he sought
the office after nine o'clock, and stood outside the bar talking to his
friend, who had little to do, since most of the freight had been shipped
through, and his bills for Paducah were all ready. The striker talked
with the mud-clerk, but watched the throng of passengers who drank with
each other at the bar, smoked in the "social hall," read and wrote at
the tables in the gentlemen's cabin, or sat with doffed hats and chatted
gallantly in the ladies' cabin, which was visible as a distant
background, seen over a long row of tables with green covers and under a
long row of gilded wooden stalactites, which were intended to be
ornamental. The little pendent prisms beneath the chandeliers rattled
gayly as the boat trembled at each stroke of her wheels, and gaping
backwoodsmen, abroad for the first time, looked at all the rusty
gingerbread-work, and wondered if kings were able to afford anything
half so fine as the cabin of the "palatial steamer Iatan," as she was
described on the bills. The confused murmur of many voices, mixed with
the merry tinkling of the glass pendants, gave the whole an air of
excitement.

But the striker did not see the man he was looking for. "Who got on at
Cairo? I think I saw a man from our part of the country," he said.

"I declare, I don't know," said the mud-clerk, who drawled his words in
a cold-blooded way. "Let me look. Here's A. Robertson, and T. Le Fevre,
and L.B. Sykes, and N. Anderson."

"Where is Anderson going?"

"Paid through to Louisville. Do you know him?"

But just then Norman Anderson himself walked in, and went up to the bar
with a new acquaintance. They did not smoke the pipe of peace, like red
Americans, but, like white Americans, they had a mysterious liquid
carefully compounded, and by swallowing this they solemnly sealed their
new-made friendship after the curious and unexplained rite in use among
their people.

Norman had been dispatched on a collecting trip, and having nine hundred
and fifty dollars in his pocket, he felt as much elated as if it had
been his own money. The gentleman with whom he drank, had a band of
crape around his white hat. He seemed very nearsighted.

"If that greeny is a friend of yours, Gus, I declare you'd better tell
him not to tie to the serious-looking young fellow in the white hat and
gold specs, unless he means to part with all his loose change before
bed-time."

That is what the mud-clerk drawled to August the striker, but th