In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago,in White River,to save the lives of other men.He said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar,some distance away,all could be saved,but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives.
He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water;but by that time the flames had closed around him,and in escaping through them he was fatally burned.
He had been urged to fly sooner,but had replied as became a pilot to reply--'I will not go.If I go,nobody will be saved;if I stay,no one will be lost but me.I will stay.'
There were two hundred persons on board,and no life was lost but the pilot's.
There used to be a monument to this young fellow,in that Memphis graveyard.
While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip,I started out to look for it,but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished.
The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead--blown up,near Memphis,and killed;that several others whom I had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel;that another and very particular friend,whom I had steered many trips for,had stepped out of his house in New Orleans,one night years ago,to collect some money in a remote part of the city,and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river,it was thought;that Ben Thornburgh was dead long ago;also his wild 'cub'whom I used to quarrel with,all through every daylight watch.A heedless,reckless creature he was,and always in hot water,always in mischief.
An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard,one day,and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck.
Thornburgh's 'cub'could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear,to 'see what he would do.'He was promptly gratified.
The bear chased him around and around the deck,for miles and miles,with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience,and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it.The off-watch turned out with alacrity,and left the bear in sole possession.
He presently grew lonesome,and started out for recreation.
He ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it,with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him;and when his owner captured him at last,those two were the only visible beings anywhere;everybody else was in hiding,and the boat was a solitude.
I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel,from heart disease,in 1869.The captain was on the roof at the time.
He saw the boat breaking for the shore;shouted,and got no answer;ran up,and found the pilot lying dead on the floor.
Mr.Bixby had been blown up,in Madrid bend;was not injured,but the other pilot was lost.
George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis--blown into the river from the wheel,and disabled.The water was very cold;he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted,when he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck.
They tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton,and warmed the life back into him,and got him safe to Memphis.
He is one of Bixby's pilots on the 'Baton Rouge'now.
Into the life of a steamboat clerk,now dead,had dropped a bit of romance--somewhat grotesque romance,but romance nevertheless.
When I knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift,boisterous,goodhearted,full of careless generosities,and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early,and come to nothing.
In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife;and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend,sort of servant.
The young clerk of whom I have been speaking--whose name was not George Johnson,but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl,and they sinned;and the old foreigner found them out,and rebuked them.Being ashamed,they lied,and said they were married;that they had been privately married.
Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed,and he forgave and blessed them.
After that,they were able to continue their sin without concealment.
By-and-bye the foreigner's wife died;and presently he followed after her.
Friends of the family assembled to mourn;and among the mourners sat the two young sinners.The will was opened and solemnly read.
It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to MRS.
GEORGE JOHNSON!
And there was no such person.The young sinners fled forth then,and did a very foolish thing:married themselves before an obscure Justice of the Peace,and got him to antedate the thing.
That did no sort of good.The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease,and carried off the fortune,leaving the Johnsons very legitimately,and legally,and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage,but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal.
Such are the actual facts;and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation.
