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Irv was glad enough to make the promise and to fulfil it. For he, too, knew with what reckless fervor the high-mettled boy would be sure to inflict punishment for the insult should he learn of it.

“Phil is the jolliest, best-natured fellow in the world,” explained Irv, when he asked the other boys not to tell their captain what had happened, “but you know what a temper he has – or rather you don’t know. None of us does, because nobody has ever made the mistake of stirring him up with a real, vital insult.”

“No,” said Will, “and I pity the fellow that ever makes that particular mistake.”

“We’ll never tell him,” said Constant. “If we did, we mightn’t be able to deliver our prisoner.”

CHAPTER XVII
AT ANCHOR

Phil had sent two telegrams, – one to the authorities at Memphis, and the other to the plundered bank in Cincinnati. In each he had announced his captures, – the man and the funds, – and in each he had asked that officers to arrest and persons to identify the culprit should be waiting at Memphis on the arrival of the flatboat.

On his return to the flatboat he felt himself so excited and sleepless that he sent his comrades below to sleep and by turns to watch the prisoner. He would himself remain on duty on deck all night. As the night wore away, the boy thought out all the possibilities, for he felt that for any miscarriage in this matter he would be solely responsible.

Among the possibilities was this: that should the flatboat arrive at Memphis before some one could get there from Cincinnati to identify the prisoner, he might be discharged for want of such identification. It would take a day or two to send men by rail from Cincinnati to Memphis, while the fierce current of this Mississippi flood promised to take the flatboat thither within less than twenty hours.

After working out all the probabilities in his mind as well as he could, Phil called below for all his comrades to come to the sweeps. He did not tell them his purpose; they were too sleepy even to ask. But studying the “lay of the land” on either side, he steered the flatboat into a sort of pocket on the Tennessee shore, and to the bewilderment of his comrades, ordered the anchor cast overboard.

By the time that the anchor held, and the boat came to a rest in the bend, the boys were much too wide awake not to have their minds full of interrogation marks.

“What do you mean, Phil?” “Why have we anchored?” “How long are we to remain here?” “What’s the matter, anyhow?” “Have you gone crazy, or what is it?”

These and a volley of similar questions were fired at him.

He did not answer. He went to one side of the boat and then to the other to observe position.

“How much anchor line is out, Will?” he presently asked.

“Nearly all of it,” answered his comrade.

“This won’t do,” said Phil. “Up anchor.”

The boys were more than ever puzzled. But they tugged away at the anchor windlass till the flukes let go the bottom and the anchor was halfway up. Then Phil called out: —

“That will do. Put a peg in the windlass and let the anchor swing in the water. To the sweeps! Hard on the starboard! We must push her inshore and into shallower water, where the anchor will hold her, and where no steamboat is likely to run over us. Who would have thought it was so deep over here?”

The boys now began to understand why the first anchorage had been abandoned and a shallower one sought for, but they did not yet know what their captain meant by anchoring at all. They did not understand why, on so clear a night, with a river so generously flooded, he did not let things take their course and get to Memphis as quickly as possible.

Presently the anchor, dragging at half cable, fouled the bottom and, with a strain that made the check-post creak, the flatboat came to a full stop.

“That will do,” said Phil. “This is as good a place as any. Pay out some more anchor line and let her rest.”

“But what on earth are you anchoring for?” asked the others, “and how long are we going to lie here?” queried Ed.

“Nearly two days and nights,” was the reply, – “long enough to let somebody travel from Cincinnati to Memphis who can identify Jim Hughes and take him off our hands. I suppose it would be all right if we went on without waiting. But I’m not certain of that, and I’m not taking any chances in this business, so we’ll lie at anchor here for nearly two days. Go to bed, all of you except the one on watch over Jim Hughes. I’m not sleepy, so I’ll stay on deck for the rest of the night.”

But by that time the boys were not sleepy either, so they made no haste about going to their bunks.

“We’ll be pretty short of something to eat by that time,” said Constant, who was just then in charge of the cooking. “We have only a scrap of bread left. The eggs and fresh meat and milk are used up, and we’ll have to fall back on corn-bread and fried salt pork.”

