River Laughter

Front matter

RIVER LAUGHTER A Complete Novelette

By Raymond S. Spears Author of “The Wandering Son,” “The Diversion of a Monographic Professor,” etc.

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Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

THE Turtles were a select crew of Mississippi River pirates. They knew the river so well that it was an instinct—so well that they could go straight across it in a fog, rowing a skiff. They waited in Tupelo Bend, above Mendova, for a favorable night to ply their occupation of loot, and, when at last a gray mist rose thickly from the surface of the water and drifted out over the sand-bars and eddied through the longshore trees, they dropped down.

They landed on the sand-bar at the upper end of Mendova wharf and tied their shanty-boat to stakes already there. They walked fifty yards across the sand to the cobbled wharf, which had been masked by the bar, and climbed to the level of Front Street. They walked across the brick paving, and there a gloomy figure emerged from the wall and whispered:

“All hunky! Get busy!”

Four men entered the little recess in the wall of the building, which was between two plate-glass windows; they did something to the double door, and it opened before them. They entered the famous “Duck and Deer” store, and one sweep of the flash disclosed the fact that it contained goods to please their fancy. They wasted no time on imagination, however; they set to work.

They dumped boxes of ammunition into bags; they caught up and tied rifles and shotguns into rolls; they filled a big tub with jack-knives and other cutlery—with flashlights, compasses, fishing-tackle and other sporting-goods-store material—and scurried across the street, down the wharf and over the sand-bar to the shanty-boat moored in the gray gloom.

They returned to the store, gathered another load and hurried to the boat with it; and, as they worked separately, they were coming or going—all four of them, for half a dozen trips. No mere minute of business satisfied them. They dealt in no diamonds, pearls or cash affair; they were low-grade workers, but they made up in quantity what they failed to get in quality or price. Many and many a dip, post-office yegg, jewelry-case trader and the like might well envy their average winnings in the precarious game they played. They specialized in method, but not in loot. This happened to be a sporting-goods-store proposition; once they had handled, or turned over, the contents of a grocery store; another time they had taken a dry-goods store; they recalled with evil glee a pawnbroker’s establishment and a fur-buyer whom they had easily raided.

The Ohio River knew their work by evidence only; in St. Louis they had a reputation not attached to names; they had even worked in New Orleans, and Kansas City and St. Paul; they were thorough, competent and of great discretion. All they wanted was a dull, foggy night, a beat seldom patrolled by police, a store of some kind and a line of disappearance. They were pirates, but they did not disdain the assistance of motor truck or flat car or even a purloined team of mules and truck.

So now they operated with the skill of experience, the daring of many escapes and the carelessness of those whom the Mississippi has long favored or played with. To their minds, Old Mississip’ was sure their good old granddaddy, and they knew him, and he knew them, and the understanding was mutual. At the same time, it is possible that one should not be too sure that he knows the silent, swinging torrent whose moods are full of many seemings.

Little remained in the sporting-goods store when they returned at last, all together, to get the safe. It wasn’t a very large safe; one of the four had given it a tentative lift with his hand and was surprized to discover that he could raise a corner. Accordingly, they all returned, caught their fists under the steel box and walked away with it.

They stopped to close and lock the door, too, and, when they went down the levee, they were conscious of the fact that, when the policeman came along on his beat, he would see nothing wrong in the store, except that the electric light had burned out.

The sand was loose on the bar, and that made lugging the safe a hard proposition. They grunted as they stumbled and staggered along—the involuntary grunts of men heavily burdened. A little noise did not alarm them, nor would it alarm any one. The banks of the Mississippi are strangely silent at times and curiously noisy at other times. No one pays much attention to minor sounds.

They had a plain path to follow across the bar. Their four pairs of feet had trampled a trail which they could follow with their toes had their black-night instincts failed them. They arrived at the edge of the bar and lowered the safe to the place where the boat’s bow had been.

“Where t'2s that shanty-boat?” one choked. “I cayn’t feel hit!”

“Ner I!” another gasped for breath.

Their feet were in the water, where they had bumped into the nine-foot-wide bow of their shanty-boat on every previous trip. They lowered the safe and scurried up or down the water’s edge. They returned and, hearing one another’s foot steps, stopped together.

“Hit’s gone!” one whispered fiercely.

“Who d’ 2”

“Some sucker’s2”

“Who’s done us?”

There was no answer from the four pirates. From out in the fog, however, apparently close at hand—but it was fog—returned a laugh. It was a low, vibrating, merry, chuckling laugh.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” in short, light expirations.

It seemed low, but the faces of the buildings along River Street, Mendova, returned the laugh in an echo as loud but breaking.

A minute later they heard another burst of laughter, further away, but carried with the uncanny distinctness which is the property of some kinds of fog. They stood there paralyzed by their disaster and heard the laugh again away down the bend.

“The dad-blasted, no-’count, son of a sneakin’ thief!” one of the four on the sand bar cursed deeply.

Another waded at the bottom of his breath:

“He hadn’t no right to take that bo’t! What’d he rob us fer? Why didn’t he go up the bank an’ steal2”

“An’ we doned all the work!” a third whined.

“An’ then he laughed at us!” the fourth one gritted his teeth.

They stood there, cursing and growling. Then, suddenly, away down River Street they heard a footfall, followed by another one and another, as some heavy-heeler came pounding along. He kept coming up and up the street, hitting concrete, slabstone and brick, according to the walks in front of the buildings. They heard him thump upon a plank, and it squeaked a little, not having as yet become damped by the fog. They heard him stop at the corner and drop a locust stick on the curb.

Away up town, three blocks up the hill, they heard the echo answer; then the cop continued his peregrination along the next block and into the one which they had entered to loot. They listened as the cop walked along. Then they heard him stop. The silence was pathetic. It was full of loneliness. Long arms reached out through it; horrors crawled along under the dark. And several sets of teeth chattered and clicked out there on the sand-bar.

The long, rising, screaming shrill of a policeman’s whistle shot through the fog like a bullet—or explosion—with the sting of a freezing gale.

“Fo’ Gawsake!” one whispered. “For Gawsake!”

He repeated it over and over again in a trembling whisper, unconscious of the fact that he was saying anything and not merely thinking or feeling it. They heard, away up yonder, the pound of heavy feet; they heard the running roll of a big cop coming down the grade, dragging his bounding locust on the pavement to let his partner know he was coming. Then there were two revolver shots. The four men down on the bar saw the faint flashes in the cloud like reflected lightning, and they knew that the bull on the beat had discovered the raid.

“You 2 fool!” a voice hissed. “Yo’ was smokin’ a cig’, an’ I seen yo’ drap hit—an’ hit ain’ went out yet—an’ they knows—they knows we ain’ be’n gone long! What’ll we do? They’ll throw circles—thisaway fustest!”

Away up yonder they heard a sharp musical ringing, and they needed no in formation as to what that meant. It was the bull cart, big, red and gold bus with the headquarters reserves in it—word had been sent from some comer that there was shooting down on River Street and whistling.

The pirates whispered together. One was for going down the bar. Another preferred up the bar, and a third was for running up into the town, scattering and hiding wherever they could find a hole.

“Stand still, boys,” one warned them. “The bull up the slough beat’s on, and the one down to the bridge is on—probably been asleep down theh—an’—they’d nab us! They ain’ never seen us—but we ain’ no angels to look at, boys; we’s riveh-rats, an’ we look hit! We ain’ no friends to count on—we’ll jes’ do like we done befo’; come on, boys!”

They felt, rather than saw or heard, him turn from the anxious staring toward that blank gray wall of ominous sounds. They did hear his light step into the water. They knew that he was wading in, and they followed him. It was Autumn water, out of the cold and bitter North. Nevertheless, swimming was better than languishing through a third degree.

Silently they took to the water, and, with strokes like muskrats or frogs, they entered the river. As they floated up into the eddy, they heard some one crossing the bar and heard him call:

“This is the way they went!” And, as they felt the current eddy, they heard, “Hey—here’s the safe!”

