My heart took fire again.  I stretched my hand to take Dorothy’s.  She removed hers gently out of reach.  “Go your way, my friend,” she said.  “Later I may write you.  You are only a boy yet ... and many things may happen.  But be sure that I suffer, and that I remember and that I need help.”

She arose and preceded me back to the house.  Mrs. Clayton seemed to direct her influence toward smoothing our way.  But nothing could be done.  I had met defeat and I wished to depart.

The next day I was on the Ohio but not bound for St. Louis.  I had decided to see New Orleans.  Change of scene might allay my thoughts.

CHAPTER XVIII

I did not tell Dorothy where I was going.  I left her to suppose that I was returning to Jacksonville.

In passing to the boat landing I stumbled and fell, bruising myself painfully.  I was hurrying to get away and in my haste and sorrow I was oblivious of my surroundings.  As I limped along on the deck, I was approached by a kindly man who offered me some ointment which he said was made from the oil that escaped over the surface of the water in the salt wells of Kentucky and elsewhere, in spite of anything that could be done and much to the inconvenience of the business of getting salt.  This man said that the oil was being subjected to experiments for use in illumination.  As an ointment it was magical, and in a few days my lameness disappeared.

Both on the Ohio and the Mississippi we saw flatboats tied together heaped with coal, which had been loaded into them from the sides of the hills of the Alleghanies and elsewhere.  They were being floated down to New Orleans.  I had found coal in several places on my land in Illinois.  Sometimes one could dig it out of the surface of the ground.  But no expeditious means were yet in use in Illinois in mining it.

The Mississippi is a wonder scene to me.  The river is full of islands and the boat winds about in endless turns of the stream.  There are swamps, and melancholy cypress and funereal live oaks.  There are the solitary huts of the woodcutters, and bars of sand covered with cane brake, and impenetrable forests, and the forbidding depths of the jungle.  Farther on there are the sugar plantations, and the levees, and the great houses of the planters, and the huts of the negroes, and the vivid greens of fields of sugar cane standing many feet high; and around these the cypress swamp.  And on every side in the midst of each plantation the tall white towers of the sugar mills.  It is all novel and wonderful to me; and it helps me to forget my insistent thoughts of Dorothy.

The steamer stopped to get wood.  It was at a creole plantation.  There was a procession of carts here, each drawn by a team of mules, driven by negroes, laughing and joking with each other.  They were slaves hauling wood to the sugar mills.  We were soon off again on the silent river, which had now broadened to the dimensions of a great lake.