“Maybe,” replied Lewis. “I don’t know what I said. I thought he meant me, and I clinched, and Tige jumped for him, too. But just then something struck us. D’ye say ’twas a tree? The whole roof went smash, and Tige and me and Hokomoke went heels over head into the river.
“I guess I’d ’a’ been drowned sure,” Lewis continued, more soberly. “I went down, down, down, and swallowed considerable water. I thought I never’d come up; but when I did, he had me by the hair, and was makin’ for the bank with me. He got out and pulled me out. I thought he had only hauled me out to get my scalp, and I tried to break away from him. But he began to say, ‘Me no kill! Me no kill! Me white man,’ Tige, too, never once offered to bite him after we got ashore.
“As soon as I found I hadn’t got to fight, I began to look for the ark,” Lewis went on, “but it had gone. I hallooed four or five times, but couldn’t hear anything of you, though I heard somebody, whose voice sounded like Mose’s, away down the river. We sat and rested a while, and then Hokomoke gave me a pull by the arm, and said, ‘Me go catch white man’s boat.’ And we started after you through the swamps and cane—an awful place to get through in the night. I don’t believe I would ever got down here if it hadn’t been for him. I told him about us, and then he told me who he was. That’s all.”
In spite of their efforts to keep him longer, Sam Hokomoke took leave of the arksmen the next day at a camp of his tribe near the fourth Chickasaw bluff.
“It’s cert’n’y curious,” said Jimmy, as they watched him disappear, waving his hand and grinning back at them, “to think I have a father who is a full-fledged Indian chief, and that I have an invitation from him to visit him or call upon him for assistance whenever I please.”
“The strangest part of it is that the Spaniards have treaties with them against us Americans, and that they’re our worst enemies,” said Marion.
No adventure worthy of note now befell them for a number of days. They passed the mouth of the St. Francis River and many natural meadows, or prairies, at several of which settlers’ cabins had recently been built. Here they were sometimes able to exchange corn and wheat for eggs, poultry, bear meat and venison.
In two days the mouth of the Arkansas River was passed. At the new settlement of Palmyra they tied up for a day and a half, in order to obtain larger sweeps and to mend the roof of the ark. The next day the Grand Gulf Hills came in view, and during the afternoon both Captain Royce and Shadwell Lincoln found that all their skill and experience barely sufficed to keep their heavily-laden craft out of Grand Gulf Eddy. For here the channel narrows, and has a vast whirlpool on each hand.
It was now the latter part of June, and despite many perils and accidents, the ark was getting well toward its destination. But the night after they had passed Grand Gulf proved one of the most exciting of the voyage. No favorable place for tying up to the bank had presented itself that afternoon, but as twilight came on they veered into a small bayou, which opened into the forest on the eastern, or Mississippi, shore.
Such creek mouths were far from being ideal stopping-places on account of mosquitoes, which, at this season, tortured man and beast almost beyond endurance. The day had been very warm, and despite the best that could be done for their comfort, the live stock on the ark suffered exceedingly.