The "Coal Queen"

by RICHARD P. BISSELL

1

I PLUGGED up and down the Illinois River for a couple of years as deck hand on the towboats, hauling coal from Havana up to Joliet, and then in the drainage canal up to Chicago, and the draft board took the second mate, so Captain Bloodworth called me up to the pilothouse and said, “You’re the new second mate,”I took my paper suitcase out of the pigpen and up to the mates’ room, and one thing sure, that mates’ room smelled better than the deck hands’ bunkroom, and even had a light in the bunk to read by, and a clean blanket with no fuel oil or coal ground into it. You go out and carry ratchets and chains and those hundredfoot lock lines for a while and you will understand what I felt like to be a mate. I couldn’t have felt any belter if they’d made me governor of the state.

I was mate there for over a year. We brought up a lot of coal from down below, and if summer nights in the canal weren’t much of a treat to the nose, and winter nights pulling ice cakes out of the lock gates weren’t very romantic, still it was a hundred and forty-five a month and all you could eat, and ten days off with pay every forty, a good tavern near the dock at Joliet, and the boat was a home.

One afternoon a few weeks before Christmas when the wind from Lake Michigan was slicing down through the frame houses and factories, we had just tied off six loads at the Joliet landing and the shore watchman came hunting me up where I was having coffee in the galley.

“Ole Murphy he wants to see you up in the office,”he said. “My, I wishl I was a big mate so’s I could set in the galley drinkin’ coffee.”

“You wanna make this trip down river and back for me?” I said.

“I gotta get back,” he said.

I went up to the office and Helen, the new office girl with the glasses, told me to go right in, that Captain Murphy was waiting for me.

“Not that I think you’ll ever amount to a damn,” says Murphy looking out the window at the canal with a sour look, “but the pilot on the Coal Queen fell off a barge last night and got himself drownded like a jackass and the boat is tied up. Now you go and pack up and take the train for Morgantown — you can be there tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling a little dizzy. “But I’m no pilot, and where in hell is Morgantown? I never heard of it.”

“West Virginia,” he said. “Monongahela River. You stand a few watches and you’ll either be a pilot or in the nut house. Now get goin’. Expense money from Miss Rundel.”

“I never knew the company had boats way over there,”I said.

“There’s a lot of other things you don’t know,” he said, “but don’t let the strain injure your brains.”

A couple of days later, after missing a train in Pittsburgh and other incidents, including a big drunk and a black eye and a girl from Donora called Hazel, I got off a crummy old day coach and there I was in Morgantown, and a guy comes up and says, “Are you Bissell?”

“Yes, I am, and where is the boat?”

He loaded me in his car and said we would go out to the landing and I could go to work right away, they had only been doing day work since the pilot drowned — the captain was working days and they tied up nights.

We came down across some tracks toward the river and I noticed a little old dirty boat with a telescoping pilothouse and a single stack, a piece of marine junk overdue for the scrap yard.

“Who owns that palatial yacht?” I said.

“Why, that’s the Coal Queen,” he said. “That’s the boat.”

“Uh-huh,”I said. “Well, let’s you and me go right down to the depot again. I can probably still get a train out this afternoon.”

“ Why,”says the shore boss looking hurt, “what’s the matter?”

“Why, man oh man, I just came off the InlandCoal, 1350 horsepower Atlas Imperial. What makes you think I’m gonna live in this old converted oil drum?” I said. “Look at the stack, tied up there with baling wire. Look at that deck —looks like Blum’s junk yard. Look at them tow knees all bunged over. And what are them two dwarfs standin’ there all over coal dust? Deck hands, I suppose, or is that the captain and chief engineer?”

Well, I went aboard. What the hell, it was awfully cold back on the Illinois. I pretty near changed my mind again once I got aboard though. What a layout. First place, all the officers, the deck hands, and the cook slept, in one bunkroom in a great pile of bunks, suitcases, pillows with no pillowcases, shoes, overalls, comic books, oily blankets, newspapers, shaving cream, oilskins, dirty socks, orange peel, cigarette butts, coffee cups, underwear, rubber boots, foot powder, razors, Western Stories, and cough syrup. And in order to get the most benefit out of all this, the system was to keep all the windows sealed tight and get an oil-soaked engineer and a couple of ripe deck hands in there, get the cook to fire up his pipe with some Plough Boy, turn the stove up high, and leave the whole thing to simmer for six hours at a time.

