The merciless waves at last threw them into a bayou against a turn of a bank where other debris was plastered, spread out like fans against the bluff.
Why is one man superior to his fellows? Why should Pauger, marooned in a brush-heap on a flooded river, tired and wet and hungry as he was, notice that the running water was dammed by the closely interlaced branches of fallen trees on either side of its channel?
They prevented its spread; so it began to dig for itself a deeper and deeper channel in the less resisting mud of the bottom. "If we were to plait branches with small limbs and strengthen such mats with heavy posts against the shores of the Delta to keep the river from spreading, then by its own force would it dig a deeper channel for itself as it goes to the sea just as this stream is doing. Such a device of branches would keep open the ship canal to the Gulf." This observation of the engineer Pauger was the beginning of the idea of those jetties which now clear the water path to the sea.
There was a boy of French extraction with the mind and spirit of the early explorers who chanced to be born in our own times. His name was James Buchanan Eads. He had the title of captain. Pauger's first hazy inspiration of the jetties Eads perfected and put into practical working use at the mouth of the Great River. He improved all the old systems of levees.
During the Civil War, the President of the United States appealed to Eads to aid the navy. In response to the country's need he invented the gunboat, forerunner of armed cruisers; built several in an incredibly short time, and sent them to thunder at the forts of Vicksburg and turn the tide of battle in favor of the Union.
He was a builder. Caissons, those large water-tight boxes within which work is done under water, were his invention. They made possible the construction of that long bridge, a triumph of engineering skill, which crosses the Mississippi at St. Louis and spans the years from our day to that hour of the flood when Anthony went from east to west on a floating tree.
Pauger was fainting under the strain of their exposed position. To encourage him Anthony said, "The post of Point Arkansas is just below here." Filling his cupped hands with water, he sent up shower after shower of mimic rain between them and the miserable, cowering beast. "Pretty pussy! Pretty pussy! Now—scat!" She backed away from the spattering water which all cats hate. As she crawled up the tangled roots she spied some patches of dry ground. In a tawny streak she leaped the chasm from the dripping tree to the knobs ahead, and disappeared.
Then Anthony, quite as a part of his day's work, stretched his half-unconscious companion on a spreading limb, detached it, and, abandoning the tree, swam down the bayou, pulling the precious load after him until he found a landing-place.