“Well, that’s food fit for the gods,” said Irv Strong, “if the gods happen to be healthy, hungry flatboatmen. But how important the food question always is in an emergency! How it always crops up when you get away from home!”

“Yes, and at home too,” said Ed; “only there we have somebody else to look after the three meals a day. It’s the most important question in the world. If all food supplies were cut off for a single month, this world would be as dead as the moon.”

“That’s true,” broke in Will. “And really, I suppose the world isn’t very forehanded with it at best. I wonder how many years we could last, anyhow, if the crops ceased to grow.”

“Not more than one year,” replied the older boy. “There never was a time when mankind had food enough accumulated to last for much more than a year, and probably there never will be. If there should be no crop for a single year, hundreds of thousands would starve every month, and a second failure would simply blot out the race. As for forehandedness, we actually live from hand to mouth, especially the people in the big cities. Only last winter a great snowstorm blockaded the railroads leading into New York for only three or four days, and even in that short time the price of food went up so high that the charitable institutions had all they could do to keep poor people from starving. So far from the world generally being forehanded for food, there never was a time when the food on hand was really sufficient to go round.”

“Well, of course,” said Will, meditatively, “there are always some people so ‘down on their luck,’ as the saying is, that they can’t earn a living, but there’s always enough food for them if they could get hold of it.”

“You’re mistaken,” said Ed. “There is nearly always something like a famine in parts of India and Russia, and even in Italy and other parts of Europe there are great masses of very hard-working people who never in their lives get enough to eat.”

There were exclamations of surprise at this, but Ed presently continued: “In many European countries the peasants do not see a piece of meat once a year, and in hardly any of them do the poorer people get what we would think sufficient for food. In fact, their food is not sufficient. They are always more or less starved, and that’s the reason so many of them are the little runts they are.”

“Then we are better off than most other nations?” said Irv.

“Immeasurably!” said Ed. “Ours is the best fed nation in the world. It is the only nation in which the poorest laborer can have meat on his table every day in the year, for even in England the poorer laborers have to make out with cheese pretty often.”

“What’s the reason?” asked Phil, who had acquired the habit of using short sentences and as few words as possible since his burden of responsibility had borne so heavily upon him.

“There are several reasons. Our soil is fertile – but so is that of France and Italy, for that matter. I suppose the great reason is that we do not have to support vast armies in idleness. In most of the European countries they make everybody serve in the army for three or four years. It costs a lot of money to support these armies and it costs the country a great deal more than that.”

“In what way?” asked Constant, who, being on sentry duty over Hughes, was sitting halfway down the ladder.

“Why, by taking all the young men away from productive work for three years. Take half a million young men away from work and put them in the army, and you lose each year all the work that a man could do in half a million years, all the food or other things that half a million men could produce in a year?”

“And the other people have to make it all up,” drawled Irv. “I don’t wonder they’re tired.”

“And besides making it all up, as you say,” responded Ed, “those other people have to work to feed and clothe and house and arm all these men, besides transporting them from one place to another, and paying for costly parades and all that sort of thing. Why, every time one of the big modern guns is fired at a target it burns up some man’s earnings for a whole year! Some man must work a year or more to pay the expense of doing it!”

“Then why don’t the people of those countries ‘kick’?” asked Will, “and abolish their armies?”

“Because the people of those countries have masters, and the masters own the armies, and the armies would make short work of any ‘kick.’ In our country the people are the masters, and they have always refused to let anybody set up a great standing army. When we have a war, the people volunteer and fight it to a finish. Then the men who have been doing the fighting are mustered out, and they go back to their work, earn their own living, and put in their time producing something that mankind needs.”

“Cipher it all down,” said Irv, “it’s liberty that makes this the best country in the world to live in.”

“Precisely!” said Ed, with emphasis. “And about the most important duty every American has to do is to remember that one, supreme fact, and do his part to keep our country as it is.”

CHAPTER XVIII
AT BREAKFAST

The day was dawning by this time, and the conversation was broken up. Constant set to work to prepare breakfast while the others extinguished the lanterns, trimmed them, filled them with oil, and “cleaned up” generally.