I opened the door and went in the bunkroom. A slim, swarthy-looking bird with curly hair and a sheik mustache was lying on a bunk reading Blue Beetle Comics and smoking cigarettes; he had his shirt off and his shoes off and his feet resting politely on the pillow of the next bunk.

“Ain’t this here Blue Beetle the god-damnedest?” he said to me as I set down my case and lit a Revelation to kill some of the smell.

“They sent me over here to go pilot,” I said. “Where’s the captain at?”

“What a shame,” he answered. “Now we got to go to work again. My it’s been peaceful here since Happy drownded.”

“You the captain?” I asked.

“I’m it,” he said. “Ain’t it the berries? What boat you come off of?”

“The Inland Coal,” I said.

“Finding it kind of a shock so far, hey, buddy?” he said. He got up and stretched, and reached over and poked some old boy asleep in a bunk across from him and hollered, “Gas! Gel the hell out a there. Here’s the new pilot aboard and that’s his bunk from nowon. Come on, Gas, you’ll hafta double up with National.”

This deck hand was in between the sheets in his work clothes — an old pair of greasy pants and a check wool shirt —and even had his shoes on. You can imagine what a deck hand’s shoes have to put up with in the way of oil, coal dust, water, mud, grease, and paint in a six-hour watch, so you can picture the sheets easily enough. He rolled out and fell on another bunk about four feet away.

“Where’d that guy get a name like ‘Gas’?” I said.

“Come on up to the pilothouse,” says the captain. “Why, that’s because he comes from Edna Gas.”

“Maybe I better go home,” I said. “What’s Edna Gas?”

“Why, man, it’s one of these here coal mines up river a ways. That’s his home. His ole man is blacksmith at the mine.”

We got up in the pilothouse. There was just barely room for the two of us, quite a change from the big roomy pilothouses I was used to, with benches, chairs, stoves, water coolers, and so on.

“Hey, National,” the captain hollered, sliding the windows back. “Get up off yer dead ass and turn that line loose. Come on, buddy, let’s go!” And one of the dwarfs, who had been sitting on the bank looking at his shoelaces, got up and commenced to turn her loose.

“Where’s he come from?” I asked.

“National Consolidated, up by Lock 14.”

“Why don’t you call him Consolidated, then?”

“Sometimes we do.” He gave the engineer a backing bell, and the old Eairbanks-Morse shot a bushel basket of sool and rust out the stack, which was right behind the pilothouse, and the boat commenced backing away from the bank into the stream.

“Hey, National,” he hollered down to the deck, “bring us up a couple coffees, okay?”

“Where we goin’?” I said.

“We’re goin’ over to the Dupont landing and pick up an empty and take off for Kingmont. You watch me make the pickup and this first lock and then you can take her.”

“Okay, but understand this is all new to me, I never piloted anything bigger’n a Illinois River duckboat.”

“Didn’t you never steer on the Inland and them olher boats ? ”

“Why sure, but any damn fool can steer out in the river. It’s those here locks and landings makes it hard.”

“Aw, have some coffee. It ain’t bad.”

2

WE GOT across the river and there was a fleet of about ten or fifteen barges, empties and loads, and a big coalyard behind them. And then piled up on the hill behind the heaps of coal was the damnedestlooking plant you ever saw, a monster— big buildings and towers, chimneys and trestles, cranes and sheds, smoke, flames, cinders, I don’t know what they made there but they called it the Morgantown Ordnance and we expected to see the whole works blow up most any time and move Monongalia County down around Pittsburgh someplace.

We came up on the barge fleet and the captain rang a slow bell and then a stopping bell and we drifted up easy to an empty barge.

“What’s your name?” the captain asked me.

“Bissell,” I said.

“Okay, Beedle, now watch how we face up to this here empty,” and he never called me anything else again as long as I knew him except when he wanted to borrow money, and then he used my first name.

The deck hand got up on the deck of the empty and grabbed the face wires and dumped them in place on the timberheads. Another deck hand trotted out to the other end of the barge and turned it loose, and before we even had the wires tightened up the captain gave a full ahead bell and we bounced alongside a couple of empties, cleared them, and sailed off up the river. The whole thing didn’t take more than three or four minutes.

“My God, do you make all your landings that fast?” I asked.

“Beedle, we make ‘em as fast as we can, boy,” he said.

“How much coal do we deliver there?”

