me as
being scalded beyond recovery. By the time they reached Memphis they
knew most of the details: At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning,
while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis, four
out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded with
fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown out.
Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and
crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale
steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the
Mississippi a river of death and tears.

Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor
of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty
others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry had
inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was
considered hopeless.

Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the
explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred
yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt,
he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What he did
after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken fire; the
rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the
wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be
saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and
landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours
until help could come. Henry was among those who were insensible by that
time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded
in his work of rescue; it will never be known.

His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and
remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry's presence
on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own
absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. He
wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the
doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew. He sent word of
the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and was in
East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless
task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis ladies were
acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy's youth and
striking features, joined i