Chapter XXIV: The Silent Boatmen

"YEES'LL niver find him there. My Dennis isn't drowned at all, at all. I wouldn't belave it if ye saw him fall into the strame wid yer own eyes. Sure an' he'll turn up safe an' sound, an' put yees all to shame for misdoubting me."

And the young wife turned away from the silent boatmen, as they continued dragging the river for the body.

They were common Irish laborers. Who would have thought that those coarse, brawny men would be so tender of her feelings as to make no reply to her assertions of her husband's safety. And yet so certain were they of his fate, that, leaving their work, they had searched the waters far and near for long, weary hours, and intended to continue at their sad task till the corpse was found.

The missing young Irishman had formerly been a workman in an establishment near by. Driven by poverty from the old country, he had come to these favored shores to find work. He had made his way to the hospitable west. Dunleith, rising so beautifully from the Mississippi, caught his eye.

He had a good share of natural shrewdness, and he foresaw that the place would grow, and he decided to seek work in the rising town. Two years of regular employment passed, enabling him to take a trip into Minnesota, and buy a quarter section of fertile land on the line of immigration, fencing it, and building a neat cabin, by the avails of his earnings as stage-driver from — Landing, on the Mississippi, inland. Then he sent to "ould Ireland" for "the wife and the babe."

With what an anxious, longing heart he looked for their arrival! And when at last, he clasped them in his arms, his cup of happiness seemed to overflow.

He was an intelligent, warm-hearted man, and had been taught that it was "no harm to take jist a drop now and thin." The family reunion could not, of course, pass uncelebrated, and what with joy and excitement of the event, and a growing love of the fiery liquid, he was led to drink more than his wont.

"It is all the wakeness Dennis has, sure," said his wife, as with heavy heart and many tears she begged the one who sold him his drams not to let him have any more, at least "till he's himself again."

But how could the rum-seller continue his traffic if he heeded the sorrows of the heart-broken?

That very night, the young husband, walking with pale face and unsteady step along the river brink, staggered in, and was swept away by the current.

Have you ever been at Dunleith? Then you know how romantically it stretches along under the limestone bluffs, and how luxuriantly in summer the grape vines clamber over the warm, bare face of the rocks.

Two weeks after the disappearance of Dennis O'Brien, mine host of — Hotel was conducting Mr. Parsons, the missionary, over the place, plucking the luscious natural plums from the garden, loading him with rich, ripe clusters from the graperies, introducing him to various objects of interest, embarrassing his retiring modesty with blandest attentions, from respect, I fear, not so much to the clergyman as to the column he chanced to fill in a Boston weekly—another illustration of the power of the press, you see.

But no genuine tavern-keeper is a fool. He knows men. He talks with all sorts of folks, and hears from year's end to year's end discussions on every known topic. And there is no subject from tea to theology on which he may not say something apt.

"The Catholics are very strong here," said he to Mr. Parsons, "and there is a church of theirs that you would like to visit. You will find in it some quaint old pictures from the masters."

"Will the edifice be open this week-day?" asked the minister.

"Certainly: a Catholic church is rarely closed. And I tell you there are some things about the Catholic system that you Protestants, if you were wise, would imitate. Let me see," he added, giving him a careless but penetrating scrutiny, "you are a clergyman—are you not?"

"You have guessed correctly," said his guest, smiling.

"So I supposed. Now, isn't it said in Scripture, 'My house shall be called a house of 'prayer?'" And he emphasized the last word. "But do not the sects use the meeting house more for preaching than devotion? Why, I have often heard ministers and church members style the invocation, singing, Bible-reading, and prayers, the 'preliminary exercises.' Even public prayers—how like orations! So that the people say, 'Wasn't that a fine prayer?' 'What an able prayer!' 'How eloquently Rev. Dr. Blank "addressed" the throne of grace!'"

"But the Romanists go to church to 'worship;' and the cathedral doors stand open all the week for devotional purposes. While with us, once in seven days, the church-going bell invites us to the sanctuary, where the attendants are treated to great sermons, learned essays, sensational subjects, elocution, rhetoric, eloquence.

"Besides," he continued, "the poor and the rich are on an equality in the Papal church. The ill clad and the well clad sit and kneel side by side. But Protestantism is shutting out the masses by high-priced pews and fashions, making religious show mock the woes of the lowly. But I must leave you now. Good-by."