“All we can tow,” he said. “We gave ‘em 68,000 tons last month. Here, get the feel of this here thing,” and he got up off the pilot’s chair. “Set down, Beedle, and make yourself at home. I’m goin’ down and get me a slice of salami. Just hold her off this point easy and the lock is around the bend.”

“If you say so,” I said.

“Call me Duke,” and he climbed down the ladder to the deck.

It was a dreary day for sure, with a greasy sky, and a yellowish foggy smoke hanging in the air, and the whole world looked sick and sad. The damned old barge in front of me was a cheerless, banged-up derelict, I was 900 miles from home and still had a hangover from my picnic stopover in Pittsburgh, and I was very lonesome for Joliet and those familiar locks and landings — Dresden Island, Starved Rock, Brandon Road, and the canal into Chicago. I couldn’t see myself sleeping down there in that rat’s nest, even to be a pilot. However, the sensation of being at last a pilot, even on this tin can, grew increasingly pleasant, and I lit a cigarette, leaned back on the pilot’s stool, and steered with my feet.

The door opened and National stuck his head in. “Say, Cap, you want some more coffee?”

That was the first time anybody ever called me Cap, and it sounded pretty fair after I had been crawling around on deck so long with my ears full of soft coal.

“No, no more coffee now,” I said. “Say, where’s that lock at?”

“You’ll see it in a minute. You can blow for it anytime now.”

Sure enough, out of the yellow winter fog I saw the lock and I found the whistle and blew a long and a short. Duke showed up with a pile of crackers with salami in between them.

“Now, I’ll take you in, Beedle, and show you how we do it over here. Want some salami?” He gave me a handful.

Man, I never saw anything like the way we went into that lock. We slammed into her like a taxicab on Wabash Avenue about 5 P.M. And when they had raised the water and opened the upper gate we came charging out with the barge alongside, turned it loose, picked it up again on the fly, knocked some concrete off the lock wall with our stern, and away we flew like a wild mustang.

“Peewee,” Duke shouted down to the deck, “bring up a couple more coffees,”

So I took her again and Duke went down and tackled Blue Beetle. This was the toughest, dreariest, most godforsaken-looking country I ever saw — the hills looked as though a battle had just been fought among the barren trees; they were desolate, dirty, scarred, and under the dull winter sky looked like there was not much hope left anyplace.

The mines, with their coal tipples and lines of coal cars, and the clusters of unpainlcd frame company houses, and slate piles and muddy streets and Royal Crown Cola signs, made you sick just to look at them. How a man could put in his time whacking away underground and come out into a mess like this and raise up a family in one of these terriblelooking shanties was more than I could understand. It was just homesickness working on me, I suppose — God knows there are some awful places along the drainage canal and in South Chicago, places that would give you the blues even on a spring morning.

Later on I got used to the burnt-over look to things, and it seemed natural and right to me that the world should consist of coal mines, coal trains, coal houses, coal taverns, coal trees, coal streets, coal children — coal everything.

This was bad enough on this dismal afternoon, but night came, and I had some pot roast and apple pie in the galley-messroom, a little hole aft of the engine room, and Duke said, “You lay down and I’ll call you at midnight. Get some sleep, Beedle.”

I lay down and tossed around for a couple of hours, dozed, woke up, heard shouts out on deck, dozed, woke, listened to National snoring, smoked a cigarette, finally fell asleep. Seemed like about ten minutes later the deck hand came and woke me. “Hey, Cap,” he said. “Midnight.”

The most dismal words in the world, the call for night watch. Getting up at midnight is bad enough if you’re just a deck hand with no responsibilities, but to stagger up to a strange pilothouse on a strange river — well, no, thanks.

“She’s rough and she’s tough, Beedle boy, but oh how we love it,” Duke said. “Well, call me if you get in trouble.” And with this sad farewell he was gone.

My first night watch was a humdinger. I bounced off the bank; I wound up in the trees and backed out. I couldn’t see and didn’t know what to look for anyway — the mountains towered above me on both sides and cast shadows that looked like islands, and the lights from the coal mines we passed made it even worse. I crawled in and oul of a couple of locks, making them the slow old way instead of Duke’s flying switch style, and finally, running on a slow bell in an intermittent fog, ran my barge head on into a riverside farmyard and practically into the barn.

I tooted the whistle for a deck hand and Peewee stuck his head in the door, eating a sandwich.

“It’s 3 A.M.,” I said, “and I’ve had enough of this. You get out on the head and I’ll hunt up a tree and we’ll tie her off.”

