A tight squeeze

by William Staats

"My experience on the river has not been conducive to good appearances. You must be gentle in your criticisms."

But Ben vowed she never had looked so lovely in all her life. Which, indeed, she had not; for there was a touching grace in the way she bore her distress that enhanced the charms of a naturally beautiful woman.

"Your clothes are not dry," said Ben.

"Not quite," she replied, "but I think they soon will be." A look of misery crossed her face as she said so, however, plainly indicating that the wet sand-ladened garments she had slept in, and which were now clinging to her person were anything but congenial to physical comfort.

"Remain here for a few moments while I take a look at our island and discover some means of escape from it, if possible," said Ben.

It did not take him long to become familiar with the topography of his new location. It was simply a sand bar half a mile long, and from four to five rods broad, standing in the middle of an old channel. The centre of the bar was but two or three feet above the river's surface, but was already covered with that dense and rapid cottonwood growth peculiar to the river country of the south. Off to the west, half a mile away, was another, but a much longer island, also covered with small trees. On the east a deep, swift channel separated the castaways from a wide expanse of the everlasting cottonwood brakes that stretched a mile inland and appeared joined in the back ground to a heavy forest. To the north and south two points of land, heavily timbered, ran far out into the river and closed up the horizon.

Ignorant as Ben was of the shifting nature of the Mississippi, he could easily surmise that in no distant past the river had swept around the point above him and formed the bay in which his island, and the other stretches of sand flats, lay.

It was not then a bay, but a bend. Then there had come a change. Perhaps it was a "wash-out" miles up the river, or a caving of bank nearer at hand. Or perchance a farmer in scouring his plow ran it through some narrow neck of sand, miles away, and the river had made its bed in the furrow, leaving whole townships inland, and putting other whole townships to soak. Whatever the cause of it, the current had evidently at a comparatively recent date been shot straight out from the point, instead of circling around it. The deep bay had filled with sand and cottonwood timber sprouted upon it. Left to itself a century and the cottonwoods on the sandbar would have grown to great trees, and been thrown to earth by the stronger arms and more powerful growth of oak, ash, and sycamore. Another century and the oak, ash, and sycamore would have bowed to the woodman's axe. The plow would have turned up their foothold. Broad acres, rich with cotton and corn, would have flourished on the captured domain. A "corner" grocery would have started. Then another, and another, and another. First a hamlet, then a borough, then a city. Then the iron horse would make his way in the young metropolis, and it would grow with a wondrous growth. Mayors, and churches, and rings, and subsidies, and aldermen, and defaulters, and debts, and boards-of-trade, and societies, and "bosses," and—all the paraphernalia that goes to make up a great city, would be grown on that sandbar where Ben stood.

But these things were not to be. There had been another "wash-out," another cave-in, or another plow furrow, somewhere else, and the river was slowly coming back to its first love, and if no "wash-outs" or furrows intervened the island Ben stood upon would in a few years again be the river's channel.

Although all of this was not surmised by him he saw enough to fill his mind with dark forebodings. He knew no boats would come that way, for even as he looked a steamer's smoke curled over the point of woodland, miles to the north of him, and disappeared without ever once allowing him to catch a glimpse of the vessel it issued from. The land side was evidently as uninhabited as the long island on the west, and both separated him in their lonely barrenness from succor. Had they then been rescued from the river only to die a lingering death of starvation and exposures! Not a match to light a fire with. Not a stranded log to float from their island prison upon. Their rescuing plank drifted off. Not strength enough to breast three yards of the swift current that swept by them. Nothing but to face fate, and—die! The position was horrible. Had he been by himself he thought he could have borne its terrors composedly. Nay, he was no coward, and when the worst came to the worst and he was no longer able to bear the pangs of hunger and the miseries of loneliness, he could have consigned his body to the river without a shudder. But to see her, the idol of his existence, the woman he adored, perish inch by inch, moment by moment, and not be able to extend a single aid—that made his heart tremble. Slowly and with down cast eyes he made his way back to where Bertha sat.