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He had begun life at an early age as a clerk on a trading-boat on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, driving sharp bargains with the plantation darkies on the banks, in the exchange of cheap jewelry and gay calicoes for cotton and eggs. Next he undertook to learn the art and mystery of printing, studying law meanwhile, and finally located at Toledo as the editor of a Democratic paper.
This would give him only a month to make his alleged canoe-voyage from the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and again upward to the place of his capture, a distance of three thousand two hundred and sixty miles. A Mississippi trading-boat of the last generation, with sails and oars, ascending against the current, was thought to do remarkably well if it could make twenty miles a day.
The agents in this disaster were never suspected, but as soon as Jasper Keene had come of age, and had command of any means of his own, his first act was to have an exhaustive search made for the old fellow, with a view of financial restitution. But the owner of the trading-boat had died, spending his last years in the futile effort to obtain the insurance money.
But marriage was a life-contract, and God required me to keep it to the end, and said, "When thou passeth through the fire I will be with thee, and the floods shall not overflow thee." I could not bear to have a bill sent to mother's executors for my wages, but I could compromise, and I did. He returned to Louisville, sold the goods, went on a trading-boat, and joined Samuel in Little Rock.
"In the old days there used to be a sort of water-gypsy, with a queer little trading-boat that plied the region of the bends a queer little old man, too Polish, I think, foreign certainly and the butt of all the wags alongshore, at the stores and the wood-yards, the cotton-sheds and the wharf-boats.
Three days later, the voyagers met a trading-boat belonging to Mr. Augustus Chouteau, the founder of a famous trading-house in St. Louis. From this party the captains procured a gallon of whiskey, and with this they served out a dram to each of their men. "This," says the journal, "is the first spirituous liquor any of them have tasted since the Fourth of July, 1805."
Usually the flooded bottoms are denuded of trees, save perhaps a narrow fringe along the bank, and a few dead trunks scattered here and there; while back, a third or a half-mile from the river, lies a dense line of forest, far beyond which rises the low rim of the basin. A trading-boat was moored just within the Saline, where we stopped for lunch under a clump of sycamores.
Hunt happening to be awake, observed a savage brandishing a kris, and performing his war-dance on the bit of deck, in an ecstasy of delight, thinking, in all probability, of the ease with which he had got possession of a fine trading-boat, and calculating the cargo of slaves he had to sell, but little dreaming of the hornets' nest into which he had fallen. Lieut.
A deep, settled melancholy seemed to have affected us all; but the sight, after many days, of a small trading-boat seemed to inspire us with hopefulness; and having, in exchange for a gun, obtained a fair quantity of provisions, we continued our journey with lightened spirits.
Before any skiff could be launched, before any effort could be made to reach the trading-boat, she suddenly disappeared. The Mississippi was at flood height, and it was thought that the boat struck some drifting obstruction, swamped, and went down in deep water.
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