With that, they took the main current and, like ducks, swam away out of danger.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

COLUMBIANA IS MILDLY ANNOYED

COLUMBIANA MUSCATINE O’BINE dropped down the Ohio in a little white cabin-boat with a red hull; she had a twenty-foot gasoline-launch beside her boat, covered with a half-cabin on the bow and a canvas over the engine-pit to prevent rains from sinking it. A pair of long, light sweeps on the twenty-four-foot flatboat saved gasoline in making landings and showed river-wisdom as well as river-thrift.

As she floated down the edge of Putney Bend eddy, where several boats were tied in, her gaze discovered a number of children and a man of perhaps thirty years playing down on the sand-bar. He was an agile, square-shouldered man, tanned by sun and wind, smooth-shaven and with the smooth action of what is called a “city man” down the river. His glance was quick and keen, and he amused the youngsters and enjoyed himself on the firm, floor-like sand.

With the snag roots and limbs for safeties, the children and man were playing Puss in the Corner; men and women in the other shanty-boats regarded the adult among the children with amusement a little tinged with contempt.

The man was oblivious, however, till the voice of Columbiana crossed the eddy in a sharp hail—

“Don’t teach them Puss in the Corner!”

“Why not?” the man demanded resentfully, gazing at her through horn-bow spectacles with wide eyes.

“Because Puss in the Corner is just getting there first and grabbing safety from the others. Teach them Prisoner’s Base. Prisoner’s Base teaches sacrifice, heroism and rescuing at personal risk! Can’t you see?”

The man gazed at the young woman with scowling expression and puzzled eyes. A number of the adult spectators chuckled. The children looked from one to the other, wondering. The game stopped while the shanty-boat went drifting on down, and the woman pulled clear of the shoal and began to make the crossing below.

“That’s right, kids!” the man said at last. “I hadn’t thought of that; we’ll play Prisoner’s Base!”

“I never played hit!” one of the children wailed. “I wanta2”

“I’ll show you how,” the man declared. “First, we must find two long lines—there! That pole-sycamore snag’s good for one base, and I’ll draw a line between that ship timber and the broken barrel for the other base. Now we’ll line up; I choose Timmy. Who do you choose, Myra?”

So they began to play Prisoner’s Base, with its racing, romping and daring rescues of caught companions. But there was an odd number, and so the man was referee and told them how. When they were engrossed in playing and had caught the idea, he turned and looked away down the crossing—where a glimmer and a reflection of the sunshine on a cabin-boat window cast darts of light over the river surface and showed whither the young woman was traveling.

When it was time for supper, the children were called to the boat, and they were happy, laughing and full of the delight they had had, playing with the big man, whose name was Caroost. Mrs. Cramell called the big man in to supper with her and her little girl and her own man, for she was grateful to have him so friendly to the little ones, teaching them games that were good to play.

At the table the big man was silent and even diffident. His smooth-shaven face, his bright, blue eyes and his quick smile were attractive, especially to children, whom he seemed to understand better than grown folks. They got nothing from him at the table, not even whether he was out of the Ohio or the Upper Mississippi. Clean, mannerly and a listener; Mrs. Cramell liked him better than ever, for he made talking so easy for her—and she had so much to say!

After supper he took down Cramell’s banjo and began to pick it to the immense delight of the little girl, not to mention Cramell and Mrs. Cramell, who loved music. He played fast music and slow, loud music and soft, good dance-tunes and sweet things to think by. When he went out on the gangplank, he tiptoed so as not to wake the little girl up, and he did not light the lamp on his own cabin-boat. He made it easy for the Cramells to sleep that night.

CAROOST put together all the gossip he had heard down the Ohio and Mississippi, but there was nothing in it for him so far as he could tell. Apparently, Mr. Barklow Waldin had been swallowed up by the Mississippi; at the same time, duty is duty!

He looked from the deck of his red shanty-boat out across the river and recognized it as one of the interesting moments of his life. Adventure had come to him in satisfactory frequency. This was another adventure, hunting for a lost human straw in ten thousand miles of navigable waters and fifty thousand miles of canoe waters—Kismet—Selah—so be it! In the years since Prof. Barklow Waldin had dropped out of sight, he might have disintegrated and flowed into the Gulf, or he might have moved up the bank somewhere and become respectable, or he might, on a one-hundred-to-one bet, still be on the Mississippi. But shanty-boaters, knowing everybody in a way, had never heard of him that they knew.