When breakfast was served, the scarcity of supplies was apparent. There were some “cold-water hoecakes,” – that is to say, bread made of corn-meal mixed up with cold water and a little salt, and baked in cakes about half or three quarters of an inch thick upon a griddle. There was a dish of fried salt pork, and with it some fried potatoes. And there was nothing else, except a “private dish” consisting of two slices of toast made from the scrap of stale wheat bread left, with a poached egg on each of them. There was no coffee and no butter, the last remains of that having been used upon the toast.

The “private dish,” Constant explained, was for Ed. “You see, we’re out to get him well, and his digestive apparatus doesn’t take kindly to fried things. I’ve saved four more eggs for him – the last we’ve got, – and six more slices of stale wheat bread. The rest of you are barbarians, and you’ll wrestle with any sort of hash I can get up till we get to Memphis.”

Ed protested vigorously against the favoritism shown him, but the others supported Constant’s plan, and the older boy had to yield.

“Well, I am deeply grateful for your kindness, boys,” he said, “and I’m duly grateful also to the thousands of men in various parts of the country who have worked so hard to furnish me with these two slices of toast.”

The boys looked up from their plates.

“Here’s another revelation,” said Irv. “My ill-furnished intelligence is about to receive another supply of much-needed rudimentary information. Go on, Ed. Tell us about it. How in the world do you figure out your ‘thousands’ of men who have had anything to do with those two slices of toast?”

“Oh, that was a joke,” said Will.

“It was nothing of the kind,” answered Ed. “I can’t possibly count up all the people who have worked hard to give me this toast, but they certainly number greatly more than a thousand.”

“We’re only waiting for wisdom to drop from your lips – ” began Irv, with his drawl.

“O, quit it, Irv!” said Phil; “you’ll learn more by listening than by talking.”

“That is probably so,” said the other, “though I remember that we heard something away up the river, about how much a person learns of a subject by talking about it.”

“Yes, but – ”

“Listen,” said Ed, “and I’ll explain. The wheat out of which this toast was made was grown probably in Dakota or Minnesota. There was a farmer there, and perhaps there were some farm-hands also, who ploughed the ground, sowed the seed, reaped the wheat, threshed it, winnowed it, and all that. Then – ”

“Yes, but all that wouldn’t include more than half a dozen,” said Phil.

“Yes, it would,” said Irv, “for there’s all the womenfolk who cooked the men’s meals and – ”

“Never mind them,” said Ed, “though of course they helped to give me my toast. Let’s count only those that contributed directly to that kindly end. These farmer people used ploughs, harrows, drills, reapers, threshing-machines, wagons, and all that, and somebody must have made them. And back of those who made them were those who dug the iron for them out of the ground, and cut the wood in them out of the forest, and the men who made the tools with which they did all this, and – ”

“I see,” said Irv. “It’s the biggest endless chain imaginable. Thousands? Why, thousands had a hand in it before you even get to the farmer – the men who made the tools, and the men who made the tools that made the tools, and so on back to the very beginnings of creation. And if we face about, there are the men that ran the railroads which hauled the wheat to mill, and the millers, and all that. Oh, the thousand are easy enough to make out.”

“Yes,” said Ed, “and then the railroads and the mills had to be built. The men that built them, the engineers, mechanics, and laborers, all helped to give me my two slices of toast. So did the men behind them, the men who made their tools and their materials, the woodsmen who chopped trees for ties, the miners who dug the iron, the smelters, the puddlers, the rolling-mill men, who wrought the crude ore into steel rails; then there are all the men who made the locomotives, and the cars, and the machinery of the mills, and – ”

“Oh, stop for mercy’s sake,” said Will. “It’s no use to count. There aren’t thousands, but millions of them. And of course the same thing is true of our clothes, our shoes, and everything else.”

“But with so many people’s work represented in it,” asked Irv, reflectively, “why isn’t that piece of toast an enormously costly affair?”

“Simply because so many people’s work is represented in it,” answered Ed. “If one man had to do it all for himself, it would never be done at all. Just imagine a man set down on the earth with no tools and nobody to help him. How much buttered toast do you suppose he would be able to turn out in a year? Why, before he could get so much as a hoe he would have to travel hundreds of miles, dig some iron and coal, cut wood with which to convert the coal into coke, melt the iron out of its ore, change it into steel, and shape it into a hoe. Why, even a hoe would cost him a year’s hard work or more, while a wagon he could hardly make without tools in a lifetime. Now he can earn the price of a hoe in a few hours, and the cost of a wagon in a few days or weeks, simply because everybody works for everybody else, each man doing only the thing that he can do best.”

