C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Jim Bludso, of the Prairie Belle
By John Hay (1838–1905)
W
Becase he don’t live, you see;
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of livin’ like you and me.
What have you been for the last three year
That you haven’t heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
Is all pretty much alike:
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill,
And another one here in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never funked, and he never lied,—
I reckon he never knowed how.
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot’s bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,—
A thousand times he swore
He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.
And her day come at last,—
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she wouldn’t be passed.
And so she come tearin’ along, that night—
The oldest craft on the line—
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For the willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin’ and cursin’, but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
“I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore.”
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smoke-stacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
I’d run my chance with Jim,
’Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t agoing to be too hard
On a man that died for men.