Марк Твен
Life on the Mississippi
Chapter 32
The Disposal of a Bonanza
‘SUCH was Ritter’s narrative,’ said I to my two friends. There was a profound and impressive silence, which lasted a considerable time; then both men broke into a fusillade of exciting and admiring ejaculations over the strange incidents of the tale; and this, along with a rattling fire of questions, was kept up until all hands were about out of breath. Then my friends began to cool down, and draw off, under shelter of occasional volleys, into silence and abysmal reverie. For ten minutes now, there was stillness. Then Rogers said dreamily —
‘Ten thousand dollars.’
Adding, after a considerable pause —
‘Ten thousand. It is a heap of money.’
Presently the poet inquired —
‘Are you going to send it to him right away?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is a queer question.’
No reply. After a little, Rogers asked, hesitatingly:
‘All of it? – That is – I mean – ’
‘Certainly, all of it.’
I was going to say more, but stopped – was stopped by a train of thought which started up in me. Thompson spoke, but my mind was absent, and I did not catch what he said. But I heard Rogers answer —
‘Yes, it seems so to me. It ought to be quite sufficient; for I don’t see that he has done anything.’
Presently the poet said —
‘When you come to look at it, it is more than sufficient. Just look at it – five thousand dollars! Why, he couldn’t spend it in a lifetime! And it would injure him, too; perhaps ruin him – you want to look at that. In a little while he would throw his last away, shut up his shop, maybe take to drinking, maltreat his motherless children, drift into other evil courses, go steadily from bad to worse – ’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ interrupted Rogers, fervently, ‘I’ve seen it a hundred times – yes, more than a hundred. You put money into the hands of a man like that, if you want to destroy him, that’s all; just put money into his hands, it’s all you’ve got to do; and if it don’t pull him down, and take all the usefulness out of him, and all the self-respect and everything, then I don’t know human nature – ain’t that so, Thompson? And even if we were to give him a third of it; why, in less than six months – ’
‘Less than six weeks, you’d better say!’ said I, warming up and breaking in. ‘Unless he had that three thousand dollars in safe hands where he couldn’t touch it, he would no more last you six weeks than – ’
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ said Thompson; ‘I’ve edited books for that kind of people; and the moment they get their hands on the royalty – maybe it’s three thousand, maybe it’s two thousand – ’
‘What business has that shoemaker with two thousand dollars, I should like to know?’ broke in Rogers, earnestly. ‘A man perhaps perfectly contented now, there in Mannheim, surrounded by his own class, eating his bread with the appetite which laborious industry alone can give, enjoying his humble life, honest, upright, pure in heart; and blest! – yes, I say blest! blest above all the myriads that go in silk attire and walk the empty artificial round of social folly – but just you put that temptation before him once! just you lay fifteen hundred dollars before a man like that, and say – ’
‘Fifteen hundred devils!’ cried I, ‘five hundred would rot his principles, paralyze his industry, drag him to the rumshop, thence to the gutter, thence to the almshouse, thence to – ’
‘Why put upon ourselves this crime, gentlemen?’ interrupted the poet earnestly and appealingly. ‘He is happy where he is, and as he is. Every sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment of high and sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave him undisturbed. That is real friendship, that is true friendship. We could follow other courses that would be more showy; but none that would be so truly kind and wise, depend upon it.’
After some further talk, it became evident that each of us, down in his heart, felt some misgivings over this settlement of the matter. It was manifest that we all felt that we ought to send the poor shoemaker something. There was long and thoughtful discussion of this point; and we finally decided to send him a chromo.
Well, now that everything seemed to be arranged satisfactorily to everybody concerned, a new trouble broke out: it transpired that these two men were expecting to share equally in the money with me. That was not my idea. I said that if they got half of it between them they might consider themselves lucky. Rogers said —
‘Who would have had any if it hadn’t been for me? I flung out the first hint – but for that it would all have gone to the shoemaker.’
Thompson said that he was thinking of the thing himself at the very moment that Rogers had originally spoken.
