Only ten of the crew mustered at mess that night. Corson had not yet recovered; Clark MacAfee still complained of his injuries, and Obed Hargous and Wistar Royce were also ill from the effects of bad water.
It was a dismal place, this narrow bayou, overhung with lofty trees, and the gray, trailing mosses, which brushed the roof of the ark. Around, on every hand, thousands of frogs were croaking, while here and there water-moccasins lay stretched along dead cypress limbs that had fallen on the stagnant waters. One was found on the roof of the ark as the crew were tying up.
Moses and Lewis made short work of this intruder, and set lanterns forward and aft, the better to see if more snakes crept aboard.
While eating supper they could hear the bellowing of alligators, which began immediately after dark. The bayou appeared to be a haunt of these formidable reptiles. Alligators, indeed, seem to have been far more numerous, as well as larger, a century ago than at present. We now rarely hear of one being seen above the mouth of the Red River; but in early days they were found as far north as New Madrid and the mouth of the Ohio. If we may believe the accounts given by boatmen, an alligator twenty feet in length was not an unusually large reptile in the days of the Louisiana Purchase.
Meanwhile the horses, frightened probably by the sound, were snorting loudly. It became evident that the reptiles smelled the live stock. It was not believed at first that they could clamber aboard; but fears of this soon arose, for one of the big reptiles, having apparently climbed out on a fallen magnolia, dashed for the side of the ark, forward, where he struck his head so hard as to cause a considerable shock to the boat. This raised a great commotion among the horses. The claws, or flippers, of other alligators could be heard constantly scratching the sides, and at length the big fellow came tumbling over the rail at the very heels of the horses.
The uproar that followed can be imagined; the men shouting, the horses kicking and squealing, Tige barking, and the pet bear growling in a savage chorus.
As if terrorized into abnormal activity, this alligator lashed right and left with his formidable tail, and snapped savagely at the legs of the horses and at the pike-poles with which the crew attacked it.
One of the horses kicked the reptile and it scuttled back against the bulwarks, rattled, dashed headlong past the gun-room, and jammed itself between a post there and the rail. Here it stuck fast, and Captain Royce, who had run to get a rifle, approached and fired the piece into the reptile’s gaping throat.
No more of the saurians got on board, or the voyage might have ended then and there; but it was not till day dawned that the scaly creatures began to sink, and swim away to their coverts.
At sunrise they poled out of the bayou, and were glad to feel the ark floating with the river again. But adventures and accidents, as has been often noted, rarely come singly. The current bore them over toward the Spanish, or Louisiana shore, and as the ark drifted past a bank of thick willows, it was suddenly drawn into the rapid outset of water through a crevasse.