Chapter XI: The “hoodooed” Steamboat

Early on a Friday morning the train landed Dick in Cincinnati; and after eating breakfast in the railway restaurant he went down to the river front to look for a boat. The river was much larger than at Pittsburgh or Wheeling, but he was disappointed in the boats. He had read of the palatial Ohio and Mississippi steamboats running to New Orleans, with their luxurious cabins, hundreds of passengers, bands playing, cargo on all the decks. But, as far as he could see, in Cincinnati there was no boat to equal even the third-rate boats of the Hudson River. They were all stern wheelers, large enough but clumsy in shape, with their passenger accommodations all on the upper deck, which was supported by posts that looked entirely too small for the weight. On every boat the whole lower deck was open, exposing to view the engines and all the machinery.

The Belle of the River, one of the largest of the Ohio River boats, was to start for New Orleans that afternoon, and Dick determined to take passage in her, at any rate as far as Memphis. The fare to Memphis, he learned, was only twelve dollars, including meals and stateroom, and the voyage might be made in a week, or it might take three times as long, according to circumstances. He could not buy a ticket, as he was in the habit of doing at home. There was a clerk in the little office on board; and the clerk kept a register in which each passenger wrote his name, just as in a hotel, and opposite the name the clerk wrote the passenger’s destination and the amount paid.

“Oh, I wouldn’t start with you for anything, captain!” he heard one of the ladies of a large party say to the captain later in the day, when he had his trunk on board and was settled in his stateroom. “What in the world makes you start on a Friday? Such an unlucky day. We’re going to take the train to Louisville in the morning, and go on board there. None of us would think of starting on a journey on Friday.”

“There’s a point!” Dick said to himself. “I wonder whether people are more superstitious down this way than they are at home. I must keep an eye open for that.”

He had a chance to see more of it before he started. There were fifteen or twenty passengers that he saw or heard of, and perhaps more that he knew nothing about, who would not start on Friday, but waited to take the morning train and catch the boat at Louisville. And of those who did go many spoke of the unlucky day, and hoped that something would delay the boat until Saturday.

Naturally Dick laughed at this folly; for a bright newspaper man has no superstitions about Friday or anything else. It is not luck that he relies upon, but pluck.

“They must be ignorant, or they’d know better,” he said to himself. “I notice, too, that none of the passengers look as though they had much money to spare; and from what they say I think they travel by boat only because it is cheap. They don’t seem to think it possible that a man should go in the boat if he has money enough to go by rail.”

There were thirty or forty passengers on board at the start, Friday or no Friday; but Dick saw very little of them on the first night. He had an article to write; and he shut himself up in his stateroom.

After breakfast next morning there was a commotion in the cabin. One of the colored stewards was talking loudly in front of the clerk’s office, and the clerk was trying to pacify him. Dick stepped up to see what it was about.

“He’s been drinking, that’s all,” the clerk explained. “I suppose he has found a bottle of liquor in one of the staterooms he cleans, and has helped himself. You go on about your work now,” he added to the colored man, “and keep quiet.”

But instead of keeping quiet he became more boisterous than ever and began to swear at the clerk.

“Here, George! Henry! Thomas! Take this man away from here!” the clerk called to a number of waiters about the table. “Take him down on the lower deck till he cools off.” In a minute a half-dozen of them, all colored, surrounded the man.

Suddenly the waiters all sprang back in alarm. The man had thrust his hand under his shirt bosom, and Dick expected to see him draw out a knife. But when the hand came out it had only a little round packet about the size of a very small egg, covered with brownish cloth, much handled, and dirty-looking.

The negro waiters could hardly have shown as much alarm if the man had drawn a knife. They shrank back in fear; it seemed to Dick that they actually turned pale; the teeth of some of them chattered.

“He got de rabbit foot!” one of them exclaimed.

“He a Hoodoo, boss!” another cried: “’tain’t safe to tech him. I wouldn’t lay hands on him fer no money.”

Dick was becoming very much interested. He had heard of the negroes carrying a rabbit’s foot for a charm, and of their Hoodoo nonsense, but he had never expected to have the good luck to see it so soon.

“Stan’ back!” the half-drunken man shouted, waving the little package in the air. He had sense enough left to see that the other waiters were afraid of him and to take advantage of the fact. “Stan’ back! I’ll work de rabbit’s foot on any man w’at comes near me.”

