standing could draw
twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their
children. Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association's
expense. These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten
pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from
interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on
drays, in ambulances,--any way, so they got there. They paid in their
twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a
month, and calculate their burial bills.

By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class
ones, were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out
of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river.
Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent.
of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the
association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and
no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the
association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and
leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and
everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result
which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the
busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one
hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some
cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the
fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not
one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers
used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the
members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for
a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like.
However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the
contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and
added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable,
for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed
before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred
and fifty dollars--the association figure--and became firmly fixed
there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member
was hired. The hilarity at the association's expense burst all bounds,
now. There was no e