I retorted that the idea would have occurred to me plenty soon enough, and without anybody’s help. I was slow about thinking, maybe, but I was sure.
This matter warmed up into a quarrel; then into a fight; and each man got pretty badly battered. As soon as I had got myself mended up after a fashion, I ascended to the hurricane deck in a pretty sour humor. I found Captain McCord there, and said, as pleasantly as my humor would permit —
‘I have come to say good-bye, captain. I wish to go ashore at Napoleon.’
‘Go ashore where?’
‘Napoleon.’
The captain laughed; but seeing that I was not in a jovial mood, stopped that and said —
‘But are you serious?’
‘Serious? I certainly am.’
The captain glanced up at the pilot-house and said —
‘He wants to get off at Napoleon!’
‘Napoleon?’
‘That’s what he says.’
‘Great Caesar’s ghost!’
Uncle Mumford approached along the deck. The captain said —
‘Uncle, here’s a friend of yours wants to get off at Napoleon!’
‘Well, by – ?’
I said —
‘Come, what is all this about? Can’t a man go ashore at Napoleon if he wants to?’
‘Why, hang it, don’t you know? There isn’t any Napoleon any more. Hasn’t been for years and years. The Arkansas River burst through it, tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!’
‘Carried the whole town away? – banks, churches, jails, newspaper-offices, court-house, theater, fire department, livery stable everything ?’
‘Everything. just a fifteen-minute job.’ or such a matter. Didn’t leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one brick chimney. This boat is paddling along right now, where the dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney-all that’s left of Napoleon. These dense woods on the right used to be a mile back of the town. Take a look behind you – up-stream – now you begin to recognize this country, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do recognize it now. It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of; by a long shot the most wonderful – and unexpected.’
Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain’s news. Thompson put a half-dollar in my hand and said softly —
‘For my share of the chromo.’
Rogers followed suit.
Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago. Town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights – an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley; town where we were handed the first printed news of the ‘Pennsylvania’s’ mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no more – swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!
Chapter 33
Refreshments and Ethics
IN regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men and made them a vanity and a jest. When the State of Arkansas was chartered, she controlled ‘to the center of the river’ – a most unstable line. The State of Mississippi claimed ‘to the channel’ – another shifty and unstable line. No. 74 belonged to Arkansas. By and by a cut-off threw this big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi. ‘Middle of the river’ on one side of it, ‘channel’ on the other. That is as I understand the problem. Whether I have got the details right or wrong, this fact remains: that here is this big and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres, thrust out in the cold, and belonging to neither the one State nor the other; paying taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither. One man owns the whole island, and of right is ‘the man without a country.’
Island 92 belongs to Arkansas. The river moved it over and joined it to Mississippi. A chap established a whiskey shop there, without a Mississippi license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under Arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required).
We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy – steamboat or other moving thing seldom seen. Scenery as always: stretch upon stretch of almost unbroken forest, on both sides of the river; soundless solitude. Here and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on the gray and grassless banks – cabins which had formerly stood a quarter or half-mile farther to the front, and gradually been pulled farther and farther back as the shores caved in. As at Pilcher’s Point, for instance, where the cabins had been moved back three hundred yards in three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had already caught up with them, and they were being conveyed rearward once more.
Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the old times; but behold, Napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is Greenville full of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish in the Valley; having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing a gross trade of $2,500,000 annually. A growing town.
There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company, an enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results. Colonel Calhoun, a grandson of the statesman, went to Boston and formed a syndicate which purchased a large tract of land on the river, in Chicot County, Arkansas – some ten thousand acres – for cotton-growing. The purpose is to work on a cash basis: buy at first hands, and handle their own product; supply their negro laborers with provisions and necessaries at a trifling profit, say 8 or 10 per cent.; furnish them comfortable quarters, etc., and encourage them to save money and remain on the place. If this proves a financial success, as seems quite certain, they propose to establish a banking-house in Greenville, and lend money at an unburdensome rate of interest – 6 per cent. is spoken of.
The trouble heretofore has been – I am quoting remarks of planters and steamboatmen – that the planters, although owning the land, were without cash capital; had to hypothecate both land and crop to carry on the business. Consequently, the commission dealer who furnishes the money takes some risk and demands big interest – usually 10 per cent., and 2{half} per cent. for negotiating the loan. The planter has also to buy his supplies through the same dealer, paying commissions and profits. Then when he ships his crop, the dealer adds his commissions, insurance, etc. So, taking it by and large, and first and last, the dealer’s share of that crop is about 25 per cent.‘15
A cotton-planter’s estimate of the average margin of profit on planting, in his section: One man and mule will raise ten acres of cotton, giving ten bales cotton, worth, say, $500; cost of producing, say $350; net profit, $150, or $15 per acre. There is also a profit now from the cotton-seed, which formerly had little value – none where much transportation was necessary. In sixteen hundred pounds crude cotton four hundred are lint, worth, say, ten cents a pound; and twelve hundred pounds of seed, worth $12 or $13 per ton. Maybe in future even the stems will not be thrown away. Mr. Edward Atkinson says that for each bale of cotton there are fifteen hundred pounds of stems, and that these are very rich in phosphate of lime and potash; that when ground and mixed with ensilage or cotton-seed meal (which is too rich for use as fodder in large quantities), the stem mixture makes a superior food, rich in all the elements needed for the production of milk, meat, and bone. Heretofore the stems have been considered a nuisance.
Complaint is made that the planter remains grouty toward the former slave, since the war; will have nothing but a chill business relation with him, no sentiment permitted to intrude, will not keep a ‘store’ himself, and supply the negro’s wants and thus protect the negro’s pocket and make him able and willing to stay on the place and an advantage to him to do it, but lets that privilege to some thrifty Israelite, who encourages the thoughtless negro and wife to buy all sorts of things which they could do without – buy on credit, at big prices, month after month, credit based on the negro’s share of the growing crop; and at the end of the season, the negro’s share belongs to the Israelite,’ the negro is in debt besides, is discouraged, dissatisfied, restless, and both he and the planter are injured; for he will take steamboat and migrate, and the planter must get a stranger in his place who does not know him, does not care for him, will fatten the Israelite a season, and follow his predecessor per steamboat.
It is hoped that the Calhoun Company will show, by its humane and protective treatment of its laborers, that its method is the most profitable for both planter and negro; and it is believed that a general adoption of that method will then follow.
And where so many are saying their say, shall not the barkeeper testify? He is thoughtful, observant, never drinks; endeavors to earn his salary, and would earn it if there were custom enough. He says the people along here in Mississippi and Louisiana will send up the river to buy vegetables rather than raise them, and they will come aboard at the landings and buy fruits of the barkeeper. Thinks they ‘don’t know anything but cotton;’ believes they don’t know how to raise vegetables and fruit – ‘at least the most of them.’ Says ‘a nigger will go to H for a watermelon’ (‘H’ is all I find in the stenographer’s report – means Halifax probably, though that seems a good way to go for a watermelon). Barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents up the river, brings them down and sells them for fifty. ‘Why does he mix such elaborate and picturesque drinks for the nigger hands on the boat?’ Because they won’t have any other. ‘They want a big drink; don’t make any difference what you make it of, they want the worth of their money. You give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents – will he touch it? No. Ain’t size enough to it. But you put up a pint of all kinds of worthless rubbish, and heave in some red stuff to make it beautiful – red’s the main thing – and he wouldn’t put down that glass to go to a circus.’
All the bars on this Anchor Line are rented and owned by one firm. They furnish the liquors from their own establishment, and hire the barkeepers ‘on salary.’ Good liquors? Yes, on some of the boats, where there are the kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it. On the other boats? No. Nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it. ‘Brandy? Yes, I’ve got brandy, plenty of it; but you don’t want any of it unless you’ve made your will.’ It isn’t as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. ‘Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don’t drink.’ In the old times the barkeeper owned the bar himself, ‘and was gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make $2,000 on a trip. A father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a fortune. Now he leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing, if a shirt a trip will do. Yes, indeedy, times are changed. Why, do you know, on the principal line of boats on the Upper Mississippi, they don’t have any bar at all! Sounds like poetry, but it’s the petrified truth.’
Chapter 34
Tough Yarns
STACK island. I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence, Louisiana – which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable gray beards of Spanish moss; ‘restful, pensive, Sunday aspect about the place,’ comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling – also with truth.
A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not known him to be a steamboat mate. He was a passenger of ours, a resident of Arkansas City, and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat, a little Sunflower packet. He was an austere man, and had the reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a river man. Among other things, he said that Arkansas had been injured and kept back by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here. One may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing; but when you come to look at the effects produced, in the way of discouragement of immigration, and diminished values of property, it was quite the opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wise to be coughed down or sneered at. These mosquitoes had been persistently represented as being formidable and lawless; whereas ‘the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size, diffident to a fault, sensitive’ – and so on, and so on; you would have supposed he was talking about his family. But if he was soft on the Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes of Lake Providence to make up for it – ‘those Lake Providence colossi,’ as he finely called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog, and that four of them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would kill him – ‘butcher him,’ as he expressed it. Referred in a sort of casual way – and yet significant way – to ‘the fact that the life policy in its simplest form is unknown in Lake Providence – they take out a mosquito policy besides.’ He told many remarkable things about those lawless insects. Among others, said he had seen them try to vote. Noticing that this statement seemed to be a good deal of a strain on us, he modified it a little: said he might have been mistaken, as to that particular, but knew he had seen them around the polls ‘canvassing.’
There was another passenger – friend of H.‘s – who backed up the harsh evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures which he had had with them. The stories were pretty sizable, merely pretty sizable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with a cold, inexorable ‘Wait – knock off twenty-five per cent. of that; now go on;’ or, ‘Wait – you are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it down – you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements: always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;’ or, ‘Pardon, once more: if you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it’s drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts – just stick to the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen truth – ain’t that so, gentlemen?’ He explained privately that it was necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds; it would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H., ‘knew to his sorrow.’ Said he, ‘I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous lie once, that it swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was actually not able to see out around it; it remained so for months, and people came miles to see me fan myself with it.’
Chapter 35
Vicksburg During the Trouble
WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless water – also a big island – in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water: in low water you can’t come up, but must land some distance below it.
Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg’s tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service during the six weeks’ bombardment of the city – May 8 to July 4, 1863. They were used by the non-combatants – mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps – but wait; here are some materials out of which to reproduce it: —
Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world – walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no God-speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings – a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town – for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen – all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o’clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons – encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout ‘Rats, to your holes!’ and laugh.
The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops; silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues; by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town, if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again, by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.
There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers – merely the population of a village – would they not come to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one would be of interest to all?
Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person’s former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all. But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession – what then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman’s pulse.
Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants – a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people told it without fire, almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone. What the man said was to this effect: —
‘It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week – to us, anyway. We hadn’t anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays, and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards. The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along. When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head. Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again! Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn’t always go under shelter if it was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say, ‘There she goes!’ and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of it, and go on talking – if there wasn’t any danger from it. If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still; – uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn’t safe to move. When it let go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt – maybe saying, ‘That was a ripper!’ or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, ‘See you again, gents!’ and shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells; and I’ve seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that they sa’ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn’t; they had iron litter. Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard – a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left; glass couldn’t stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses vacant – looked like eye-holes in a skull. Whole panes were as scarce as news.
‘We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye pretty good turnouts. I’ve seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit quiet – no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then – and all the more so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again. Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer combination – along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had an accident – the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn’t seen for a while, and saying, ‘Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we’ve got hold of a pint of prime wh – .’ Whiskey, I was going to say, you know, but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man’s arm off, and left it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was ‘the whiskey is saved.’ And yet, don’t you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another taste during the siege.
‘Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close. Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn’t have made a candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night, Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.
‘Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight; eight belonged there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don’t know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us within a couple of years. One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while, digging out. Some of us came near smothering. After that we made two openings – ought to have thought of it at first.
