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.”