PIRATES OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
ANOTHER BATTLE.
“The next year I went down again with the same captain, on another broad-horn. When we got to this place where we had been aground, we gave the sand-bar a wide berth, and avoided it; but we had another fight with the robbers one night, when we were anchored. They came upon us suddenly, when all but two of us were asleep. They got possession of the boat. They killed the captain, and sent me overboard. What they did with the other men I never knew, but I suppose they killed them.
“The whole fight did not last three minutes, from the time they first sprang aboard until I was in the river, and floating away on the water. I must have gone down the stream three or four miles, keeping my head above water; and at last I came to the shore, right under a rocky cliff.
“I climbed up, and squeezed the water out of my clothes. By this time it was morning. I looked around, and saw, a little way off, a curious looking hole in the rock, and something like a path leading up to it. I went up this path and into the rock.
“A fire was burning close by the entrance, and I thought somebody must live there. It never occurred to me that the place might be a robbers’ cave. I shouted, and nobody came out. Then I picked up a brand out of the fire, and waved it until it blazed, so as to light me into the rock.
IN A ROBBERS’ CAVE.
“After going about twenty feet along a narrow passage, I found myself in a sort of room, thirty or forty feet square. It looked partly natural and partly as if it had been dug out of a rock. There were piles of stuff where the men slept, and there were goods of various sorts lying around; but nobody was there. There was a bag of silver dollars which my eye happened to rest upon, and I picked it up. I then thought that I had got into the cave of the robbers, and that it was the same crew that was in the boat. I went out of that place quick, and it was well I did so.
“When I got outside, I could see the boat coming, not half a mile away, and those fellows on board. If I had staid fifteen minutes more, they would have caught me.
“There was no way of escaping up the face of the cliff without their seeing me, so I crawled down to the water, and slipped in again. I could swim well, and thought the best thing to do would be to float down the river a few miles farther, and then get ashore wherever I saw a house or a boat.