Nearest him the second clerk, standing, leaned on an
elbow thrown out upon the desk and rested one foot on a rung of the
stool. A second clerk might do that; a third or "mud" clerk would hardly
have made so free. The youthful mud clerk, with his hat under his folded
arms, leaned on the jamb of a door that let back into the clerks'
stateroom. Opposite him the youngest of the four, latest come among
them, stood out in the cabin and hung in over the broad window counter,
across which the office did business with the world. Watson's "cub
pilot" he was, on the sick list, thin and weak with swamp-fever.
The forenoon watch was half gone. The boat was fluttering along at high
speed under a bright but fickle sky, and the clerks and the "cub" hardly
needed to glance out the nearest larboard window to know that she was
already turning northward into a pleasant piece of river called Nine
Mile Reach. A certain Point Lookout was some five miles behind in the
east, and the town of Providence, negligibly small, with Lake
Providence, an old cut-off, hid in the woods behind it, was close ahead.
One of the number mentioned the boat's failure during the night to make
the miles expected of her, but the four agreed that the cause was not
any lack of speed power but an overplus of landings below Vicksburg--two
being for burials--and a long delay at Vicksburg itself, providing for
the sick.
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