 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. By Mark Twain. CHAPTER VIII. PERPLEXING LESSONS. At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, bars, points, and bends, and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, in as much as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps. But, of course, my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler. What is the shape of walnut bend? He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm, I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives. I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of ammunition and was sure to subside into a very placable and even remorseful old smooth bore as soon as they were all gone. That word old is merely affectionate. He was not more than thirty-four. I waited, by and by, he said. My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But, mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime. How on earth am I ever going to learn it then? How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it. Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home? On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house. I wish I was dead. Now, I don't want to discourage you, but, well, pile it on me. I might as well have it now as another time. You see, this has got to be learned. There isn't any getting round it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you don't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape, and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night. The river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty din ones, too, and you'd run them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid straight wall, you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there, and that wall falls back and makes sway for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grizzly-drizzly gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to assure. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways. You see, oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head, it would make me stoop-shouldered! No! You only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes. Very well, I'll try it. But after I have learned it, can I depend on it? Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around? Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W came in to take the watch, and he said, Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that country clear away up above the old Hanon chickens. The banks are caving, and the shape of the shore is changing like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point above forty. You can go up inside old Sycamore snag now, footnote one. It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain that inside means between the snag and the shore. M-T. So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore-changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that, in order to be a pilot, a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know, and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this. I judged the upper bar as making down a little at Hale's Point, had quarter twain with a lower lead, and marked twain, footnote two fathoms, quarter twain is two and a quarter fathoms, thirteen and a half feet, mark three is three fathoms, had quarter twain with a lower lead, and marked twain with the other. Yes, I thought it was making down a little last trip. Meet any boats? Met one abreast the head of twenty-one, but she was away over hugging the bar, and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the sunny south, hadn't any skylights for the chimneys, and so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel, his partner, footnote partner is a technical term for the other pilot, his partner would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man's woodyard or plantation. This was courtesy. I supposed it was necessity, but Mr. W. came on watch full twelve minutes late on this particular night a tremendous breach of etiquette. In fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the pilot house without a word. I was appalled. It was a villainous night for blackness. We were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river, where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it seemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was, but I resolved that I would stand by him anyway. He should find that he was not wholly friendless. So I stood around and waited to be asked where we were. But Mr. W. plunged on serenely through the solid firmament of black cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth. Here is a proud devil, I thought. Here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligation to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat. I presently climbed up on the bench. I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic was on watch. However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking. Mr. W. gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four o'clock and all well, but me. I felt like a skin full of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once. Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed that it was to do Mr. W. a benevolence. Tell him where he was. It took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into Mr. Bixby's system, and then I judge it filled him nearly up to the chin, because he paid me a compliment, and not much of one either. He said, Well, taking you by and large, you do seem to be more different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before. What you suppose he wanted to know for? I said I thought it might be a convenience to him. Convenience denation. Didn't I tell you that a man's got to know the river in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall? Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it is the front hall, but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me which hall it is. How am I to know? Well, you've got to know on the river. All right! Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr. W. I should say so. Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and utterly ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window sash and stuff. I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody who had the name of being careless and injuring things. I went to work now to learn the shape of the river, and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain, but just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank. If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore when I got abreast of it. No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, and it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby. He said, Well, that's the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn't change every three seconds, they wouldn't be of any use. Take this place where we are now, for instance. As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom right along the way I'm going. But the moment it splits at the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to Starbird in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock, and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind the other, I've got to waltz to Larbird again, or I'll have the misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the Kielsen out of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand. If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights, there would be an awful steamboat graveyard around here inside of a year. It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of, upside down, wrong and first, inside, out, fore and aft, and thwerp ships, and then know what to do on grey nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this naughty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me after this fashion. How much water did we have in the middle-crossing at hole-in-the-wall trip before last? I considered this an outrage. I said, every trip down and up the Ledzmen are singing through that tangled place for three quarters of an hour on stretch. How do you reckon I can remember such a mess as that? My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water in every one of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New Orleans. And you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. You must keep them separate. When I came to myself again I said, when I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead. And then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this business. I want a slush bucket and a brush. I'm only fit for a roust about. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot. And if I had, I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around unless I went on crutches. Now drop that. When I say I'll learn, footnote, teach is not in the river vocabulary. Learn a man the river, I mean it, and you can depend on it. I'll learn him or kill him. End of Chapter 8. There was no use in arguing with a person like this. I promptly put such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal water and the countless crossing marks began to stay with me. But the result was just the same. I never could more than get one naughty thing learned before another presented itself. Now I had often seen pilots gazing at the water and pretending to read it as if it were a book. But it was a book that told me nothing. A time came at last, however, when Mr. Bixby seemed to think me far enough advanced to bear a lesson on water-reading. So he began. Do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water? Now, that's a reef. Moreover, it's a bluff reef. There is a solid sandbar under it that is nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house. There is plenty of water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it. If you were to hit it, you would knock the boat's brains out. Do you see where the line fringes out at the upper end and begins to fade away? Yes, sir. Well, that is a low place. That is the head of the reef. You can climb over there and not hurt anything. Cross over now and follow along close under the reef. Easy water there. Not much current. I followed the reef along till I approached the fringed end. Then Mr. Bixby said, Now, get ready. Wait till I give the word. She won't want to mount the reef. A boat hates shoal water. Stand by. Wait. Wait. Keep her well in hand. Now, cramp her down. Snatch her. Snatch her. He seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin it around until it was hard down, and then we held to it. The boat resisted and refused to answer for a while, and next she came surging to starboard, mounted the reef, and sent a long angry ridge of water foaming away from her boughs. Now watch her. Watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you. When she fights strong and the tiller slips a little in a jerky, greasy sort of way, let up on her a trifle. It is the way she tells you at night that the water is too shoal. But keep edging her up, little by little, toward the point. You are well up on the bar now. There is a bar under every point, because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy and allows the sediment to sink. Do you see those fine lines on the face of the water that branch out like the ribs of a fan? Well, those are little reefs. You want to just miss the ends of them, but run them pretty close. Now look out. Look out. Don't you crowd that slick, greasy-looking place. There ain't nine feet there. She won't stand it. She begins to smell it. Look sharp, I tell you. Go places. There you go. Stop the starboard wheel. Quick! Ship us to back. Set her back! The engine bells jingled, and the engines answered promptly, shooting white columns of steam far aloft out of the scape-pipes, but it was too late. The boat had smelt the bar in good earnest. The foamy ridges that radiated from her bows suddenly disappeared. A great dead swell came rolling forward and swept ahead of her. She careened far over to Larbert, and went tearing away toward the other shores if she were about scared to death. We were a good mile from where we ought to have been when we finally got the upper hand of her again. During the afternoon watch the next day Mr. Bixby asked me if I knew how to run the next few miles. I said, Go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one, start out from the lower end of Higgins' woodyard, make a square crossing, and that's all right. I'll be back before you close up the next point. But he wasn't. He was still below when I rounded it and entered upon a piece of river which I had some misgivings about. I did not know that he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went gaily along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my soul charge such a length of time before. I even got to setting her and letting the wheel go entirely while I vane gloriously turned my back and inspected the stem marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy indifference which I had prodigiously admired in Bixby and other great pilots. Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced to the front again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn't clapped my teeth together I should have lost it. One of those frightful bluff reefs was stretched its deadly length right across our bowels. My head was gone in a moment. I did not know which end I stood on. I gasped and could not get my breath. I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that it wove its stealth together like a spider's web. The boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her. I fled, and still it followed. Still it kept right across my bowels. I never looked to see where I was going. I only fled. The awful crash was imminent. Why didn't that villain come? If I committed the crime of ringing a bell I might get thrown overboard. But better that than kill the boat. So in blind desperation I started such a rattling chivalry down below as never had astounded an engineer in this world before, I fancy. Amidst the frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious way, and my reason for sook had thrown we were about to crash into the woods on the other side of the river. Just then Mr. Bixby stepped calmly into view on the hurricane deck. My soul went out to him in gratitude. My distress vanished. I would have felt safe on the brink of Niagara with Mr. Bixby on the hurricane deck. He blandly and sweetly took his toothpick out of his mouth between his fingers, as if it were a cigar. We were just in the act of climbing an overhanging big tree, and the passengers were scutting a stern like rats, and lifted up these commands to me ever so gently. Stop the starbird. Stop the larbord. Set her back on both. The boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the bowels a critical instant, then reluctantly began to back away. Stop the larbord. Come ahead on it. Stop the starbird. Come ahead on it. Point her for the bar. I sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning. Mr. Bixby came in and said with mock simplicity, When you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times before you land, so that the engineers can get ready. I blushed under the sarcasm and said I hadn't had any hail. Ah! Then it was for wood, I suppose. The Officer of the Watch will tell you when he wants to wood up. I went on consuming, and said I wasn't after wood. Indeed. Why, uh, what could you want over here in the bend, then? Did you ever know of a boat following a bend upstream at this stage of the river? No, sir. And I wasn't trying to follow it. I was getting away from a bluff reef. No, it wasn't a bluff reef. There isn't one within three miles of where you were. But I saw it. It was as bluff as that one yonder. Just about. Run over it. Do you give it as an order? Yes, run over it. If I don't, I wish I may die. All right. I am taking the responsibility. I was just as anxious to kill the boat now as I had been to save her before. I impressed my orders upon my memory to be used at the inquest and made a straight break for the reef. As it disappeared under our bows, I held my breath. But we slid over it like oil. Now do you see the difference? It wasn't anything but a wind reef. The wind does that. So I see. But it is exactly like a bluff reef. How am I ever going to tell them apart? I can't tell you. It's an instinct. By and by you will just naturally know one from the other. But you never will be able to explain why or how you know them apart. It turned out to be true. The face of the water in time became a wonderful book. A book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest. Never one that you could leave unread without loss. Never one that you would want to skip, thinking you might find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man. Never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every re-perusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether. But to the pilot that was an italicised passage. Indeed it was more than that. It was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it, for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression that water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all but the grimmest and most dead earnest of reading matter. Now, when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the Great River as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood. In the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating black and conspicuous. In one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water. In another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings that were as many tinted as an opal, where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines ever so delicately traced. The shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver, and high above the forest wall a clean stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances, and over the whole scene far and near the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face, another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it inwardly after this fashion. This sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow. That floating log means that the river is rising. Small thanks to it. That slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that. Those tumbling boils show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there. The lines and circles and the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously. That silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the break from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats. That tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark? No. The romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish towards compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a break that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sewn thick with what are, to him, the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade? Whosoever has done me the courtesy to read my chapters, which have preceded this, may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters, and I am not quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them. Clear water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once. But piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy. For there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river. Footnote, true at the time referred to, not true now, 1882. I feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it, who had piloted a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject. If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with the reader. But since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up a considerable degree of room with it. When I had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the river, when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans, when I had learned to read the face of the river as one would cull the news from the morning paper, and finally, when I had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array of soundings and crossing-marks and keep fast hold of them, I judged that my education was complete. So I got to tilting my cap to the side of my head and wearing a toothpick in my mouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these heirs. One day he said, What is the height of that bank yonder at Burgess's? How can I tell, sir? It is three quarters of a mile away. Very poor eye. Very poor. Take the glass. I took the glass and presently said, I can't tell. I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high. Foot and a half? That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bank along here last trip? I don't know. I never noticed. You didn't. Well, you must always do it hereafter. Why? Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you. For one thing it tells you the stage of the river. Tells you whether there's more water or less in the river along here than there was last trip. The lads tell me that. I rather thought I had the advantage of him there. Yes, but suppose the lads lie. The bank would tell you so, and then you'd stir those ladsmen up a bit. There was a ten-foot bank here last trip, and there's only a six-foot bank now. What does that signify? That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip. Very good. Is the river rising or falling? Rising? No, it ain't. I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some driftwood floating down the stream. A rise starts the driftwood, but then it keeps on floating a while after the river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this. Wait till you come to a place where it shelves a little. Now, here. Do you see this narrow belt of fine sediment? That was deposited while the water was higher. You see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways. Do you see that stump on the false point? Aye, aye, sir. Well, the water is just up to the roots of it. You must make a note of that. Why? Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103. But 103 is a long way up the river yet. That's where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is water enough in 103 now, yet there may not be by the time we get there. But the bank will keep us posted all along. You don't run close chutes on a falling river upstream, and there are precious few of them that you are allowed to run at all downstream. There's a law of the United States against it. The river may be rising by the time we get to 103, and in that case we'll run it. We are drawing—how much? Six feet aft, six and a half forward. Well, you do seem to know something. But what I particularly want to know is if I have to keep up an everlasting measuring of the banks of this river twelve hundred miles, month in and month out. Of course. My emotions were too deep for words for a while. Presently, I said, and how about these chutes? Are there many of them? I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trippus. You've ever seen it run before, so to speak. If the river begins to rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house. We'll cut across low places that you've never noticed at all, right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river. We'll creep through cracks where you've always thought was solid land. We'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one side. We'll see the hindsight of every island between Norlands and Cairo. Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as I already know. Just about twice as much more as near as you can come at it. Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went into this business. Yes, that is true, and you are yet, but you'll not be when you've learned it. I can never learn it. I will see that you do. By and by, I ventured again. Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river shapes and all, and so I can run it at night? Yes. And you've got to have good, fair marks from one end of the river to the other that will help the bank tell you when there is water enough in each of these countless places, like that stump, you know. When the river first begins to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them. When it rises a foot more, you can run another dozen. The next foot will add a couple of dozens and so on. So you see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead moral certainty and never get them mixed. For when you start through one of those cracks, there's no backing out again, as there is in the big river. You've got to go through or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river. There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all except when the river is brimful and over the banks. This new lesson is a cheerful prospect? Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you. When you start into one of those places you've got to go through. They are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of, and the shoal water is always up at the head, never elsewhere. And the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little, so that the marks you reckon they're depth by this season may not answer for next. Learn a new set then every year? Exactly! A cramper up to the bar. What are you standing up through the middle of the river for? The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river. The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away. It required the nicest steering to pick one's way through this rushing raft, even in the daytime, when crossing from point to point. And at night the difficulty was mightily increased. Every now and then a huge log lying deep in the water would suddenly appear right under our bows coming head on. No use to try to avoid it then. We could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers. Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs in a rattling bang dead in the center with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge and stay right across our nose and back the Mississippi up before it. We would have to do a little craw-fishing then to get away from the obstruction. We often hit white logs in the dark, for we could not see them till we were right on them. But a black log is a pretty distinct object at night. A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone. Of course on the great rise down came a swarm of prodigious timber rafts from the headwaters of the Mississippi, coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading-scows from everywhere, and broad horns from Posey County, Indiana, freighted with fruit and furniture, the usual term for describing it, though in plain English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins. Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft, and it was returned with usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keep a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken. All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up right under our bowels, almost, and an agonized voice, with a back-wood swang to it, would wail out, Where in the... you going to? Can't you see nothing? You dash dash egg-suckin' sheep-stealing one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey! Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scowl in the form of the gesticulating orator, as if under a lightning flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-or, and down the dead blackness would shut again, and that flat boatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck. Once at night, in one of those forest-bordered crevices behind an island, which steamboat men intensely describe with a phrase, as dark as the inside of a cow, we should have eaten up a posy county family, fruit, furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught the sound of the music in time to shear off, doing no serious damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment. These people brought up their lantern, then, of course, and as we backed and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it, both sexes and various ages, and cursed us till everything turned blue. Once a coal-boatman sent a bullet through our pilot house when we borrowed a steering-or of him in a very narrow place. CHAPTER X During this big rise, these small fry-craft were an intolerable nuisance. We were running shoot after shoot, a new world to me, and if there was a particularly cramped place in a shoot, we would be pretty sure to meet a broad horn there, and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a still worse locality, namely the head of the shoot, on the shore water, and then there was to be no end of profane cordialities exchanged. Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in an instant a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil close upon us, and then we did not wait to swap knives but snatched our engine-bells out by the roots and piled on all the steam we had to scramble out of the way. One doesn't hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steam boat when he can get excused. You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed steamboating days. Indeed they did. Twenty times a day we would be cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small fry rascals were drifting down into the head of the bend, away above, and beyond us a couple of miles. Now a skiff would dart away from one of them and come fighting its laborious way across the desert of water. It would ease all in the shadow of our folksal, and the panting oarsmen would shout, Give me a paper!—as the skiff drifted swiftly astern. The clerk would throw over a file of Norlin's journals. If these were picked up without comment you might notice that now a dozen other skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything. You understand they had been waiting to see how number one was going to fear. Number one, making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars and come on now. And as fast as they came the clerk would heave over neat bundles of religious tracts tied to shingles. The amount of hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature will command, when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews, who have pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply incredible. As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of the water before. We were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I had always seen avoided before. We were clattering through shoots like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these shoots were utter solitudes. The dense untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little crack, and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before. The swinging grapevines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by, the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the spend-thrift richness of the forest foliage were wasted and thrown away there. The shoots were lovely places to steer in. They were deep, except at the head. The current was gentle. Under the points the water was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's broadside in them as you tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly. Behind other islands we found wretched little farms and wretched little log cabins. There were crazy rail fences sticking a foot or two above the water, with one or two jeans clad, chills racked, yellow-faced male miserables roosting on the top rail, elbows on knees, jaws in hands, grinding tobacco and discharging the results at floating chips through crevices left by lost teeth, while the rest of the family and the few farm animals were huddled together in an empty wood flat riding at her moorings close at hand. In this flat boat the family would have to cook and eat and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days or possibly weeks, until the river should fall two or three feet and let them get back to their log cabin and their chills again, chills being a merciful provision of an all-wise providence to enable them to take exercise without exertion. And this sort of watery camping-out was a thing which these people were rather liable to be treated to a couple of times a year, by the December rise out of the Ohio and the June rise out of the Mississippi, and yet these were kindly dispensations, for they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. They appreciated the blessing too, for they spread their mouths and eyes wide open and made the most of these occasions. Now what could these banished creatures find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water season? Once in one of these lovely island-shoots we found our course completely bridged by a great fallen tree. This will serve to show how narrow some of the shoots were. The passengers had an hour's recreation and a virgin wilderness, while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away, for there was no such thing as turning back, you comprehend. From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm or woodyard opening at intervals, and so you can't get out of the river much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane. But from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, it is a different matter. The river is more than a mile wide and very deep, as much as two hundred feet in places. Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental china-trees. The timber is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles. When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off their crops in a hurry. When they have finished grinding the cane, they form the refuse of the stalks, which they call bagasse, into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar-countries the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills. Now the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly and smoke like Satan's own kitchen. An embarkment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a hundred feet, according to circumstances. Say, thirty or forty feet as a general thing. Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles when the river is over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel. And see how you will feel, too. You find yourself a way out in the midst of a vague, dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances. For you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't. The plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke and look like a part of the sea. All through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty. You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know. All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction when you think you are a good half-mile from shore. And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the embankment and topple your chimney's overboard, you will have the small comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do. One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week, but there was no novelty about it. It had often been done before. I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish to add a curious thing while it is on my mind. It is only relevant in that it is connected with piloting. There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, Mr. X, who was a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind was troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange things. He was often fellow-pilot for a trip or two with George Ealer, on a great Norland's passenger packet. During a considerable part of the first trip George was uneasy, but got over it by and by, as X seemed content to stay in his bed when asleep. Late one night the boat was approaching Helena, Arkansas. The water was low, and the crossing above the town in a very blind and tangled condition. X had seen the crossing since Ealer had, and as the night was particularly drizzly, sullen, and dark, Ealer was considering whether he had not better have X called to assist in running the place when the door opened, and X walked in. Now, on very dark nights light is a deadly enemy to piloting. You are aware that if you stand in a lighted room on such a night you cannot see things in the street to any purpose, but if you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can make out objects in the street pretty well. So, on very dark nights pilots do not smoke. They allow no fire in the pilot house stove if there is a crack which can allow the least ray to escape. They order the furnaces to be curtailed with huge tarpolins and the skylights to be closely blinded. Then no light whatever issues from the boat. The undefinable shape that now entered the pilot house had Mr. X's voice, and this said, Let me take her, George. I've seen this place since you have, and it is so crooked that I reckon I can run it myself easier than I could tell you how to do it. It is kind of you, and I swear I am willing. I haven't got another drop of perspiration left in me. I have been spinning round and round the wheel like a squirrel. It is so dark I can't tell which way she is swinging till she is coming around like a whirligig. So Ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless. The black phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything. Steady the waltzing steamer with a turn or two, and then stood at ease, coaxing her a little to this side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if the time had been noonday. When Ealer observed this marvel of steering he wished he had not confessed. He stared and wondered and finally said, Well, I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was another mistake of mine. X said nothing, but went serenely on with his work. He rang for the leads, he rang to slow down the steam. He worked the boat carefully and neatly into invisible marks, then stood at the center of the wheel, and peered blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his