A young man so fearless, so energetic, and so able to invent mechanical devices at sudden need, was bound to succeed in a business like this. And young Eads did succeed. "Fortune," he believed, "favors the brave;" and his motto was, "Drive on!"
The insurance companies were willing to give the wreckers a large interest, sometimes as much as a half, of the rescued cargoes; and there was a law by which a vessel or freight that had been wrecked for five years belonged to whoever could get it up. Eads and his partners worked up and down the river for hundreds of miles. The first diving-bell boat was followed by a larger one, provided with machinery for pumping out sand, and for raising whole hulls. While in this hazardous business Eads invented many new appliances for use in its various branches. Because he was in charge of a boat people began to call the young wrecker Captain Eads, and that was the only reason for a title which clung to him always. He grew now to know the river as few have ever known it,--his operations extended from Galena, Illinois, to the Balize at the river's very mouth, and even into the tributaries of the Mississippi,--and he used to say that there was not a stretch of fifty miles in the twelve hundred between Saint Louis and New Orleans in which he had not stood on the bottom under his diving-bell.
With the same devotion to his parents as when he peddled the apples in the street, Eads now bought them a farm in Iowa, and provided in every way he could for their comfort. But beyond the ordinary desire of making a fortune for them, for himself, and for a new interest that was coming into his life, it does not appear that there were in his mind any unusual ambitions, any of the dreams of genius. As yet he was only a hard-working, earnest young man, extraordinarily clever to be sure, but founding on that cleverness no visions of great renown in the future. Perhaps this was because he had enough to dream of in the present, enough hopes of purely domestic happiness to look towards. For he had fallen in love with a Miss Martha Dillon, a young lady of about his own age, daughter of a rich man in Saint Louis. The father disapproved of the match, not only because he thought the suitor too young, too poor, too unknown, but because he wished to keep his daughter with him, and for other less reasonable causes.