Gideons Band | Page 2

that the one boat which you might be
seeking you would find quite hidden among walls and roofs, and of all
the rest of the harbor's general fleet you could see little or nothing. Not
so on this great sun-swept, wind-swept, rain-swept, unswept steamboat
levee. You might come up out of any street along that mile-wide front,
and if there were a hundred river steamers in port a hundred you would
behold with one sweep of the eye. Overhead was only the blue dome, in
full view almost from rim to rim; and all about, amid a din of shouting,
whip-cracking, scolding, and laughing, and a multitudinous flutter of
many-colored foot-square flags, each marking its special lot of goods,
were swarms of men--white, yellow, and black--trucking, tumbling,
rolling, hand-barrowing, and "toting" on heads and shoulders a
countless worth of freight in bags, barrels, casks, bales, boxes, and
baskets. Hundreds of mules and drays came and went with this same
wealth, and out beyond all, between wharf and open river, profiled on
the eastern sky, letting themselves be unloaded and reloaded, stood the
compacted, motionless, elephantine phalanx of the boats.
The flood beneath them was up to the wharf's flooring, yet their low,
light-draught hulls, with the freight decks that covered them doubled in
carrying room by their widely overhanging freight guards, were hid by
the wilderness of goods on shore. Hid also were their furnaces, boilers,
and engines on the same deck, sharing it with the cargo. But all their
gay upper works, so toplofty and frail, showed a gleaming white front
to the western sun. You marked each one's jack-staff, that rose mast
high from the unseen prow, and behind it the boiler deck, high over the
boilers. Over the boiler deck was the hurricane roof, above that the
officers' rooms, called the "texas." Above the texas was the pilot-house,
and on either side, well forward of the pilot-house and towering abreast
of each other and above all else--higher than the two soaring derrick
posts at the two forward corners of the passenger and hurricane decks,
higher even than the jack-staff's peak--stood the two great black
chimneys.

And what a populace teemed round and through all! Here was the
Creole, there the New Englander. Here were men of oddest sorts from
the Missouri, Ohio, and nearer and farther rivers. Here were the
Irishman, the German, the Congo, Cuban, Choctaw, Texan, Sicilian;
the Louisiana sugar-planter, the Mississippi cotton-planter,
goat-bearded raftsmen from the swamps of Arkansas, flatboatmen from
the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky; the horse trader, the
slave-driver, the filibuster, the Indian fighter, the circus rider, the
circuit-rider, and men bound for the goldfields of California.
More than half the boats, this April afternoon, flew from the jack-staff
of each, to signify that it was her day to leave, a streaming burgee
bearing her name. A big-lettered strip of canvas drawn along the front
guards of her hurricane-deck told for what port she was "up," and the
growing smoke that swelled from her chimneys showed that five was
her time to back out.
In the midst of the scene, opposite the head of Canal Street--the streets
that run to the New Orleans levee run up-hill and get there head
first--lay a boat which specially belongs to this narrative. A pictorial
poster, down in every café and hotel rotunda of the town, called her
"large, new, and elegant," and such she was in fair comparison with all
the craft on all the sixteen thousand navigable miles of the vast river
and its tributaries. Her goal was Louisville, more than thirteen hundred
miles away. Her steam was up, a velvet-black pitch-pine smoke
billowed from her chimneys, and her red-and-white burgee, gleaming
upon it, named her the Votaress.

II
THE "VOTARESS"
Her first up-river trip! The crowd waiting on the wharf's apron to see
her go was larger and included better types of the people than usual, for
the Votaress was the latest of the Courteney fleet, hence a rival of the
Hayle boats, the most interesting fact that could be stated of anything

afloat on Western waters.
So young was she, this Votaress, so bridally fresh from her Indiana and
Kentucky shipyards, that the big new bell in the mid-front of her
hurricane roof shone in the low sunlight like a wedding jewel. Its
parting strokes had sounded once but would sound twice again before
she could cast off. Both pilots were in the lofty pilot-house, down from
the breast-board of which a light line ran forward to the bell's tongue,
but neither pilot touched the line or the helm. For the captain's use
another cord from the bell hung over the hurricane deck's front and
down to the boiler deck rail, but neither up there on the boiler deck nor
anywhere near