position. As the leads shoaled more and more he stopped the engines entirely, and the dead silence and suspense of drifting followed when the shoalest water was struck. He cracked on the steam, carried her handsomely over, and then began to work her warily into the next system of shoal marks. The same patient heedful use of leads and engines followed. The boat slipped through without touching bottom, and entered upon the third and last intricacy of the crossing. Imperceptibly she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then, under a tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away into deep water and safety. Ealer let his long pent breath pour out in a great relieving sigh, and said, That's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on the Mississippi River. I wouldn't believe it could be done if I hadn't seen it. There was no reply, and he added, Just hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get a cup of coffee. A minute later Ealer was biting into a pie down in the Texas, and comforting himself with coffee. Just then the night watchman happened in, and was about to happen out again, when he noticed Ealer and exclaimed, Who is that the wheel, sir? X? Darn for the pilot house quicker than lightning! The next moment both men were flying up the pilot house companion way three steps at a jump. Nobody there. The great steamer was whistling down the middle of the river at her own sweet will. The watchman shot out of the place again. Ealer seized the wheel, set an engine back with power, and held his breath while the boat reluctantly swung away from a tow-head which she was about to knock into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. By and by the watchman came back and said, Didn't that lunatic tell you he was asleep when he first came up here? No. Well, he was. I found him walking along on top of the railings just as unconcerned as another man would walk a pavement. And I put him to bed. Now, just this minute there he was again, way astern, going through that sort of tight-rope devil-tree the same as before. Well, I think I'll stay by next time he has one of those fits, but I hope he'll have them often. You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Hell in a Crossing, and ever saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf kid-glove diamond breast-pinned piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead? CHAPTER XII When the river is very low and one steam-boat is drawing all the water there is in the channel, or a few inches more, as was often the case in the old times, one must be painfully circumspect in his piloting. We used to have to sound a number of particularly bad places almost every trip when the river was at a very low stage. Sounding is done in this way. The boat ties up at the shore, just above the Shoal Crossing. The pilot, not on watch, takes his cub, or steersman, and a picked crew of men, sometimes an officer also, and goes out in the yaw, provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury, a regularly devised sounding boat, and proceeds to hunt for the best water. The pilot on duty watches his movements through a spy-glass, meantime, and in some instances assisting by signals of the boat's whistle, signifying try higher up, or try lower down. For the surface of the water, like an oil painting, is more expressive and intelligible when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand. The whistle signals are seldom necessary, however. Never, perhaps, except when the wind confuses the significant ripples upon the water's surface. When the yaw has reached the Shoal Place, the speed is slackened, the pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole ten or twelve feet long, and the steersman, at the tiller, obeys the order to hold her up to starboard, or let her fall off the larboard. Footnote, the term larboard is never used at sea now to signify the left hand, but was always used on the river in my time. Or steady, steady as you go! When the measurements indicate that the yaw is approaching the shoalest part of the reef, the command is given to ease all, when the men stop rowing and the yaw drifts with the current. The next order is, Stand by with the buoy! The moment the shallowest point is reached, the pilot delivers the order, let go of the buoy! And over she goes. If the pilot is not satisfied, he sounds the place again. If he finds better water higher up or lower down, he removes the buoy to that place. Being finally satisfied, he gives the order, and all the men stand their oars straight up in the air in line. A blast from the boat's whistle indicates that the signal has been sent, then the men give way on their oars and lay the yaw alongside the buoy. The steamer comes creeping carefully down, is pointed straight at the buoy, husbands her power for the coming struggle, and presently at the critical moment turns on all her steam, and goes grinding and wallowing over the buoy and the sand, and gains the deep water beyond. Or maybe she doesn't. Maybe she strikes and swings. Then she has to wile away several hours, or days, sparring herself off. Sometimes a buoy is not late at all, but the yaw goes ahead, hunting the best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake. Often there is a deal of fun and excitement about sounding, especially if it is a glorious summer day, or a blustering night. But in winter the cold and the peril take most of the fun out of it. A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long, with one end turned up. It is a reversed schoolhouse bench, with one of the supports left and the other removed. It is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it. But for the resistance of the turned up end of the reversed bench the current would pull the buoy under water. At night a paper lantern with a candle in it is fastened on the top of the buoy, and this can be seen a mile or more. A little glimmering spark in the waste of blackness. Nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding. There is such an air of adventure about it. Often there is danger. It is so gaudy and man of warlike to sit up in the stern sheets and steer a swift yaw. There is something fine about the exultant spring of the boat when an experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the oars. It is lovely to see the white foam stream away from the boughs. There is music in the rush of the water. It is deliciously exhilarating in summer to go speeding over the breezy expanses of the river when the world of wavelets is dancing in the sun. It is such grandeur, too, to the cub to get a chance to give an order. For often the pilot will simply say, Let her go about, and leave the rest to the cub, who instantly cries in his sternest tone of command, He's starboard! Strong and the law-bird! Starboard, give way! With a will, men! The cub enjoys sounding for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers are watching all the yaw's movements with absorbing interest if the time be daylight, and if it be night he knows that those same wondering eyes are fastened upon the yaw's lantern as it glides out into the gloom and dims away in the remote distance. One trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house with her uncle and aunt every day and all day long. I fell in love with her. So did Mr. Thornberg's cub, Tom G. Tom and I had been bosom friends until this time, but now a coolness began to arise. I told the girl a good many of my river adventures and made myself out a good deal of a hero. Tom tried to make himself appear to be a hero too, and succeeded to some extent. But then he always had a way of embroidering. However, virtue is its own reward, so I was a barely perceptible trifle ahead in the contest. About this time something happened which promised handsomely for me. The pilots decided to sound the crossing at the head of twenty-one. This would occur about nine or ten o'clock at night when the passengers would still be up. It would be Mr. Thornberg's watch, therefore my chief would have to do the sounding. We had a perfect love of a sounding-boat, long, trim, graceful, and as fleet as a greyhound. Her thwarps were cushioned. She carried twelve oarsmen. One of the mates was always sent in her to transmit orders to her crew, for ours was a steamer where no end of style was put on. We tied up at the shore above twenty-one and got ready. It was a foul night, and the river was so wide there that a landsman's uneducated eyes could discern no opposite shore through such a gloom. The passengers were alert and interested. Everything was satisfactory. As I hurried through the engine room, picturesquely gotten up in storm-toggery, I met Tom and could not forbear delivering myself of a mean speech. Ain't you glad you don't have to go out sounding? Tom was passing on, but he quickly turned and said, Now, just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself. I was going after it, but I'd see you in Halifax now, before I do it. Who wants you to get it? I don't. It's in the sounding-boat. It ain't either. It's been new-painted, and it's been up on the ladies' cabin-guards two days drying. I flew back and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching and wondering ladies just in time to hear the command, Give way, man! I looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away, the unprincipled Tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him with a sounding-pole which I had been sent on