And the missionary entered the Romanist church alone.

The "dim religious light," the silence that might be felt, the kneeling men and women scattered among the pews, the pictures of saints and representatives of the passion of Jesus, the gliding in and out of ecclesiastics, and in a niche the "confessional box," spoke voicelessly of things unseen and ghostly.

Returning to the open air, as the clergyman was going musingly through a street inhabited mostly by foreigners, a crowd gathered before a door led him to ask what had happened.

"Dennis O'Brien is found, sir," said an Irish woman, with eyes red from weeping. "His body's jist brought in from the river, sir, swollen an' soaked so yees would hardly know it."

The deceased had temporarily occupied rooms in the second story, and through the open window came a wild wailing. It was the voice of his widow who "refused to be comforted." And alas! what a sorrow was hers, so soon and suddenly after her lonely, stormy ocean voyage, and the long-wished-for meeting with the companion of her youth, to be torn from him in so awful a manner!

The priest's carriage, with its elegant span and equipage, stood by; so the clergyman knew that he was there to administer the last rites of his church.

"But what comfort," thought the Protestant, "has the priest to offer the stricken woman? Or, indeed, any of the bereaved among his trusting followers, when, according to his teachings, the flames of purgatory wait to seize the saintliest of his flock at death."

As he pondered this perversion of the "glad tidings of great joy," and there came thronging to mind the sweet words of consolation for the afflicted with which the Bible is freighted, how he longed to break the darkness that brooded over the benighted minds before him!

"And O," he exclaimed, "the cruel horrors and tragedies of the rum-traffic! When will its days be numbered? When will the deluded immigrant cease to pay the rum-seller for robbing him of property, reason, and life, and murdering his dear ones?"

Of the men and women who rode in the long funeral procession at the burial of Dennis O'Brien, few were wholly sober. Over his dishonored remains, they drank the deadly draught that had hurried him into eternity. And the dead man did not rise to rebuke them!

How like a kaleidoscope is real life! Forty-eight hours had not completed their rounds, when the gathering suspicion that whiskey was not the only agent directly concerned in the fate of the interesting young immigrant, culminated in the arrest of a man for his murder. As the officers—one on each side of him—hurried the suspected criminal along, Mr. Parsons elbowed his way through the excited throng to get a glimpse of the prisoner. It was his ex-workman, Mr. Grey "alias" Simmons, "alias" Grimes.

Mr. Parsons obtained a private interview with him. He affected entire ignorance of the clergyman, pretending with craftily affected surprise that he was not Mr. Grey, that he had not before seen Mr. Parsons, and that the latter had assuredly mistaken him for some other person.

"Grey," said the missionary, indignantly, "you are in the hands of justice, charged with a capital crime, and it becomes you to remember that if I volunteer to testify in the case, I can tell a hard story."

The convict was as cowardly as cunning, and, with blanched cheeks, he asked, in abject terror,—

"Do you think, Mr. Parsons, that I shall be hung?"

"The prospect is dark for you," replied the missionary; "for if you are tried, and not convicted, the people are so enraged that they may take the law into their own hands. If you wish me to show you the least favor, answer me in a straightforward manner. Where is Scroggs, the scoundrel you met on the prairie as you went from Mrs. Willard's to L—?"

Had a bolt from a cloudless sky fallen at his feet, he could not have been more amazed.

"He doesn't stay in any particular place; he keeps moving round."

"He's afraid he shall run across Mr. Willard, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"And where is Mr. Willard?"

"None of us know, for certain. Scroggs says he was picked up, and is in one of the river towns. But Merrow, who helped him do the job, don't really believe it. 'I' think he's alive somewhere."

This was all the information concerning Mr. Willard that Mr. Parsons then elicited.

As to the ill-fated Hibernian, it appeared that Grimes was with him at the groggery on the evening of the tragedy; that he was seen again in his company after leaving the rum-shop; that O'Brien had on his person considerable money, with which to buy housekeeping articles to take with his family to his Minnesota farm. And that when the body was recovered, his pocket-book was gone, while a five-dollar bill paid O'Brien the evening of his death was in Grey's possession. It was identified by the initials of a fellow-workman of O'Brien's, written, with the date, on the back of the note, the afternoon of the fatal day.