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 believed 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 at the wheel, sir?’
‘X.’
‘Dart 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 ‘towhead’ 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, away astern, going
through that sort of tight-rope deviltry 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 Helena crossing.
I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if
he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin
piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn’t
he do if he was dead!’
When the river is very low, and one’s steamboat
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 yawl—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 watching
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
