They did not recognize it as a
thunderous "Halt!" and kept on. Less than a minute later, a shell
exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass
and damaging the decoration. Zeb Leavenworth tumbled into a corner.
"Gee-mighty, Sam!" he said. "What do they mean by that?"
Clemens stepped from the visitors' bench to the wheel and brought the
boat around.
"I guess--they want us--to wait a minute--Zeb," he said.
They were examined and passed. It was the last steamboat to make the
trip through from New Orleans to St. Louis. Mark Twain's pilot days were
over. He would have grieved had he known this fact.
"I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since," he
long afterward declared, "and I took a measureless pride in it."
At the time, like many others, he expected the war to be brief, and his
life to be only temporarily interrupted. Within a year, certainly, he
would be back in the pilot-house. Meantime the war must be settled; he
would go up to Hannibal to see about it.
XVIII.
THE SOLDIER
When he reached Hannibal, Samuel Clemens found a very mixed condition of
affairs. The country was in an uproar of war preparation; in a border
State there was a confusion of sympathies, with much ignorance as to what
it was all about.
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