Or, if it offered, they took passage on some fast sailing clipper bound for Baltimore or Philadelphia, and crossed the mountains to the Ohio and were within a week or two of home.
Bruce Carrington had seen the day of barge and raft reach its zenith, had heard the first steam packet's shrieking whistle which sounded the death-knell of the ancient order, though the shifting of the trade was a slow matter and the glory of the old did not pass over to the new at once, but lingered still in mighty fleets of rafts and keel-boats and in the Homeric carousals of some ten thousand of the half-horse, half-alligator breed that nightly gathered in New Orleans.

Broad-horns and mud-sills they were called in derision.

A strange race of aquatic pioneers, jeans and leather clad, the rifle and the setting-pole equally theirs, they came out of every stream down which a scow could be thrust at flood-time; from tiny settlements far back among the hills; from those bustling sinks of iniquity, the river towns.

But now, surely, yet almost imperceptibly, their commerce was slipping from them.

At all the landings they were being elbowed by the newcomers--men who wore brass buttons and gold braid, and shiny leather shoes instead of moccasins; men with white hands and gold rings on their fingers and diamonds in their shirts--men whose hair and clothing kept the rancid smell of oil and smoke and machinery.
After the reading of the warrant that morning, Charley Balaam had shown Carrington the road to the Forks, assuring him when they separated that with a little care and decent use of his eyes it would be possible to fetch up there and not pass plumb through the settlement without knowing where he was.