“Lem me alone,” said Jim. “I know the river.”
Just then the boat scraped bottom on the bar. Phil called out quickly:—
“All hands to the larboard oars! Give it to her hard!” and himself seizing the steering oar, he managed by a hair’s breadth to swing the great box—for that is all that a flatboat is—into the deep and rapid channel near the Indiana shore.
As she drifted into safe water, Phil said:—
“That’s incident number one in the voyage.”
“Yes, and it came pretty near being chapter first and last in the log-book of The Last of the Flatboats,” replied Irv Strong.
For several miles now there was nothing to do but float. But Phil was closely watching Jim Hughes and observed that that worthy made three visits to the hold,—as the cargo part of the boat is called,—going down each time by the forward ladder and not by the stairs leading to the cabin.
When the boat reached the big eddy about half a mile above Craig’s Landing, it was necessary for all hands to go to the oars again in order to make the landing.
Presently Phil observed that Hughes was steering wildly. His efforts with the steering oar were throwing the boat far out into the river, away from the shore on which they were to land, and directly toward the head of a strong channel which at this stage of water ran like a mill-race along the Kentucky shore on the farther side of Craig’s bar. Should the boat be sucked into that channel, she would be carried many miles down the stream before she could ever be landed even on the wrong side of the river, and she could never come back to Craig’s Landing unless towed back by a steamboat.