James M. Caroost just loved the idea of having been adventurous, although in the critical moment of superlative incident he might endure rather more than he enjoyed. At the same time nervous anticipation never prevented him from having jubilant retrospection. He had what he fondly called a dual personality.

He sat for an hour on the stern-deck of his boat, looking down the Mississippi in the dark night. Away down the bend a Government light wavered and flickered, looking him in the eyes with a challenge. He accepted it. He went ashore and cast off his bow-line. He pulled in his stern line rapidly and thus backed his boat out into the eddy current. He floated noiselessly up the eddy, around into the main current and down the crossing, pulling a pair of sweeps that carried his boat into the channel.

He sat in the comfortable wicker chair, but not at his ease. At intervals he groaned; then he cursed under his breath; once he said:

“I can’t learn from my own heart! Somebody else always has to tell me!”

He made his calculations; in two hours he rowed into the west side and threw over his anchor in the dead water at Typer’s Plantation. He turned in to sleep and was up at first dawn. As soon as he could see, he was searching the river with his binoculars. Every few minutes he was out to look, but in the intervals he cooked his breakfast of ham, fried eggs, fried potato, coffee and milk kept sweet with boracic acid—he was reckless.

Soon after eight o’clock he saw a little white shanty-boat moving down out of the sand-bar almost opposite him. He grinned to himself. He took a book labeled “Mississippi River Maps,” and turned to Sheet No. 1.

“She’s traveling by these same charts or how’d she know that little bay behind those willows?” he asked himself.

The shanty-boat made the water flicker for a time and then fell into the quivering reflection of the morning sunshine. When it was about a third of a mile below him, he hoisted his anchor and, with two pulls of his sweeps, entered the river current. The two boats moved down into Columbus Bend, and, as they came into the Iron Bank, they were hardly a hundred yards apart. He sat in his cabin, however, out of sight, reading one of a shelf of books with the word “Essays” over it. Under that shelf were several other shelves, each with a label.

The two boats were carried past Columbus within two hundred yards, and the house-boat floated toward the Chalk Bluff, after swirling in the Hickman Bluff current toward Wolf Island Chute. The man’s boat went down the long chute and out of sight behind the sand-bar. When it was out of sight, the man turned up the outboard motor and steered at seven miles an hour around the long loop and floated down behind Wolf Island Towhead into Beckwith Bend current just as the little white shanty-boat swung to Lower Lees Landing.

Columbiana came out on the bow deck and stared at the motor-boat with a calculating gaze. She looked up the long dead water of Wolf Island Chute and then looked up the short, swift, current of the main river down which she had floated. There was no sign of life on the house-boat; but how could a boat float five miles in a six-mile current and a boat float eight miles in a three-mile current and both arrive at the same point at the same time? Columbiana’s expression was one of anxious, or at least grave, suspicion.

All day long the two boats floated down, almost within a toss. The river was falling, and they held to the trough near the mid-current. It was a navigable river, public and free. Any one in a craft had a right anywhere by living up to the rules. Columbiana, however, was doubtful. Nearly an hour before dusk she pulled into the dead water above Donaldson’s Point about three miles. When she looked across the river, she saw the red cabin-boat floating around in the eddy at the foot of the filled-in Island No. 9. The boat made a complete circle around and then bumped into the bank for the night.

Columbiana shot a wild goose from a flock that came down within a hundred yards, killing it with a fight rifle and retrieving it with a skiff. She hoped that scoundrel on yon side was watching her shoot, for that would be fair warning. In the morning she dropped out again about eight o’clock and then discovered that the swift peninsula current carried her right down to the motor-boat, which had started forty minutes before in a dragging current. So, as they passed the Slough Landing whisky-boat, they weren’t two hundred yards apart, and at Gates Landing, two miles down, they were only a hundred yards apart.

