er barges and rafts drifting as they were drifting, with
their wheat and corn and whisky to that common market at the river's
mouth.

Sometimes they dragged their boat back up-stream, painfully,
laboriously; three or four months of unremitting toil sufficed for this,
when the crew sweated at the towing ropes from dawn until dark, that
the rich planters in Kentucky and Tennessee might have tea and wine for
their tables, and silks and laces for their womenfolk. More often
they abandoned their boat and tramped north, armed and watchful, since
cutthroats and robbers haunted the roads, and river-men, if they had not
drunk away their last dollar in New Orleans, were worth spoiling. Or,
if it offered, they took passage on some fast sailing clipper bound for
Baltimore or Philadelphia, and crossed the mountains to the Ohio and
were within a week or two of home.

Bruce Carrington had seen the day of barge and raft reach its zenith,
had heard the first steam packet's shrieking whistle which sounded the
death-knell of the ancient order, though the shifting of the trade was
a slow matter and the glory of the old did not pass over to the new at
once, but lingered still in mighty fleets of rafts and keel-boats and
in the Homeric carousals of some ten thousand of the half-horse,
half-alligator breed that nightly gathered in New Orleans. Broad-horns
and mud-sills they were called in derision. A strange race of aquatic
pioneers, jeans and leather clad, the rifle and the setting-pole equally
theirs, they came out of every stream down which a scow could be thrust
at flood-time; from tiny settlements far back among the hills; from
those bustling sinks of iniquity, the river towns. But now, surely, yet
almost imperceptibly, their commerce was slipping from them. At all the
landings they were being elbowed by the newcomers--men who wore brass
buttons and gold braid, and shiny leather shoes instead of moccasins;
men with white hands and gold rings on their fingers and diamonds in
their shirts--men whose hair and clothing kept the rancid smell of oil
and smoke and machinery.

After the reading of the warrant that morning, Charley Balaam had shown
Carrington the road to the Forks, assuring him when they separated that
with a little care and decent use of his eyes it would be possible to
fetch up there and not pass plumb through the settlement without knowing
where he was. But Carrington had found the Forks without difficulty. He
had seen the