Part 19

“Come over and stand by the side of me,” he said. “What is your name?”

The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water.

“Do you drink?”

“No.”

“Do you gamble?”

“No, Sir.”

“Do you swear?”

“Not for amusement; only under pressure.”

“Do you chew?”

“No, sir, never; but I must smoke.”

“Did you ever do any steering?” was Bixby’s next question.

“I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.”

“Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is—toward that lower cottonwood, snag.”

Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat down on the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. By and by he said:

“There is just one way that I would take a young man to learn the river: that is, for money.”

“What do you charge?”

“Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever.”

In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or “cub,” board free. Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for incidentals. His terms looked rather discouraging.

“I haven’t got five hundred dollars in money,” Sam said; “I’ve got a lot of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I’ll give you two thousand acres of that.”

Bixby dissented.

“No; I don’t want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already.”

Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela’s husband without straining his credit.

“Well, then, I’ll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I earn it.”

Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby’s heart. His slow, pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident sincerity of purpose—these were externals, but beneath them the pilot felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were agreed upon. The deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was receiving pilot’s wages. During Mr. Bixby’s daylight watches his pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing him and nursing his sore foot. Any literary ambitions Samuel Clemens may have had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans he had almost forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs.

From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to St. Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue—a towering front of trade. It was glorious to nose one’s way to a place in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet. At St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary to make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. Then, when he suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain—a “sumptuous temple”—his happiness seemed complete.

XXIII THE SUPREME SCIENCE

In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. He has not exaggerated this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a simple confession.

Serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. As already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking meant. His statement that he “supposed all that a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river” is not to be accepted literally. Still he could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do that —not until afterward.