Young Captain Royce went slowly back to the shipyard, thinking of the sullen look in Jimmy Claiborne’s eyes.
“The boy means to make trouble,” he said to himself. But beyond the annoyance which would result from being obliged to refuse, if Jimmy got Uncle Amasa to plead for him, there seemed to be nothing much that Jimmy could do. Young as he was—scarcely twenty-two—Marion Royce had already won the confidence of the settlement by his courage and coolness, and those who had chosen him as leader and captain would certainly uphold him in any position which
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he might take in regard to the selection of his crew. But between being merely upheld in a disagreeable duty, and having the cordial good feeling of all the shareholders, there was much to choose.
He was tempted, as he went along through the woods between the little shipyard and the schoolhouse, to turn a deaf ear to his own better judgment. But he had made three trips down the river to New Orleans, and he knew the importance of an efficient crew, just as he knew the danger of a single insubordinate spirit.
“If it were anybody else but Jimmy Claiborne”, he thought, “it would not so much matter.” There were the twenty barrels of peach brandy and whisky—the Claibornes’ share of the cargo—and in the long monotonous days and nights only ceaseless vigilance would keep the men from broaching them. If Jimmy were in the crew, his sense of proprietorship in this
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portion of the cargo would make the danger of it very much greater.
It was a voyage of untold perils. Every year an increasing number of white outlaws, hidden in the caves along the river, harried and robbed the boatmen who floated down from the upper settlements. There were lurking bands of hostile Indians. And there was the river itself with its treacheries; its snags; its mud bars and its floods. It was no unusual thing for an ark to set out as this one was about to do, provided against all foreseeable disasters, and never be heard from afterward. Some were wrecked, some were robbed and their crews obscurely murdered. But no tidings of their fate came back to the solitary homes on the upper Ohio.
To set out on such a voyage with a single man or boy who could not be trusted, might mean the loss of the boat or even of every life on board of her. Marion Royce
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looked ahead of him, suddenly throwing back his shoulders and breathing deeply.
“It’s got to come, and it had better be over with at once,” he said aloud. “Oh, Uncle Amasa! Ho, Uncle Amasa! Hold on and let me catch up with you!”
The old man could be seen through the thinning trees that covered the slope leading down to the creek’s mouth. He stopped and waited for the captain to come up to him.
“We’ll get them twenty barrels down from the still this afternoon, son,” he began, as Marion joined him. “It’s time to get your cargo collected, and them casks will do just as well down here at the shed where there’s room for ’em. We’re pretty crowded with them up to the still.”
“It isn’t the cargo I’m worrying so much about,” said the captain slowly. “It’s the supercargo.”
The old man looked at him shrewdly.
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He understood as well as if Marion had told him in so many words that he did not want to take Jimmy.
“It’s a rough voyage,” the captain said. “If I thought it would help to make a man of Jimmy I’d take him and risk his stirring up a feeling of insubordination in those Marietta fellows that he knows better than I do. But my feeling is that Jimmy ought to stay at home. There’s plenty of chance for him to show what stuff he’s made of, and if we get back all right we may be able to take him next year. The boy’s a little wild, and it won’t do him any good to go to Natchez—all devildom is loose at Natchez. And then there may be a French fleet at New Orleans. There may be fighting. The Spaniards may have shut the city in our faces. We may have to fight to be allowed to land, but if we do have to, I guess ten thousand or so rivermen will help us to show the Spanish governor
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whether he can shut the gate of the world to us Americans.”
“Ye think there’s any truth in that tale of Bonaparte’s seizing the Mississippi, son?”
“No,” said the captain, “I don’t. I believe Jefferson is going to buy out the Spaniards or drive them home, and that the country will belong to us clear to the sea.”
“Hm,” said the old man. “Well, son, if there’s goin’ to be any such doings down to New Orleans, I’d be terrible sorry for Jimmy to miss it. I reckon I couldn’t very well leave Maria. I expect I’m pretty tolerable old for a trip like what you say it is to go down the river, even when everything is fav’rable. I’d mebby do best to cossett what’s left of my scalp and not run the risk of losing it to a strange Indian when I could just as easy lose it to one nearer home. I don’t reckon Maria would consent to my going, but I’d set a right
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smart store on one of our family havin’ a hand in them doin’s down to New Orleans, and I reckon them rivermen at Natchez won’t corrupt Jim any more than the roustabouts around Marietta shipyard. I just reckon you’ll have to take him along, son.”
There was no resentment whatever in the old man’s tone. He made no defense of Jimmy, although Jimmy was his idolized grandson, and Jimmy’s father had been taken captive by the Indians before Jimmy was a year old—which was sixteen years ago—and nothing had ever been heard of him. But Uncle Amasa had lived as a pioneer among pioneers, where every man had to stand by himself, for himself, and for those whom his presence protected. He made no defense of Jimmy.
There was an uncomfortably long pause. They were near enough to the little shipyard at the mouth of the creek, so that they stopped to finish their discussion before they
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joined the men who were working. Little old Uncle Amasa stood shrunken like a withered bush on which a workman had hung his coat and cap. Captain Royce faced him, young and alert and vigorous, sure of his judgment, but reluctant to oppose the old man whom the entire settlement loved.
“Uncle Amasa,” he said at length, smiling at the shrewd light-gray eyes that looked into his, “you’ve always been too hasty.”
“Aye,” admitted the old pioneer, “and if I’d been a trifle hastier, I’d ’a’ saved my whole scalp instead of only half of it. It’s a grand thing to be hasty, son, when you’re dealing with savages.”
“You were hasty when you bought the still without considering how it would affect the settlement here,” continued the captain, gravely. “Until this year, good Master Hempstead and his like had to go
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clear to Marietta to indulge their little foibles. You want me to tell you why you are so anxious to have Jimmy go with me on this trip? It’s because you see you were too hasty, and you want to separate him as far as possible from that new still. But I’m afraid that you can’t do that so long as I am taking the twenty barrels of brandy and whisky along in the cargo. I’ll take the cargo, or I’ll take Jimmy. I can’t take both even for all the things you’ve done for me and mine, and for the help you’ve been in building the ark here. As long as I’m captain, and the whole settlement has appointed me to represent them in disposing of their year’s harvest and work, I owe my first duty to the safety of the cargo and the lives I’m taking along with me. The Marietta hands will have no right in the boat, and I can handle them if Jimmy isn’t along to stir up insubordination.”
“He’ll be along,” said Uncle Amasa,
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cheerily. “If there are to be doin’s at New Orleans, I’d like for him to see them and have them to tell to his children when he grows old. Life is pretty much all in the way you see it, and I’ve seen a heap, and I want that Jimmy should. The only comfort I’ve ever had in these long years since his pa disappeared is been in thinking of the strange secrets he must have got to know. I reckon if James was to come back from captivity alive, I’d be so curious to hear about his experiences that I’d clean forget to rejoice at having him home again.”
The young captain looked at Uncle Amasa. Queer characters were the rule rather than the exception among the settlers who had willingly turned their backs on civilization and safety, but in all his experience he knew of no other pioneer whose foolhardiness could be inspired by sheer curiosity.
“Do you mean to say, Uncle Amasa,
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that since you can’t go yourself the chance of your grandson seeing new things makes you insist upon my taking him, even if his presence jeopardizes the welfare and success of the whole expedition?”
“Jimmy will be good, I reckon,” said the old man, “and he’s old enough now; so I should like for him to see a little of the world.”
“You’re a shareholder, like the rest of us,” said the captain, “and I don’t mean to seem disrespectful; but I think you’re acting hastily, Uncle Amasa, and I hope you won’t encourage Jimmy to feel that he has a right to come without my consent, for I should have to put him off, and that would be a humiliation, and I don’t want to embitter him any more than I can help. But I won’t have him on the ark, and that’s all I can say about it.”
“Well, well, we won’t discuss it, son; we won’t discuss it at all,” said Uncle
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Amasa. “But I’d like to know how ye think I would look going back to his widowed mother and telling her that you didn’t trust her only son to conduct himself as bravely as any of you?”
A smile broke over the young captain’s face at the idea of any such message going to the acrid lady who had made the Claibornes’ home-clearing a place to be cautiously approached and discreetly avoided. “I wouldn’t say anything to Maria at all,” he advised. “I would just gradually get Jimmy out of the notion.”
The captain felt that he had not come out of the argument at all well. It seemed rather absurd for a man to set himself against a boy—a boy, moreover, whom he had seen grow up—but there were so many reasons for Jimmy’s own sake why he should not be allowed to go that Uncle Amasa’s calm refusal to even consider them filled him with uneasiness. If the grandson
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proved as unimpressionable as the grandfather, there was trouble ahead. And Marion Royce felt that he was undertaking enough in this venture without adding anything that might bring about disorder or mutiny.
They went down the hill, the captain silent, Uncle Amasa gossiping cheerily as a snow-bird, and both men were soon at work on the great ninety-foot ark or “broadhorn” that still rested on its rude ways at the edge of the creek.
“We’ll get it into the water before night,” said the captain, looking lovingly at the unwieldy bulk that was more like a scow, built to be towed, than like a boat designed to navigate itself among channels and currents. It would, indeed, be more at the mercy of the elements than any scow, because its high freeboard would catch the wind as well as its clumsy upperdeck. It was built of rough hewn timbers, and put
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together with pins and treenails, so that it could be readily taken apart and sold as lumber for house-building in New Orleans, when its service as a cargo boat should be over.
Jonas Sparks, the old Marietta shipwright, who was overseeing the work, nodded at the captain. There was still a vast amount of decking or roofing to be done, and for this some of the lumber was still to be brought over from Marietta sawmill.
“It would be a good job done,” said Jonas Sparks, “if you could get your timber sawed up to Marietta while she is swelling. It will save that much time.”
“The new Pittsburgh mill hands haven’t come,” said the captain, “and they can’t get enough men at Marietta to work on the new brig and run the mill. The men won’t work. I expect we’ll have to go up
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and saw the lumber ourselves. What do you think?”
“Well,” said Jonas, to whom the difficulty of getting any sort of skilled or regular labor was too familiar to cause annoyance, “we’ll just put her into the water and see what can be done about getting the boards. There comes Charlie Hoyt with another load of the Claibornes’ whisky.”
A wagon team was drawing into the shipyard clearing with a load of casks. Everyone about the ark went to the shed in which the cargo for the ark was being gradually piled up, and soon the men were busy helping Charlie Hoyt unload. When he had finally driven off again, considerable time had been wasted, and in the afternoon, when the boys trooped down after school to help in the launching, they found that it had been necessary to postpone it for another day. Next month, when the river should have risen with the melting snows,
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the delay of a day might mean all the difference between success and failure, safety and total wreck. But the Ohio was still locked between its ice banks, below the mouth of the creek, and a day meant little or nothing to the pioneers of the wilderness.
As thieving Indians occasionally slipped into the clearings at night, Jonas Sparks had volunteered to sleep in the shed, which served as storage warehouse for such portions of the cargo as the settlers had already brought down. He took his meals at the Royces, however, and it was sometimes late before he picked up his lantern and his rifle and went over to the shipyard.
It was late that night. There was no moon, and his lighted lantern showed the tree trunks like moving shapes in the snow; but the old shipwright trudged along as fearless as in the open day, swinging his lantern as if it did not make him a target
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for any unseen red or white enemy who might be skulking through the woods.
Suddenly he began to run. Flames had shot up in the clearing around the shipyard, and he heard the crackle of the huge pillar of fire that flared and waved to the height of the treetops.
“The ark is burning!” he shouted, forgetting in his excitement that no one could possibly hear him. He rushed down to the clearing and saw the great flames lapping up the shed like thirsty dogs. Bright embers floated out over the trees, and some circled down onto the ark, which had not yet begun to burn. As the old shipbuilder saw all this, he realized that the fire was too far along for anyone to stop it or to hope to save any of the cargo in the shed. The light in the sky would soon bring all the settlers in the neighborhood, accustomed as they were to an alert vigilance against Indian surprises. So he hurried
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down to the creek to break through the covering of snowy ice and carry bucketful upon bucketful of water, which he poured over the half-decked boat. The intense heat of the fire so close at hand was scorching the timbers and the steam rose in white masses as the icy creek water ran in thin streams over the ark.
Marion Royce was the first to reach the fire. The flames were at their height, waving long streamers above the treetops so that their light could be seen for ten miles down the river, and settlers farther down thought that Marietta was burning.
“What could have started it?” asked the captain, as he and Jonas came up from the creek with a hogshead nearly filled between them.
“I can’t imagine,” said the shipbuilder. “The Indians would rather have stolen the stuff than burnt it up, and no one round hereabouts has any grudge agin’ the ark.”
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“You didn’t see anyone?” asked the captain.
“No one but Jimmy Claiborne,” answered Jonas. “Just as I came into the clearing I saw him runnin’ for dear life along the road to the Ayreses, to get help, I reckon, and that’s why I didn’t lose any time carryin’ the alarm. I knew he’d take it.”
