“We’re in the woods.”
“I’m pleased to observe that you still have ‘lucid intervals,’ Irv,” said Ed Lowry. “But I have a rather more definite idea than that of our whereabouts. I studied it out on the map early this morning.”
“Good, good! Where are we?” cried out all the boys in a breath, and with great eagerness.
“Come here and see,” said Ed, unrolling his great river map. “You observe that a number of rivers originate in northern Mississippi and western Tennessee, almost under the levees of the Mississippi. There are the Big Sunflower, the Coldwater, and the Tallahatchie, with the Yalobusha only a little way off. All of them run into the Yazoo, which in its turn runs into the Mississippi near Vicksburg. All of them are marked on my map as navigable for a part of their course. All of them lie in a great flat basin or lowland swamp. But for the levees the Mississippi would flow into them whenever it rises to any considerable extent. In fact, they must originally have been mere bayous of the great river, running out of it and back into it again. The Mississippi levees have stopped all that ordinarily, but the levees have given way this time, and so the Mississippi is now pouring its water into these rivers, and as there is too much of it for them to hold, it has filled the entire swamp country between them, making one vast stream of them all in effect. We are somewhere in between those rivers, and if we can keep our flatboat afloat and not wreck her among these trees, the current will sooner or later carry us into the natural channel of one or the other of them. That I understand to be Phil’s idea, and he is right.”
“That’s all right,” said Phil, who was restlessly pacing up and down the deck. “But has anybody any suggestion to make?”
Nobody had anything to offer.
“Very well, then,” said the young captain, “let’s get to work. We’ve talked enough. We must keep one fellow at a pump all the time. We can’t do much with the sweeps while we’re in the woods, and our greatest danger is that of running the boat into one of these big trees and wrecking her. To prevent that I want you, Irv, and you, Constant,—for you are the stoutest oarsmen,—to get into a skiff and carry a line about a hundred feet in advance of the boat. She slews around pretty easily under a pull, and I want you two to guide her with a line. I’ll tell you when you are to row to right or left to avoid trees, and the rest of the time you’ve only to keep the line taut so as to be ready for emergencies. Get into the skiff at once, and take a light line with you.”
As soon as the skiff was in position and the guiding line stretched, Phil directed Will Moreraud to jump into another skiff and release the flatboat from her moorings.
It was perilous business navigating thus through a dense subtropical forest. Phil stood at the bow, intently watching and giving his commands in a restrained voice and with an apparent calm that sadly belied his actual condition of mind. Will and Ed “stood by” the sweeps, working the pumps, but holding themselves ready to pull on the great oars whenever Phil should find that mode of guiding the boat practicable.