“What’s coming now?”
“A stump sticking out of the water at Higgin’s Point.”
They always were right. It was magic. It was incredible. They knew, too, the depth of the water. They could point out a spot and say, “That used to be an island—Buckle’s Island.”
“But it’s water! It couldn’t be an island. It’s water. We’re—why, we’re riding on it now.”
Mr. Pepper would persist, unmoved. “Used to be an island.” Or, pointing again, “Two years ago I took her right down through there where that point lays.”
“But it’s dry land. You’re just fooling, aren’t you, Mr. Pepper? Because you couldn’t take a boat on dry land. It’s got things growing on it! Little trees, even. So how could you?”
“Water there two years ago—good eleven foot.”
Small wonder Magnolia was early impressed with this writhing monster that, with a single lash of its tail, could wipe a solid island from the face of the earth, or with a convulsion of its huge tawny body spew up a tract of land where only water had been.
Mr. Pepper had respect for his river. “Yessir, the Mississippi and this here Nile, over in Egypt, they’re a couple of old demons. I ain’t seen the Nile River, myself. Don’t expect to. This old river’s enough for one man to meet up with in his life. Like marrying. Get to learn one woman’s ways real good, you know about all there is to women and you got about all you can do one lifetime.”
Not at all the salty old graybeard pilot of fiction, this Mr. Pepper. A youth of twenty-four, nerveless, taciturn, gentle, profane, charming. His clear brown eyes, gazing unblinkingly out upon the river, had tiny golden flecks in them, as though something of the river itself had taken possession of him, and become part of him. Born fifty years later, he would have been the steel stuff of which aviation aces are made.