Columbiana was vexed. She gazed steadfastly at the red boat without seeing anyone. She had the feeling that in the cabin was a man watching her. She had that feeling for three hours, and then with her binoculars, as the stem of the boat swung around, she saw a man sitting inside the cabin, leaning back in a comfortable rocker with his feet on a bench, reading calmly and obliviously.

Then she was vexed to think that she had paid any attention to the horrid old thing. She landed in at New Madrid and went up town to buy supplies. When she dropped passed Tiptonville, fifteen miles below, she saw a man coming down the bank at the ferry with an arm full of bundles and packages, and half an hour later she was perturbed to observe a cabined motor-boat floating down in the caving bend less than half a mile behind her. And, when she pulled into the foot of Merriwether Bend sand-bar, the motor-boat anchored about a mile below at the head of Little Cypress Bend sand-bar.

But the following morning, when she floated out, the motor-boat was gone from its anchorage, and in vain she looked for it up and down the river. She studied the caving bend below Island No. 13, and, when she passed Reelfoot, she pulled over close to see if the scoundrel had stopped along there in the shanty-boat town.

All day long she looked for him up and down, and, when she landed in, she shrugged her shoulders. In the morning, when she dropped out and turned the bend of Needham’s Cut-off, a light song was choked in her throat by the discovery of a motor-boat a hundred yards from her port bow. Where it came from, and by what force, she could not tell. She would think of something else for a minute and then return with a start to the fact of the exasperating presence. She did not see the boat stir under any power. It drifted with the current—yet there it was!

That night she floated down the chute of Island No. 35, and anchored at the foot. Ten minutes later she saw the red boat anchored just over the sand-bar, practically just around the corner—and it had anchored there first! She couldn’t even think a word.

Fishermen for the Mendova market were down this stretch of the river. The sporting resort of Gumbo Bend was at hand. Islands and sand-bars seemed to promise a thousand picnics for all. A long, narrow shanty-boat floated by just at dusk, and four men looked across at the pretty girl on the boat. One of them hailed:

“Hello, gal! Lonesome?”

Without a word she reached behind the door, and, before the ribald crew could more than duck, she fired five .25-20s through their cabin. One bullet hit the dish-cupboard, and the still night resounded with the fall of caving crockery and the crash of glassware.

On the night air was borne a whine:

“Aw, Red. What’d yo’ want ’sult a riveh-lady fo’—yo’ danged fool! Yo’ mout of knowed yo’d git the wust of hit!"

A little later Columbiana saw the motorboat drifting down by her anchorage and turning into the main current.

“Now where’s he going?” she muttered.

The next instant there was a whiff of chill, and immediately there boiled up in the night a heaving, writhing, climbing gray mist, which rapidly assumed the proportions of a fog.

Columbiana shivered and entered the cabin, where, with the curtains pulled down, she tried to read a magazine essay. But she gave it up and turned to fiction, and so she read herself to sleep where she sat.

She was awakened by a loud, long laugh—

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

She blew the light and ran to look. She was adrift in the night with her anchor on the deck where she hadn’t left it; on all sides was a fog as gray as sin.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

A HA-HA-HA IN THE RIVER NIGHT

FOUR river-rats, treading water and cursing their luck, floated down Mendova Bend with their heads in the fog that hung black upon the night. They kept near enough to one another to talk in low voices, awed by their misfortune and wishing that they could find the scoundrel who had stolen their shanty-boat after they had filled it up with tons of loot from a water-front sporting-goods store.

Out there in mid-Mississippi it was like floating in a lake, except that once in a while they felt the water boiling around them and currents pulling them about. Water-rats that they were, they didn’t mind floating down the current, even though it had been cold to plunge into the water; now it felt almost warm.

They kept their lungs full of air, breathing in short gasps, to float better, and they swore with angry, ignorant fluency. Some mean scoundrel had been too lazy to pull a trick and had robbed them after they had done all the hard work. They had carried guns and hardware and all that kind of stuff till they sweat and were dead-tired. They had taken all the chance of being caught by a bull or somebody or other, and, just when they had the safe and everything right, they find their boat stolen, their loot gone and themselves under the stern necessity of taking instant flight!

