Crows & Cards by Joseph Helgerson Read Free Book Online

and I'll be teaching 'em to you."
    ***
    So that's how we passed our trip to St. Louis—Chilly talking, me listening while curled up as far away from the railing as I was worth, 'cause there was a powerful lot of muddy, deep water moving along beneath us.
    The Rose Melinda shot down the middle of the river, where the current was swiftest. We passed wood yards like my pa's and gristmills and blossoming apple orchards and sprouting tobacco fields—whistling along like a teakettle all the while. Chilly claimed we must have been ripping off a good ten miles an hour when we weren't stopping to pick up letters and passengers and livestock. Anyone strong enough to wave a white hankie from the shore got stopped for.
    Night finally eased down over the trees; the river sank into darkness, which made the waters seem all the deeper. Every once in a while you could see a farmhouse lantern twinkling brave as Joshua at Jericho, but mostly what you had was black. Two or three lights meant a village, which was rare. The only lights with us regular belonged to the Rose Melinda herself, and they shone on the water like windows to another world, one you could reach only by diving to the bottom of the river and opening a door. Believe you me, I didn't have no plans of going down there.
    After a while a half-moon broke through the tree line, turning everything the prettiest ivory. Not that I had the strength to appreciate it any. Right about then Chilly started up with ghost stories concerning floating barrels that were haunted, and hangman trees that dropped all their leaves in July, and sunken steamers whose lights had lured many a pilot to his doom. At least such stories helped keep my mind off all my brothers and sisters, curled up so cozy in the loft back home. But eventually Chilly got tired of talking, which left me alone with the ghosts and the river and thoughts of my family. Finding himself some floor space that wasn't alive with tobacco juice, Chilly rustled up some sleep. But I stayed wide awake the whole night through, taking in the wonder of it all. Not even a feather bed could have put me out.
    We were still sailing along under moonlight when we met up with the Missouri River. I couldn't spy its muddy waters, but Chilly woke up enough to claim he could smell 'em, and before long he had me believing my nose was full of stampeding buffalo, blowing grasses, smoky Injuns, and whatever else the Missouri rubbed up against way out west. The adventures sunk in all them smells made me feel pretty bouncy about my decision to bail out of being a tanner.
    Not long after that, dawn snuck up on us, making everything fresh and lovely.
    Then we rounded the last bend, and ... well, all of a sudden I couldn't swallow, or spit, or nothing. Stretching out before us was St. Louis, and for a bit I forgot I ever knew how to talk. The town didn't seem to have no beginning or end, just stretched on and on. I'd never seen such a sight before and don't imagine I ever will again—not for the first time, I won't. The place was a hundred times bigger and grander than anything I'd ever come across. Wait, better make that a thousand times bigger and grander. You couldn't compare log walls and dirt floors to something like this. I reckon that ancient Rome couldn't have been any more breathtaking to them ancient Romans.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    A S THE R OSE M ELINDA CHUGGED ALONG the levee, hunting for an open spot, we cruised past mounds of molasses barrels and ox yokes and rope coils and bales of fur pelts and hogsheads of tobacco and small pyramids made from pigs of lead. Behind all that rose warehouses and church spires and factory chimneys climbing three or four stories high, at least. My eyeballs couldn't jump fast enough to take in everything. Mixed in with all the sights were the tinkling of ships' bells and whistles and the ripeness of horses and mules and oxen that were pulling drays and buckboards and carts all piled high with goods bound for log cabins and