University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
A MUTE GOES ABOARD A BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly
as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in
cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen,
his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He
had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No
porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by
friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers,
wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he
was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

In the same moment with his advent, he stepped
aboard the favorite steamer Fidèle, on the point of
starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but unsaluted,
with the air of one neither courting nor shunning
regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it
through solitudes or cities, he held on his way along

the lower deck until he chanced to come to a placard
nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the
capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have
recently arrived from the East; quite an original
genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein
his originality consisted was not clearly given; but
what purported to be a careful description of his person
followed.

As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered
about the announcement, and among them certain
chevaliers, whose eyes, it was plain, were on the capitals,
or, at least, earnestly seeking sight of them from
behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they
were enveloped in some myth; though, during a chance
interval, one of these chevaliers somewhat showed his
hand in purchasing from another chevalier, ex-officio a
peddler of money-belts, one of his popular safe-guards,
while another peddler, who was still another versatile
chevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, the lives
of Measan, the bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of
the Mississippi, and the brothers Harpe, the Thugs
of the Green River country, in Kentucky—creatures,
with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the
time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations
of wolves in the same regions, leaving comparatively
few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed
gratulation, and is such to all except those who think
that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off,
the foxes increase.

Pausing at this spot, the stranger so far succeeded

in threading his way, as at last to plant himself just
beside the placard, when, producing a small slate and
tracing some words upon it, he held it up before him
on a level with the placard, so that they who read the
one might read the other. The words were these:—

As, in gaining his place, some little perseverance, not
to say persistence, of a mildly inoffensive sort, had been
unavoidable, it was not with the best relish that the
crowd regarded his apparent intrusion; and upon a
more attentive survey, perceiving no badge of authority
about him, but rather something quite the contrary—he
being of an aspect so singularly innocent;
an aspect, too, which they took to be somehow inappropriate
to the time and place, and inclining to the
notion that his writing was of much the same sort: in
short, taking him for some strange kind of simpleton,
harmless enough, would he keep to himself, but not
wholly unobnoxious as an intruder — they made no
scruple to jostle him aside; while one, less kind than
the rest, or more of a wag, by an unobserved stroke,
dexterously flattened down his fleecy hat upon his
head. Without readjusting it, the stranger quietly
turned, and writing anew upon the slate, again held
it up:—

Illy pleased with his pertinacity, as they thought it,
the crowd a second time thrust him aside, and not
without epithets and some buffets, all of which were

unresented. But, as if at last despairing of so difficult
an adventure, wherein one, apparently a non-resistant,
sought to impose his presence upon fighting characters,
the stranger now moved slowly away, yet not before
altering his writing to this:—

Shield-like bearing his slate before him, amid stares
and jeers he moved slowly up and down, at his turning
points again changing his inscription to—

and then—

The word charity, as originally traced, remained
throughout uneffaced, not unlike the left-hand numeral
of a printed date, otherwise left for convenience in
blank.

To some observers, the singularity, if not lunacy, of
the stranger was heightened by his muteness, and, perhaps
also, by the contrast to his proceedings afforded in
the actions—quite in the wonted and sensible order of
things — of the barber of the boat, whose quarters,
under a smoking-saloon, and over against a bar-room,
was next door but two to the captain's office. As if
the long, wide, covered deck, hereabouts built up on
both sides with shop-like windowed spaces, were some
Constantinople arcade or bazaar, where more than one
trade is plied, this river barber, aproned and slippered,
but rather crusty-looking for the moment, it may be
from being newly out of bed, was throwing open his

premises for the day, and suitably arranging the exterior.
With business-like dispatch, having rattled down
his shutters, and at a palm-tree angle set out in the
iron fixture his little ornamental pole, and this without
overmuch tenderness for the elbows and toes of the
crowd, he concluded his operations by bidding people
stand still more aside, when, jumping on a stool, he
hung over his door, on the customary nail, a gaudy sort
of illuminated pasteboard sign, skillfully executed by
himself, gilt with the likeness of a razor elbowed in
readiness to shave, and also, for the public benefit, with
two words not unfrequently seen ashore gracing other
shops besides barbers':—

An inscription which, though in a sense not less intrusive
than the contrasted ones of the stranger, did
not, as it seemed, provoke any corresponding derision
or surprise, much less indignation; and still less, to all
appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute of
being a simpleton.

Meanwhile, he with the slate continued moving
slowly up and down, not without causing some stares
to change into jeers, and some jeers into pushes, and
some pushes into punches; when suddenly, in one of
his turns, he was hailed from behind by two porters
carrying a large trunk; but as the summons, though
loud, was without effect, they accidentally or otherwise
swung their burden against him, nearly overthrowing
him; when, by a quick start, a peculiar inarticulate
moan, and a pathetic telegraphing of his fingers, he

involuntarily betrayed that he was not alone dumb,
but also deaf.

Presently, as if not wholly unaffected by his reception
thus far, he went forward, seating himself in a
retired spot on the forecastle, nigh the foot of a ladder
there leading to a deck above, up and down which ladder
some of the boatmen, in discharge of their duties,
were occasionally going.

From his betaking himself to this humble quarter,
it was evident that, as a deck-passenger, the stranger,
simple though he seemed, was not entirely ignorant of
his place, though his taking a deck-passage might have
been partly for convenience; as, from his having no
luggage, it was probable that his destination was one
of the small wayside landings within a few hours' sail.
But, though he might not have a long way to go, yet he
seemed already to have come from a very long distance.

Though neither soiled nor slovenly, his cream-colored
suit had a tossed look, almost linty, as if, traveling
night and day from some far country beyond the prairies,
he had long been without the solace of a bed.
His aspect was at once gentle and jaded, and, from the
moment of seating himself, increasing in tired abstraction
and dreaminess. Gradually overtaken by slumber,
his flaxen head drooped, his whole lamb-like figure
relaxed, and, half reclining against the ladder's foot, lay
motionless, as some sugar-snow in March, which, softly
stealing down over night, with its white placidity startles
the brown farmer peering out from his threshold at
daybreak.