Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 26, 2025
He had been, as a boy, clerk on a Mississippi River steamboat, and a vacancy occurring in the office of mate, he had been promoted to that place. His youthful face and quiet speech did not sufficiently impose upon the rough deck-hands of that early day. They had been accustomed to harsher modes of address, and he saw his authority defied and in danger.
He tried to add something else, but seemed undetermined what. "Be a good little girl " It was evidently all he could think of. Nodding to the woman behind him, he turned on his heel, and left. One of the deck-hands was sent to fetch her trunk. He walked out behind them, through the cabin, and the crowd on deck, down the stairs, and out over the gangway.
The captain, with Clingman and Lane, had the first, or starboard watch, while Morris, the mate, had the port watch, with Wales and Clinch. Louis and Felix were appointed second engineers, as the seamen on board relieved them from duty as deck-hands; and the three in that department were to keep four-hour watches, like the officers and seamen.
One of the deck-hands was a boy of sixteen, who had served in a similar capacity on board the lake steamers, and was a good wheelman, though he knew nothing of the navigation of the lake, and steered only by the directions given him from time to time. Captain Lawry called this hand, and gave him the wheel, with orders to run for a certain headland several miles distant.
On the previous night, he said, he had set his net and dozed off to sleep in the bottom of the boat. The next he knew it was morning, and he opened his eyes to find his boat rubbing softly against the piles of Steamboat Wharf at Benicia. Also he saw the river steamer Apache lying ahead of him, and a couple of deck-hands disentangling the shreds of his net from the paddle-wheel.
At a favorable moment, when Lawry and the deck-hands were employed on the after part of the deck, he slipped down the plank and into the forecastle, concealing himself in the berth of one of the firemen. This trick might insure him a passage with the excursion-party, if nothing more. When the ladies and gentlemen had all arrived, the boat left the wharf, and commenced her voyage down the lake.
Volunteers were called for from the army, men who had had experience in any capacity in navigating the western rivers. Captains, pilots, mates, engineers and deck-hands enough presented themselves to take five times the number of vessels we were moving through this dangerous ordeal.
He sent his coachman after the sheriff at once, and directed that the search for Ben Wilford should be renewed. The stateroom was found locked, as he had left it, and the gold undisturbed. Mrs. Light and the girls, the firemen and the deck-hands, had their own stories to tell, to all of which Mr. Sherwood listened very patiently. "You have done well, Lawry," said he. "You have saved my gold."
This was a great gain; for they were not only splendid men at their job, but were men willing to risk their liberty or their lives for the Ulster cause. Deck-hands and firemen would be procurable at whatever port a steamer was to be bought.
Then the work of lading or unlading rapidly began in the witching play of the light that set into radiant relief the black, eager faces and the black, eager figures of the deck-hands struggling up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares, or kegs of nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, steadily mocked or cursed at in their shapeless effort, till the last of them reeled back to the deck down the steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to his broken sleep wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down among the heaps of freight.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking