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Presently a happy thought struck Will Moreraud.

“Wait a minute,” he said, and with that he rolled several barrels of corn meal into the open space.

“Now,” he cried, “three of you stand on one end of the plank while I drive it into place. Let the other end ride free of the bottom, but one of you hold it so that it can’t slew away from the gunwale.”

The boys did this, and Will succeeded in driving one end of the timber into place while three of his comrades stood upon that end of it. The other end was held up by the waterspout a foot from the bottom of the boat, but Ed was holding it against the gunwale, in the place where it was desired to force it down.

“Now, hold it so,” said Will, “and I’ll force it down.”

With that he turned a two-hundred-pound barrel of meal on end upon the plank just beyond the point where the three boys were standing. This pressed the timber down somewhat, and Will helped it with another barrel. Then he began bringing heavy sacks of corn and oats, so heavy that he could scarcely handle them. These he piled high on top of the meal barrels, and the combined weight forced the plank down to within an inch of the bottom.

With one end securely weighted down, he began piling freight in the same way upon the other. Now and then the resisting water would push the heavy and heavily weighted plank away from the gunwale and force a passage for itself between. But when the plank was securely weighted down upon the bottom, two or three of the boys, acting together, were able, with axes and heavy hammers, to drive it finally and firmly against the side of the boat.

Then with the long wrought-iron spikes it was firmly secured in its place, but Phil decided not to remove any of the freight that was piled on top of it, lest the tremendous water pressure from below should force even the great iron spikes out of their sockets and set the leak going again. Indeed, to prevent this he directed his comrades to pile all the freight they could so that its weight should fall upon the protecting timber.

By the time that all this was done it was eleven o’clock in the morning, and Irv Strong turned to Phil with an earnest look in his eyes, and said: —

“We claim the fulfilment of your promise, Phil. You must go to sleep now.”

The other boys stood by Irv’s side with faces as earnest as his own. It was obvious that he spoke for all of them and as the result of an understanding. Phil hesitated for a moment. Then he said: —

“Thank you, fellows, all of you. I’ll do as you say.”

As he almost staggered toward the cabin in his exhaustion, he paused, still thoughtful of the general welfare, and said: —

“Irv, you take charge while I sleep, and call me if anything happens.”

Two minutes later the lad was deeply slumbering.

CHAPTER XXIX
RESCUE

When Phil at last waked, Ed was putting supper on the table, and it was rather a late supper too, for the boys had purposely postponed it in order to let Phil get all the sleep possible. He had in fact slept for fully eight hours.

“Well, how do you feel now, skipper?” asked Will.

“I don’t know exactly,” answered the boy, yawning and stretching. “Stupid for the most part, hungry for the rest of it. I say, what time of day or night is it?”

“It’s about eight thirty P.M.,” answered Constant, pulling out his antique Swiss watch and consulting it.

“Yes, but what P.M.? What day is it? When did I go to sleep?”

The boys soon straightened things out in their captain’s temporarily bewildered mind. The effort to do so was aided by the sight and smell of a great platter which Ed at that moment set upon the table. It held a “boiled dinner.” There was a juicy brisket of corned beef on top. Under it were peeled and boiled potatoes, boiled turnips still retaining their shape, and beneath all was the last cabbage on board, the remains of a purchase made at Memphis a week or ten days before, though to the boys it seemed many moons past.

As Phil eyed the savory dish he became for the first time fully awake.

“I say, fellows,” he broke out, “what does this mean? Why didn’t you have this sort of thing for dinner instead of keeping it for supper?”

“Because you weren’t awake at dinner time to help us eat it, Phil. It’s the last really good meal we’re likely to see for days to come, and we – ”

“You see,” broke in Irv Strong, “we’re bound to build you up again, Phil, if we have to do it with a hammer and nails. But how recklessly you expose your country breeding!” as he helped all round; “if you were captain of an ocean liner now instead of a flatboat, you would know that dinner before six o’clock is impossible to civilized man, and that the actual dinner hour in all those regions where dress coats and culture prevail, ranges from seven to eight o’clock.”

“You are unjust in your mockery, Irv,” said Ed. “And by that you in your turn simply expose your provincialism – and ours, too.”

“How?” asked Irv, chuckling to think that he had succeeded in diverting the conversation from channels in which it might easily have become emotional. For all the boys had been for hours under a strain of severe anxiety on Phil’s account. They were full of admiration for the self-sacrificing way in which he had worked and thought and planned for the common welfare. They had been touched to the heart by his exhaustion after his strenuous work was done, and they had been anxious all that afternoon, lest the breakdown of his strength should prove to be lasting. His appetite at supper relieved that fear, but the very relief made them all the more disposed to be a trifle tender toward him. Irv had prevented a scene, so he didn’t mind Ed’s criticism.

“How’s that, Ed?”

“Why, when you sneer at people because their customs are different from those that we are used to, don’t you see you are just as narrow-minded as they are when they sneer at us because our customs are not theirs.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to sneer,” said Irv. “But, of course, it does seem odd for people to eat dinner at six or seven o’clock in the evening, instead of eating it about noon.”

“Not a bit of it. The dinner hour is a matter of convenience. In a little town like ours it is convenient for everybody to go home to dinner at noon, and so everybody does it. In a big city where people live five or ten miles away from their places of business, it is impossible. In such cities business doesn’t begin till nine or ten o’clock in the morning, when the banks and exchanges open, and it is in every way handier to have dinner after the day’s work is done. Our habits are just as odd to city people as theirs are to us.”

“Oh, yes, I see that,” said Irv, “and ‘Farmer Hayseed’ is just as snobbish when he laughs at ‘them city folks’ as the city people are when they ridicule him. It reminds me of the nursery story about the town mouse and the country mouse.”

“How about the leaks, fellows?” asked Phil, who was now quite himself again.

“There aren’t any to speak of,” reported Irv. “We’ve gone over the whole bottom of the boat now, stopping every little crack, and now she’s as dry as a bone. Five minutes’ pumping in an hour is quite enough.”

“All right!” said the captain. “Then we’ll take off her bandages in the morning. With that tarpaulin wrapped around her she looks like Sally Hopper when she comes to school with a toothache and a swelled jaw bound up in flannel.”

But the next morning brought with it some other and more pressing work than that of removing the tarpaulin.

At daylight the boat was floating easily and rapidly down the middle of the overflowed river, when Phil, who was on deck, saw half a mile ahead, a group of people huddled together upon a small patch of ground that protruded above the water. It was, in fact, the top of one of those very high Indian mounds that abound in the Sunflower swamp country.

Calling the other boys on deck, Phil took a skiff and rowed ahead as rapidly as he could. When he reached the little patch of dry land, which was circular in shape, and did not exceed twenty feet in diameter, he found a family of people in a woful state of destitution and wretchedness.

They had no fire and no fuel. They had been for several days without food and were now so weak that they could scarcely speak above a whisper. The party consisted of a father, a mother, three big-eyed children, and a negro man.

The negro man, great stalwart fellow that he was, was now the most exhausted one of the party, while the youngest of the children, whom the others called “Baby,” as if she were yet too small to carry a name of her own, was still chipper and full of interest in the strange things about her when she was taken on board the flatboat.

The work of rescue occupied a considerable time and cost the boys some very hard work. The people on the mound were too feeble from hunger and long exposure even to help in their own deliverance. The negro man had to be lifted bodily into a skiff and laid out at full length upon its bottom. The rest, except “Baby” were not in much better condition. The man could walk indeed, in an unsteady way, but he was so dazed in his mind that it required force to keep him from dropping out of the skiff on the way to the flatboat.

The woman and the two older children were chewing strips of leather, cut from the man’s boot tops. The baby continually sucked its thumb.

People in such condition are very difficult to manage. They are physically incapable of doing anything to help themselves, and mentally just alert enough to interfere querulously with the efforts of others to help them. To get such a company into frail, unsteady skiffs, to row them away to the flatboat, and then to “hoist them aboard,” as Phil called the operation, required quite two hours of very hard work, but it was accomplished at last.

But to get them aboard was only the beginning of the work of rescue. They were starving and they must be fed. Phil was for setting out the remainder of the last evening’s boiled dinner at once and bidding them help themselves. But Irv’s superior knowledge of such matters prevented that disastrous blunder.

“Why, don’t you know, Phil, that to give them even an ounce of solid food now would be to kill them! Open a can of consomme, and heat it quick.”

When the soup was ready he peppered it lavishly, explaining to Ed: —

“The problem is not merely to get food into their stomachs, but to get their stomachs to turn the food to some account after we’ve got it there. In their weakened condition they can’t digest anything solid, and it is a serious question whether their stomachs can even manage this thin, watery soup. So I’m putting pepper into it as a ‘bracer.’ It will stimulate their stomachs to do their work.”

As he explained, he fed the soup to the sufferers – a single spoonful to each. They were clamorous for more, but Irv was resolute.

“Wait till I see how that goes,” he said. “You can’t have any more till I say the word.”

The children cried. The woman hysterically laughed and cried alternately. The man sat still with bowed head and with the tears trickling down his face – whether tears of joy, of distress, or of mere weakness, it was hard to say.

The negro man was too far gone even to swallow. Irv had to turn him on his back and literally pour a spoonful of soup down his throat. Then he said to Ed and Constant: —

“I’m afraid this man is dying. His hands are very cold and so are his feet – cold to the knees. Take some towels – no, here,” seizing a blanket from one of the bunks, – “take this. Dip it into boiling water, – fortunately we’ve got it ready, – wring the blanket out and wrap his feet and legs in it, from the knees down. Then take towels and do the same for his hands. Pound him, too, punch him, roll him about – bulldoze and kuklux him in every way you can till you get his blood to going again! It’s the only way to save the poor fellow’s life.”

By this time Irv deemed it safe to give each of his other patients another spoonful or two of the soup, and he even ventured to pour three more spoonfuls down the throat of the negro.

“He’s reviving a little,” Irv explained. “And as a strong man, with a robust stomach accustomed to coarse food, he can stand more soup than the others.”

Thus little by little Irv and Ed, with such assistance from the other boys as they needed, slowly brought the starving party back to life. As the negro man had been the first to succumb to starvation, – perhaps because his robust physical nature demanded more food than more delicately constructed bodies do, – so he was the first to recover. By nightfall he was walking about on the deck, while all the rest were still lying in the bunks below as invalids.

After awhile Irv stopped him.

“Did anybody ever tell you that you’re an exceptional personage?”

“Lor’ no, boss. Well, yes, some o’ de black folks in de chu’ch done took ’ceptions to me sometimes ’cause I wouldn’t give enough to de cause, but fore de court, boss – ”

“That isn’t what I mean,” broke in Irv, with smiles rippling all over him, and running down even to his legs. “I mean, did anybody ever notice that you were, – oh, well, never mind that; but tell me, would you like a good big slice of cold corned beef before you go to sleep?”

The negro answered in words. But his more emphatic answer was not one of words. He threw his arms around Irv in a giant’s embrace that almost crushed the youth’s bones.

“There, that will do,” said Irv. “You have an engagement as a cotton compress or something of that sort, when you’re at home, I suppose. But now, if I let you have a good big slice of cold corned beef to-night, will you eat it just as I tell you, take a bite when I tell you and at no other time, and stop whenever I tell you? Will you promise?”

“Shuah, sar, shuah,” eagerly responded the man.

“But ‘sure’ isn’t enough,” replied Irv, half in amusement and half in seriousness, for he felt that his experiment was very risky, and he wanted to be able to regulate it, and stop it at any point. “Sure isn’t enough. Will you promise me on the isosceles triangle?”

“Yes, boss.”

“On the grand panjandrum?”

“For shuah.”

“And even on the parallelopipedon itself?”

“Shuah, boss. I dunno what dem names mean, but for shuah I’ll do jes’ what you tells me to if you’ll lem’ me have de meat.”

Irv was satisfied. He went below and prepared a sandwich. Returning, he allowed the man to eat it in bites, with long intervals between. It not only did no harm, it restored the man to such vitality that Phil decided to get some information out of him as to the flatboat’s whereabouts.

He learned first that the rescued family sleeping below was that of a well-to-do planter; that the flood, coming as it did as the result of a crevasse, and therefore suddenly, had taken them completely by surprise, in the middle of the night, four or five days ago; that they had with difficulty escaped to the Indian mound in a field near by, and that they had not been able to take with them any food, or anything else except the clothes they had on. This accounted for the fact that the woman wore only a wrapper over her nightdress, that the man was nearly naked, and that the children were clad only in their thin little nightgowns.

