Chapter 4

Chapter 4
The Boys' Ambition

WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my
comrades in our village on the west
bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman.
We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.
When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns;
the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us
all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope
that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a
steamboatman always remained.

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis,
and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day
was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and
empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this.
After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now,
just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine
of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so;
one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores,
with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall,
chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep--
with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down;
a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk,
doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or
three lonely little freight piles scattered about the 'levee;'
a pile of 'skids' on the slope of the stone-paved wharf,
and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them;
two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody
to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them;
the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi,
rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense
forest away on the other side; the 'point' above the town,
and the 'point' below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning
it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant
and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above
one of those remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman,
famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up
the cry, 'S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene changes!
The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious
clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours
out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead
town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go
hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf.
Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming
boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time.
And the boat