A negro
deck-hand, the truck-driver, and the white master of the launch shoved
aboard the big sample trunks of the drummers with grunts, profanity, and
much stamping of mud. Presently, without the formality of bell or
whistle, the launch clacked away from the landing and stood up the wide,
muddy river.
The river itself was monotonous and depressing. It was perhaps half a
mile wide, with flat, willowed mud banks on one side and low shelves of
stratified limestone on the other.
Trading-points lay at ten- or fifteen-mile intervals along the great
waterway. The typical landing was a dilapidated shed of a store half
covered with tin tobacco signs and ancient circus posters. Usually, only
one man met the launch at each landing, the merchant, a democrat in his
shirt-sleeves and without a tie. His voice was always a flat, weary
drawl, but his eyes, wrinkled against the sun, usually held the
shrewdness of those who make their living out of two-penny trades.
At each place the red-headed peanut-buyer slogged up the muddy bank and
bargained for the merchant's peanuts, to be shipped on the down-river
trip of the first St.
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