“Then we all work for each other without knowing it,” said Will.

“Of course we do. When we fellows were diving for that pig-iron, we were working for the thousands of people who will use or profit by the things that somebody else will make out of that pig-iron and – ”

“And for the somebody else,” said Irv, “that will make those things out of the pig-iron, and for all the ‘somebody elses’ that work for them, and so on in every direction! Whew! it makes my head swim to think of it. But what a nabob you are, Ed! Just think! Thousands and even millions of people are, at this moment, at work to make you comfortable!”

“Yes, and each one of the millions is at work for all the others while all the others are at work for him. Theorists sometimes dream out systems of ‘coöperative industry,’ hoping in that way to better men’s condition. But their very wildest dreams do not even approach the complex and perfectly working coöperation we already have in use.”

“Just think of it!” said Irv. “Suppose that every man in our little town of two or three thousand people had to do everything for himself! He would have to raise sheep for wool, card, spin, and weave it, and fashion it into clothes. He would have to raise cotton and linen in the same way, and cattle too, and keep a tannery and be a shoemaker and a farmer and a mason and a carpenter and all the rest of it. And then he would have to mine his own iron and coal, and make his own tools and – well, he wouldn’t do it, because he couldn’t. He’d just wander off into the woods hunting for something that he could kill and eat, and he’d try to kill anybody else that did the same thing, for fear that the somebody else would get some of the game that he wanted for himself. He’d be simply a savage!”

“Well, but even savages go in tribes and hunt together and live together,” said Will.

“Of course they do,” answered Ed, “and that’s their first step up toward civilization. When they do that they have learned in a small way the advantage of working together, each for all and all for each. The better they learn that lesson, the more civilized they become.”

“Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything and everybody to work for the state and be supported by it?” asked Phil.

“Not a little bit of it,” said Ed. “That would be simply to go back to the tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize the advantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. We have worked out of that and into something better. With us, every man works for all the rest by working for himself in the way that best serves his own welfare. Under our system every man is urged and stimulated by self-interest to do the very best and most work that he can. Under a communistic or socialistic or tribal system, every man would be as lazy as the rest would let him be, because he would be sure of a share in all that the others might make by their labor. It is sharp competition that makes men do their best. It is in the ‘struggle for existence’ that men advance most rapidly.”

“Wonder if that wasn’t what Humboldt meant,” said Irv, “when he called the banana ‘the curse of the tropics,’ adding that when a man planted one banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendants to the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessity for clothes.”

“Exactly,” said Ed. “Somebody once said that ‘every man is as lazy as he dares to be.’”

“Well, I am, anyhow,” yawned Irv, “and so I’m going up on deck under the awning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night.”

CHAPTER XIX
SCUTTLE CHATTER

The pocket in which The Last of the Flatboats lay at anchor was well out of the path of passing steamboats. It was also pretty free from drift-wood, except of the smaller sort. So there was nothing of any consequence to be done during the two days of waiting. It was necessary to pump a little now and then, as the very tightest boat will let in a little bilge water, especially when she is as heavily loaded as this one was. There were what Irv Strong called “the inevitable three meals a day” to get, but beyond that there was nothing whatever to do.

Ed’s books were a good deal in demand at this time. Irv and Phil managed to do some swimming in spite of the drift-wood and the coldness of the water. For the rest, the boys lounged about on the deck, with now and then a “long talk” at the scuttle or in the cabin if it rained. Their “long talks” on deck were always held around the scuttle, so that the one on guard over Hughes might take part in them. There were only five steps to the little ladder that led from deck to cabin, and by sitting on the middle one the boy on guard could keep his feet on the edge of the prisoner’s bunk and let his head protrude above the deck.

They had naturally been thinking a good deal about what Ed had told them concerning food, and now and then a question would arise in the mind of one or another of them which would set the conversation going again.

“I wonder,” said Will Moreraud, “how men first found out what things were good to eat?”

