CHAPTER III
CAUGHT IN THE RIVER DRIFT
ALL thought of escaping to the edge of the mighty current and the safety of the long shore eddies suddenly left Sib Carruth’s mind as he started to the rescue of the person who had shouted for help, from the common peril of the river drift. He had a good, strong-hulled shanty-boat. It would row as easily as any twenty-four-foot skiff, for there was a three-to-one rake at bow and stern, and the boat slid over the water like a skimming dish yacht.
Rowing with the sweeps—oars fifteen feet long—he found that the light on the cabin roof blinded him, so he ran up on top and carried the lantern forward, where it could be seen by any one on the river, while he, standing in the shadow of the cabin, could not see even the reflected glow except where some drop of water out in the drift showed a sparkle for a moment as he passed in range.
He rowed slowly, his eyes growing more accustomed to the shades of darkness. The open places amid the drift were faintly shimmering, reflecting the feeble light that shone through the clouds from the stars; the drift itself loomed in fantastic shapes of pure black on the water. There were logs and patches of sticks and grass; lumps of straw-stacks; the rectangles and triangles of sides of buildings; barrels and hogs heads; tangles like jackstraws of lumber and trees. It was as if everything that will float had its kind in the masses, around which were straits and ponds and open waterways as smooth as blown glass.
He entered upon an acre of perfectly open water, and on the far side was running through a narrows hardly fifteen feet wide when he saw a black mass of drift shoving down across the way ahead of him. He heard the wet wood grinding and the dull snap of breaking branches.
Instantly he fell against the sweeps, to stop the boat in its course; he pulled out of the closing gap, and turned through the wide water to skirt around the moving mass—not for a moment worried, because he had seen in time the thrust of the coming squeeze.
At intervals he heard the shout from the drift, and he answered it. It was a long way through those low floating islands, over to the person who had called for help! He had to go in and out of openings that proved to be more bays; and then again, what looked like a solid mass ahead of him would drag itself asunder and a wide gate would open for him to pass.
His oars made a loud splash, and at times he heard nearer shore a roaring that told of a pile of drift, a clump of trees, or some other obstruction standing against the power of the torrent. In the most intense silence he heard beginning the far-away rasping and breaking and rubbing of floating islands crowding one another as two eddies of surface current flowed into the same suck.
What had seemed to be one great flow of water with a common course, when he regarded it from the safe harbor inshore, now proved to be a wonderful host of swirls, jets, masses, bulges, waves, and bodies of water, all going down the one channel, but changing and breaking up, gathering momentum. Sib was learning much about a flood that he had never known before!
"This way!" he heard a voice, suddenly very near, and over to his left he saw the flare of a match.
He pushed toward the figure he could dimly see standing on something. It was then as though the river were a perverse spirit, for out of the dark pressed floating islands of drift and right around them squeaked and ground one of those terrible squeezes which at their worst break tree trunks into slivers.
There was an uproar. Sib felt the bumping of heavy timber under his boat; he saw a snag limb thirty feet long whirling around not forty yards distant; he heard the rending of boards and the straining of acres of flotsam writhing on all sides. Logs pressed under the bow of his cabin-boat and lifted it; logs, pressed under the stern, and raised it too.
He ran up on the roof, caught up the lantern, and jumped down to look overside, to see if the bottom of his boat was torn off.
"Why! I’m lifted clear out!" he cried aloud. "That’s what comes of having a long rake to the hull!"
"Mister! Mister!" the voice shouted, "we’re breakin’ up!"
Sib held up the lantern, and threw the bull’s eye beam in the direction of the shout. On a pile of drift fifty or sixty feet away stood a boy about the size of Sib. He held another smaller boy in his arms. The space between was filled with a mass of sticks, planks, corn-stalks, branches, logs, and what not. It looked firm enough for the moment, but Sib knew what it was—a place full of pitholes and bottomless wells—and that in a minute it might break up into mere match-stick scum upon the surface.
"Come on!" Sib cried.
"I can’t!" the other choked. "He’s caught his leg into a crack—"
"I’m coming!" Sib shouted, catching a coil of rope from its hook on the stern and hanging it on his arm. He threw two half-hitches and took a bite over the stern bumper cleat, and then with the lantern in one hand, and playing out the rope from the coil with the other, he ran from chunk to chunk till he reached the two boys on the drift.
"I’m coming!"
"Our boat tore up!" the speaker said. "Jep and me got onto a log raft, and he went to sleep—his foot’s caught—or we could’ve got a-goin’. Help, can you? He’s fainted!"
"Hold the lantern!" Sib said, and catching up a pole six feet long and three inches through, he jammed it down into the crack where Jep’s foot was caught. He set his shoulder to the pole and twisted it, and then the other boy took hold and together they pried.
