and his men grouped about him. The next moment the swimmer’s face
appeared in the circle of light, and in another one the owner of it
was hauled aboard, limp and drenched, while cheer on cheer went up.
It was that devil Tom.
The yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men.
They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck
by the wheel and killed. Tom had never jumped for the guard at all,
but had plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel.
It was nothing; I could have done it easy enough, and I said so;
but everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass,
as if he had done something great. That girl couldn’t seem to have
enough of that pitiful ‘hero’ the rest of the trip; but little I cared;
I loathed her, any way.
The way we came to mistake the sounding-boat’s lantern for the
buoy-light was this. My chief said that after laying the buoy
he fell away and watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took
up a position a hundred yards below it and a little to one side of
the steamer’s course, headed the sounding-boat up-stream, and waited.
Having to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking;
he looked up when he judged that the steamer was about on the reef;
saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the steamer had already
run over it; he went on with his talk; he noticed that the steamer
was getting very close on him, but that was the correct thing;
it was her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking
him aboard; he was expecting her to sheer off, until the last moment;
then it flashed upon him that she was trying to run him down,
mistaking his lantern for the buoy-light; so he sang out,
‘Stand by to spring for the guard, men!’ and the next instant the
jump was made.
Chapter 13
A Pilot’s Needs
BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is,
make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters,
some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting.
First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly
cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection.
Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory.
He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so;
he must know it; for this is eminently one of the ‘exact’ sciences.
With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times,
if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase ‘I think,’
instead of the vigorous one ‘I know!’ One cannot easily realize
what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve
hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness.
If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up
and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every
house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign
by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly
name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random
in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then
have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a
pilot’s knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head.
And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing,
the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones,
and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places,
you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order
to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you
will take half of the signs in that long street, and CHANGE THEIR
PLACES once a month, and still manage to know their new positions
accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes
without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required
of a pilot’s peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.