your reputation’s in danger? So I let
the wages go, and froze to my reputation. And
I’ve never regretted it. Reputation’s
worth everything, ain’t it? That’s
the way I look at it. He had more selfish organs
than any seven men in the world—all packed
in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where
they belonged. They weighed down the back of his
head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air.
People thought it was vanity, but it wasn’t,
it was malice. If you only saw his foot, you’d
take him to be nineteen feet high, but he wasn’t;
it was because his foot was out of drawing. He
was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if
his foot was made first, but he didn’t get there;
he was only five feet ten. That’s what
he was, and that’s what he is. You take
the lies out of him, and he’ll shrink to the
size of your hat; you take the malice out of him,
and he’ll disappear. That “Cyclone”
was a rattler to go, and the sweetest thing to steer
that ever walked the waters. Set her amidships,
in a big river, and just let her go; it was all you
had to do. She would hold herself on a star all
night, if you let her alone. You couldn’t
ever feel her rudder. It wasn’t any more
labor to steer her than it is to count the Republican
vote in a South Carolina election. One morning,
just at daybreak, the last trip she ever made, they
took her rudder aboard to mend it; I didn’t know
anything about it; I backed her out from the wood-yard
and went a-weaving down the river all serene.
When I had gone about twenty-three miles, and made
four horribly crooked crossings—’
‘Without any rudder?’
’Yes—old Capt. Tom appeared
on the roof and began to find fault with me for running
such a dark night—’
‘Such a dark night ?—Why,
you said—’
’Never mind what I said,—’twas
as dark as Egypt now, though pretty soon the moon
began to rise, and—’
’You mean the sun—because you
started out just at break of—look here!
Was this before you quitted the captain on account
of his lying, or—’
‘It was before—oh, a long time before.
And as I was saying, he—’
‘But was this the trip she sunk, or was—’
‘Oh, no!—months afterward.
And so the old man, he—’
‘Then she made two last trips, because
you said—’
He stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his
perspiration, and said—
‘Here!’ (calling me by name), ’you
take her and lie a while—you’re handier
at it than I am. Trying to play yourself for
a stranger and an innocent!—why, I knew
you before you had spoken seven words; and I made
up my mind to find out what was your little game.
It was to draw me out. Well, I
let you, didn’t I? Now take the wheel and
finish the watch; and next time play fair, and you
won’t have to work your passage.’
Thus ended the fictitious-name business. And
not six hours out from St. Louis! but I had gained
a privilege, any way, for I had been itching to get
my hands on the wheel, from the beginning. I seemed
to have forgotten the river, but I hadn’t forgotten
how to steer a steamboat, nor how to enjoy it, either.