The clerk sent a boy in a hurry after the two mates, and in a minute they appeared--big, brawny, white men. They had no fear of the rabbit’s foot, and they seized the man and hustled him out of the cabin and down the companionway, Dick and many of the other passengers following.

The man was still abusive, but he was released on the lower deck; and he went immediately to the boiler and began to warm his little packet. He held it first one side toward the hot boiler, then the other, and turned it round and round.

“He warmin’ de rabbit foot!” Dick heard one of the black roustabouts say in an alarmed tone. “He’ll do mischief, dat man will.”

In a few minutes, perhaps when the rabbit’s foot was warm enough to be in good working order, the man walked back to the two mates, who were still watching him.

“I pay you off for dis!” he shouted. “I sink dis boat wid de rabbit foot, I will. I kill you yet.”

In a second the first mate had the man by the throat and half-doubled him backward.

“That’s what I’ve been waiting for!” the mate exclaimed; “I just wanted you to threaten somebody. Now I’ll put you and your rabbit’s foot out of harm. Get me a rope, somebody.”

The man was quickly tied hand and foot and fastened to a stanchion, and in the scuffle the little packet was knocked from his hand. Dick picked it up.

“Oh, gimme back me rabbit’s foot!” the man whined. His pluck was all gone, now that he had lost his charm. “Please, boss, gim it back ter me.”

“Oh, no!” Dick laughed. “It’s too dangerous for you to carry. It’s warm, too, and there’s no telling what damage it might do.”

Not one of the black deck hands would approach the packet. They held aloof; even some of the passengers looked alarmed when Dick took out his penknife and opened the blade.

“Don’t you do it!” one of them advised. “’Tain’t well to fool with them things.”

“No, don’t cut it open,” another said. “Some harm’ll come to you, sure, if you do.”

“Nonsense!” Dick exclaimed. “No wonder these poor colored men are superstitious, if you white men encourage them in this way.”

Without more ado he ripped open the packet with his knife. There were many wrappings under the brown cloth--first a layer of oiled silk, then one of flannel; but the interior was soon reached. There in the centre lay the wonderful charms:--

A rabbit’s foot with hair and claws all complete.

Half of a gold ring.

A lock of straight black hair, tied with a string. And--

Four small pieces of broken glass.

“It don’t look very dangerous, does it?” Dick asked; and he tossed the packet over the boat’s side into the river.

Several times that morning he heard colored men on board prophesying evil because the man had “hoodooed de boat”; and some of the white passengers sagely shook their heads. Just as the boat was approaching Louisville, half an hour before noon, when Dick was in his stateroom, the light mulatto boy who waited upon him entered the room.

“If I was you, I’d leave dis boat at Louisville, boss,” the boy said. “I’d git off here if I could, but I’se shipped for de voyage. De boat’s boun’ to come to some harm, suah! Dat feller he hoodoo her; he wo’k de rabbit foot on her, and somethin’ goin’ to happen.”

“All right, George,” Dick laughingly replied; “that’s just in my line of business. If anything happens to the boat, I must be here to see it, so I’ll stay on board.”

The stop kept the boat at Louisville for more than an hour. The “Hoodoo man” was released and put ashore with a warning not to come back, and the thirty or forty passengers whose fear of starting on Friday had led them to take the train, joined the boat. By half-past one she was on her way down the river again.

“That was a good incident, that Hoodoo man,” Dick said to himself; “I was lucky to see it.” He did not know that the incident was only begun.

“Don’t you want to go up on the Texas deck?” one of the passengers asked him--a pleasant-faced young fellow in a red flannel shirt. “We’ll be going over the falls in a minute or two, and it’s worth seeing.”

Together they went up to the Texas, the highest deck of all, many feet above water, where a number of men were already standing.

The falls of the Ohio at Louisville might more properly be called rapids, for they stretch out over half a mile or more. When the water is high they are almost obliterated; but in low water they become a raging, roaring descent, studded with dangerous rocks. While the boat was rushing through this rapid Dick felt several sharp bumps against the bottom; but they were different from the bumps he had felt at Porto Rico or anywhere else, and he attached no importance to them.