“Oughta be easy to find a tree, Cap,” he said. “You found a good many already tonight.”

After that I stood a day watch until I found out what the river looked like, and in a couple of weeks I was running up through fog, smoke, and the black night, smoking cigarettes, hollering for more coffee, and paying no more attention to the river than High Street after midnight back home.

3

OH, we had some hair-raisers — it wouldn’t be towboating otherwise. One night I was shoving my empty out of Lock 15 and I turned the boat loose and rang a backing bell to get behind the barge so I could face up to shove again. When I rang the come-ahead bell I got no answer and kept right on going back. I rang some more bells but nothing happened and then I opened the door and looked back to see how hard we would hit the lock gates.

The engineer had run out of compressed air to start the Diesel engine and was so mad he was picking Stillson wrenches off the wall and bouncing them off the deck plates. I never heard such a noise or such loud cussing, even in Illinois. That man went clear off his nut he was so mad.

He finally built up some air and we got the engines started again.

After we got hooked up I told National to ask the engineer to come up to the pilothouse. He showed up after a while eating a fried-egg sandwich.

“ You got kind of a hot temper, ain’t you?” I said.

“Well, look here,” he said. “I see those indicator lights and I hear those bells a-ringin’ and I know sure to God I’m all out of air and nothin’ to do. Still you kep’ a-ringin’ them bells. Cap, that just made me so dang mad I had to do somethin’, and I started with that ole 48-inch Stillson wrench and I pulled her off the wall and slammed her on the deck. Then I slammed the rest of them and I felt some better.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a lucky thing there’s a film of ice up here above the lock. While you were down there slammin’ wrenches on the deck, our barge ran out and stuck in the ice; otherwise she would of gone over the dam.”

“How about an egg sanwidge?” he said.

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “But don’t put no salt on it.” And he ducked out info the bitter cold again and fried me up an egg sandwich and we were the best of friends.

A couple of nights later he and the deck hand on watch fell asleep on the galley table, and if I hadn’t jumped out of the pilothouse and gone down and yanked them off onto the floor, we would have taken the lock and all right on down to Pittsburgh.

Then we got into high water. Those locks have an open dam beside them, with the water going right over the top like a waterfall.

“There’s some bad currents around these here locks in high water, Beedle,” Duke told me. “Watch it close when you’re comin’ down with loads.”

I got all messed up at Lock 13 one afternoon and the barge, with 800 tons of coal in it, and the boat commenced drifting crosswise right onto the dam. The cook was making an upside-down cake and he happened to look out and saw us right on top of the dam and he came hell-bent for the pilothouse and got up on the roof. I pulled the general alarm signal and Duke came up to the pilothouse in his underwear.

I rang the engineer for an overload — for once he wasn’t asleep or dreaming and he really poured it to that old tired-out engine. We hung there with our stern right on the crest of the dam, and finally she began to shove up oul of it.

“Well, I ain’t gettin’ no sleep up here,” Duke said, and he went back to bed.

When we got back down to Morgantown that trip, the cook went, up the bank and back to home and mother, and then we lived on cheese and crackers for a couple of days until the shore boss sent us a new cook.

This old man was all in from forty-five years in the mines and thought he would make a good steamboat cook. He couldn’t cook anything but fried eggs and pork chops, and used the same dishwater for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until it looked like the Chicago drainage canal, so Duke fired him and he went uptown and got a job sweeping out the courthouse on Sundays.

The next cook was out of the mines but he was so dumb they couldn’t make a miner out of him, so he came aboard and all he could do was roast. We had roast this and roast that and roast everything but roast eggs. He would throw a chunk of meat and some potatoes and carrots in the roaster and then sit out on the deck all day watching the mountains and the coal mines go past, or reading Western Detective,

“Listen, Roast,” I said one morning when he was sitting on the floor of the pilothouse carving his fingernails with the paring knife, “why don’t you just get down there and make a couple of pies for dinner? Them canned peaches are getting terrible tiresome.”

“Cap, if I could cook a pie, what would I be doin’ on this here boat? I could easier be boss of the Arkwright mine than I could make a pie.”And he went down and stuck a fork in the pork roast and turned over the potatoes.

It was kind of a tie which was the most useless, the cook or the second engineer. This engineer I had on my watch was about twenty years old and one of these guys that can’t stand to watch you pick your teeth without giving a few pointers.

