something about the handling of cattle,--and in those days this meant breaking and working them. It was a hard winter, and there was so much work on the farm that I got only one month's schooling.
The teacher was a man named Lockwood. He kept telling us that we ought to read about farming, and study the business by which we expected to live; and this made a deep impression on me. Lockwood was a real teacher, and like all such worked without realizing it on stuff more lasting than steel or stone,--young, soft human beings. I did not see that there was much to study about as to driving on the canal; and when I told him that he said that the business of taking care of the horses and feeding them was something that ought to be closely studied if I expected to be a farmer. This looked reasonable to me; and I soon got to be one of those driver boys who were noted for the sleekness and fatness of their teams, and began getting the habit of studying any task I had to do. But I was more interested in cattle than anything else, and was sorry when spring came and we unmoored the old boat and pulled down to Albany for a cargo west. This summer was like the last, except that I was now a skilled driver, larger, stronger, and more confident than before.
I used to ask leave to go on ahead on some fast boat when we drew near to the Sproule farm, so I could spend a day or two at farm work, see the family, and better than this, I am afraid--for they were pretty good to me--look the cattle over, pet and feed the calves, colts and lambs, count the little pigs and generally enjoy myself. On these packet boats, too, I could talk with travelers, and try to strike the trail of John Rucker.
I had one never-failing subject of conversation with the Sproules and all my other acquaintances--how to find my mother. We went over the whole matter a thousand times. I had no post-office address, and my mother had depended on Rucker's getting Captain Sproule's address at Syracuse--which of course he had never meant to do--and had not asked me to inquire at any place for mail. I wrote letters to her at Buffalo as she had asked me to do in her letter, but they were returned unclaimed. It was plain that Rucker meant to give me the slip, and had done so. He could be relied upon to balk every effort my mother might make to find me. I inquired for letters at the post-offices in Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany and Tempe at every chance, but finally gave up in despair.
2
I had only one hope, and that was to find the hump-backed man with the black beard--the man Rucker was talking to on the boat we had passed on our voyage eastward before I found my home deserted. This was a very slim chance, but it was all there was left. Captain Sproule had noticed him, and said he had seen him a great many times before. He was a land agent, who made it a business to get emigrants to go west, away up the lakes somewhere.
"If your stepfather had any money," said the captain, "you can bet that hunchback tried to bamboozle him into some land deal, and probably did. And if he did, he'll remember him and his name, and where he left the canal or the Lakes, and maybe where he located."
"I must watch for him," I said.
"We'll all watch for him," said the captain.
Paddy was not with us the next summer; but Bill was, and so was Ace, with whom I was now on the best of terms. We all agreed to keep our eyes peeled for a hunchback with a black beard. Bill said he'd spear him with a boathook as soon as he hove in sight for fear he'd get away. Ace was sure the hunchback was a witch[3] who had spirited off my folks; and looked upon the situation without much hope. He would agree to sing out if he saw this monster; but that was as far as he would promise to help me.
[3] "Witch" in American dialect is of the common gender. "Wizard" has no place in the vocabulary.--G.v.d.M.
The summer went by with no news and no hunchback; and that winter I stayed with an aunt of Captain Sproule's, taking care of her stock. I got five dollars a month, and my keep, but no schooling. She wanted me to stay the summer with her, and offered me what was almost a man's wages; which shows how strong I was getting, and how much of a farmer I was. I did stay and helped through the spring's work; but on Captain Sproule's second passing of Mrs. Fogg's farm, I joined him, not as a driver, but as a full hand. I kept thinking all the time of my mother, and felt that if I kept to the canal I surely should find some trace of her. In this I was doing what any detective would have done; for everything sooner or later passed through the Erie Canal--news, goods and passengers. But I had little hope when I thought of the flood which surged back and forth through this river of news, and of the little bit of a net with which I fished it for information.
All this time the stream of emigration and trade swelled, and swelled until it became a torrent. I thought at times that all the people in the world had gone crazy to move west. We took families, even neighborhoods, household goods, live stock, and all the time more and more people. They were talking about Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, and once in a while the word Iowa was heard; and one family astonished us by saying that they were going to Texas.
The Mormons had already made their great migration to Utah, and the Northwestern Trail across the plains to Oregon and to California took its quota of gold-seekers every year. John C. Fremont had crossed the continent to California, and caused me to read my first book, The Life of Kit Carson.
Bill, who never could speak in hard enough terms about sailing on the mud-puddle Lakes, which he had never done as yet, once went to Pittsburgh, meaning to go from there down the Ohio and up the Missouri. He had heard of the Missouri River fur-trade, and big wages on the steamboats carrying emigrants from St. Louis up-stream to Nebraska, Iowa and Dakota Territory, and bringing back furs and hides. But at Pittsburgh he was turned back by news of the outbreak of cholera at New Orleans, a disease which had struck us with terror along the canal two or three years before. That summer there were medicine pedlers working on all the boats, selling a kind of stuff they called "thieves' vinegar" which was claimed to be a medicine that was used in the old country somewhere by thieves who robbed the infected houses in safety, protected by this wonderful "vinegar"; and only told how it was made to save their lives when they were about to be hanged. A man offered me a bottle of this at Rochester, for five dollars, and finally came down to fifty cents. This made me think it was of no use, and I did not buy, though just before I had been wondering whether I had not better borrow the money of Captain Sproule; so I saved my money, which was getting to be a habit of mine.
California, the Rockies, the fur-trade, the Ohio Valley, the new cities up the Lakes and the new farms in the woods back of them, and some few tales of the prairies--all these voices of the West kept calling us more loudly and plainly every year, and every year I grew stronger and more confident of myself.
The third year I had made up my mind that I would get work on a passenger boat so as to be able to see and talk with more people who were going up and down the Lakes and the canal. I went from one to another as I met folks who were coming back from the West, and asked every one if he had known a man out west named John Rucker; but, though I found traces of two or three Ruckers in the course of the three years, it did not take long in each case to find out that it was not the man I hated so, and so much wanted to find. People used to point me out as the boy who was trying to find a man named Rucker; and two or three came to me and told me of men they had met who might be my man. I became known to many who traveled the canal as being engaged in some mysterious quest. I suppose I had an anxious and rather strange expression as I made my inquiries.
It took me two years to make up my mind to change to a passenger boat, so slow was I to alter my way of doing things. I have always been that way. My wife read Knickerbocker's History of New York after the children were grown up and she had more time for reading, and always told the
