‘Oh, your grandmother!’

They all laughed, and I tried again to talk, but they broke in on me and stopped me.

‘Now, looky-here,’ says Davy; ’you’re scared, and so you talk wild.  Honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?’

’Yes, sir, in a trading scow.  She lays up at the head of the bend.  But I warn’t born in her.  It’s our first trip.’

‘Now you’re talking!  What did you come aboard here, for?  To steal?’

’No, sir, I didn’t.—­It was only to get a ride on the raft.  All boys does that.’

‘Well, I know that.  But what did you hide for?’

‘Sometimes they drive the boys off.’

’So they do.  They might steal.  Looky-here; if we let you off this time, will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?’

‘’Deed I will, boss.  You try me.’

’All right, then.  You ain’t but little ways from shore.  Overboard with you, and don’t you make a fool of yourself another time this way.—­Blast it, boy, some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black and blue!’

I didn’t wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore.  When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around the point.  I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home again.

The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman which I desire to offer in this place.

I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination—­the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there.  I believe there has been nothing like it elsewhere in the world.

Chapter 4 The Boys’ Ambition

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village{footnote [1.  Hannibal, Missouri]} on the west bank of the Mississippi River.  That was, to be a steamboatman.  We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.  When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.  These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk.  Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing.  Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this.  After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then:  the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two