Then Phil learned that The Last of the Flatboats was now in the Tallahatchie River, as he had guessed, not far from the point where it enters the Yazoo, at Greenwood. A little study of the map showed Phil that if this were true, he might expect to reach Vicksburg within four or five days, which in fact is what happened, not on the fourth or fifth, but on the sixth day thereafter, early in the morning.

In the mean time the crew and their guests had eaten up pretty nearly all the boat’s store of provisions, and The Last of the Flatboats had been stripped of her unsightly swaddling-cloth, the tarpaulin. Phil tied her up at the landing near the historic town as proudly as if she had not run away, and misbehaved as she had done.

“She has only been showing us some of the wonders of the Wonderful River, that we should never otherwise have known anything about,” he said.

But this is going far ahead of my story. The boys and their boat were still in the Yazoo, nearly a week’s journey above Vicksburg. So let us return to them.

CHAPTER XXX
A YAZOO AFTERNOON

There were no difficulties of any consequence to contend with after The Last of the Flatboats entered the Yazoo. The boys’ guests were well now, and joined them in their long talks on deck. These talks covered every conceivable subject, and the planter, who proved himself to be an unusually well-informed man, added not a little to their interest.

“I say, Ed,” said Phil one day, holding up one of his newspapers, “you were all wrong about the crops.”

“How do you mean, Phil?”

“Why, you put corn first, as the most valuable crop produced in this country.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“Not if this newspaper writer knows his business and tells the truth.”

“Why, what does he say?” asked Ed, with an interest he had not at first shown in Phil’s criticism.

“He says that in Missouri, which I take to be one of the great corn-growing states – ”

“It is all that,” answered Ed. “What about it?”

“Why, he says that in Missouri the eggs and spring chickens produced by what he calls ‘the great American hen’ sell every year for more money than all the corn, wheat, oats, and hay raised in the state, twice over. And he gives the figures for it too.”

“That is surprising,” said Ed, “but it is very probably true. The trouble is that we have no trustworthy statistics on the subject. No ordinary farmer keeps any account of his crops of that kind. Not one farmer in a hundred could tell you at the end of a year how many dozens of eggs or how many pairs of chickens he had sold. Still less could he tell you how many of either his family had eaten. So it must all be guess-work about such crops, while practically every bushel of wheat, corn, and oats and every bale of cotton or hay, and every pound of tobacco is carefully set down in official records.”

“That reminds me,” said Irv, “of the remark a farmer once made to me, when deploring the poverty of himself and his class.”

“What was it?” asked Will.

“Why, he said that lots of men in the cities got two or three thousand dollars a year for their work, while he never yet had got over five hundred dollars for his. I questioned him a little, and found that he didn’t take any account of his house rent and fuel free, or of all the farm produce that his family ate. He thought the few hundred dollars he had to the good at the end of the year, after paying for his groceries and dry goods, was all he got for his labor.”

“Speaking of these unconsidered crops,” said the planter, “I fancy it would astonish us if we could have the figures on them. It is said, for example, that more than a million turkeys are eaten in New York City alone every winter. Now, if we count all the other great cities and all the little ones, and all the towns and all the country homes where turkeys are eaten, it will be very hard to guess how many millions of these fowls are raised and sold and eaten in this country every year.”

“It’s hard on the turkeys,” moralized Will Moreraud.

“Well, I don’t know,” answered Phil. “I remember reading a story by James K. Paulding called ‘A Reverie in the Woods.’ He tells how he fell half asleep and heard all the animals and birds and fishes holding a sort of congress to denounce man for his cruelties to them. After a while the earthworm got so excited over the matter that he wriggled himself into the brook. Thereupon the trout, who had also been one of the complainants against man’s cruelty, snapped up the worm, and swallowed him. Seeing this, the cat grabbed the trout, and the fox caught the cat, and the eagle caught the fox, and the hawk made luncheon on the dove, and so on through the whole list. I imagine that that is nature’s way. Everything that lives, lives at the expense of something else that lives. It is all a struggle for existence, with the survival of the fittest as the outcome. And as a man, or even a commonplace boy like me, is fitter to live than a turkey, I think the slaughter of those innocents is all right enough.”

