RESCUE

When Phil at last waked, Ed was putting supper on the table, and it was rather a late supper too, for the boys had purposely postponed it in order to let Phil get all the sleep possible. He had in fact slept for fully eight hours.

“Well, how do you feel now, skipper?” asked Will.

“I don’t know exactly,” answered the boy, yawning and stretching. “Stupid for the most part, hungry for the rest of it. I say, what time of day or night is it?”

“It’s about eight thirty P.M.,” answered Constant, pulling out his antique Swiss watch and consulting it.

“Yes, but what P.M.? What day is it? When did I go to sleep?”

The boys soon straightened things out in their captain’s temporarily bewildered mind. The effort to do so was aided by the sight and smell of a great platter which Ed at that moment set upon the table. It held a “boiled dinner.” There was a juicy brisket of corned beef on top. Under it were peeled and boiled potatoes, boiled turnips still retaining their shape, and beneath all was the last cabbage on board, the remains of a purchase made at Memphis a week or ten days before, though to the boys it seemed many moons past.

As Phil eyed the savory dish he became for the first time fully awake.

“I say, fellows,” he broke out, “what does this mean? Why didn’t you have this sort of thing for dinner instead of keeping it for supper?”

“Because you weren’t awake at dinner time to help us eat it, Phil. It’s the last really good meal we’re likely to see for days to come, and we—”

“You see,” broke in Irv Strong, “we’re bound to build you up again, Phil, if we have to do it with a hammer and nails. But how recklessly you expose your country breeding!” as he helped all round; “if you were captain of an ocean liner now instead of a flatboat, you would know that dinner before six o’clock is impossible to civilized man, and that the actual dinner hour in all those regions where dress coats and culture prevail, ranges from seven to eight o’clock.”

“You are unjust in your mockery, Irv,” said Ed. “And by that you in your turn simply expose your provincialism—and ours, too.”

“How?” asked Irv, chuckling to think that he had succeeded in diverting the conversation from channels in which it might easily have become emotional. For all the boys had been for hours under a strain of severe anxiety on Phil’s account. They were full of admiration for the self-sacrificing way in which he had worked and thought and planned for the common welfare. They had been touched to the heart by his exhaustion after his strenuous work was done, and they had been anxious all that afternoon, lest the breakdown of his strength should prove to be lasting. His appetite at supper relieved that fear, but the very relief made them all the more disposed to be a trifle tender toward him. Irv had prevented a scene, so he didn’t mind Ed’s criticism.

“How’s that, Ed?”

“Why, when you sneer at people because their customs are different from those that we are used to, don’t you see you are just as narrow-minded as they are when they sneer at us because our customs are not theirs.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to sneer,” said Irv. “But, of course, it does seem odd for people to eat dinner at six or seven o’clock in the evening, instead of eating it about noon.”

“Not a bit of it. The dinner hour is a matter of convenience. In a little town like ours it is convenient for everybody to go home to dinner at noon, and so everybody does it. In a big city where people live five or ten miles away from their places of business, it is impossible. In such cities business doesn’t begin till nine or ten o’clock in the morning, when the banks and exchanges open, and it is in every way handier to have dinner after the day’s work is done. Our habits are just as odd to city people as theirs are to us.”

“Oh, yes, I see that,” said Irv, “and ‘Farmer Hayseed’ is just as snobbish when he laughs at ‘them city folks’ as the city people are when they ridicule him. It reminds me of the nursery story about the town mouse and the country mouse.”

“How about the leaks, fellows?” asked Phil, who was now quite himself again.

“There aren’t any to speak of,” reported Irv. “We’ve gone over the whole bottom of the boat now, stopping every little crack, and now she’s as dry as a bone. Five minutes’ pumping in an hour is quite enough.”

“All right!” said the captain. “Then we’ll take off her bandages in the morning. With that tarpaulin wrapped around her she looks like Sally Hopper when she comes to school with a toothache and a swelled jaw bound up in flannel.”

But the next morning brought with it some other and more pressing work than that of removing the tarpaulin.

At daylight the boat was floating easily and rapidly down the middle of the overflowed river, when Phil, who was on deck, saw half a mile ahead, a group of people huddled together upon a small patch of ground that protruded above the water. It was, in fact, the top of one of those very high Indian mounds that abound in the Sunflower swamp country.

Calling the other boys on deck, Phil took a skiff and rowed ahead as rapidly as he could. When he reached the little patch of dry land, which was circular in shape, and did not exceed twenty feet in diameter, he found a family of people in a woful state of destitution and wretchedness.

They had no fire and no fuel. They had been for several days without food and were now so weak that they could scarcely speak above a whisper. The party consisted of a father, a mother, three big-eyed children, and a negro man.

The negro man, great stalwart fellow that he was, was now the most exhausted one of the party, while the youngest of the children, whom the others called “Baby,” as if she were yet too small to carry a name of her own, was still chipper and full of interest in the strange things about her when she was taken on board the flatboat.

The work of rescue occupied a considerable time and cost the boys some very hard work. The people on the mound were too feeble from hunger and long exposure even to help in their own deliverance. The negro man had to be lifted bodily into a skiff and laid out at full length upon its bottom. The rest, except “Baby” were not in much better condition. The man could walk indeed, in an unsteady way, but he was so dazed in his mind that it required force to keep him from dropping out of the skiff on the way to the flatboat.

The woman and the two older children were chewing strips of leather, cut from the man’s boot tops. The baby continually sucked its thumb.

People in such condition are very difficult to manage. They are physically incapable of doing anything to help themselves, and mentally just alert enough to interfere querulously with the efforts of others to help them. To get such a company into frail, unsteady skiffs, to row them away to the flatboat, and then to “hoist them aboard,” as Phil called the operation, required quite two hours of very hard work, but it was accomplished at last.

