CHAPTER VI.
A CUB-PILOT'S EXPERIENCE.
WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other
delays, the poor old * Paul Jones' fooled away about two weeks in
making the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me
a chance to get acq* tainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me
how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more
potent than ever for me.
It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had
taken deck passage—more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six
dollars of me on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me
the day after we should arrive. But he probably died or forgot, for
he never came. It was doubtless the former, since he had said his
parents were wealthy, and he only travelled deck passage because it
was cooler.1
I soon discovered two things. One was that a vessel would not
be likely to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve
years; and the other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my
pocket would not suffice for so imposing an exploration as I had
planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship. Therefore it
followed that I must contrive a new career. The * Paul Jones ' was
now bound for St. Louis. I planned a siege against my pilot, and at
the end of three hard days he surrendered. He agreed to teach me
the Mississippi Biver from New Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred
dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after gradu-
ating. I entered upon the small enterprise of * learning' twelve or
thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy
1 « Deck' passage—tVe. steerage passage.