourth night after the catastrophe.

His brother was with him by that time, and believed he recognized the exact fulfilment of his dream.

The young pilot's grief was very great. In a letter home he spoke of the dying boy as "My darling, my pride, my glory, my all." His heavy sorrow, and the fact that with unsparing self-blame he held himself in a measure responsible for his brother's tragic death, saddened his early life. His early gaiety came back, but his face had taken on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always wore in repose. Less than twenty-three, he had suddenly the look of thirty, and while Samuel Clemens in spirit, temperament, and features never would become really old, neither would he ever look really young again.

He returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer, whom he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license as Mississippi River pilot from St. Louis to New Orleans. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all those wearisome details and acquired that confidence that made him one of the elect. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and depth in all those endless miles of shifting current, every cut-off and crossing. He could read the surface of the water by day, he could smell danger in the dark. To the writer of these chapters, Horace Bixby said:

"In a year and a half from the time he came to the river, Sam was not only a pilot, but a good one. Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. There were no signal-lights along the sh.o.r.e in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind; and on a dark, misty night, in a river full of snags and shifting sandbars and changing sh.o.r.es, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty."

Bixby had returned from the Missouri by the time his pupil's license was issued, and promptly took him as full partner on the "Crescent City," and later on a fine new boat, the "New Falls City." Still later, they appear to have been together on a very large boat, the "City of Memphis," and again on the "Alonzo Child."

XVI.

THE PILOT

For Samuel Clemens these were happy days--the happiest, in some respects, he would ever know. He had plenty of money now. He could help his mother with a liberal hand, and could put away fully a hundred dollars a month for himself. He had few cares, and he loved the ease and romance and independence of his work as he would never quite love anything again.

His popularity on the river was very great. His humorous stories and quaint speech made a crowd collect wherever he appeared. There were pilot-a.s.sociation rooms in St. Louis and New Orleans, and his appearance at one of these places was a signal for the members to gather.

A friend of those days writes: "He was much given to spinning yarns so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. Occasionally some of his droll yarns got into the papers. He may have written them himself."

Another old river-man remembers how, one day, at the a.s.sociation, they were talking of presence of mind in an accident, when Pilot Clemens said:

"Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old man leaned out of a four-story building, calling for help. Everybody in the crowd below looked up, but n.o.body did anything. The ladders weren't long enough. n.o.body had any presence of mind--n.o.body but me. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I threw the old man the end of it. He caught it, and I told him to tie it around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down."

This was a story that found its way into print, probably his own contribution.

"Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel," said Bixby, "but the best thing he ever did was the burlesque of old Isaiah Sellers. He didn't write it for print, but only for his own amus.e.m.e.nt and to show to a few of the boys. Bart Bowen, who was with him on the "Edward J. Gay"

at the time, got hold of it, and gave it to one of the New Orleans papers."