Vandemarks Folly | Page 9

of salt pork, finishing with pie. All the cook had to

do was to boil potatoes, cook eggs when we had them and make coffee;
for the most of our victuals we bought as we passed through the
country. The captain had a basket of potatoes or apples on the deck
which he used as cash carriers. He would put a piece of money in a
potato and throw it to whoever on shore had anything to sell, and the
goods, if they could be safely thrown, would come whirling over to be
caught by some of us on deck. We got many a nice chicken or loaf of
bread or other good victuals in that way; and we lived on the fat of the
land. All sorts of berries and fruit, milk, butter, eggs, cakes, pies and
the like came to the canal without any care on our part; everything was
cheap, and every meal was a feast. This first breakfast was a trial, but I
made a noble meal of it. The sailor, Bill, pretended to believe that I had
killed a man on shore and had gone to sea to escape the gallows. Ace
and Paddy to frighten me, I suppose, talked about the dangers and
difficulties of the driver's life; while the captain gave all of us stern
looks over his meal and looked fiercely at me as if to deny that he had
ever been kind. When the meal was over he ordered Ace to the
tow-path, and told him to take me along and show me how to drive.
"Here," he snapped at me, "is where we make a spoon or spoil a horn.
Go 'long with you!"
Ace climbed on the back of one of the horses. I looked up wondering
what I was to do.
"You'll walk," said Ace; "an' keep your eyes skinned."
So we started off. Each horse leaned into the collar, and slowly the
hundred tons or so of dead weight started through the water. The team
knew that it was of no use to surge against the load to get it started, as
horses do with a wagon; but they pulled steadily and slowly, gradually
getting the boat under way, and soon it was moving along with the
team at a brisk walk, and with less labor than a hundredth part of the
weight would have called for on land. I have always believed in inland
waterways for carrying the heavy freight of this nation; because the
easiest and cheapest way to transport anything is to put it in the water
and float it. This lesson I learned when Ace whipped up Dolly and Jack
and took our craft off toward Syracuse.

It was a hard day for me. We were passing boats all the time, and we
had to make speed to keep craft which had no right to pass us from
getting by, especially just before reaching a lock. To allow another boat
to steal our lockage from us was a disgrace; and many of the fights
between the driver boys grew out of the rights o£ passing by and the
struggle to avoid delays at the locks. Sometimes such affairs were not
settled by the boys on the tow-path--they fought off the skirmishes; the
real battles were between the captains or members of the crews.
If there were rules I don't know now what they were, and nobody paid
much attention to them. Of course we let the passenger boats pass
whenever they overtook us, unless we could beat them into a lock. We
delayed them then by laying our boat out into the middle of the canal
and quarreling until we reached the lock; under cover maybe of some
pretended mistake. Our laying the boat out to shut off a passing rival
was dangerous to the slow boat, for the reason that a collision meant
that the strongly-built stem-end of the boat coming up from behind
could crush the weaker stern of the obstructing craft. Such are some of
the things I had to learn.

3
The passing of us by a packet brought me my first grief. She came up
behind us with her horses at the full trot. Their boat was down the canal
a hundred yards or so at the end of the tow-line; and just before the boat
itself drew even with ours she was laid over by her steersman to the
opposite side of the ditch, her horses were checked so as to let her line
so slacken as to drop down under our boat, her horses were whipped up
by a sneering boy on a tall bay steed, her team went outside ours on the
tow-path, and the passage was made. They made, as was always the
case, a