“I—I—don’t know.”
“You—you—don’t know?” mimicking my drawling manner of speech. “What do you know?”
“I—I—nothing, for certain.”
“By the great Cæsar’s ghost, I believe you! You’re the stupidest dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of you being a pilot—you! Why you don’t know enough to pilot a cow down a lane.”
Oh, but his wrath was up! He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again.
“Look here! What do you suppose I told you the names of those points for?”
I tremblingly considered a moment, and the devil of temptation provoked me to say:
“Well—to—to—be entertaining, I thought.”
This was a red flag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-gear of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was; because he was brimful, and here were subjects who could talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out and such an eruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen’s curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with. Presently he said to me in the gentlest way:
“My boy, you must get a little memorandum book; and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.”