‘She’ll not make it!’ somebody whispered.
The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman’s
cries, till it was down to—
’Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!....
E-i-g-h-t feet!.... Seven-and—’
Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube
to the engineer—
‘Stand by, now!’
‘Aye-aye, sir!’
‘Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and—’
We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a
lot of bells ringing, shouted through the tube, ’now,
let her have it—every ounce you’ve
got!’ then to his partner, ‘Put her hard
down! snatch her! snatch her!’ The boat rasped
and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the
apex of disaster a single tremendous instant, and
then over she went! And such a shout as went
up at Mr. Bixby’s back never loosened the roof
of a pilot-house before!
There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby
was a hero that night; and it was some little time,
too, before his exploit ceased to be talked about
by river men.
Fully to realize the marvelous precision required
in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky
waste of water, one should know that not only must
she pick her intricate way through snags and blind
reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely
as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern,
but at one place she must pass almost within arm’s
reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch
the hull timbers from under her if she should strike
it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars’
worth of steam-boat and cargo in five minutes, and
maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain.
The last remark I heard that night was a compliment
to Mr. Bixby, uttered in soliloquy and with unction
by one of our guests. He said—
‘By the Shadow of Death, but he’s a lightning
pilot!’
At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed
to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, ‘points,’
and bends; and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber
it was, too. However, inasmuch 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.
