All The
Physicians Stood Watches There, And All The Medical Students; And The
Rest Of The Town Furnished Money, Or Whatever Else Was Wanted.
And
Memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many a disaster like
the 'Pennsylvania's' had happened near her doors, and she was
experienced, above all other cities on the river, in the gracious office
of the Good Samaritan'
The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to
me. Two long rows of prostrate forms - more than forty, in all - and every
face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome
spectacle. I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy
experience it was. There was one daily incident which was peculiarly
depressing: this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It
was done in order that the MORALE of the other patients might not be
injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony.
The fated one was always carried out with as little stir as possible,
and the stretcher was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants;
but no matter: everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its
muffled step and its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it
wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave.
I saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them no
more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than
once. His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed
in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.
He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and
shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion,
his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment
into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and
he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, HUMP
yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be
all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement this
explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which
nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then
while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the
cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was bad
for the others, of course - this noise and these exhibitions; so the
doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind or
out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed by
that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. He
suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines
and in his water - so he ceased from putting either to his lips. Once,
when he had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the
dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of
his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered
himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be
brought near him. Three times I saw him carried to the death-room,
insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time he revived, cursed
his attendants, and demanded to be taken back. He lived to be mate of a
steamboat again.
But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.
Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that
go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated
judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers
had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help. On the evening of
the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away,
and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.' His hour had struck;
we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.
Chapter 21 A Section in My Biography
IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I
dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent
work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted
smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed - and hoped - that I was
going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when
my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was
suspended, my occupation was gone.
I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada;
next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California; next, a
reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich
Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an
instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I
became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other
rocks of New England.
In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years
that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilot-
house.
Let us resume, now.
Chapter 22 I Return to My Muttons
AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the
river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left;
so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a
stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle
of April.
As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, I took some
thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were
recognized, on the river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk,
inquire, and spy around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it
was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding
stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the
sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts:
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