Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine the wages, in order to get berths.  Too late—­apparently—­the knights of the tiller perceived their mistake.  Plainly, something had to be done, and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing.  A close organization.  Nothing else would answer.  To compass this seemed an impossibility; so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped.  It was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter.  But at last about a dozen of the boldest—­and some of them the best—­pilots on the river launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances.  They got a special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name of the Pilots’ Benevolent Association; elected their officers, completed their organization, contributed capital, put ‘association’ wages up to two hundred and fifty dollars at once—­and then retired to their homes, for they were promptly discharged from employment.  But there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their by-laws which had the seeds of propagation in them.  For instance, all idle members of the association, in good standing, were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month.  This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season.  Better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed.

Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children.  Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association’s expense.  These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the Mississippi Valley.  They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere.  They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances,—­any way, so they got there.  They paid in their twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month, and calculate their burial bills.

By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones, were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it.  It was the laughing-stock of the whole river.  Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them.  Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached.  Wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and