“You are entirely right, Phil,” said Ed. “A pound of boy is certainly worth fifty or fifty thousand pounds of turkey, because one boy can do more for the world than all the turkeys that were ever hatched. And when a boy eats turkey he converts it into boy, and it helps him to grow into a man.”

“Precisely!” said Irv Strong. “It cost the worthless lives of many pigs, turkeys, chickens, sheep, and cattle to make George Washington. But surely one George Washington was worth more than all the pigs, turkeys, chickens, sheep, and beef-cattle that were killed in all this country between the day he was born and the day of his death. But pardon us,” added Irv, turning to the planter, “you were going to say something more when we interrupted.”

“It was nothing of any consequence,” answered their guest, “and your little discussion has interested me more than anything I had thought of saying. But I was going to say that according to a New York newspaper’s careful calculation, that city pays more than a million dollars every spring for white flowers for Easter decorations alone, while its expenditures for flowers during the rest of the year is estimated at not less than five millions more. Then there is the peanut crop. Who ever thinks of it? Who thinks of peanuts in any serious way? Yet it was the peanut crop that saved the people of tidewater Virginia and North Carolina from actual starvation during the first few years after the Civil War. And every year that crop amounts to more than two and a half million bushels!”

“What luck for the circuses!” exclaimed Will Moreraud.

“But the circuses do not furnish the chief market for peanuts,” said Irv, who was somewhat “up” on these things.

“Where are they consumed, then?” asked Will.

“Well, the greater part of them are used in the manufacture of ‘pure’ Italian or French olive oil – most of it ‘warranted sublime,’” said Irv.

“Are we a nation of swindlers, then?” asked Phil, whose courage was always offended by any suggestion of untruth or hypocrisy or dishonesty.

“I don’t know,” said Irv, “how to draw the line there. The men who make olive oil out of peanuts stoutly contend that their olive oil is really better, more wholesome, and more palatable than that made from olives.”

“Why don’t they call it peanut oil, then, and advertise it as better than olive oil, and take the consequences?” asked upright, downright, bravely honest Phil.

“Men in trade are not always so scrupulous about honesty and truthfulness as you are, Phil,” said Ed. “But sometimes – they excuse their falsehoods on the ground – ”

“There isn’t any excuse possible for not telling the truth,” said Phil. “Men who tell lies in their business are swindlers, and that’s the end of the matter. If they are making a better article than the imported one, they ought to say so, and people would find it out quickly enough. When they offer their goods as something quite different from what they really are, they are telling lies, I say, and I, for one, have no respect for a liar.”

“You are right, Phil, of course,” said Ed. “But there is a world of that sort of thing done. The potteries in New Jersey, I am told, mark their finer wares with European brands, and they contend that if they did not do it they could not sell their goods.”

“A more interesting illustration,” said the planter, “is found in the matter of cheeses. Cheese, as at first produced, is the same the world over. But cheese that is set to ‘ripen’ in the caves of Roquefort is one thing, cheese ripened at Camembert is another, and so on through the list. Now of late years it has been discovered that the differences between these several kinds of cheese are due solely to microbes. There is one sort of microbe at Roquefort, another at Brie, and so on. Now American cheesemakers found this out some years ago, and decided that they could make any sort of cheese they pleased in this country. So they took the several kinds of imported cheeses, selected the best samples of each, and set to work to cultivate their microbes. By introducing the microbes of Roquefort into their cheeses they made Roquefort cheeses of them. By inoculating them with the Brie microbe, or the Camembert microbe, or the Stilton or Gruyère microbe, they converted their simple American cheeses into all these choice varieties. And it is asserted by experts that these American imitations, or some of them at any rate, are actually superior to the imported cheeses, besides being much more uniform in quality.”

“That’s all right,” said Phil. “But why not tell the truth about it? Surely, if their cheeses are better than those made abroad, they can trust the good judges of cheese to find out the fact and declare it. And when that fact became known they could sell their cheese for a higher price than that of the imported article, on the simple ground of its superiority. How I do hate shams and frauds and lies – and especially liars!”