Catching the imprisoned leg by the knee, Sib suddenly felt it ease out, and with a cry he caught Jep up on his shoulder and started for the shanty-boat over the floating island. The other boy followed him.
"Keep hold of the rope!" Sib warned. "Hold the lantern so we’ll see where to step!"
"She’s strainin’!" the stranger gasped, as the rope rose from the drift ahead of him.
"Hold ’er!" Sib exclaimed, setting down his burden and catching the rope. "I’ll snub it on this snag branch!"
The drift was twisting all around them, and they could see the big logs crawling through the mass, could feel them straining underfoot; and between them and the boat water appeared among the flotsam. It was a fearful moment, for the squeeze had ended, and the mass of drift was breaking up and separating in little lumps. They saw the house-boat settling down as the logs rolled and floated from under her. Their own island began to flatten down and spread out. Sib caught the unconscious boy in his arms, and held to the branch that he had used for a snub. He could hear the light rope whimpering under the terrific strain as the boat tried to drift one way and the great snag to which she was fastened pulled the other.
Then suddenly the rope sagged.
"Hold ’im!" Sib exclaimed, and the other youth caught the helpless burden while Sib, inch by inch, foot by foot, stole the slack of the line from the river. The shanty-boat swung around, pulled away like a colt, drew a little nearer, and then worked away again.
At last, when there was only open water around it, and when all the other drift had left the big snag, the stern of the shanty-boat came to them. They hoisted their burden up on the deck, and Sib clambered after.
The other boy held with both hands to the cleat and stared, white-faced. Sib caught him, and dragged him on board.
"I’m all in. I can’t lift a pound!" the boy said in a low voice as he fell forward on the deck. "We’ve ben comin’—a long time—an’ we’ve ben fightin’ Ole Mississip, night ’n day!"
He was no older than Sib, if as old. The lad he had stood by to the end was two or three years younger. What they had endured showed in part in their white, pinched faces. Sib, after a few hours on the river, was already tired, while these two had been fighting the river night and day!
"Hungry?" he asked.
"Hungry!" the other gasped. "We’ve ben eatin’ tree bark, stranger. They ain’ much eatin’, ’ceptin’ the mud, out o’ the Big Muddy—is there?"
He smiled.
"My brother—he’s just fainted. He wasn’t scairt—just worried, some—an’ his leg hurt, too! It held right there ’most all day! Must be near mornin’ now, ain’t it?"
Sib looked around. They were in open water. Little sticks of drift and a chunk or two of wood were within the radius of the light. The drift had gone away off somewhere. There was a little time for refreshments.
He carried the two boys into the cabin, and laid one down on his own cot; the other he placed in the rocking-chair by the coal stove. Then he made tea. The younger boy, with a little tea in his throat, began to stir. The older boy stopped drinking his own, to watch anxiously.
"He’s all right!" Sib exclaimed. "Just tired out—worn out!"
"He couldn’t stand it," the elder brother explained. "We had two nights of it, besides this one. Somebody tried to git to us, up to Chester, but they got squeezed off. Comin’ through Grand Tower it was—"
"What! from above Chester!" Sib exclaimed. "Why, that’s sixty miles!"
"Yes, sir; we was tore out at Meramec River. Dad was driftin’, an’ we was helpin’ him. All of a sudden our skift was busted. Dad jumped. We did, too, but not far enough. Dad romped it down the bank lookin’ for a skift, but, shucks! we was comin’ down eight miles an hour, and he was behind a mile. We ’lowed we’d git drifted in, but we didn’t have a chanst."
"Two nights and two days!" Sib exclaimed. "And nothing to eat! Say, we’ll have some supper, now!"
"You just trippin’?" the boy asked.
"No; I was carried out of a creek. Was asleep on the cot, and the stake we tied to pulled out, and let me float down. I didn’t know it till just a little while ago. Whew! it’s after midnight!"
"It seemed a long time, stranger, when you was comin’, but you come!" the boy said gravely. "Who-all mout you be?"
"Sibley Carruth."
"I’ve heard about you; you come down the Missouri; Dad was trappin’ below Kansas City on those old river lakes there. You come clear down from Fort Benton. I’d like to do that. We started to Kansas City. My name’s Jimmy Veraine; he’s Jepson Veraine. Ho law! I never saw so many books onto a shanty-boat before!"
"We use them when we’re tied in," Sib explained. "Father and Mother are great hands to read."
"Dad’s that-way, too," Jimmy said. "He don’t ever stop in anywheres but what he buys a newspaper. We was to St. Louis a week, and Dad bought two newspapers there. He never misses a word. Everytime he reads a piece, he marks it with a pencil, so’s he’ll know he read it. He don’t b’lieve in wastin’ any time, readin’ the same thing twicet. Paw don’t. This stuff’s awful good drinkin’; what is it?"
