Part 24

“Pounded him, sir.”

“Pounded him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you pound him much—that is, severely?”

“One might call it that, sir, maybe.”

“I am deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You have been guilty of a great crime; and don’t ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but—lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound thrashing; do you hear? I’ll pay the expenses.”*

* “Life on the Mississippi.”

Captain Klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. Brown, of course, forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the trip “an emancipated slave” listening to George Ealer’s flute and his readings from Goldsmith and Shakespeare; playing chess with him sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long after-years—that of taking back the last move and running out the game differently when he saw defeat.

Brown swore that he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens remained on it, and Captain Klinefelter told Brown to go. Then when another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain offered to let Clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been only a little more than a year at the wheel. But Clemens himself had less confidence and advised the captain to keep Brown back to St. Louis. He would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as steersman when Brown was gone. Without knowing it, he may have saved his life by that decision.

It is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the Pennsylvania sailed. Henry liked to join in the night-watches on the levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked the round chatting together. On this particular night the elder spoke of disaster on the river. Finally he said:

“In case of accident, whatever you do, don’t lose your head—the passengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate’s orders. When the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. Don’t get in yourself. The river is only a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily enough.”

It was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow.

XXVI THE TRAGEDY OF THE “PENNSYLVANIA”

Captain Klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the A. T. Lacey, which left two days behind the Pennsylvania. This was pleasant, for Bart Bowen had become captain of that fine boat. The Lacey touched at Greenville, Mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted:

“The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island! One hundred and fifty lives lost!”

Nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at Napoleon a Memphis extra reported some of the particulars. Henry Clemens’s name was mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. Still farther up the river they got a later extra. Henry was again mentioned; this time as being scalded beyond recovery. By the time they reached Memphis they knew most of the details: At six o’clock that warm mid-June morning, while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis, four out of eight of the Pennsylvania’s boilers had suddenly exploded with fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown out. Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the Mississippi a river of death and tears.

Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor of an improvised hospital—a public hall—surrounded by more than thirty others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was considered hopeless.

Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt, he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What he did after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken fire; the rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours until help could come. Henry was among those who were insensible by that time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded in his work of rescue; it will never be known.

His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry’s presence on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. He wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the doctors persuaded him to wait—just why, he never knew. He sent word of the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and was in East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis ladies were acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy’s youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. Some medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also took special interest in Henry’s case. Dr. Peyton, an old Memphis practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through.

But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. Half delirious with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his mother and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee. The letter to Orion Clemens’s wife has been preserved.

MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18, 1858.

DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,—Long before this reaches you my poor Henry—my darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. The horrors of three days have swept over me—they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are gray hairs in my head to-night. For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. Men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me “lucky” because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they know not what they say.

I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans, and I must tell you the truth, Mollie—three hundred human beings perished by that fearful disaster. But may God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth. She has done her duty by these poor afflicted creatures—especially Henry, for he has had five—aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has had. Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he is exactly like the portraits of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours. There are 32 scalded men in that room, and you would know Dr. Peyton better than I can describe him if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he passes, “May the God of Heaven bless you, Doctor!” The ladies have done well, too. Our second mate, a handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die. Yesterday a beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and handed him a pretty bouquet. The poor suffering boy’s eyes kindled, his lips quivered out a gentle “God bless you, Miss,” and he burst into tears. He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not forget it.

Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.

Your unfortunate brother, SAML. L. CLEMENS.

P. S.—I got here two days after Henry.

But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. It would seem that Samuel Clemens’s cup of remorse must be always overfull. The final draft that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident —the night that Henry died. He could never bring himself to write it. He was never known to speak of it but twice.

Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and improved slowly that day and the next: Dr. Peyton came around about eleven o’clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. He said: