“It’s a good thing that I described Hicks to the captain,” Barker chuckled. “The captain recognized him all right.”
Then the Red Hawk gave a long whistle, the pilot pulled the bell at the engine, there was a great hissing of steam and the big stern-wheel noisily churned the brown water of the Mississippi. Slowly the heavily-laden boat backed into mid-stream, again the pilot rang the bell, and the boat made a half-turn and was headed down-stream.
The boys came out of their cabin.
“How can the pilot find his way?” asked Bill, “when the night is so pitch-dark?”
“A good pilot knows the river by heart,” Barker told the boys. “He knows it by day and by night, and up-stream and downstream.”
At the present time it is comparatively easy to pilot a steamboat on the Mississippi. Hundreds of wing-dams, built by the government engineers, keep the current in the same channel, and numerous guideboards and lights on shore tell the pilot where to steer his boat. In addition to this, the modern boats are all provided with powerful headlights and search-lights.
At the time of the Civil War wing-dams, guideboards, shore-lights, and search-lights were all unknown. The safety of the Mississippi steamers depended entirely on the pilots. Their accurate knowledge of the river, their skill in handling the wheel, their quick decision in moments of danger, brought every year hundreds of boats safely back and forth between the ports of St. Paul and St. Louis.
As the Red Hawk was gliding by the magnificent groves of cottonwoods, which begin to line the Mississippi just below the Indian Mounds at St. Paul, the trapper and his three friends were quietly sitting on the upper deck in front of the pilot-house.
There was little talk, for all were absorbed in the running of the boat.
Now the boat seemed to be headed into an absolutely black wall, which proved, however, to be only the dense shadow caused by the forest or by a high rocky bank. Had the pilot not had the nerve to steer straight into the black shadow, he would have wrecked his boat among the snags on a sandbar, where the safe channel seemed to run.