“I must watch for him,” I said.

“We’ll all watch for him,” said the captain.

Paddy was not with us the next summer; but Bill was, and so was Ace, with whom I was now on the best of terms.  We all agreed to keep our eyes peeled for a hunchback with a black beard.  Bill said he’d spear him with a boathook as soon as he hove in sight for fear he’d get away.  Ace was sure the hunchback was a witch[3] who had spirited off my folks; and looked upon the situation without much hope.  He would agree to sing out if he saw this monster; but that was as far as he would promise to help me.

[3] “Witch” in American dialect is of the common gender.  “Wizard” has no place in the vocabulary.—­G.v.d.M.

The summer went by with no news and no hunchback; and that winter I stayed with an aunt of Captain Sproule’s, taking care of her stock.  I got five dollars a month, and my keep, but no schooling.  She wanted me to stay the summer with her, and offered me what was almost a man’s wages; which shows how strong I was getting, and how much of a farmer I was.  I did stay and helped through the spring’s work; but on Captain Sproule’s second passing of Mrs. Fogg’s farm, I joined him, not as a driver, but as a full hand.  I kept thinking all the time of my mother, and felt that if I kept to the canal I surely should find some trace of her.  In this I was doing what any detective would have done; for everything sooner or later passed through the Erie Canal—­news, goods and passengers.  But I had little hope when I thought of the flood which surged back and forth through this river of news, and of the little bit of a net with which I fished it for information.

All this time the stream of emigration and trade swelled, and swelled until it became a torrent.  I thought at times that all the people in the world had gone crazy to move west.  We took families, even neighborhoods, household goods, live stock, and all the time more and more people.  They were talking about Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, and once in a while the word Iowa was heard; and one family astonished us by saying that they were going to Texas.

The Mormons had already made their great migration to Utah, and the Northwestern Trail across the plains to Oregon and to California took its quota of gold-seekers every year.  John C. Fremont had crossed the continent to California, and caused me to read my first book, The Life of Kit Carson.

Bill, who never could speak in hard enough terms about sailing on the mud-puddle Lakes, which he had never done as yet, once went to Pittsburgh, meaning to go from there down the Ohio and up the Missouri.  He had heard of the Missouri River fur-trade, and big wages on the steamboats carrying emigrants from St. Louis up-stream to Nebraska, Iowa and Dakota Territory, and bringing back furs and hides.  But at Pittsburgh he was turned back by news of the outbreak of cholera at New Orleans, a disease which had struck us with