Five minutes afterward, with the boat still in the rapids, several newcomers ran rapidly up to the Texas and began to watch a boat that was putting out from the Kentucky shore. Dick looked too; and as soon as the boat was near enough to be seen plainly, he watched with great interest.

For it was no ordinary boat that was coming out toward them at great speed. Painted white, her brass mountings glistened in the sun. Her eight oarsmen pulled with the strength and precision of man-of-war’s men. The man at the tiller was in uniform, and all the men wore blue caps. It was a pretty sight, that handsome boat so excellently handled.

“What boat is that coming out?” Dick asked one of the newcomers.

“That is the life-saving crew from Louisville,” the man replied.

“The life-saving crew!” Dick repeated; “and what are they coming out here for?”

“Don’t you know we’re sinking?” the man asked. “The hold is half-full of water now. The life savers must have seen us strike the rocks five minutes ago, and they’re coming out to our assistance. Oh, it’s a fine thing, that life-saving service! If the boat goes down in deep water, they’ll find some way to get us all ashore. Just see them come!”

Dick and his red-shirted companion hurried down to the deck below them, and there everything was in confusion. Women and children were screaming, and several women had fainted. Men were rushing about after life preservers and gathering up their valuables. The boat’s whistle had begun to blow continuously, and the horrible racket added to the excitement.

“Now don’t get excited!” the clerk was shouting, in a way little adapted to calm the passengers’ fears. “The life-saving crew is right alongside of us, and they’ll get us all off. Keep cool, ladies; keep cool.”

“How deep is the water here at the foot of the falls?” Dick asked the clerk.

“Sixty feet!” was the whispered reply; “deepest place on the river.”

Dick started for the lower deck, but on the way he nearly ran into a woman with two little girls and no man to help her. They had secured a life preserver somewhere, and the woman was frantically trying to fasten it to the smaller girl. He instantly brought his good sense to bear for the relief of the frightened family.

“Let me show you how to fasten that, madam,” he said as coolly as though he were talking about strapping a valise; and he drew up a chair and sat down and took the little girl on his knee. “Not that you’re going to need it now,” he went on, “but it’s as well to understand these things. We are not in any danger; and anyhow I shall stay right here by you and take care of you. You sit down on the other knee” (to the larger child) “there; now you’re just as safe as if papa had you, for I could swim this river a dozen times without losing my breath.”

A hundred shouts of “Keep cool” and “Don’t be excited” could not have quieted the little family as Dick’s quiet, confident manner did.

“Two steamboats have got us!” somebody cried at the after end of the cabin; “one on each side of us.”

This caused a rush to the forward and after decks, and the passengers saw that a big steamboat was made fast on each side. The whistling had called them to the sinking boat’s assistance, and they were helping her to a shallow place of safety. The life-saving crew were on board, too; and they helped give the people confidence. Now that any one who chose could step to the deck of one of the other boats, nobody cared to go.

Slowly the three boats together moved toward the Kentucky shore; and when they were close by the lower end of the canal by which boats avoid the falls in going up the river, one of them let go and drew ahead, and the other pushed the Belle of the River close against the rocky shore.

She had hardly lain there two minutes before down she went to the very bottom with all on board. But fortunately the bottom of the river was not more than two feet below the bottom of the boat, for it was a shallow flat that had been selected to let her sink in; and when she rested upon the mud the water did not reach her lower deck.

“I knew it! I knew it!” cried Dick’s woman with the two little girls. “I just felt it in my bones that something was going to happen when we started on a Friday. I don’t know what ever possessed me to do it. And when that negro man hoodooed the boat, that just finished us.”

“You must not think so, madam,” Dick replied. “The current carried us slightly out of the channel and we struck a rock. Our starting on a Friday had nothing whatever to do with it; and certainly you cannot believe that an ignorant negro could bewitch the boat with a rabbit’s foot. That is too ridiculous to think of.”

Before the woman could say anything further two men walked through the cabin talking. “I’m going to take my family ashore just as soon as they get out a gangplank,” one of them was saying. “That coon hoodooed the boat, and she’ll have nothing but bad luck.”

Dick went down to the lower deck and found the negroes in a great state of excitement. There was not one of them but believed that the accident had been caused by the man with the rabbit’s foot.

“I’m a-gwine to sneak first chance I gits,” he heard one of the roustabouts say to another; “no hoodooed boat for me!”

