EPISODES IN PILOT LIF& 439
against the bluff hank of the river would be to insure the loss of
many lives. He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow
water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in
escaping through them he was fatally burned. He had been urged
to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply—
* I will not go. If I go, nobody will be saved ; if J stay, no one
will be lost but ma I will stay.'
There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost
but the pilot's. There used to be a monument to tb?g young fellow,
in that Memphis graveyard. While we tarried in Memphis on our
down trip, I started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that
I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished.
The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead—
blown up, near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I
had known had fallen in the war—one or two of them shot down at
the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom I had
steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in New Orleans,
one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the
city, and had never been seen again—was murdered and thrown into
the river, it was thought; that Ben Thornburgh was dead long ago;
also his wild * cub * whom I used to quarrel with, all through every
daylight watch. A heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in
hot water, always in mischief. An Arkansas passenger brought an
enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the
hurricane deck. Thornburgh *s * cub' could not rest till he had gone
there and unchained the bear, to * see what he would do/ He was
promptly gratified. The bear chased VT^ around and around the
deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning
through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's
coatoail and went into fche texas to chew it. The off-watch turned
out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. He presently
grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. He ranged the whole
boat—visited every part of it, with an advance guard of Seeing
people in front of V»m and a voiceless vacancy behind him\ a&d when
his owner captured him at last, those two were the osly visible
beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a
solitude*