“Jimmy Claiborne!” echoed the captain. A thought flashed into his mind, but he refused to consider it.
“I wonder if we couldn’t slide the blocks out from under her and let her drop down the ways,” he said. “She’s beginning to burn here at the bow, from the heat. We can’t keep her from burning. The ways are bound to go. Look, Jonas! Merciful goodness—Look out!”
The shed had caved in. The column of fire hung for a moment like the jet of a waterspout, then dropped back into the
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heart of the fire, and the flames billowed out in a huge circle that swept the bows of the ark and curled in blue threads about the ways on which it rested.
“We can’t do it singlehanded,” shouted Jonas, above the terrible roar of the fire. “We can’t move it. It’s got to go unless somebody comes to help us. It’s frozen to the ways and the tackle is all in the shed.”
“We’ve got to do it,” the captain shouted back. He took up a puncheon maul and began desperately pounding at the blocks that kept the ninety-foot hull from dropping down the snowy, ice-crusted ways.
“Great stars, man, can’t you let it alone?” cried the shipwright. “Can’t you see that even if you did start her she’d smash herself on the bottom of the creek? We’ve got to have men and tackle to let her down.”
There was a shout from the edge of the clearing, and Jonas and the captain turned to
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see Moses Ayer and Lewis Hoyt and Louis Gist come plunging towards them, having outrun their elders who were following.
“Run to Uncle Amasa’s to get his hoisting tackle,” cried Jonas to Louis Gist. “We’ve got to launch the ark, and everything we had here is burning up in the shed. Here, Mose, come and tote water.”
The two boys hurried to carry out his orders, and Lewis Hoyt caught up a board and began shoveling snow onto the ark. The heat was frightful, and the boys smelt their buckskins singeing as they rushed about the fire, and the cinders fell on them.
“Where’s Jimmy Claiborne?” asked Moses Ayer when Louis came back alone with the rope and tackle, staggering under the weight of the heavy coil.
“Wasn’t there,” gasped Louis. “Uncle Amasa’s on the way, though.”
Marion Royce turned sharply to Moses.
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“Jimmy went to your house to give the alarm,” he said.
“He never came to our house,” declared Moses. “I saw the fire myself, through the chink over my bed where the plug has come out. I called Pop and came over. Jimmy never came near us.”
The captain’s face set. “We’ve no time to bother about Jimmy, now,” he said. “One of you carry this tackle into that biggest walnut tree and make it fast about fifteen feet above the ground. It’s only to steady the strain as she drops down. Make it fast, though. We don’t want it giving way.”
Moses was already half-way to the tree. “All right,” he shouted.
Lighted only by the fire that reflected red pools in the snow, the men and boys worked at the launching that should save the ark. The great flatboat was frozen to the ways, and it seemed as if nothing but
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superhuman power would ever start it. Then, suddenly, an appalling report came from the burning shed. The ground shook with it, and the flames burst out again into vast torches that flared above the trees a moment and then fell back extinguished. Timbers and brands of fire shot hither and thither through the air. The men sprung away with terrorized faces.
“The whisky casks have burst,” said the captain. “I thought they had gone long ago. Is anyone hurt?”
At the edge of the clearing the light of the flames showed a figure outstretched—a grim patch of darkness on the reddened snow.
Lewis Hoyt was the first to reach it. He turned to face the anxious men who hurried to him.
“It’s Master Hempstead!” he cried. “He isn’t killed. This beam must have struck him and knocked him down as he was coming to the fire.”
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Half a dozen men bent down to examine the crumpled figure of the unconscious schoolmaster, and as they were separating to let the captain and Charlie Hoyt carry him away to be cared for by the women at the Royces, a shout made them turn to the fire again.
“The ark!” cried a dozen voices. “The ark is going!”
The vibration of the explosion had accomplished what the men alone could not have done, and the ark was slipping down the ways.
“Here,” cried Marion Royce, “take this,” and quite unconscious that it was a human being whom he was handing over absently, he dashed back to the assistance of Jonas Sparks.
But by the time he reached the ways the ark was grinding the ice of the creek, her bottom scraping the bed of the shallow stream.
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Moses Ayer came up, trembling from the terrible strain on the windlass when the ark shot down. The perspiration was raining down his drawn, excited face.
“She’s launched!” he said.