“I’m almost sorry this thing happened,” Dick said to himself, “though it’s all in the way of business for me. Nothing in the world will ever convince half of these people that the boat was not bewitched by that steward. I suppose it’s in some such way as this that most wonderful stories originate. But I didn’t imagine that intelligent white people could believe in such nonsense.”

There was too much going on, however, for him to spend much time thinking about the coincidence. The Belle of the River was still whistling, and one boat after another came to her assistance, till there were six or eight alongside. As they all burned soft coal, their smoke soon made the air almost unbearable.

“Well, that’s an idea!” Dick exclaimed as he watched the proceedings. “A fellow can learn something every day, if he keeps his eyes open.”

A man had been down in the hold and had found a ragged hole six feet long and about four feet wide in the boat’s bottom; but as she rested in the mud the hole was temporarily stopped and no more water could flow in. It was the suction pipes that caused Dick’s exclamation. Each of the helping boats got out a big hose and ran one end into the Belle’s hold, while the other end was attached to their steam pumps. When they all began to pump they brought the water out in a hurry, and soon had the hold dry.

“Now they’ll build a bulkhead around the hole,” the clerk said to Dick as he stood and watched; “a big square box; and first they’ll lay in a lot of mattresses and pillows off the beds, and then layers of mud and stones, and put a good stout plank cover over it. That will keep us afloat till we get to Paducah. There’s a marine railway at Paducah, and we’ll make repairs there. Say,” he added in a lower voice, “do you think the coon really had anything to do with it?”

Dick was too much disgusted to give a serious reply.

“Undoubtedly!” he said. “I don’t think the rabbit’s foot alone could have done it; but when you combine the foot with a bit of gold ring, certain atomic forces are liberated which are difficult to control. Then by adding three or four bits of old glass, the isothermal pressure becomes tremendous. A lock of hair of course increases the equilibrium in the proportion of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle. But we were very lucky, after all. That was only a forefoot of a rabbit. If it had been a hindfoot, we’d all been drowned, sure.”

“That’s just my opinion of it,” the clerk replied, seriously shaking his head; and Dick moved away.

The process of building a bulkhead was easily described, but the work itself took more than twenty-four hours, and the boat lay close to the Kentucky shore till early on Monday morning. A plank was laid from the upper deck to the rocky bluff on shore, and all who chose were at liberty to go ashore and spend the time in Louisville, only three or four miles away.

But Dick was too busy for that. He was trying hard to “keep up with his facts,” as he put it; and he spent much of the time in his stateroom writing.

“I’d like to know why it is,” he said to himself, “that something unusual happens wherever I go. Is it because I’m on the lookout for such things, I wonder? Or do I have better luck than most correspondents? First, a riot in the cars put down by a celebrated preacher, then a bewitched steamboat, and now a little shipwreck. Why, I couldn’t have done better so far if I’d managed the program myself. But if this thing keeps on, Mr. Dick Sumner, you’re going to run into an accident some day that will put a sudden end to your newspaper writing.”

Slowly the boat made her way down the river, stopping at all the principal towns to take in cargo. Furniture, wagons, sash and blinds, bales of hay, bags of feed--a thousand different things were taken aboard till all the deck room was filled, and even the Texas deck was piled up high, making the boat look twice as large as she had looked before. Sometimes the stop was only for two or three hours, at others it lasted all day or all night. There was no pretence of hurry.

Dick would have caught up easily with his facts in this slow journey, only new facts, new subjects for articles, were accumulating all the time. The passengers he thought were worthy of a letter to themselves; many of the river towns were worth describing. He could not turn in any direction without adding new material. The young fellows who wore flannel shirts and carried guns, and there were fifteen or more of them, were “swampers,” he learned. Having finished their summer and fall work on northern farms, they were on their way to the Red River swamps in Louisiana to cut cypress timber, and late in the spring they would return. Of course they were full of good stories and Dick gathered them all in.

One night these swampers gave Dick a capital story. The wooded shore on the north was in Illinois, on the other side lay Kentucky. It was a bright moonlight night and every mark in the river was plain as day. But for some reason the captain decided to stop for the night, and he took the boat close up to the Illinois shore and tied her, bow and stern, to two immense chestnut trees.

