might have tea and wine for their tables, and silks and laces for
their womenfolk. More often they abandoned their boat and
tramped north, armed and watchful, since cutthroats and robbers
haunted the roads, and river-men, if they had not drunk away
their last dollar in New Orleans, were worth spoiling. Or, if it
offered, they took passage on some fast sailing clipper bound for
Baltimore or Philadelphia, and crossed the mountains to the Ohio
and were within a week or two of home.

Bruce Carrington had seen the day of barge and raft reach its
zenith, had heard the first steam packet's shrieking whistle
which sounded the death-knell of the ancient order, though the
shifting of the trade was a slow matter and the glory of the old
did not pass over to the new at once, but lingered still in
mighty fleets of rafts and keel-boats and in the Homeric
carousals of some ten thousand of the half-horse, half-alligator
breed that nightly gathered in New Orleans. Broad-horns and
mud-sills they were called in derision. A strange race of
aquatic pioneers, jeans and leather clad, the rifle and the
setting-pole equally theirs, they came out of every stream down
which a scow could be thrust at flood-time; from tiny settlements
far back among the hills; from those bustling sinks of iniquity,
the river towns. But now, surely, yet almost imperceptibly,
their commerce was slipping from them. At all the landings they
were being elbowed by the newcomers--men who wore brass buttons
and gold braid, and shiny leather shoes instead of moccasins; men
with white hands and gold rings on their fingers and diamonds in
their shirts--men whose hair and clothing kept the rancid smell
of oil and smoke and machinery.