But to get them aboard was only the beginning of the work of rescue. They were starving and they must be fed. Phil was for setting out the remainder of the last evening’s boiled dinner at once and bidding them help themselves. But Irv’s superior knowledge of such matters prevented that disastrous blunder.

“Why, don’t you know, Phil, that to give them even an ounce of solid food now would be to kill them! Open a can of consomme, and heat it quick.”

When the soup was ready he peppered it lavishly, explaining to Ed:—

“The problem is not merely to get food into their stomachs, but to get their stomachs to turn the food to some account after we’ve got it there. In their weakened condition they can’t digest anything solid, and it is a serious question whether their stomachs can even manage this thin, watery soup. So I’m putting pepper into it as a ‘bracer.’ It will stimulate their stomachs to do their work.”

As he explained, he fed the soup to the sufferers—a single spoonful to each. They were clamorous for more, but Irv was resolute.

“Wait till I see how that goes,” he said. “You can’t have any more till I say the word.”

The children cried. The woman hysterically laughed and cried alternately. The man sat still with bowed head and with the tears trickling down his face—whether tears of joy, of distress, or of mere weakness, it was hard to say.

The negro man was too far gone even to swallow. Irv had to turn him on his back and literally pour a spoonful of soup down his throat. Then he said to Ed and Constant:—

“I’m afraid this man is dying. His hands are very cold and so are his feet—cold to the knees. Take some towels—no, here,” seizing a blanket from one of the bunks,—“take this. Dip it into boiling water,—fortunately we’ve got it ready,—wring the blanket out and wrap his feet and legs in it, from the knees down. Then take towels and do the same for his hands. Pound him, too, punch him, roll him about—bulldoze and kuklux him in every way you can till you get his blood to going again! It’s the only way to save the poor fellow’s life.”

By this time Irv deemed it safe to give each of his other patients another spoonful or two of the soup, and he even ventured to pour three more spoonfuls down the throat of the negro.

“He’s reviving a little,” Irv explained. “And as a strong man, with a robust stomach accustomed to coarse food, he can stand more soup than the others.”

Thus little by little Irv and Ed, with such assistance from the other boys as they needed, slowly brought the starving party back to life. As the negro man had been the first to succumb to starvation,—perhaps because his robust physical nature demanded more food than more delicately constructed bodies do,—so he was the first to recover. By nightfall he was walking about on the deck, while all the rest were still lying in the bunks below as invalids.

After awhile Irv stopped him.

“Did anybody ever tell you that you’re an exceptional personage?”

“Lor’ no, boss. Well, yes, some o’ de black folks in de chu’ch done took ’ceptions to me sometimes ’cause I wouldn’t give enough to de cause, but fore de court, boss—”

“That isn’t what I mean,” broke in Irv, with smiles rippling all over him, and running down even to his legs. “I mean, did anybody ever notice that you were,—oh, well, never mind that; but tell me, would you like a good big slice of cold corned beef before you go to sleep?”

The negro answered in words. But his more emphatic answer was not one of words. He threw his arms around Irv in a giant’s embrace that almost crushed the youth’s bones.

“There, that will do,” said Irv. “You have an engagement as a cotton compress or something of that sort, when you’re at home, I suppose. But now, if I let you have a good big slice of cold corned beef to-night, will you eat it just as I tell you, take a bite when I tell you and at no other time, and stop whenever I tell you? Will you promise?”

“Shuah, sar, shuah,” eagerly responded the man.

“But ‘sure’ isn’t enough,” replied Irv, half in amusement and half in seriousness, for he felt that his experiment was very risky, and he wanted to be able to regulate it, and stop it at any point. “Sure isn’t enough. Will you promise me on the isosceles triangle?”

“Yes, boss.”

“On the grand panjandrum?”

“For shuah.”

“And even on the parallelopipedon itself?”

“Shuah, boss. I dunno what dem names mean, but for shuah I’ll do jes’ what you tells me to if you’ll lem’ me have de meat.”

Irv was satisfied. He went below and prepared a sandwich. Returning, he allowed the man to eat it in bites, with long intervals between. It not only did no harm, it restored the man to such vitality that Phil decided to get some information out of him as to the flatboat’s whereabouts.

He learned first that the rescued family sleeping below was that of a well-to-do planter; that the flood, coming as it did as the result of a crevasse, and therefore suddenly, had taken them completely by surprise, in the middle of the night, four or five days ago; that they had with difficulty escaped to the Indian mound in a field near by, and that they had not been able to take with them any food, or anything else except the clothes they had on. This accounted for the fact that the woman wore only a wrapper over her nightdress, that the man was nearly naked, and that the children were clad only in their thin little nightgowns.

Then Phil learned that The Last of the Flatboats was now in the Tallahatchie River, as he had guessed, not far from the point where it enters the Yazoo, at Greenwood. A little study of the map showed Phil that if this were true, he might expect to reach Vicksburg within four or five days, which in fact is what happened, not on the fourth or fifth, but on the sixth day thereafter, early in the morning.

In the mean time the crew and their guests had eaten up pretty nearly all the boat’s store of provisions, and The Last of the Flatboats had been stripped of her unsightly swaddling-cloth, the tarpaulin. Phil tied her up at the landing near the historic town as proudly as if she had not run away, and misbehaved as she had done.

“She has only been showing us some of the wonders of the Wonderful River, that we should never otherwise have known anything about,” he said.

But this is going far ahead of my story. The boys and their boat were still in the Yazoo, nearly a week’s journey above Vicksburg. So let us return to them.