I was coming down river one afternoon and he came up to the pilot house to chew the rag for a while, and we talked about how to make seine nets and whether a horsehair would turn into a snake if you put it in rain water and a raft of other nonsensical topics, and after a while he said, “It ain’t none of my business but you ain’t in the channel here. You’ll find deeper water over yonder.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Duke told me to run this stretch by holding her right about down the middle.”

“It ain’t up to me to make no suggestions,” he said, “but all the other pilots run close down the left bank until they get down there to the powerhouse.”

“All right,” I said, and pulled her over toward that deep water he was raving about. In about four minutes the barge began to plow up mud and the engine commenced to labor.

“All them other pilots must of been dreaming,” I said. “In another minute we’ll be hard aground.”

“Well, I didn’t mean quite so far over. Now you got her in too close.”

“Okay,” I said. “In the meantime would you mind stepping down into the engine room and giving me a backing bell and I’ll see if I can work her out of here.”

“There used to be plenty of water in here,” he said as he left for the engine room.

“I guess it all went for a trip down to Pittsburgh to see a ball game,” I said.

4

THE Monongahela runs almost straight north to Pittsburgh, where it joins the Allegheny to form the mighty Ohio. We were about 100 miles from Pittsburgh, at the headwaters up in the mountains, and the river flowed in sharp bends and twists, past coal mines, wild timberland, villages, the B. & O. railroad yards, and two towns, Morgantown and Fairmont.

We ran into ice and bucked it, and froze in, and broke loose, and finally tied off our load of coal on a smoky Christmas Eve and took the boat down to the Morgantown landing and tied up for Christmas. There was no snow on the ground, and a damp smoky fog hung in the streets as we climbed up the old brick sidewalk to celebrate in a joint called the Imperial.

Seated in a booth and trampled by coal miners with their dome hats on, we drank Kinsey blended whiskey with Tube City beer for chasers, and I thought of home.

That was the worst Christmas I ever put in everybody had on overalls or $25 blue serge suits, and by midnight they were rolling on the floor and fighting and the girls were drunk and bawling, with their hair coming down, and there were pools of beer and spilled drinks everyplace. A couple of booths away there was a kid about ten years old who should have been home in bed dreaming of sugar plumsinstead he was stealing drinks of beer and was the life of the party.

“How old are you, honey?” I said to my girl Emma, who was smoking cigarettes like her life depended on it.

“ How old you think?” she said, draining another shot and chasing it with orange pop.

“Oh, about nineteen,” I said, giving her the benefit of the doubt.

“Well, I ain’t,” she said. “I’m only sixteen. Wahoo! Frank! How’s about some service over here?”

So about 2.30, while St. Nick was still busy filling stockings, I went hack to my crummy hotel and turned in. Some Christmas Eve.

The winter slowly dragged away, and we had a succession of cooks, and it rained, snowed, sleeted, froze in, thawed, fogged up; and where the sun had gone to, nobody seemed to be able to say, but I swear I never saw it for four months at least there were mostly poor people around here that couldn’t afford to pay for it, I guess.

When spring came we opened the bunkroom door a little bit and let some of the fumes escape, tossed some odd shoes in the river, and we were even going to air out the blankets but Duke thought that would fade them. The smoke and fog cleared up for a while, and the sun came out, and I began to get a look at the country, and it was really something to look at. There were trees in bloom in the hills, and mountain laurel with big blossoms on it like I’d never seen before, and the meadows were the greenest green, and the air all through the valley commenced to smell of leaves and flowers instead of softcoal smoke. With a few trees in leaf around them, these beat-up frame company houses at the mines looked a little better, and the people even seemed less like lost souls; you would see a little girl with a spring hat sitting in the slate piles and it was a big change from winter.

For some reason or other we began to run short of coffee cups about this time, just normal breakage I suppose, and Duke kept forgetting to order them until we were down to two cups for the whole crew. I started drinking my coffee out of a tumbler rather than use one of the coffee cups after National had rinsed it out and set it back.

“Send me up a cup of coffee, Gas!”

“I can’t. The engineer got one cup and the cook got the other.”

“All right, send it up in a tomato can, then.”

This went on for several days and one afternoon I had just gone on watch and was bringing two loads into Lock 14 at Lowesville, West Virginia, and having my coffee out of a jelly glass. Duke came into the pilothouse and had on a clean uniform and his good hat.

