had never seen him before; so I went up there. The pilot inspected me;
I re-inspected the pilot. These customary preliminaries over, I sat
down on the high bench, and he faced about and went on with his work.
Every detail of the pilot-house was familiar to me, with one exception,–
a large-mouthed tube under the breast-board. I puzzled over that thing a
considerable time; then gave up and asked what it was for.
‘To hear the engine-bells through.’
It was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented
half a century sooner. So I was thinking, when the pilot asked–
‘Do you know what this rope is for?’
I managed to get around this question, without committing myself.
‘Is this the first time you were ever in a pilot-house?’
I crept under that one.
‘Where are you from?’
‘New England.’
‘First time you have ever been West?’
I climbed over this one.
‘If you take an interest in such things, I can tell you what all
these things are for.’
I said I should like it.
‘This,’ putting his hand on a backing-bell rope, ‘is to sound the fire-alarm;
this,’ putting his hand on a go-ahead bell, ‘is to call the texas-tender;
this one,’ indicating the whistle-lever, ‘is to call the captain’–
and so he went on, touching one object after another, and reeling off
his tranquil spool of lies.
I had never felt so like a passenger before.
I thanked him, with emotion, for each new fact, and wrote it
down in my note-book. The pilot warmed to his opportunity,
and proceeded to load me up in the good old-fashioned way.
At times I was afraid he was going to rupture his invention;
but it always stood the strain, and he pulled through all right.
He drifted, by easy stages, into revealments of the river’s
marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another,
and backed them up with some pretty gigantic illustrations.
For instance-
‘Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well,
when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock,
over sixty feet high and two miles long. All washed away but that.’
[This with a sigh.)
I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing,
in any ordinary way, would be too good for him.
Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting
aloft on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance,
he indifferently drew attention to it, as one might to an object
grown wearisome through familiarity, and observed that it was
an ‘alligator boat.’
‘An alligator boat? What’s it for?’
‘To dredge out alligators with.’
‘Are they so thick as to be troublesome?’
‘Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down.
But they used to be. Not everywhere; but in favorite places,
here and there, where the river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point,
and Stack Island, and so on–places they call alligator beds.’
‘Did they actually impede navigation?’
‘Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that we
didn’t get aground on alligators.’
It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk.
However, I restrained myself and said–
‘It must have been dreadful.’
‘Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting.
It was so hard to tell anything about the water; the damned
things shift around so–never lie still five minutes at a time.
You can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look of it;
you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef–that’s all easy;
but an alligator reef doesn’t show up, worth anything.
Nine times in ten you can’t tell where the water is;
and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain’t there
when YOU get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime.
Of course there were some few pilots that could judge of
alligator water nearly as well as they could of any other kind,
but they had to have natural talent for it; it wasn’t a thing
a body could learn, you had to be born with it. Let me see: