The striker had learned rapidly, and was trusted to stand a regular watch.  The first engineer and the third were together, and the second engineer and the striker took the other watch.  The boat in this way got the services of a competent engineer while paying him only a striker’s wage.

About the time the heavily-laden Iatan turned out of the Mississippi into the Ohio at Cairo at six in the evening, the striker went off watch, and he ought to have gone to bed to prepare himself for the second watch of the night, especially as he would only have the dog-watch between that and the forenoon.  But a passenger had got aboard at Cairo, whose face was familiar.  The sight of it had aroused a throng of old associations, pleasant and unpleasant, and a throng of emotions the most tender and the most wrathful the striker had ever felt.  Sleep he could not, and so, knowing that the mud-clerk was on watch, he sought the office after nine o’clock, and stood outside the bar talking to his friend, who had little to do, since most of the freight had been shipped through, and his bills for Paducah were all ready.  The striker talked with the mud-clerk, but watched the throng of passengers who drank with each other at the bar, smoked in the “social hall,” read and wrote at the tables in the gentlemen’s cabin, or sat with doffed hats and chatted gallantly in the ladies’ cabin, which was visible as a distant background, seen over a long row of tables with green covers and under a long row of gilded wooden stalactites, which were intended to be ornamental.  The little pendent prisms beneath the chandeliers rattled gayly as the boat trembled at each stroke of her wheels, and gaping backwoodsmen, abroad for the first time, looked at all the rusty gingerbread-work, and wondered if kings were able to afford anything half so fine as the cabin of the “palatial steamer Iatan,” as she was described on the bills.  The confused murmur of many voices, mixed with the merry tinkling of the glass pendants, gave the whole an air of excitement.

But the striker did not see the man he was looking for.  “Who got on at Cairo?  I think I saw a man from our part of the country,” he said.

“I declare, I don’t know,” said the mud-clerk, who drawled his words in a cold-blooded way.  “Let me look.  Here’s A. Robertson, and T. Le Fevre, and L.B.  Sykes, and N. Anderson.”

“Where is Anderson going?”

“Paid through to Louisville.  Do you know him?”

But just then Norman Anderson himself walked in, and went up to the bar with a new acquaintance.  They did not smoke the pipe of peace, like red Americans, but, like white Americans, they had a mysterious liquid carefully compounded, and by swallowing this they solemnly sealed their new-made friendship after the curious and unexplained rite in use among their people.

Norman had been dispatched on a collecting trip, and having nine hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, he felt as much elated as if it had been his own money.  The gentleman with whom he drank, had a band of crape around his white hat.  He seemed very nearsighted.