'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.'
'Ah,I never can 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 dozen,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 brim full 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 their depth by,this season,may not answer for next.'
'Learn a new set,then,every year?'
'Exactly.Cramp her 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 day-time,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 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 head waters 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 bows,almost,and an agonized voice,with the backwoods 'whang'to it,would wail out--'Whar'n the ----you goin'to!Cain't you see nothin',you dash-dashed aig-suckin',sheep-stealin',one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!'
Then for an instant,as we whistled by,the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scow and 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-oar,and down the dead blackness would shut again.
And that flatboatman 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 steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the inside of a cow,'we should have eaten up a Posey 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 sheer 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 coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house,when we borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow place.