“I’ll get off here and ketch the bus and go to Morgantown and get us some coffee cups,” he said stroking his mustache with the back of his forefinger. “Then I’ll meet you at the landing when you get there.”

“All right,” I said. “My, you smell pretty, can I kiss you?”

“Listen, Beedle, that’s the real stuff— that cost me over a dollar at the drugstore.

“Well, I hope Helen will like it,” I said. She was one of his girls, that hung out up at the Union Bar.

“So long, Beedle boy, twist her tail, kid,” and he went out onto the barge, jumped up to the lock wall, and took off for the highway.

That was about 1 P.M. on a Monday and the sun was shining and I felt pretty good. I was full of roast and Jello, and the rest of the world was grubbing away in factories or shooting each other up, and here I was in a little glass box with nothing to do but steer this cute little boat up and down the river and get paid for it. When you are going down the river on a spring afternoon and you pass some little town, you can often see the poor boobs leaning out the factory windows watching the boat go by, and then you feel good, because you know that man was not made to run a drill press, and you know that you have beaten the game. For me to be drawing wages for piloting a towboat, why that’s jusl like paying a kid to watch the circus.

This time wasn’t so enjoyable though. I got down to Morgantown about 8 P.M. and spotted the two loads of coal at the Dupont landing. We had orders to take an empty down river to Rosedale mine and bring back a load. I picked up the empty and went on down to the landing to get Duke.

No Duke.

So I went on down to Rosedale and brought up a load and spotted it at the Dupont landing and it was now midnight and no Duke. I picked up two empties and headed off up the river and I ran all night, thinking Duke would be at some landing up the river but he wasn’t, and I ran all the next day. By nightfall I had been in the pilothouse thirty-two hours with no relief and I was feeling pretty sleepy and not so gay as on the previous afternoon. I should have tied the boat up but I had to cover up for Duke so the company wouldn’t know he was uptown — he would have done the same for me.

I got National or Gas to stay with me in the pilothouse and let them steer in the straight stretches and I would take a quick nap on the floor. I was seeing things that weren’t there by the time it got dark, and of course the deck hands couldn’t even steer the straight stretches for me at night, they weren’t used to seeing in the dark. I was all doped up on cigarettes and coffee and I figured if Duke didn’t show up pretty soon I would really have to tie up.

I had been exactly forty-one hours on watch in the pilothouse when we finally picked him up at Lock 15. He came up in the pilothouse as fresh as a daisy but smelling pretty rich of whiskey.

“Okay, kid,” he said, “I’ll take her.”

“That’s nice. Sure you got everything uptown all taken care of?” I said.

“Well, thoy’s a couple little matters I didn’t get around to but I’ll get them later. You ain’t tired, are you, Beedle?”

“Hell no,” I said. “I’m just gettin’ warmed up to it.”

“You tell ‘em, Beedle, sing them blues, boy. She’s rough and she’s tough, this steamboatin’ —”

“But oh how we love it,” I finished for him.

I stepped out of the pilothouse and turned back. “You get them coffee cups?” I asked.

“Oh hell, I’ll get them tomorrow,” he said. “I forgot all about them blame coffee cups.”

This was about the end of West Virginia and me, although I didn’t know it at the time. A week later I was on the two-car steam train headed for Connellsville, pa., to pick up the night train for Chicago — they had transferred me again, back to the canal, just in time for the hot weather.

The train followed right along the riverbank, and pretty soon I saw the boat coming up from Rosedale with a load, with that old stack kind of pushed back and a cloud of blue exhaust trailing behind, and as we passed abreast of her I saw Duke up in the glass box, and National out coiling down a line on the barge, and Roast was lying down on the deck sound asleep. I wanted to holler at Duke and say, “So long, Duke, meet me up at the Imperial,” and “So long, Roast, don’t forget them canned peaches,” and I wanted to tell the guy sitting beside me here in the train, “That’s Duke Harmison up in the pilothouse, he’s the Captain. And thats the cook asleep there. He’s a no good bum. They must have about 800 tons in that barge—looks like Rosedale coal. That deck hand’s name is Wilfred Adams but we call him National. And I’m the pilot.

Then in a second we had passed them, and they faded in the distance, and that was the end of me and the towboat Coal Queen and the Monongahela River, Duke Harmison, and the coal mines.

“See that old boat?” said the fellow in overalls beside me on the green plush. “Ain’t it a miracle what some fools will do to earn a living? Can you imagine living on a thing like that?”

“Yeh,” I said, “I can imagine it.”