the saloon, and leaving her in bed I took a turn round the deck to sharpen my appetite. It seemed to me that we ought to be making Louisville sometime that day, and seeing a bluff old chap leaning at the rail I inquired of him when we might expect to arrive.
He looked at me in amazement, removed his cigar, and says:
'Gawd bless mah soul, suh! Did you say Louisville?'
'Certainly,' says I. 'When will we get there?'
'On this boat, suh? Never, 'pon my word.'
'What?' I gazed at the man, thunderstruck.
'This boat, suh, is for St Louis — not Louisville. This is the Mississippi river, suh, not the Ohio. For Louisville you should have caught the
'My God,' says I. 'But they told me —' And then I remembered my shouted conversation in the rain with that drivelling buffoon at the steamboat office; the useless old bastard had caught the word 'Louis' only, and given me the wrong boat. Which meant that I was some hundreds of miles from where I wanted to be-and Cassy was as far from the free states as ever.
If I was dismayed, you should have seen her; she went blazing wild and hurled a pot of powder at my head, which fortunately missed.
'You fool! You blockhead! Hadn't you the sense to look at the tickets?' So much for all my kindness that she'd been so full of.
'It wasn't my fault,' says I, trying to explain, but she cut me off.
'Do you realise the danger we are in? These are
'Stuff and nonsense! We can catch a boat from St Louis back to Louisville and be there in two days; where's the danger?'
'For a runaway like me? Turning south again, towards the people who may be coming up river to look for me. Oh, dear Lord, why did I trust an ape like you?'
'Ape, you insolent black slut? Blast you, if you had taken thought yourself, instead of whoring about this last two days like a bitch in heat, you'd have seen we were on the wrong road. D'you expect me to know one river from another in this lousy country?'
Our discussion continued on these lines for a spell, and then we quieted down. There was nothing to be done except wait through an extra two days in the slave states, and while Cassy was fearful of the prolonged risk, she said she supposed we could make Louisville, and then Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, safe enough. However, the shock didn't make our voyage any happier, and we were barely on speaking terms by the time we reached St Louis, where some more bad news awaited us. Although the river was thick with steamboats, traffic was so heavy that there wasn't a state-room, or even a maindeck passage, to be had for two days, which meant that we must kick our heels in a hotel, waiting for the
We kept under cover for those forty-eight hours, except for one trip that I made down to the steamship office, and to buy one of the new Army Colt revolvers, just in case. At the same time I was able to take a look at the town, which interested me, because in those days St Louis was a great swarming place that never went to bed, and was full of every species of humanity from the ends of America and beyond. There were all the Mississippi characters, steamboat people, niggers, planters, and so on, and in addition the place was choc-a-bloc with military from the Mexican war, with Easterners and Europeans on their way to the Western gold fields, with hunters and traders from the plains, men in red shirts and buckskins, bearded to the eyes and brown as nuts, salesmen and drummers, clergymen and adventurers, ladies in all the splendours of the Eastern salons shuddering delicately away from the sight of some raucous mountain savage crouched vomiting in the muddy roadway with his bare backside, tanned black as mahogany, showing through his cutaway leather leggings. There were skinners with their long whips, sharps in tall hats with paste pins in their shirts, tall hard men chewing tobacco with their long coats thrown back to show the new five- and six-shooters stuck in thefr belts; there was even a fellow in a kilt lounging outside a billiard saloon with a bunch of yarning loafers as they eyed the white and yellow whores, gay as peacocks, tripping by along the boardwalk. From the levee, crammed with bales and boxes and machinery, to the narrow, mud- churned streets uptown, it was all bustle and noise and hurry, and stuck in the middle was the church St Louis was all so proud of, with its Grecian pillars and pointed fresco — just like a London club with a spire stuck on top.
And I was sauntering back to the hotel, smoking a cigar, and congratulating myself that we would be on our way tomorrow, when I chanced to stop outside an office on one of the streets, just to cast an idle eye over the official bills and notices posted there. You know the way of it; you are just gaping for gaping's sake, and then suddenly you see something that shrivels the hairs right down to your backside. There it was, a new bill, staring me full in the face:
ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD!!
I will pay the above sum to any person or persons who
will capture, DEAD or ALIVE, the Murderer and Slave
stealer calling himself TOM ARNOLD, who is wanted for
the brutal killings of George Hiscoe and Thomas Little,
in Marshall County, Mississippi, and stealing away the
female slave, CASSIOPEIA, the property of Jacob Forster, of
Blue Mountain Spring Plantation, Tippah County, Mississippi.
The fugitive is six feet in height, long-legged and well
built, customarily wears a Black Moustache and Whiskers,
and has Genteel Manners. He pretends to be a Texian, but
speaks with a Foreign Accent. Satisfactory proofs of
identity will be required.
ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD!!
Offered in the name and authority of
Joseph W. Matthews,
Governor of Mississippi.
I didn't faint away dead on the spot, but I had to hold on to a rail while the full import of it sank in. They had found the bodies, and assumed I had murdered them, and the traps were in full cry. But here-hundreds of miles away? And then I remembered the telegraph. They'd be looking in every town from St Louis to Memphis by now — you'd have thought, with killings happening every day in their savage country, that they wouldn't make such a row over another two: but of course it was the slave-stealing that had really stirred them up. Here was added reason for getting to the free states quickly; in Ohio they wouldn't give a damn how many nigger-beaters' throats I'd cut, especially in such a good cause-I'd learned enough in my brief unhappy experience of the United States to know that it was two countries even then, and they hated each other like poison. Yes, up there I'd be safe, and on trembling legs I hurried back to the hotel, to break the glad news that they were after us with a vengeance.
Cassy gasped and went pale, but she didn't cry, and while I was stamping about chewing my nails and swearing she got out a map which we had bought, and began to study it. Her finger was trembling as she traced the route down from St Louis to the Cairo fork, and then north-east up the Ohio river. At Louisville she stopped.
