The Agreeable Leadsman

by Mark Twain, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The pilot of the Cora Lattimer was a man named Lemuel Dace, and he let me sit on the high bench at the back of the pilot-house through his night watch on two conditions: that I did not speak to him in a crossing, and that I did not tell him the river was beautiful. I did not know where the crossings were, so to be safe I did not speak at all, and that suited him better than either condition. We went down past Cape Girardeau in that silence, with the stove ticking and the big wheel going over a spoke at a time under his hands, and the shore sliding by on both sides as black as a bank's opinion of a poor man.

About one in the morning we came to a place where he stopped chewing. He reached up and pulled a bell-rope twice, and away down forward a man's voice took up the lead.

"M-a-r-k three! . . . M-a-r-k three! . . . Quarter-less-three! . . . Half twain! . . ."

It came up long and drawn out and lonesome, and a second man on the hurricane deck passed it along to us in the same tune, so that each call arrived twice, once far and once near, like an echo that had been to school. I had read about it in books. I forgot both conditions and said it was the finest sound I had ever heard on the water.

Mr. Dace did not answer. He was listening. "Quarter twain! . . . M-a-r-k twain! . . ." He put the wheel over a little and held it there, and the boat went on into the dark on faith, as far as I could see, though I suppose it was not faith with him. Then the calls began to come deeper again, three fathom and better, and he pulled the rope once and the singing stopped, and he spat into the box and went back to chewing.

"It's a good sound," he said, by and by, "to them that don't know what it's saying."

I said I had supposed it was saying how deep the water was.

"It's saying how deep the man says the water is," said Mr. Dace. "Which ain't always the same article. I knowed a leadsman once that sung it prettier than that fellow down there, so pretty the ladies used to come out on the guards of a night to hear him, and he come nearer to drowning me than anything in the Mississippi ever done. And he never told a lie in his life that he knowed of."

He said nothing more until we were through the next crossing and into a long easy reach below the head of an island, where there was nothing to do but keep her in the middle and think. Then he told it to me. I give it as near as I can in his words. I cannot give his pauses. They were his own, and they do not print.

---

"His name was Hosea Pettibone," said Mr. Dace, "and he come from up the Missouri, from back of Boonville, out of a family of Methodists that had raised him to be a comfort to people. That was the whole of his raising, as near as I could ever make out, and they done it thorough. He'd been a comfort to his mother and a comfort to the preacher and a comfort to the schoolmaster, and there warn't a man in Cooper County that didn't speak well of him, because there warn't one he hadn't agreed with. If you told Hosea it was going to rain, he'd look up at the sky and then look at you, sorry, and say he believed it was. And if you said no, it warn't, he'd look up again and brighten all over and say he believed you was right, it warn't. He warn't a liar. You want to get that, or there ain't any use my going on. He believed it both times. He had the kind of a face that come round natural to whoever was looking at it, the way a sunflower comes round to the sun, and his mind followed along after his face like a dog.

"This was in fifty-seven. I was a cub then, nineteen years old, steering for old Mr. Asa Brophy on the Nancy Hartwell, St. Louis to New Orleans, a big side-wheeler that drawed six foot and a half loaded. Hosea come aboard at St. Louis and hired on as a deckhand, and the first time the mate sent him forward with the line, in a little bit of a crossing above Grand Tower, the whole boat stopped what it was doing. The mate stood there on the forecastle with a coil of rope in his hands and his mouth open. The passengers come out of the cabin with their napkins still in their collars. Nobody had ever heard the lead called like that. He had a voice like a church organ that had been to a camp meeting and got converted. He could hold M-a-r-k three till you'd think the river was going to slow up and listen. Mr. Brophy said it was a sin to waste a voice like that on wooding, and he had him made regular leadsman inside of a week, and the captain give him a dollar a month over his wages, and the ladies give him things.

"Now you got to understand how the thing works, or you won't see where the snag is. The leadsman stands on the forward guard with a hand-line, and there's a lead on the end of it, seven pound or so, with a hollow in the bottom that he fills with tallow, so it brings up a little of whatever it hit, sand or mud or what not. There's marks on the line, a strip of leather here and a rag there and knots between, so he can read it by the feel in the dark. He heaves the lead ahead, and when the boat comes up over it and the line's straight up and down, he takes the mark that's at the water and sings it out, and the man on the hurricane deck sings it up to the pilot. That's all there is to it. A child could do it. The whole art of it is to read the mark that's at the water and not some other mark that you like better. And the pilot, in a crossing at night, where he can't see the bottom and can't see much of anything else, steers by what he hears. If the man says three fathom and it's nine foot, the pilot goes ahead on three fathom. He ain't got anything else to go ahead on.

"Well, sir, for a month Hosea was the most popular leadsman between St. Louis and the Gulf. That was April, and the river was bank-full and over, and there warn't a bar between St. Louis and Cairo with less than three fathom on it, so it didn't make a particle of difference what anybody called. The ladies come out on the guards in the evenings when we was making a crossing, and stood along the rail in rows with their shawls on, and when Hosea sung out M-a-r-k three they sighed all down the row together, like wheat when the wind goes over it. A preacher from Memphis said it put him in mind of the Psalms, and he wrote it down in a little book. Mr. Brophy said he never felt so easy in a crossing in thirty years. I felt easy too. I was nineteen.

"Then the river begun to fall.

"She fell about a foot a day along the first of May, the way she does, and the bars come up under her one after another like the bones in a starved horse, and the crossings got to be places where a pilot earned his money. And Hosea went on calling three fathom.

"Not every time. That's what fooled us. Out in the open river in daylight, where nobody was anxious and nobody was watching, he'd call you nine and a half as honest as a clock. It was in the bad crossings, at night, with the captain up on the roof walking back and forth with his hands behind him, and Mr. Brophy leaning out of the window, and the ladies along the rail with their breath held, that the water got so remarkable deep.

"The first I knowed of it was the boat. A boat in shoal water gets sluggish. She drags, and her bow wants to go off to one side, and she don't answer her helm the way she ought, and an old pilot will tell you she smells the bottom. One night in the crossing below the Widow Pruitt's woodyard Hosea was singing quarter less three, quarter less three, as rich as gravy, and the Nancy Hartwell was smelling bottom so hard I could feel it come up through the spokes into my arms. I said so to Mr. Brophy. He said I was nervous. He said, 'Listen at that boy. Quarter less three. You can't smell bottom with sixteen foot and a half under you, it's against arithmetic.' And she went over. I could hear the sand go by under her like somebody shushing a baby. And on the far side Hosea sung out M-a-r-k three so beautiful that the ladies clapped.

"So the next time we come down to the Widow Pruitt's, I asked Mr. Brophy to take her through himself, which he was glad to, being of the opinion that I was nervous, and I went down forward and stood behind Hosea on the guard, in the dark, where he didn't see me. He heaved, and the boat come up over the lead, and he took in his line, and I seen the leather go by his hand at the water. That's under two fathom. Then he looked up. Not at the line. Up, at the hurricane roof, where the captain was walking, and back along the guard where the shawls was. And he drawed in his breath and sung out M-a-r-k three! the way an angel would if an angel had took up the river.

"'Hosea,' I says, 'that was nine foot and a half.'

"He turned round and looked at the line in his hand, and then at me. He was the sorriest-looking boy you ever saw. Sorry for me, you understand. Sorry I'd been put to the trouble.

"'Why, Lem,' he says, 'did you see the captain's face?'

"I said I hadn't been looking at the captain's face. I said I'd been looking at the line, which was what he was paid to look at.

"'He's been worried sick since Cairo,' Hosea says, gentle, the way you'd explain to a child. 'He's walked that roof every crossing for a week. And them ladies has come all the way from Louisville. You wouldn't have me holler out nine and a half to a man in that condition, with ladies listening.'

"I said I would. I said that was the whole of the job.

"He looked at me like I'd said I'd kick a dog. And then he said the thing I've thought about since, more than I ever thought about anything a preacher said. 'Well,' he says, 'it ain't as if it was a lie, Lem. She went over, didn't she?'

"I went up and told Mr. Brophy. I give it to him straight, the leather and the looking up and the angel and all. And Mr. Brophy took his pipe out of his mouth and looked at me a long time, the way you'd look at a man that's told you the church is on fire, when you can hear the choir through the window.

"'Lem,' he says, 'I have heard that boy sing.'

"That was all the argument he had, and it was enough for him. A boy that could call the lead like that couldn't call it wrong; it stood to reason. The captain was of the same mind, and the ladies would have been, if anybody had asked them. But I was a cub, and a cub is a nuisance that a pilot has took good money to put up with, and so in the end they let me have my way for one crossing, to quiet me, the same as you give a child a spoon to bang.

"There was a deckhand named Gus Ahlers, a Hanover man, about as big as a yawl and about as talkative. He hadn't hardly any English at all, but he had the numbers. He'd learned them on the river, and he had them the way the river has them, in feet and fathoms and nothing else. Coming down to Plum Point, I got the mate to put Gus on the lead.