“What’s the matter, captain?” Dick asked. “Why don’t you go on?”

“Oh, we might as well give the old thing a rest!” was the only reason the captain cared to give.

The swampers decided that it was exactly the proper sort of night for a coon hunt, and southern Illinois exactly the proper place. They got out a plank and went ashore and built a rousing bonfire, around which they sat and played their fiddles and sang songs till midnight. When they started on the hunt Dick borrowed a gun and went with them, for he was acquainted with them all.

“That’s article number nine,” he said to himself when he returned. “Coon Hunt in Illinois. Odd duty for a New York reporter, too, to go coon hunting in Illinois.”

On the eleventh day after leaving Cincinnati, the Belle of the River reached Paducah, Kentucky, and Dick had his first opportunity to see the working of a marine railway. There was a hill rising from the river, and at the top of the hill a long shed in which immense wooden cylinders were revolved by an engine. Wooden tracks reached some distance up the hill, and great iron chains ran down to the water, the upper ends being made fast to the cylinders.

These chains were fastened around the boat, and when the cylinders revolved they were wound up and drew the boat sideways out of the water. Out she came, with crew, freight, and passengers all on board; not only out of the water, but twenty or thirty feet up the hill, where the workmen could reach her bottom to repair her.

This was not done at once, however. Another boat was in the way at first, and two days passed before Dick’s boat was raised. Then two more days dragged along without any sign of the repairs beginning. The delay gave Dick a grand chance to write, but he soon began to feel that he was wasting the Transport’s time.

“How long will it take to repair the boat, after they begin?” he asked the captain.

“Not more than two or three days,” was the answer.

“And when will they begin?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder if they’d begin to-morrow or next day.”

“That’s too slow for me!” Dick exclaimed. “I’ll have to leave you, captain, and finish the journey to Memphis by rail. I believe there is a railroad from here to Memphis.”

He went ashore and made inquiries in Paducah, and found that there was a train for Memphis at seven in the evening. By bedtime he was bowling across Kentucky in a railway car, through endless cotton fields, with the withered cotton stalks standing like skeleton sentinels in the moonlight. At two o’clock in the morning he was in Memphis.

“Any restaurants open at this time of night?” he asked of the solitary “cabby” outside the station.

“Plenty of them, sir,” the man replied; “step right in and I’ll take you to one.”

The train for Little Rock started at six, so he had four hours to eat his supper and take a look at Memphis by moonlight. He had been “roughing it” so long on the boat that the sight of paved streets and substantial city houses seemed almost strange. At half-past five he was in the Little Rock train with some vague, shadowy impressions of Memphis in his mind. What was clearest to him was a high bluff, and at the foot of the bluff a broad sheet of silver that narrowed down to a ribbon in the distance. The silver ribbon was the Mississippi River by moonlight.

Dick’s train was ferried across the river on a large steamboat, and soon after daylight the journey across the eastern part of Arkansas began. It was a hundred miles of dismal swamp, the railroad running on an embankment through the swamp. Here and there were log cabins, inhabited by people with skins turned deep yellow by their diet of salt pork, quinine, and vile whiskey. This at least was the train conductor’s explanation of their remarkable color.

“They have one advantage over the rest of us,” Dick exclaimed with a shudder; “they must be awfully glad to die!”

At Forest City the train began to ascend to higher lands, and the young correspondent soon had his first look at a prairie. It was miles and miles across, without a fence or a tree. But there were some cultivated fields and comfortable homes that were a relief after the depressing swamp.

At Little Rock, Dick changed to the Iron Mountain train that was to carry him to Malsem, where he must change again to a little narrow-gauge road for the Hot Springs. There were only men in his car in the Iron Mountain train; men mostly of the cowboy, “dead drop” sort; and all the conversation he heard around him was about shooting and fighting.

“I’d ’a’ licked that feller in less than two minutes, if they hadn’t ’a’ pulled me off,” he heard a one-eyed man in the seat in front of him say.

“I had the dead drop on him, an’ he knowed it!” came from the seat behind.

“Well,” Dick quietly laughed to himself; “here’s another phase of the great American people. I’ve left the superstitious ones and now I’ve fallen in with the fighters. But if they shoot and fight as much as they talk about it, I wonder that any of them are still alive.”