“What bothers me,” drawled Irv, “is that I’ve been eating microbes all my life without knowing it. I here and now register a solemn vow that I’ll never again eat a piece of cheese – unless I want to.”

“Oh, the microbes are all right,” said Ed, “provided they are of the right sort. There are some microbes that kill us, and others that we couldn’t live without. There are still others, like those in cheese, that do us neither good nor harm, except that they make our food more palatable. For that matter the yeast germ is a microbe, and it is that alone that makes our bread light. Surely we can’t quit eating light bread and take to heavy baked dough instead, because light bread is made light by the presence of some hundreds of millions of living germs in every loaf of it while it is in the dough state.”

“Coming back to the question of crops,” said the planter, “does it occur to you that there would be no possibility of prosperity in this country but for the absolute freedom of traffic between the states?”

“Would you kindly explain?” said Ed.

“Certainly. The farmers of New York and New Jersey used to grow all the wheat, and all the beef, mutton, and pork that were eaten in the great city, and they made a good living by doing it. But the time came when the western states could raise wheat and beef and all the rest of it much more cheaply than any eastern farmer could. This threatened to drive the New York and New Jersey farmers out of business, and naturally, if they could, they would have made their legislators pass laws to exclude this western wheat and meat from competition with their crops. This would have hurt the western farmer; for what would in that case have happened in New York would have happened in all the other eastern states. But it would have hurt the people of the great cities – and indeed all the people in the country still more. It would have made the city people’s food cost them two or three times as much as before. That would have compelled them to charge more for their manufactured products and for their work in carrying on the foreign commerce of the country. That would have crippled commerce, – which lives upon exceedingly small margins of profit, – and the prosperity of the country would have been ruined. It was to prevent that sort of thing that our national government was formed, with a constitution which forbade any state to interfere with commerce between the states.”

“What became of the New York farmer, then?” asked Irv.

“When he found that he couldn’t raise wheat, corn, etc., as cheaply as the western farmer could sell them in New York, he quit raising those things and produced things that paid him instead.”

“What sort of things?”

“Fruits, poultry, milk, butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, buckwheat, honey, etc., and in producing these the New York farmer grew richer than ever. Since New York quit raising on any considerable scale the things that we commonly think of as farm products, that state has become the richest in the country in the value of its agricultural production, simply because the New York farmer raises only those things for which there is a market almost at his front gate.”

“That is very interesting,” said Will. “But how is it that the far West can furnish New York and Philadelphia and the rest of the eastern cities with bread and meat cheaper than the farmers near those cities can sell the same things?”

“The value of land,” said the planter, “has much to do with it. The value of a farmer’s land is his investment, and first of all, he must earn interest on that.”

“Pardon me,” said Ed, “but that, it seems to me, is a very small factor. The value of good farming lands in the East is not very different from that of similar lands in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the other great farming states of the West.”

“What is the key to the mystery, then?” asked Irv.

“Transportation,” answered Ed. “The western farm lands, with an equal amount of labor, produce more wheat, corn, pork, and the like, than eastern lands do, and it costs next to nothing to carry their wheat, corn, pork, etc., to the East.”

“What does it cost?” asked Will.

“Well, I see that the rate is now less than three mills per ton per mile. At three mills per ton per mile, ten barrels, or a ton, of flour could be carried from Chicago to New York for three dollars, or thirty cents a barrel. Even at half a cent per ton per mile it would cost only fifty cents.”

“While the railroads are engaged in transporting that flour to the hungry New Yorkers at that exceedingly reasonable rate,” said Irv, slowly rising to his feet, “it is my duty to go below and convert a few insignificant pounds of the flour on board into a pan of biscuit, while you, Ed, fry some salt pork, the only meat we have left, and heat up a can or two of tomatoes.”

This ended the long chat, for besides the preparation of supper there was much else to do. There were the lights to be hung in their places, and more occupying still, there was the difficult task of tying up the boat for the night. For experience had taught Phil caution, and he had decided that until The Last of the Flatboats should again float upon the broad reaches of the Mississippi, she should be securely moored to two trees during the hours of darkness. With the Yazoo ten feet above its banks, it would have been very easy indeed for the flatboat to drift out of the river into the fields and woodlands. And Phil had had all the experience he wanted of such wanderings.