“Boys,” he continued, “I must tell you something now. That Cousin Hicks of yours is a bad case. There may be a fight if we ever run across him. If there is, you keep out of it. Tatanka and I will handle him.
“Never mind,” he cut the boys short when they wanted to know more, “I tell you he is a bad egg. Now you know enough. I ran across him long ago in Indiana.”
“He is a skunk,” Tatanka grunted, with an angry face and with eyes flashing. “If we catch him, we shall throw him into the river like a worthless cur.
“I am glad we shall go away,” he continued. “I never was afraid to fight our enemies, the Chippewas, but I am afraid of spook lakes, of earthquakes, and of big guns. All Indians are afraid of them.”
The Mississippi River contains a very large number of islands. Below the larger islands often lie long low bars grown over with small willows, and these brush-covered bars are known as tow-heads.
Between Cairo and New Orleans, the Mississippi River Commission has numbered about one hundred and thirty islands, while many large ones have names. From time to time old islands disappear and new ones are made, when the river washes out a short cut across a bend.
The travelers found Bissell’s Channel about half-way between Island No. 8 and Island No. 9, as Captain Banks had told them. But it was not a channel at all; as the boys had expected. It was a road of stumps about two miles long, and the boys wondered how it was made and what it was for.
The four travelers arrived on Island No. 10 in good time, for the distance was only twenty-five miles down stream from Hickman.
They made their camp inside the deserted Confederate works and they looked with awe upon the big portholes in the logs through which the cannons had swept the river.
“How did the Union soldiers take the island!” the boys asked.