That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges. However, I did not feel discouraged long. I judged that it was best to make allowances, for doubtless Mr. Bixby was “stretching.” Presently he pulled a rope and struck a few strokes on the big bell. The stars were all gone now, and the night was as black as ink. I could hear the wheels churn along the bank, but I was not entirely certain that I could see the shore. The voice of the invisible watchman called up from the hurricane deck:
“What’s this, sir?”
“Jones’s plantation.”
I said to myself, “I wish that I might venture to offer a small bet that it isn’t,” But I did not chirp. I only waited to see. Mr. Bixby handled the engine bells, and in due time the boat’s nose came to the land, a torch glowed from the forecastle, a man skipped ashore, a darkey’s voice on the bank said, “Gimme de k’yarpet bag, Mass’ Jones,” and the next moment we were standing up the river again, all serene. I reflected deeply a while, and then said—but not aloud—“Well, the finding of that plantation was the luckiest accident that ever happened; but it couldn’t happen again in a hundred years.”
Perplexing Lessons
At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, “points,” and bends, and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler:
“What is the shape of Walnut Bend?”
He might as well have asked me my grandmother’s opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn’t know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.
I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of ammunition and was sure to subside into a very placable and even remorseful old smoothbore as soon as they were all gone. That word “old” is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I waited. By and by he said:
“My boy, you’ve got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn’t the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime.”