The Last of the Flatboats

by George Cary Eggleston

  CHAPTER XVII

  AT ANCHOR

  Phil had sent two telegrams,--one to the authorities at Memphis, andthe other to the plundered bank in Cincinnati. In each he had announcedhis captures,--the man and the funds,--and in each he had asked thatofficers to arrest and persons to identify the culprit should be waitingat Memphis on the arrival of the flatboat.

  On his return to the flatboat he felt himself so excited and sleeplessthat he sent his comrades below to sleep and by turns to watch theprisoner. He would himself remain on duty on deck all night. As thenight wore away, the boy thought out all the possibilities, for he feltthat for any miscarriage in this matter he would be solely responsible.

  Among the possibilities was this: that should the flatboat arrive atMemphis before some one could get there from Cincinnati to identify theprisoner, he might be discharged for want of such identification. Itwould take a day or two to send men by rail from Cincinnati to Memphis,while the fierce current of this Mississippi flood promised to take theflatboat thither within less than twenty hours.

  After working out all the probabilities in his mind as well as he could,Phil called below for all his comrades to come to the sweeps. He did nottell them his purpose; they were too sleepy even to ask. But studyingthe "lay of the land" on either side, he steered the flatboat into asort of pocket on the Tennessee shore, and to the bewilderment of hiscomrades, ordered the anchor cast overboard.

  By the time that the anchor held, and the boat came to a rest in thebend, the boys were much too wide awake not to have their minds full ofinterrogation marks.

  "What do you mean, Phil?" "Why have we anchored?" "How long are we toremain here?" "What's the matter, anyhow?" "Have you gone crazy, or whatis it?"

  These and a volley of similar questions were fired at him.

  He did not answer. He went to one side of the boat and then to the otherto observe position.

  "How much anchor line is out, Will?" he presently asked.

  "Nearly all of it," answered his comrade.

  "This won't do," said Phil. "Up anchor."

  The boys were more than ever puzzled. But they tugged away at the anchorwindlass till the flukes let go the bottom and the anchor was halfwayup. Then Phil called out:--

  "That will do. Put a peg in the windlass and let the anchor swing in thewater. To the sweeps! Hard on the starboard! We must push her inshoreand into shallower water, where the anchor will hold her, and where nosteamboat is likely to run over us. Who would have thought it was sodeep over here?"

  The boys now began to understand why the first anchorage had beenabandoned and a shallower one sought for, but they did not yet know whattheir captain meant by anchoring at all. They did not understand why, onso clear a night, with a river so generously flooded, he did not letthings take their course and get to Memphis as quickly as possible.

  Presently the anchor, dragging at half cable, fouled the bottom and,with a strain that made the check-post creak, the flatboat came to afull stop.

  "That will do," said Phil. "This is as good a place as any. Pay out somemore anchor line and let her rest."

  "But what on earth are you anchoring for?" asked the others, "and howlong are we going to lie here?" queried Ed.

  "Nearly two days and nights," was the reply,--"long enough to letsomebody travel from Cincinnati to Memphis who can identify Jim Hughesand take him off our hands. I suppose it would be all right if we wenton without waiting. But I'm not certain of that, and I'm not taking anychances in this business, so we'll lie at anchor here for nearly twodays. Go to bed, all of you except the one on watch over Jim Hughes. I'mnot sleepy, so I'll stay on deck for the rest of the night."

  But by that time the boys were not sleepy either, so they made no hasteabout going to their bunks.

  "We'll be pretty short of something to eat by that time," saidConstant, who was just then in charge of the cooking. "We have only ascrap of bread left. The eggs and fresh meat and milk are used up, andwe'll have to fall back on corn-bread and fried salt pork."

  "Well, that's food fit for the gods," said Irv Strong, "if the godshappen to be healthy, hungry flatboatmen. But how important the foodquestion always is in an emergency! How it always crops up when you getaway from home!"

  "Yes, and at home too," said Ed; "only there we have somebody else tolook after the three meals a day. It's the most important question inthe world. If all food supplies were cut off for a single month, thisworld would be as dead as the moon."

  "That's true," broke in Will. "And really, I suppose the world isn'tvery forehanded with it at best. I wonder how many years we could last,anyhow, if the crops ceased to grow."

  "Not more than one year," replied the older boy. "There never was a timewhen mankind had food enough accumulated to last for much more than ayear, and probably there never will be. If there should be no crop fora single year, hundreds of thousands would starve every month, and asecond failure would simply blot out the race. As for forehandedness, weactually live from hand to mouth, especially the people in the bigcities. Only last winter a great snowstorm blockaded the railroadsleading into New York for only three or four days, and even in thatshort time the price of food went up so high that the charitableinstitutions had all they could do to keep poor people from starving. Sofar from the world generally being forehanded for food, there never wasa time when the food on hand was really sufficient to go round."

  "Well, of course," said Will, meditatively, "there are always somepeople so 'down on their luck,' as the saying is, that they can't earn aliving, but there's always enough food for them if they could get holdof it."

  "You're mistaken," said Ed. "There is nearly always something like afamine in parts of India and Russia, and even in Italy and other partsof Europe there are great masses of very hard-working people who neverin their lives get enough to eat."

  There were exclamations of surprise at this, but Ed presentlycontinued: "In many European countries the peasants do not see a pieceof meat once a year, and in hardly any of them do the poorer people getwhat we would think sufficient for food. In fact, their food is notsufficient. They are always more or less starved, and that's the reasonso many of them are the little runts they are."

  "Then we are better off than most other nations?" said Irv.

  "Immeasurably!" said Ed. "Ours is the best fed nation in the world. Itis the only nation in which the poorest laborer can have meat on histable every day in the year, for even in England the poorer laborershave to make out with cheese pretty often."

  "What's the reason?" asked Phil, who had acquired the habit of usingshort sentences and as few words as possible since his burden ofresponsibility had borne so heavily upon him.

  "There are several reasons. Our soil is fertile--but so is that ofFrance and Italy, for that matter. I suppose the great reason is that wedo not have to support vast armies in idleness. In most of the Europeancountries they make everybody serve in the army for three or fouryears. It costs a lot of money to support these armies and it costs thecountry a great deal more than that."

  "In what way?" asked Constant, who, being on sentry duty over Hughes,was sitting halfway down the ladder.

  "Why, by taking all the young men away from productive work for threeyears. Take half a million young men away from work and put them in thearmy, and you lose each year all the work that a man could do in half amillion years, all the food or other things that half a million mencould produce in a year?"

  "And the other people have to make it all up," drawled Irv. "I don'twonder they're tired."

  "And besides making it all up, as you say," responded Ed, "those otherpeople have to work to feed and clothe and house and arm all these men,besides transporting them from one place to another, and paying forcostly parades and all that sort of thing. Why, every time one of thebig modern guns is fired at a target it burns up some man's earnings fora whole year! Some man must work a year or more to pay the expense ofdoing it!"

  "Then why don't the people of those countries 'kick'?" asked Wil
l, "andabolish their armies?"

  "Because the people of those countries have masters, and the masters ownthe armies, and the armies would make short work of any 'kick.' In ourcountry the people are the masters, and they have always refused to letanybody set up a great standing army. When we have a war, the peoplevolunteer and fight it to a finish. Then the men who have been doing thefighting are mustered out, and they go back to their work, earn theirown living, and put in their time producing something that mankindneeds."

  "Cipher it all down," said Irv, "it's liberty that makes this the bestcountry in the world to live in."

  "Precisely!" said Ed, with emphasis. "And about the most important dutyevery American has to do is to remember that one, supreme fact, and dohis part to keep our country as it is."