"You never heard such a thing in your life. Gus didn't sing it. He didn't know it was supposed to be sung. He stood up there on the guard and heaved, and read the line, and called out what was at the water, flat as a man reading names off a coroner's list. Nine and a half. Nine. Eight and a half. No M-a-r-k to it at all. Every call went into the ladies like a cold draught. Mr. Brophy slowed her down to nothing and felt his way across, sweating, with every call coming up meaner than the last, and we went over Plum Point with about half a foot to spare under her, and Gus called nine and a half on the far side in the same voice he'd used for seven, and went aft and had his supper.

"Well, that night there was a meeting in the ladies' cabin. There was a Presbyterian minister from Vicksburg aboard that trip, and they had him in the chair. They didn't ask for Gus to be put off the boat, they warn't that kind of people; they only drawed up a paper, very polite, and sent it up to the captain. It said the passengers had observed with pain that the soundings had grown a great deal worse since the change of leadsman, and that the new man's manner of calling them was not calculated to support the spirits of the company, and was the more to be regretted in that ladies were present. The minister put in a line of his own that it was hardly Christian. Fourteen names was signed to it. The captain read it on the roof, and he come and stood in the pilot-house door with it in his hand, and he looked at me the way you'd look at a man that had brought smallpox aboard.

"Next night Hosea was back on the lead.

"And that same night we hung up on a bar above Memphis, in a crossing where Hosea was calling quarter less three and there was about six foot, and we stayed there two days and a half. You don't know what that means, and I'll tell you. It means you set two big spars down off the bow into the sand, like a pair of crutches, and you run tackle from the tops of them to the capstan, and you heave her bow up and drive ahead with the wheels, and you get about a yard. And then you do it again. Two days and a half, in the sun, with the roustabouts heaving and the mud coming up yellow round the wheels and the passengers' dinners getting thinner every meal.

"Nobody was drowned. I want to be fair to Hosea. The worst that happened was a gentleman from Natchez lost his temper, and a lady cried, and we was three days late into Memphis with a load of eggs that warn't eggs any more by the time we got there.

"But you'd ought to have seen who they blamed. Before we was off the bar, it was settled in the ladies' cabin that the whole trouble come from the Hanover man. He had called the water so shallow at Plum Point, they said, that he had put shoal water into Mr. Brophy's mind, and Mr. Brophy had been steering timid ever since, and a pilot that steers timid will find a bar anywhere. Gus Ahlers never heard any of it. He hadn't the English. He went on heaving at the capstan bar, and they went on blaming him, and it didn't hurt either party.

"And at Memphis they put a card in the paper. I seen it. 'The undersigned passengers on the steamer Nancy Hartwell,' and so on, thanking the captain for his courtesy and Mr. Brophy for his skill, under a trying detention, and particularly the leadsman, Mr. H. Pettibone, whose cheerful and melodious calling of the soundings did much to sustain the spirits of the company. They took up a purse for him besides. Eleven dollars and a half, and a silver pencil from the lady that cried.

"Hosea read the card on the forecastle, with the purse in his other hand, and he cried too. He said he hadn't ever meant anybody to go to that trouble.

---

"Was he a bad boy?" I asked.

Mr. Dace put the wheel over a spoke or two and brought it back. The boat went on down the middle of the reach without any opinion on the question.

"No," he said. "He warn't bad. He had a conscience. It was the busiest thing about him. I never knowed a boy so tender of his conscience as Hosea. It just always pointed at whoever was looking at him."

I asked what became of him.

"He done well," said Mr. Dace. "There was a gentleman aboard that trip, from Jefferson City, that had signed the card, and he took a great liking to Hosea, and when we got to New Orleans he took him off the river and give him a place. Hosea was in the legislature eleven years, after. They tell me he never in all that time called less than mark three on any question that come before him, and the State of Missouri has been aground under him off and on ever since, and every time she hangs up they vote him a resolution of thanks."

He was quiet then, and I was quiet, and we came to the foot of the reach. He reached up and pulled the bell-rope twice. Down forward a man took up the lead, and the man on the hurricane deck passed it back to us, once far and once near.

"Quarter twain! . . . M-a-r-k twain! . . . Quarter-less-twain! . . ."

Mr. Dace rang to slow her, and put his head out of the window into the dark, to hear it better.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ā Marcō Twainiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Mark Twain, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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