"Tea."
"Paw always drinks coffee, but this is good. Seems like this bread an’ butter’s got more taste to hit than any cake or pie I ever ate!"
"I could eat a barbecued cow!" the other boy said from the cot. "I was so dog-goned tired I hadn’t a squawk left in me!"
"Then you never had none in you!" Jimmy grinned. "He never said a word, but I could see he was worried some, the way he set his jaws."
Sib was working fast; he threw some cold rabbit, a few sliced potatoes, a cut-up carrot, two onions, salt, a half-turnip, and two cabbage leaves into cold water in a kettle. He covered the kettle and put it on the kitchen stove, over a good fire.
"A little soup will taste good to you," he said. "You don’t want to eat too hearty, after ’most starving!"
"I won’t eat any more than one spoonful after another," Jimmy grinned. "We found somethin’ to eat, there in the drift, I forgot to tell you. There was three oranges; they was tol’able old, kind o’ soaked, and wa’n’t what you’d call pretty to look at, but they was good!"
"I never ate nothin’ so good!" Jep declared.
"How is the leg?" Sib asked.
"The ankle’s sore, but the thick sole o’ my shoe sort of held the log off."
"You’re lucky!"
While the soup was boiling, Sibley went out on the bow to look around. Jimmy followed him. They were still in the middle of the current. Blackness shrouded the sky and the surface of the river. It was beginning to rain again.
"We’re all right!" Jimmy remarked. "It’s only when the squeeze gits you that there’s trouble! This is a nice boat, too! She rose right up when the logs come in under ’er. If we could see, we mout pull in, but it’d be better to wait for day, ’count o’ sawyers and drift piles and things along the edge. Dad said that next to bein’ up the bank, bein’ out into the middle of it’s safest. We wa’n’t only just in the edge, and it snatched us out, and you—you drifted out of a creek!"
"Your father’ll worry."
"Not any more’n your folks will. You got a mother, ain’t you?"
"Yes."
"I ’lowed you had; you don’t never see any boat like this ’n, ’less there’s one o’ them females on board. Take it when Maw’s to home, you git so you wash your neck every day. When she’s away takin’ care of your aunt, prob’ly you ain’t so dog-goned particular."
"I hope she won’t worry!" Sib exclaimed.
"Well, she will; bet your boots she’ll think everything in the world’s happenin’ to you. I know them women. Maw’s that away. Say stranger, if you’ll let me git to lay down there by that stove, I’ll—"
"Not much!"
"Yes, sir! I won’t sleep on no bed; that bed’s so dog-goned clean an’ I’m what Maw’d call so mussed up—"
They compromised by swinging a hammock across the room, with a blanket in it.
"Call me purty soon, and I’ll spell you!" Jimmy suggested sleepily, and Sib said he would. But he blew the lights out, and went up on the roof, with his heavy shirt and a waterproof coat on, to keep watch. They were in the midst of open water, but at intervals from both sides of the current came the roar of water rushing through woods or against banks or over shoals.
"Come day, and we can make shore somewhere," he thought.
He could see dimly, when his eyes became accustomed to the dark. The falling rain made the distance invisible, and drowned all sounds while it lasted. Out of the gray mist of a downpour he saw something approaching. He lighted the lantern. Then sprang down and caught up a pike-pole, to fend the thing off.
"Why, it’s a boat!" he cried. "It’s a motor-boat!"
Instead of fending it away, he reached with the pike-pole and drew the two boats together, side by side. He made them fast at the bows with what was left of the launch’s mooring-line, which had chafed off somewhere up-stream. Running through the cabin, he made the two boats fast with a rope across the stems, from cleat to cleat on the decks.
It was an open launch, covered from end to end with a canvas tarpaulin, and it stood high in the water, showing the hull was dry. It was four feet longer than the twenty-eight-foot shanty-boat. Sibley raised the canvas and found the motor covered with a box. On raising this, he saw a fine heavy-duty engine, with reverse gear, storage-battery, starter, and lighting-wires. It was a new boat, with strong towing-bitts. Even the gasolene tank was full, and there was motor oil in a five-gallon can ready for use.
"When it comes day, I reckon this’ll drive us ashore!" Sib grinned, "and the salvage will be worth a hundred dollars to us!"
For "findings is keepings" down Old Misissip, against all claims but that of an owner. If one rescues a boat, a log, or other valuable drift, the finder is paid for his trouble by the owner—the salvage fee varying according to circumstances. "Drifting" for logs and boats is a regular flood-time occupation.