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.
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 day-time.’
‘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.’