a fool's errant to fetch. Then that young girl said to me, Oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night! Do you think there is any danger? I would rather have been stabbed. I went off full of venom to help in the pilot-house. By and by the boat's lantern disappeared, and after an interval a wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water a mile away. Mr. Thornburg blew the whistle in acknowledgment, backed the steamer out, and made for it. We flew along for a while, then slackened steam, and went cautiously gliding toward the spark. Presently Mr. Thornburg exclaimed, Hello, the buoy's lantern's out! He stopped the engines. A moment or two later he said, Why, there it is again! So he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads. Gradually the water showed up, and then began to deepen again. Mr. Thornburg muttered, Well, I don't understand this. I believe that buoy has drifted off the reef. Seems to be a little too far to the left. No matter. It is safest to run over it anyhow. So in that solid world of darkness we went creeping down on the light. Just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, Mr. Thornburg seized the bell-ropes, rang a startling peel, and exclaimed, My soul, it's the sounding boat! A sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below, a pause, and then the sound of grinding and crashing followed. Mr. Thornburg exclaimed, There! The paddle-wheel has ground the sounding boat to Lucifer matches! Run! See who is killed! I was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye. My chief and the third mate and nearly all the men were safe. They had discovered their danger when it was too late to pull out of the way. Then, when the great guards overshadowed them a moment later they were prepared and knew what to do. At my chief's order they sprang at the right instant, seized the guard, and were hauled aboard. The next moment the sounding y'all swept after the wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms. Two of the men and the cub Tom were missing. A fact which spread like wild fire over the boat. The passengers came flocking to the forward gangway, ladies and all, anxious eyed, white-faced, and talked in odd voices of the dreadful thing. And often again I heard them say, Poor fellows! Poor boy! Poor boy! By this time the boat's y'all was manned in a way to search for the missing. Now a faint call was heard off to the left. The y'all had disappeared in the other direction. Half the people rushed to one side to encourage the swimmer with their shouts. The other half rushed the other way to shriek to the y'all to turn about. By the callings the swimmer was approaching. But some said the sound showed failing strength. The crowd massed themselves against the boiler-deck railings, leaning over and staring into the gloom, and every faint and fainter cry rung from them such words as, Ah! Poor fellow! Poor fellow! Is there no way to save him? But still the cries held out and drew nearer. And presently the voice said pluckily, I can make it! Stand by with a rope! What a rousing cheer they gave him! The chief mate took his hand in the glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand, and his men grouped about him. The next moment the swimmer's face appeared in the circle of light, and in another one the owner of it was hauled aboard, limp, and drenched, while cheer on cheer went up. It was that devil, Tom. The y'all crew searched everywhere but found no sign of the two men. They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck by the wheel and killed. Tom had never jumped for the guard at all, but had plunged headfirst into the river and dived under the wheel. It was nothing. I could have done it easy enough, and I said so. But everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to-do over that ass, as if he had done something great. That girl couldn't seem to have enough of that pitiful hero the rest of the trip. But little I cared. I loathed her anyway. The way we came to mistake the sounding boat's lantern for the buoy's light was this. My chief said that after laying the buoy he fell away and watched it till it seemed to be secure. Then he took up a position a hundred yards below it, and a little to one side of the steamer's course. Headed the sounding boat upstream and waited. Having to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking. He looked up when he judged that the steamer was about on the reef, saw that the buoy was gone, and supposed that the steamer had already run over it. He went on with his talk. He noticed that the steamer was getting very close on him, but that was the correct thing. It was her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking him aboard. He was expecting her to shear off until the last moment. Then it flashed upon him that she was trying to run him down, mistaking his lantern for the buoy light. So he sang out, Stand by to spring for the guard, men! And the next instant the jump was made. But I am wondering from what I was intending to do, that his Make Plainer then perhaps appears in the previous chapters some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate, until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so. He must know it. For this is eminently one of the exact sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase, I think. Instead of the vigorous one, I know. One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river, and know it with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then, if you will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and position of the crossing stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs in that long street, and change their places once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory of the fickle Mississippi. I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world, to know the old and new Testaments by heart and be able to recite them glibly forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass of knowledge and no marvellous facility compared to a pilot's massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvellous facility in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it. Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not. And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work. How placidly effortless is its way! How unconsciously it lays up its vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single valuable package of them all. Take an instance. Let a Ledsman cry, half twain, half twain, half twain, half twain, half twain, until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock. Let conversation be going on all the time and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening to the Ledsman, and in the midst of this endless string of half-twains let a single quarter-twain be interjected without emphasis and then the half-twain cry go on again, just as before. Two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter-twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and side-marks to guide you that you ought to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself. The cry of quarter-twain did not really take his mind from his talk, but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis. You would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects you were passing at the moment it was done. But you could if your memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sort of thing mechanically. Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will develop it into a very colossus of capability, but only in the matters it is daily drilled in. A time would come when the man's faculties could not help noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not help holding on to them with a grip of a vice. But if you asked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast, it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you. Astonishing things can be done with a human memory, if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business. At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief, Mr. Bixby, went up there, and learned more than a thousand miles at that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing. When he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night, his education was so nearly complete that he took out a daylight license. A few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting day and night, and he ranked A-1-2. Mr. Bixby placed me as a steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats of memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was born in him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name. Instantly Mr. Brown would break in, oh, I knew him! Salo-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter under the flesh. He was only in the southern trade six months. That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with him. There was five feet in the upper river then. The Henry Blake grounded at the foot of Tower Island, drawing four-and-a-half. The George Elliott unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the Sunflower. Why, the Sunflower didn't sink till I know when she sunk! It was three years before that, on the 2nd of December. Assa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk, and it was his first trip in her, too. Tom Jones told me these things a week after her in New Orleans. He was first made of the Sunflower. Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year, and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died two years after, 3rd of March. Erisipolis. I never saw either of the Hardys. They were Allegheny Rivermen, but people who knew them told me all these things. And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks, winter and summer, just the same, and his first wife's name was Jane Shook. She was from New England, and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood. She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was married. And so on by the hour the man's tongue would go. He could not forget anything. It was simply impossible. The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head after they had lain there for years as the most memorable events. His was not simply a pilot's memory. His grasp was universal. If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory. And then, without observing that he was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter. And you were lucky indeed if you did not take up that writer's relatives one by one and give you their biographies too. Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it all occurrences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject. He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led aside. Mr. Brown would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog. He would be so full of laugh that he could hardly begin. Then his memory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance, drift into the history of his owner, of his owner's family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same. Then this memory would recollect that one of these events occurred during the celebrated hard winter of such and such year, and a minute description of that winter would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder. Corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses, and cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bareback riders. The transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural. From the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step. Then, of course, the heathen savages would suggest religion. And at the end of three or four hours tedious jaw the watch would change, and Brown would go out of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog, after all this waiting and hungering. A pilot must have a memory, but there are two higher qualities which he must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the nearest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any dangerous steamboat can get into. But one cannot quite say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must start with a good stock of that article, or he will never succeed as a pilot. The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after the young pilot has been standing his own watch alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the position. When an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his steamboat night or day that he presently begins to imagine that it is his courage that animates him. But the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man's. He discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether. The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment. He is not prepared for them. He does not know how to meet them. All his knowledge forsakes him. And within fifteen minutes he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death. Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly. A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon the candidate. Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward I used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it. I had become a good steersman. So good indeed that I had all the work to do on our watch night and day. Mr. Bixby seldom made a suggestion to me. All he ever did was to take the wheel on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings, land the boat when that she needed to be landed, play gentlemen of leisure nine tenths of the watch, and collect the wages. The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned my ability to run any crossing between Cairo and New Orleans without help or instruction I should have felt irreparably hurt. The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot, in the daytime, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation. Well, one matchless summer day I was bowling down the bend above Island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose as high as a giraffes when Mr. Bixby said, I'm going below awhile. I suppose you know the next crossing. This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest crossing in the whole river. One couldn't come to any harm whether he ran it right or not. And as for depth, there never had been any bottom there. I knew all this perfectly well. Know how to run it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut. How much water is there in it? Well, that is an odd question. I couldn't get bottom there with a church steeple. You think so, do you? The very tone of the question shook my confidence. That was what Mr. Bixby was expecting. He left without saying anything more. I began to imagine all sorts of things. Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down to the folksal with some mysterious instructions to the Ledzman. Another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers, and then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smokestack where he could observe results. Presently the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck. Next the chief mate appeared. Then a clerk. Every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience. And before I got to the head of the island I had fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my nose. I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness in his voice, Where is Mr. Bixby? Gone below, sir. But that did the business for me. My imagination began to construct dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the run of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead. The wave of cowered agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished. I seized the bell-rope, dropped it, ashamed, seized it again, dropped it once more, clutched it tremblingly once again, and pulled it so feebly that I could hardly hear the stroke myself. Captain and mate sang out instantly and both together, Starbird led there and quick about it! This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel. But I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new dangers on that side and away I would spin to the other, only to find perils accumulating to Starbird and be crazy to get to port again. Then came the Ledzmann's sepulcher cry, Deep for—deep for—in a bottomless crossing, the terror of it took my breath away. Mark three, Mark three, quarter less, three, half, twain—this was frightful. I eased the bell-rope and stopped the engines. Quarter twain, quarter twain, Mark twain—I was helpless, I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot and I could have hung my hat on my eyes they stuck out so far. Quarter less, twain, nine and a half, we were drawing nine. My hands were in a nervous flutter. I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to the engineer, Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal soul out of her! I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr. Bixby smiling a bland sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane-deck sent up a thunder-gust of humiliating laughter. I saw it all now, and I felt meaner than the meanest man in human history. I laid in the Ledz, set the boat in her legs, came ahead on the engines, and said, It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, wasn't it? I suppose I'll never hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the head of sixty-six. Well, no, you won't, maybe. In fact, I hope you won't, for I want you to learn something by that experience. Didn't you know there was no bottom in that crossing? Yes, sir, I did. Very well, then. You shouldn't have lowered me or anybody else to shake your confidence in that knowledge. Try to remember that. And another thing. When you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward. That isn't going to help matters any. It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. Yet about the hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear a phrase which I had conceived a particular distaste for. It was, Oh, Ben, if you love me back, her! In my preceding chapters I have tried, by going into the minutia of the science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension of what the science consists of, and at the same time I have tried to show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I have loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain. A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people. Parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency. The editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind. No clergyman is a free man, and may speak the whole truth regardless of his parish's opinions. Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we modify before we print. In truth every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude. But in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none. The captain could stand upon the hurricane-deck in the pomp of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper's reign was over. The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and with her he chose, and tie her up to the bank, whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were entirely free. He consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth, and not by a fiction of words. I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. His interference in that particular instance might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steam-boating days. He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants, and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show in some degree embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes. But then people in one's own grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects. By long habit pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands. It gravels me to this day to put my will in the weak shape of a request instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order. In those old days to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New Orleans and back, and discharge cargo consumed about twenty-five days on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work except the two pilots. They did nothing but play gentlemen uptown and received the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The moment the boat touched the wharf at Eather City, they were ashore, and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for another voyage. When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness under full pay three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. And one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore got such pay as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to. When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest and treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated, especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday of that trade, Kansas Times, and got nine hundred dollars a trip which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a conversation of that day. A chap out of the Illinois River with a little stern wheel-tub accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots. Gentlemen, I've got a pretty good trip for the up country and shall want you about a month. How much will it be? Eighteen hundred dollars a piece. Heavens and earth, you take my boat, let me have your wages, and I'll divide. I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboat men were important in landsmen's eyes, and in their own too, in a degree, according to the dignity of the boat they were on. For instance, it was a proud thing to be of the crew of such stately craft as the Alec Scott, or the Grand Turk. Negro firemen, deckhands, and barbers belonging to those boats were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware of that fact, too. A stalwart darkie once gave a fence at a Negro ball in New Orleans by putting on a good many heirs. Finally one of the managers bustled up to him and said, "'Who is you, anyway? Who is you? That's what I want to know.' The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting on all those heirs on a stinted capital. "'Who is I? Who is I? I'll let you know mighty quick who I is. I want you niggers to understand that I fires to middle dough,' footnote, door, "'on Alec Scott!' That was sufficient. The barber of the Grand Turk was a spruce young Negro who aired his importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle in which he moved. The young colored population of New Orleans were much given to flirting at twilight on the banquets of the back streets. Somebody saw and heard something like the following one evening in one of those localities, a middle-aged Negro woman projected her head through a broken pane and shouted, very willing that the neighbors should hear an envy, "'You, Marian! Come into house this minute! Standing out there foolin' long with that low trash, and here's the barber off and the Grand Turk wants to converse with ya!' My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot's peculiar official position placed him out of reach of criticism or command brings Stephen W. naturally to my mind. He was a gifted pilot, a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. He had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easygoing and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most august wealth. He always had work. He never saved a penny. He was a most persuasive borrower. He was in debt to every pilot on the river and to the majority of the captains. He could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of harem-scarum devil-may-care piloting that made it almost fascinating, but not to everybody. He made a trip with good old Captain Y. once, and was relieved from duty when the boat got to New Orleans. Somebody expressed surprise at the discharge. Captain Y. shuttered at the mere mention of Stephen. Then his poor, thin old voice piped out something like this. Why, bless me, I wouldn't have such a wild creature on my boat for the world, not for the whole world. He swears. He sings. He whistles. He yells. I never saw such an engine to yell. All times of the night it never made any difference to him. He would just yell that way, not for anything in particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it. I never could get into a sound sleep, but he would fetch me out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful war-woops. A queer being, very queer being. No respect for anything or anybody. Sometimes he called me Johnny, and he kept a fiddle and a cat. He played execrably. This seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl. Nobody could sleep where that man and his family was. And reckless! There never was anything like it. Now you may believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting here, he brought my boat at tilting down through those awful snags that she caught under a rattling's head of steam, and the wind blowing like the very nation at that. My officers will tell you so. They saw it. And, sir, while he was at Tarran right down through those snags, and I, shaken in my shoes and praying, I wish I may never speak again if he didn't pucker up his mouth and go to whistling. Yes, sir! Whistling buffalo-gals, can't you come out tonight? Can't you come out tonight? Can't you come out tonight? I am doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral, and weren't related to the corpse. And when I remonstrated with him about it, why, he smiled down on me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good and not be meddling with my superiors. Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work and, as usual, out of money. He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was in the very close place, and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, just half wages. The captain agreeing not to divulge the secret, and so bring down the contempt of all the guild upon the poor fellow. But the boat was not more than a day out of New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain was boasting of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told. Stephen winced, but said nothing. About the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped out on the hurricane-deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal surprised. He glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen, but Stephen was whistling placidly and attending to business. The captain stood around a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a suggestion. But the etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace. He chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments. But soon he was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever. Presently he ventured to remark, with deference, Pretty good stage of the river now, ain't it, sir? Well, I should say so. Bankful is a pretty liberal stage. Seems to be a good deal of current here. Good deal, don't describe it. It's worse than a mill race. Isn't it easier in towards shore than it is out here in the middle? Yes, I reckon it is. But a body can't be too careful with a steamboat. It's pretty safe out here. Can't strike any bottom here. You can depend on that. The captain departed, looking rueful enough. At this rate he would probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis. Next day he appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully standing up the middle of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the Mississippi, and whistling the same placid tune. This thing was becoming serious. In by the shore was a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily. She began to make for an island chute. Stephen stuck to the middle of the river. Speech was wrung from the captain. He said, Mr. W., don't that chute cut off a good deal of distance? Well, I think it does. But I don't know. Don't know. Well, isn't there water enough in it now to go through? I expect there is. But I am not certain. Upon my word this is odd. Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are going to try it. Do you mean to say that you don't know as much as they do? They? Why, they are two hundred and fifty dollar pilots. But don't you be uneasy. I know as much as any man can afford to know for a hundred and twenty-five. The captain surrendered. Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing the rival boat a two hundred and fifty dollar pair of heels.