“By trying them, I guess,” said Phil. “I read in a book somewhere that whenever the primitive man saw a new beast he asked first, ‘can he eat me?’ and next, ‘can I eat him?’”

“Yes,” said Ed, “and that sort of thing continued until our own time, when science came in to help us. You know where the jimson weed got its name, don’t you?”

None of them had ever heard.

“Well, ‘jimson’ is only a corruption of ‘Jamestown.’ When the early settlers landed at Jamestown they found so many new kinds of grain, and animals, and plants that they began trying them to see which were good and which were not. Among other things they thought the burs of the jimson weed – the poisonous thorn-apple of stramonium – looked rather inviting. So they boiled a lot of the burs and ate them. Like idiots, they didn’t confine the experiment to one man, or better still ‘try it on a dog,’ but set to work, a lot of them at once, to eat the stuff. It poisoned them, of course, and made a great sensation in Jamestown. So they named the plant the Jamestown weed.”

“I remember,” said Irv, “my grandfather telling me that when he was young, people thought tomatoes were poisonous, and he said it took a long time for those that tried them to teach other people better.”

“That’s what I had in my mind,” said Ed, “when I said that there was no known way to find out whether things were good to eat or not except by trying them, till modern science came to our aid.”

“How does modern science manage it?” asked Will.

“Well, if any new fruit or vegetable should turn up now, a chemist would analyze it to find out just what it was composed of. Then the doctors who make a study of such things would ‘try it on a dog,’ or more likely on a rabbit or guinea pig, to find out if it had any value as a medicine. They try every new substance in that way in fact, whether it is an original substance just discovered or some new compound. They even tried nitro-glycerine, and found it to be a very valuable medicine. So, too, they have got some of our most valuable drugs from coal oil, simply by trying them.”

“Good for modern science!” said Phil. “But, Ed, what were the other new things the colonists found in this country?”

“There were many. But those that have proved of most importance are corn, tobacco, tomatoes, watermelons, turkeys, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes.”

“Oh, come now,” said Irv, raising his head and resting it on his hand, “you said Irish potatoes.”

“And why not? They are a very important product, and the crop of them sells for many millions of – ”

“But they didn’t originate in this country, did they? Weren’t they brought here from Ireland?”

“Not at all. They were taken from here to Ireland.”

“Then why are they called Irish potatoes?”

“Because they proved to be so much the most profitable crop the Irish people could raise that they soon came to be the chief crop grown there. I don’t know whether the colonists found any of them growing wild in Virginia or not. They are supposed to have originated in South America and Mexico. At any rate, they are strictly native Americans. By the way,” said Ed, “the people who thought tomatoes poisonous were not so very far out in their reckoning. Both the tomato and the potato are plants belonging to the deadly nightshade family, and the vines of both contain a virulent poison.”

“Perhaps somebody tried tomato vines for greens,” said Phil, “and got himself ready for the coroner before the tomatoes had time to grow and ripen.”

“That isn’t unlikely,” said Ed. “At any rate, an experiment of that kind would have gone far to give the fruit a bad name.”

“However that may be,” said Irv, “it is pretty certain that men must have found out what was and what wasn’t good to eat mainly by trying. There’s salt now. It is the only mineral substance that men everywhere eat. All the rest of our foods are either animal or vegetable.”

“And that’s a puzzle,” replied Ed. “Man must have got a very early taste of salt, or else there wouldn’t be any man.”

“How’s that?”

“Why, the human animal simply can’t live without salt. He digests his food by means of an acid which he gets from salt, and from nothing else whatever. So he must have had salt from the beginning.”

“The Garden of Eden must have been a seaport then,” mused Phil. “Adam and Eve probably boiled their new potatoes in water dipped up from the docks.”

The boys laughed, and Ed continued: —

“It is a curious fact that the ancients, even as late as Greek times, knew nothing about sugar; at least, in its pure state. They got a good deal of it in fruits and vegetables, of course, and the Greeks used honey very lavishly. They not only ate it, but they made an intoxicating liquor out of it which they called mead. But of sugar, pure and simple, they knew nothing whatever. Their language hasn’t even a word for it. Yet in our time sugar is one of the most important products in the world, so important that many nations pay large bounties to encourage its cultivation.”

