He Would Always Manage To
Have A Rusty Bolt To Scrub While His Boat Tarried At Our Town, And He
Would Sit On The Inside Guard And Scrub It, Where We Could All See Him
And Envy Him And Loathe Him.
And whenever his boat was laid up he would
come home and swell around the town in his blackest
And greasiest
clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a
steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his
talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could
not understand them. He would speak of the 'labboard' side of a horse in
an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. And he was
always talking about 'St. Looy' like an old citizen; he would refer
casually to occasions when he 'was coming down Fourth Street,' or when
he was 'passing by the Planter's House,' or when there was a fire and he
took a turn on the brakes of 'the old Big Missouri;' and then he would
go on and lie about how many towns the size of ours were burned down
there that day. Two or three of the boys had long been persons of
consideration among us because they had been to St. Louis once and had a
vague general knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was
over now. They lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear
when the ruthless 'cub'-engineer approached.
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