Mike leaned on his six-foot-long rifle and dreamed about becoming a boatman. He watched the water churn against the sides of the river craft, sparkling like soapsuds. Best of all, he liked watching the men who ran the boats. Most of them were as powerful and as full of brag and fight as he was. A few wore red feathers in their hats. A red feather meant that the person wearing it was the roughest, toughest, hardest-to-beat river man around.

"I aim to get me a red feather," Mike decided. "I aim to get me all the red feathers there are, from here to the Rockies, and on the other side, too!"

Mike told his folks good-bye, polished up Bang-All until it glittered like a hive of bees, and walked up to the first keelboat captain he found in Pittsburgh.

"What can you do?" the captain asked Mike.

"There‘s just about nothing I can‘t do," said Mike, "except possibly drink up the Pacific Ocean in one swallow. Otherwise, I can out-roar a mother hurricane and all her family, knock down a thunderbolt with my breath, spit the Sahara Desert into a flood, and in my spare time, haul up so many whales, the Atlantic will sink a hundred feet. I can also do a few other things that I can‘t even think of right at the moment."

"I’ll try you out," said the captain, and he wrote Mike’s name down on the crew list.

Mike bought himself a proper keel boatman‘s outfit — a red shirt, blue jacket, linsey-woolsey pants, moccasins, a fur cap, and a wide belt from which he hung a knife. He strutted on board and looked around until he saw a big-nosed man with a red feather stuck in his cap. Mike swaggered over to the man, doubled up his fists, and roared: