Chapter 195: Whoosh, Chug, Chug, Chug

Editor: nnpdad 11 December 2021

That little boat was noisy and it was slow so this wasn’t a luxury ride by any stretch of the imagination. Brin spent the first couple of hours whining about the noise until he finally settled down and slept on the cargo house roof between us.

Captain Svenson manned the steering rudder and three men were up on the bow playing spotter and using the push poles to avoid snags. Missing a log or snag and breaking the paddle wheel on a hidden obstacle would turn us back into a pole boat again and we all wanted to avoid that. It was pretty intense work and they shifted off frequently. We stayed out of the current but were able to maintain decent speed, maybe as much as eight mph. We did have a decent cargo in the hold and Svenson held forth that our speed was somewhat hampered because of that.

As we chugged upriver I privately wondered whether our engineers could make improvements on the speed and reliability of the machine. I was fairly sure they would do so, engineers can’t help tinkering and they had plenty of data on hand. My main intention with this boat was high speed transport on the river, or what passed for high speed anyway. So mainly Mail and Passengers except in emergency since the propulsion system was simply too fragile and the cargo space was limited.

These were the thoughts that occupied my mind as we slowly trundled up river; it wasn’t a flight of fancy or anything but it was still a good mental exercise. We got to know the crew fairly well on the trip and it did turn out that two of them were married. I took a full evening around the fire to explain to them how Rulo worked and its basic rules, all of which seemed to go over well with most of them. I wondered how many would stay. The truth is we only really needed the captain, the engineer and the mechanic because we had enough boatsmen to do those jobs.

We pulled into St. Louis just before dinner time on the fifth day. The pole boat was at least a week behind us. If we could get the manufacture of steam engines down, we’d need to build some tug boats to help tow these pole boats upriver. It would be a grand challenge yet one that would serve us well in the long term. I just hoped I had that research data in our library. I had spent an evening browsing those after seeing a few of those on the river when we visited Memphis to pick up Lunch. I’m a research nut, so sue me.

We drew a few of the curious when we docked and started to off-load. Amos agreed to show the crew around and take them to the barracks once all was secure. Reloading of fuel and maintenance still had to be performed as well as posting guard duty shifts. Svenson and I weren’t really needed so we proceeded up to Main Street and I introduced him to Byrne’s. The Captain very much appreciated Byrne’s.