“There’s a bottom plank ’most ripped out of her!” shouted Moses, coming on deck and looking wildly about for Marion. “She’s goin’ down!”
“I don’t reckon she’ll sink,” said Kenton; “but she’ll be durn wet to sleep in.”
“What did it?” cried Lewis.
“Sawyer, I guess, while she was comin’ through the gap. It was an awful pull. Ain’t nothin’ left to show what done it, now,” said MacAfee.
“There’s a bayou a little way below here that we can pole her into and lay her up,” said Marion. “Let go the hawsers. Lewis, you and Lincoln watch the cargo and the horses. Get ashore. I don’t believe she can sink. Let go the lines—all together—Claiborne, you and Kenton and Mose man the sweeps. I’ll look out forward. Watch the water, you fellows. If she settles any further, call out. Give us time to get off in the skiffs. I don’t think she’ll settle much farther.”
The ark had sunk to her gunwales, and now floated like a raft. The whole crew were on deck, excepting the two who had been set ashore to watch the cargo and horses. With her dismantled cabin piled amidships, she looked a wreck indeed, and excited much sympathy from the craft that passed her. About a mile below, the arksmen worked her into a flooded bayou, up which they were obliged to pole for a considerable distance before reaching shoal water.
On this bayou the arksmen, directed by Marion, established a permanent camp. The cargo was brought over by small boatloads, and some was loaded and brought across by land on the horses, and stored in a shelter which was built for it. There were no means of re-shipping it by other barges, for all the craft on the river were loaded with their own freight; and, besides, the port was still closed to the Americans.
At this camp Marion overhauled the great flatboat as well as he could, without getting it out of the water, and so heavy had been the damage done by the snag and the strain of bringing the ark through the gap that, as Moses said, the cross-bottoming and closing of the seams was about as much work as building two new flatboats.
Weeks passed, and the stifling malarial summer wore through. One after another the men sickened with a local fever, against which their familiar remedies seemed powerless. They recovered, but the great heat which made work during the middle of the day impossible, kept them prostrated. The dews fell like rain every night, and made sleeping on the ground, as they were accustomed to doing in the northern woods, more dangerous than they knew. The air they breathed was full of heavy scents from blossoming bays and magnolias.