"For my father's sake," said Tony, to himself. "I don't see why I should exert myself to please him, when he goes out of his way to refuse every request I make of him."
He walked back to his desk, placed his algebra upon the shelf with the rest of his books--it would have given him more pleasure if he could have kindled a fire with it in the stove--bade his teacher good-night and went out. Most boys would have been too sulky to be courteous, but Tony Richardson was not that sort. With all his faults he was not mean-spirited.
"This thing _is_ getting to be a trifle too monotonous," said he, as he put on his hat and descended the stairs, "and I am not going to stand it much longer; that's all there is about _that_. I don't see why father wants me to study algebra, when he hated it so cordially himself. I'll warrant that there are not two captains in his whole fleet who know the binomial-theorem from a side of sole-leather, and yet they are all good commanders. If they can run a boat without knowing anything about mathematics, I don't see why I can't do the same. I want to go to sea--I just know I was born to be a sailor--and if father won't let me go, he must give me a place on one of his boats. I can tell him that much."
While these thoughts, and a good many others like them, were passing through Tony's mind, he was walking rapidly toward the levee. When he came within sight of the river he saw there, among the scores of other vessels with which the levee was lined, one of his father's magnificent boats, the Telegraph, which was advertised to start for New Orleans on the following Monday. The engineer had just sounded his gong, and a boy about his own age was ascending the steps that led into the pilot-house. The captain had stationed himself near the bell that stood on the forward part of the hurricane-deck, and the hands, under the charge of one of the mates, were awaiting the order to haul in the gang-plank and cast off the lines.
"She must be going up to the coal-fleet," thought Tony, as he ran swiftly down the levee, swinging his hat over his head. "I shall have plenty of time to go up with her, and get back to the depot before the train starts for home."
The captain saw him coming, and knowing who he was, delayed the order to cast off until Tony had run up the gang-plank. The latter stopped on the hurricane-deck to exchange a few words of greeting with the "old man," and then went into the pilot-house, where he found George Ackerman at the wheel. George had now been on the river for more than six months, and the reader will have some idea of the progress he had made in his new vocation when we tell him that he was the only pilot on board the Telegraph at that moment, that Mr. Black, after being engaged for the trip, had gone to Webster Groves to take leave of his family, that his partner, Mr. Kelsey, was somewhere on shore, and that neither of them had felt the least hesitation in leaving George to take the boat up to the coal-fleet, and bring her back again.