as well he might, and the boat, drifting in to the bank under the boughs of a tree, was helpless.  Her jackstaff and yawl were carried away, her guards broken in, and her deck-load of cotton was tumbling into the stream a dozen bales at once.  The captain was nowhere to be seen, the engineer had evidently abandoned his post and the special agent had gone to hunt up the soldiers.  I happened to be on the hurricane deck, armed with a revolver, which I fired as rapidly as I could, listening all the time for the fire of the soldiers—­and listening in vain.  It transpired later that they had not a cartridge among them; and of all helpless mortals a soldier without a cartridge is the most imbecile.  But all this time the continuous rattle of the enemy’s guns and the petulant pop of my own pocket firearm were punctuated, as it were, by pretty regularly recurring loud explosions, as of a small cannon.  They came from somewhere forward—­I supposed from the opposition, as I knew we had no artillery on board.

The failure of our military guard made the situation somewhat grave.  For two of us, at least, capture meant hanging out of hand.  I had never been hanged in all my life and was not enamored of the prospect.  Fortunately for us the bandits had selected their point of attack without military foresight.  Immediately below them a bayou, impassable to them, let into the river.  The moment we had drifted below it we were safe from boarding and capture.  The captain was found in hiding and an empty pistol at his ear persuaded him to resume command of his vessel; the engineer and pilot were encouraged to go back to their posts and after some remarkably long minutes, during which we were under an increasingly long-range fire, we got under way.  A few cotton bales piled about the pilot-house made us tolerably safe from that sort of thing in the future and then we took account of our damages.  Nobody had been killed and only a few were wounded.  This gratifying result was attributable to the fact that, being unarmed, nearly everybody had dived below at the first fire and taken cover among the cotton bales.  While issuing a multitude of needless commands from the front of the hurricane-deck I looked below, and there, stretched out at full length on his stomach, lay a long, ungainly person, clad in faded butternut, bare-headed, his long, lank hair falling down each side of his neck, his coat-tails similarly parted, and his enormous feet spreading their soles to the blue sky.  He had an old-fashioned horse-pistol, some two feet long, which he was in the act of sighting across his left palm for a parting shot at the now distant assailants.  A more ludicrous figure I never saw; I laughed outright; but when his weapon went off it was matter for gratitude to be above it instead of before it.  It was the “cannon” whose note I had marked all through the unequal fray.