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Updated: June 13, 2025
The boat landed just at daylight, and I left my baggage on the wharf-boat and went looking around the town and out a piece in the country, to put in the time and not get here too soon; and so I come down the back way." "Who'd you give the baggage to?" "Nobody." "Why, child, it 'll be stole!" "Not where I hid it I reckon it won't," I says. "How'd you get your breakfast so early on the boat?"
She did not begin to think of going into the cabin until Pat was working the boat in toward the landing a square above the old familiar wharf-boat. "What day is this?" she asked Eshwell. "Saturday." Only Saturday! And last Monday less than five days ago she had left this town for her Cincinnati adventure. She felt as if months, years, had passed.
He started slow and dreamily down toward the wharf-boat; turned the corner of a freight-pile and came suddenly upon two of the boys. They were lightly laughing over some pleasant matter; they heard his step, and glanced up just as he discovered them; the laugh died abruptly; and before Ed could speak they were off, and sailing over barrels and bales like hunted deer. Again Ed was paralyzed.
The wharf-boat is a conspicuous object at every landing of importance, being a covered barge used as a storehouse for coming and going steamboat freight. It is a private enterprise, for public convenience, with certain monopolistic privileges at the incorporated towns.
Bill went to the wharf-boat, and I began looking for another partner. A few months after dissolving partnership with my old friend Bill, I met a man from Red River who told me that Bill was making big money up there. He said, "Why, that crazy looking old fellow is running a corner grocery, livery stable, and winning all the money and horses about the landing."
No particular place to meet and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have answered; but when the dead low water came it was destructive.
All night he tossed sleeplessly on his uncomfortable bed, striving in vain to unravel the mystery in which the fate of his nephew and of Major Caspar's raft had become enshrouded. In the morning he strolled undecidedly down to the wharf-boat, and, missing his skiff, asked the watchman, who was just going off duty, what he had done with it.
Sure enough, the singing ranks disappeared behind the wharf-boat, and a minute later came marching around the stern and lined up on the outer guard of the vessel. The skinny, grizzly-headed negro commander held up his sword, and the Knights and Ladies of Tabor fell silent. The master of the launch tossed his head-line to the wharf-boat, and yelled for one of the negroes to make it fast. One did.
All her power of thought and feeling was used up in absorbing these unfolding wonders. And when the June sun suddenly pierced the heavy clouds of fog and smoke, she clasped her hands and gasped, "Lovely! Oh, how lovely!" And now the steamer was at the huge wharf-boat, in shape like the one at Sutherland, but in comparative size like the real Noah's Ark beside a toy ark.
The eyes opened lazily, took one glance, the face blanched, the form whirled itself from the sack-pile, and in an instant Ed was alone and Fairchild was flying for the wharf-boat like the wind! Ed was dazed, stupefied. Was Fairchild crazy? What could be the meaning of this?
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