The Way of the Mississippi

By Raymond S. Spears

The Way of the Mississippi by Raymond S. Spears is about the various white men and Native Americans who travel along the Mississippi River and their stories. Excerpt: "THE Indians who knew the Mississippi River before the advent of Joliet and La Salle named the vast phenomenon " The Father of Waters." White men who live upon the river or along its swamp-land banks now know whence came that expressive term. After one has been with the stream long enough for its novelty to have worn away, acquaintance and proximity do not diminish the wonder aroused by the huge torrent. Far from it!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066439194

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Raymond S. Spears

The Way of the Mississippi

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066439194

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I. TOSKIN BUYS A PRETTY SHANTY BOAT.

CHAPTER II. JUST NATURALLY SENTIMENTAL.

CHAPTER III. AN ARTIST PRACTICES.

CHAPTER IV. WHEN A MAN HAS DONE SOMETHING.

CHAPTER V. A FAVOR TO A RIVER PIRATE.

CHAPTER VI. DANGLING RIVER TEMPTATIONS.

CHAPTER VII. THE RIVER DOES TO MEN.

CHAPTER VIII. THEY WALK IN RIVER NIGHT

CHAPTER IX. THE CRAVEN LURKS

CHAPTER X. AN OLD MAN'S KISS

CHAPTER I.

TOSKIN BUYS A PRETTY SHANTY BOAT.

Table of Contents

APALE blue shanty boat eddied down Muskrat Bend and drifted the mud against the mud bar just below Mendova. There it was held by the bottom for a day before any one noticed. Then the Sneak, a semicruiser belonging to the city police department swung down into the eddy, and Tappan, at the wheel, noticed that the shanty boat was neither moored to stakes nor anchored offshore.

When he entered the boat, as he did after hailing it, and not receiving an answer, he found lying on the bunk a dead man. The body was stark and cold, for murder had been done. Some one had shot the victim while he was sound asleep, apparently, through a window opposite the bunk.

Tappan knew the Mississippi as well as any one. He not only had the river police experience, but he had been third mate on a river steamer for years, and previous to that, he had been a rafter and towboat hand, and as a boy and young man he had lived on shanty boats with his father, an old river storeboater and fur buyer. He knew the river signs with any of them.

With his whistle, Tappan summoned Policeman Daker, who patrolled Front Street, from the near side of which Mendova Wharf was paved down to the current, and part of the paving was covered by the advancing mud bar of the point above town. Daker came running across the baked mud and with Tappan, made as close an examination of the shanty boat premises as possible, in order to learn what they could about the circumstances and also to ascertain the identity of the victim. Evidently everything had been taken which would help serve this purpose, indicating a robbery motive.

There was nothing in the boat to disclose any secrets. There was no scrap of new paper, not a bit of pencil writing on walls or in notebook, no photographs of girls or men. But a banjo standing in a corner was interesting. It was a small instrument, yet beautiful in make and tone, as Tappan found when he picked a bar of Trip Me Down the River, finding the strings almost in perfect tune.

Tappen examined the fingers of the corpse, but there was no least mark on the tips to show that the victim was the banjo player. This fact led Tappan to scrutinize the instrument much more closely—but no name was written on the head, nor scratched on the rim or neck.

The victim of the murder was five feet, eight inches tall, with dark, wavy hair, dark complexion, dark brown eyes, of slender build and with no mark of real labor in his appearance. His clothes were all good, his coat and waistcoat hanging on a hook over the hunk, his trousers lying on a. chair, neatly folded to preserve the creases, and a shirt that must have cost at least twelve dollars was lying over the back of the chair.

In the waistcoat pocket was a thin, expensive watch: in the trouser pocket was some small change; two or three manicure tools were in a case, and the whole boat was permeated with a rather strong perfume, like musk in its weight, but floral rather than animal in its composition. Tappan sniffed this perfume over and over again, and added it to his memories.

The dead truck was sent for, and the body removed to the morgue: The evening Battle-Ax voiced the general impression that this was one of the unsolvable mysteries that are the peculiar type of the Mississippi from Cairo to the Passess—a river mystery which the Father of Waters would avenge in its own way.

Tappan, being a mere policeman, resigned the case to the city detective force, and finger-print experts photographed the stove lid handle, the pearl pocket knife blade, and a dozen other features that might show something on comparison with the collection of finger prints in the Bertillon Laboratory. But these revealed only prints of the victim's own fingers and thumbs.

There was in the kitchen, or galley, of the little boat plenty of material for the microscopic and photomicrography amusement and practice of the various department experts. It was noticeable that the man had black tea, as well as a fifty-five cent grade of coffee: he was stocked up with supplies for a long trip down the river, including a sack of flour in a moisture-proof tin can, good quality bacon and ham, a jar of sugar, jug of sorghum, and various things to eat. The detectives told what a lot of things they deduced from the various edibles and the appearance of the host. Tappan was not quoted at all.

But Tappan knew a good many things which his up-the-bank detective associates had overlooked. The hickory nuts in the bow hold were from the Columbus hickories; the boat was a beautifully built craft, with planed stringers., tongue-and~groove planking, roofing with matched board lining. and five by five inch timber for oar pins and mooring heads. The long sweeps for rowing the boat were beautifully balanced. and the hull, which was twenty-four feet long and seven feet wide, rowed like a skiff.

The shanty boat was such a one as an old shanty boater would be apt to build. It had been carefully constructed, and there was not a drop of water in the hull, and the cabin was almost perfectly dust-tight—it could lie down the lee of a mile-long sand bar and the wind of a norther would hardly blow puffs of dirt through any crack or seam.

For several days the detectives worked up and down the water front and had Tappan take them up the river for miles, trying to find some one who had seen the boat, but the shanty boaters, fishermen, drifters and others up the bends and along the banks all denied any knowledge whatever of the boat. Two or three hundred people went to the morgue and viewed the victim. but not one betrayed any personal interest in the matter.

The autopsy revealed what post mortem operation usually do reveal in such affairs: the bullet had taken a certain course through sundry and divers wonderfully named parts, organs and cavities, and had lodged under the skin in the back, showing, as the coroner said, that the murderer had evidently stood over his victim and fired straight down into the sleeping man, but because the coroner and doctors said this, Tappan began to wonder if it were true.

The pale blue shanty boat was towed by the Sneak up into Fox River, and moored in the Wild Goose Nest, so called. This was a bend of Fox River, opposite Runway Street, where some willows and brush grew along the bank. Here many shanty boaters of a particular type landed in and pulled out from time to time. Few places were of more evil repute from the Missouri River forks to the Gulf of Mexico than the Wild Goose Nest. Above Ferry Street landing, however, was the Duck’s Nest, where perfectly reputable shanty boaters