“By the way,” asked Phil, after a few moments’ meditation, “what is the most important crop in this country?”

“Wheat” – “cotton,” answered Will and Constant respectively.

“No,” said Ed, “corn is very much our most important crop.”

“More so than wheat?”

“Four to one and more,” said Ed. “Our corn crop amounts to about two thousand million bushels every year – often greatly more. Our wheat crop averages about five hundred million bushels. And as corn has more food value in it, pound for pound, than wheat has, it is easy to see that not only for us, but for all the world, our corn crop is quite four to one more important than our wheat.”

“But I thought corn wasn’t eaten much except in this country?” queried Irv. “The Germans and French and English don’t eat it.”

“Don’t they, though?” asked Ed, with a quizzical look. “Don’t they eat enormous quantities of American pork, bacon, and beef? And what is that but American corn in another shape?”

“That’s so,” said Irv, this time sitting bolt upright. “I’ve heard that the big farmers all over the West keep tab on the price of meat and corn. If meat is high and corn low, they bring up all their hogs from the woods, fatten them on the corn and sell them. But if meat is low or corn high, they sell the corn.”

“And they know to the nicest fraction of a pound,” added Ed, “how much corn it takes to make a given amount of pork.”

“Well, even if we didn’t sell any corn at all to other nations,” said Phil, “I should think our crop would help them. We eat a great deal of it, and if we hadn’t it, we’d eat just so much wheat instead, and so we should have just that much less wheat to sell to them.”

“Exactly,” said Ed. “Every thing that feeds a man in any country leaves precisely that much more to feed other men with in other countries.”

“And what a lot it does take to feed a man!” exclaimed Will.

“Not so much as you probably imagine,” said Ed. “A robust man requires about a pound and a half of meat and a pound and a half of bread per day. Vegetables are simply substitutes for bread and cost about the same. Eggs, milk, etc., take the place of meat and cost less. So by reckoning on three pounds of food a day, half meat and half bread, or their equivalents, we find that a strong, healthy, hard-working man can be fed at a cost of about fifteen cents a day. The coarser and more nutritious parts of beef and mutton and good sound pork can be bought at retail at an average of eight cents a pound – often much less. The man’s meat, therefore, will cost him twelve cents a day or less. Good flour can be had at about two cents a pound. The man’s bread will, therefore, cost him about three cents a day, making the total cost of his food about fifteen cents a day, or less than fifty-five dollars a year.”

“But it costs something to cook it,” said Phil.

“Yes, but not much. I have calculated only the actual cost of the raw materials, but my figures are too high rather than too low, for corned beef and chuck steaks are often sold at retail as low as three or four cents a pound, and neck pieces, heads, hearts, livers, and kidneys even lower, while I have allowed eight cents a pound as an average price for all the meat that the man eats. Now, allowing for the cost of cooking and for unavoidable waste, I reckon that a strong, healthy American citizen can feed himself abundantly on less than seventy-five dollars a year.”

“But what if he can’t get the seventy-five dollars?” asked Will.

“In this country any man in tolerable health can get it easily. There is no excuse in this country for what somebody calls ‘the poverty that suffers,’ at any rate among people who have health. Why, one hundred dollars a year is a good deal less than thirty cents a day, and anybody can earn that.”

“What does cause ‘the poverty that suffers,’ then?” asked Will.

“Drink, mainly,” broke in Phil.

“By the way,” said Irv, looking up from some figures he had been making, “does it occur to you that our corn crop alone, even if we produced nothing else in the world, would furnish food enough for all the people in this country?”

“No; how do you figure it, Irv?” asked Will.

“Why, Ed says the corn crop amounts to 2,000,000,000 bushels. There are 56 pounds in a bushel, or 112,000,000,000 pounds in the crop. That would give every man, woman, and child in our 70,000,000 population 1600 pounds of corn per year, or pretty nearly four and a half pounds apiece each day in the year, while Ed says no man needs more than three pounds of food per day. So the corn crop, whether eaten as bread or partly in the shape of meat, furnishes a great deal more food than the American people can possibly eat. No wonder we ship such vast quantities of foodstuffs abroad!”