“Danged ole Mississip’ all oveh ag’in!” one grumbled. “’Membeh the time we was killin’ beef in the Overflow an’ we was left high an’ dry into that Ohio sport’s launch an’ neveh did get to git out, Tid?”

“Yeh!” Tid’s voice grumbled. “An’ that time we took them logs out’n Wolf Riveh, nicest line of Black Walnut an’ sech, an’ the dang thing sunk on to us, afteh we’d got hit mos’ to N’Orleans—Yo’ ’membeh that, Rooter?”

“Sho! I wouldn’t mind hit none if I could git to go up the bank, but hit don’t agree with a feller. I’m always gittin’ sick er took bad er arrested er sunthin’ up the bank. Hit don’ agree with me!”

“Me nuther!” a plaintive voice responded. “Sh-h-h!”

They all heard a sound and felt an echo through the water. They knew it as beavers know the slap of a beaver’s tail. Sharply and eagerly they listened. It was the dip of a pair of oars—big oars—or long, shanty-boat sweeps.

“All right, boys!” a whisper went around the drifting pirate crew, and Tid added, “I’ll rattle the water so’s we won’t git los’ in this yeah danged thickenin’!”

They followed the touching splash he made as he reached toward the sound they heard. To the dipping of the oars was added the sound of a soliloquizing voice:

“Where in the world am I? Seems as if I’d ought to be getting somewhere! This must be the Mississippi! It can’t be any lake! I never heard of any lake down here. Lake Pepin’s up on the upper river. But this water isn’t moving. I wonder2”

He began to pull his oars tentatively again. The swimmers, not without imagination, could think of the lost soft-paw standing there in the black gloom, looking in all directions and seeing nothing. The depths of his folly they did not know until they were baffled and disturbed by the apparition of a great, yellow glow in the night.

Tid stopped swimming, and the four stood erect in the water, treading, their faces faintly visible as they rode with their heads like pumpkins staring ahead at the source of that light. It was light enough for a steamboat, but they heard no paddle-wheels.

“Hit’s that danged fool!” Tid managed to convey to the crew.

“Yeh!” they all breathed.

Tid moved toward the center of radiance, and they heard the tripper musing:

“I wonder which way is which? My! But this fog’s thick! It’s an awful eery feeling, out here all alone, not knowing which way is which! Why, I can’t tell anything about it! It’s just as if ghosts might be walking around. Ghosts would be lost in this like the river-man said wild geese are lost in canebreaks and river-bottoms sometimes. I can’t tell anything by the maps—they’re—Wha—what’s that?”

The pirates, too, stopped to listen. Somewhere around in the fog was something. It was a sound, and the sound grew from a rattling death-cough to a loud, long laughing—

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a!”

“Fo’ lawse—a gosh!” one of the pirates breathed, and through the fog of yellow-golden haze returned a quick reply:

“What—what’s that? Did somebody speak?”

“Nope!” Tid replied without thinking, and the drifting soft-paw started to laugh but stopped suddenly.

“Hello!” he called doubtfully.

There was no answer. He called louder, and there was still no reply. Then he shouted, and a minute later his bellow returned doubled in volume from some bank of trees or bluffs alongshore.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-a!” a laugh followed out of the fog, and for the first time the pirates all felt very, very cold.

“Gosh!” they heard the soft-paw muttering. “That man’s crazy! This river’s crazy! How’d I get to floating off down the Mississippi! Why, I had two anchors out, and I—and I know I tied the ropes fast. I wonder—somebody must have turned me loose!”

Tid turned and looked at his mates. They could see one another plainly now, and their expressions were puzzled and baffled. They, too, had seen a shanty-boat where it wasn’t—or where it ought to have been. Some darned scoundrel. …

However, they had something personal to attend to just then. If the old river was tricking them same as usual, they couldn’t float around all night and perhaps two or three days in a falling river, waiting for the fog to lift so that they would know where they were. Right there ahead of them was a shanty-boat, and it was a soft-paw. Soft-paws notoriously never thought anything about people. At the same time Tid decided he had better be polite.