CHAPTER XVIII

Five or six miles below, they sighted a tiny, tree-clad island in midstream, and there once more made the boat fast. This time nothing interrupted their slumbers. They were under the west bank of the island, sheltered by overhanging branches, and the sun was high in the sky before they woke. It was the merry singing of a crew of river-men, floating past on their broad raft of steamboat fuel, that roused Tad. He sat up, saw that the morning was already well along, and gave Allen a dig in the ribs.

“Ahoy, you lubbers!” he cried. “Roll out! It’s nearly noon.”

He built the breakfast fire, washed himself, and went over to give Poke his morning greeting. As he started to maul the cub playfully, he saw him wince. The little bear limped and held up one forepaw in apparent pain. Looking closer, Tad found that it was bruised, as if it had been trodden on.

“Look at this, boys,” he called. “Here’s the real hero of the fight.” And he told how Poke’s growling had first awakened him in the night.

“A mighty good little b’ar,” said Abe approvingly. “If that big-footed Congo stepped on him, though, he’s lucky he didn’t have his whole leg squashed.”

Allen produced some bacon fat which was rubbed on the wound and which Poke at once set about licking off. After that he seemed to feel much better, and soon was his own droll self again.

Breakfast over, Abe bent his back to the oars, and they soon overhauled the wood-raft which had passed them. As the flatboat came alongside, one of the raft-men strolled over to the edge of the logs and hailed them. He was a tall, rangy Tennesseean in homespun.

“Big doin’s in Baton Rouge las’ night,” said he, shooting a dark stream of tobacco juice into the yellow current.

“So?” replied Abe. “We tied up down river here a ways, an’ slept peaceful.”

“Hum, ye don’t look it,” said the raft-man, casting an eye at the red-tinged bandage around Abe’s head. “I figgered maybe you-all was in the fight.”

“What fight?” asked Allen.

“Ain’t ye heard? Why, it seems there was a bunch o’ river-men in Sancho’s bar, down by the levee, an’ Jack Murrell an’ two of his gang come in an’ ordered drinks. Pretty soon somebody spotted ’em, an’ a row started. Murrell an’ his men shot their way out, an’ they’d ha’ got clean away, only their hosses took fright and begun rarin’ around. ’Fore Bull Whaley could git mounted somebody put a knife in him--killed him dead. An’ they grabbed Sam Jukes, too, an’ put him in the lock-up. Murrell had his luck with him, same as usual. He gits on that ol’ three-stockin’ hoss o’ his an’ goes a-sailin’ off up the north road, belly to the ground. He ain’t got as many friends in Baton Rouge as he has up river.”

“He’s got plenty in Natchez,” Abe replied. “If he don’t break his neck on the way, he’ll be safe enough up thar.”

“Huh!” laughed the raft hand. “Break his neck? Not him! He was born to be hung.”

They discussed the weather, the state of the river, and General Jackson’s chances in the coming presidential election. Allen traded a peck of potatoes for some pipe tobacco, and they were about to pass on, when the raft-man introduced a new topic.

“Did ye see them notices stuck up around Natchez an’ Baton Rouge?” he asked. “Five thousand dollars reward fer findin’ some boy that’s lost. A lad ’bout the size an’ looks o’ the one you got thar, I should say.” He cast a keen glance in Tad’s direction.

Tad grinned and stood up, stretching, so that his ragged clothes and sunburnt legs and arms became visible.

“Yeah?” he remarked. “Some rich city kid from back east, wasn’t he?”

If the Tennessee man had had any suspicions, they were allayed. He nodded. “Some feller was tellin’ how a broadhorn steerer from up the Ohio had done got hold o’ the boy an’ was boun’ to git the reward,” said he.

“Humph,” grunted Abe, noncommittally, and dug deep with the oars. The _Katy Roby_ went lumbering downstream, leaving the raft astern.

“So long,” called Allen and Tad. “See you in New Orleans.”

“Gosh,” chuckled Allen as they drew out of earshot. “You sure fooled him that time, son. In that rig I doubt if yer own Pappy’d know ye.”

Notwithstanding the late start, Abe had put twenty miles behind them by the time Allen announced that the noon meal was ready.

He stretched his big arms wearily and wiped away the sweat that was streaming out from beneath his piratical-looking bandage.

“Wal,” he said, as he sat down, “I promised Tad I’d git him to New Orleans ’most as soon as the mail, an’ you noticed no steamboats have passed us yet.”

“Don’t worry,” said Allen. “They will. I jest heard one whistlin’ up above the bend, four or five minutes ago.”

Sure enough, before Abe had swallowed the last of his tea, they heard a loud blast close astern, and one of the stately white river steamers came plowing down the channel. Allen jumped to the sweep and Abe to the bow oars, and they had barely time to swing the _Katy Roby_ over toward the right, when the nose of the big craft went sweeping by.

Abe held the flatboat on her course as the wash from the paddles rocked her. Then he turned, leaning on his oars, and watched the steamer bear away to the east, rounding a bend.

“Maybe she won’t beat us by so much, at that,” said the big rower with a laugh. “I’ve got a sort of an idee that that narrow cut, ahead thar, will save us a few miles.”

Instead of following the steamboat around the curve of the main river, Abe steered straight for the mouth of the cut, where a channel a hundred feet wide led between low banks of willow. The current flowing through this cut was not as rapid as they had found it in some of the chutes farther north, and Tad remarked on the fact.

“I suppose it’s just because the whole river moves slower down here near the Gulf,” he said.

Abe made no reply but pulled steadily forward between the close banks rank with tropical vegetation. For a mile or more the cut ran fairly straight. Then it began to twist disconcertingly, first west, then north, then west and south again.

Big live oaks and dark, mysterious-looking cypresses began to appear along the shores. The water, instead of having the yellow hue they had seen for the last thousand miles, was a dark brown, but clear enough to see the snags and weed-clumps two or three feet below the surface.

Rounding still another bend, they came suddenly on a wide reach, unlike any section of the river they had yet encountered.

Enormous trees shut it in on both sides with high, thick walls of green. There were flowering vines twining high into the branches of these trees, and in some places the vermilion-tinted blossoms glowed like a flame against the dark background.

Along the shores, in the edge of the stream, grew other flowers--solid masses of pink and purple water hyacinths, like low islands of bloom. A little breeze came up the reach from the south, and Tad saw a section of one of these islands detach itself and go drifting up the channel like a gay-colored pleasure barge.

A blue heron almost as tall as a man looked up from his frog-hunting and rose on great silent wings, flapping away to the depths of the cypress swamp. There were no songs of birds to break the funereal stillness. Even the water was still. If it had any movement, it was so sluggish that the eye could hardly detect it.

Abe had stopped rowing and stood on the fore deck looking about him. The quietness affected all of them strangely. They felt like speaking in whispers.

“Gosh,” murmured Allen, “ain’t it purty here! Spooky, though.”

“It’s purty, right enough,” Abe answered. “But it’s not the Mississippi. We’ve got into a slack-water, somehow.”

“That’s a fact,” said Allen. “It don’t seem quite like the river, does it? Jiminy Pete! Look a’ thar! They’s more alligators in this place than catfish in our creek back home.”

The roaring challenge of a bull ’gator came from down the reach, and others answered all along the bank. Shattering the quiet of the place and reëchoing from the tall cypresses, the sound was almost terrifying in its intensity. Hardly had it died away when the boys heard the report of a gun, close at hand, and a puff of blue smoke drifted out from behind a little point.

Allen would have rushed under the shelter to get his own fowling-piece, but Abe held up a warning hand.

“Wait,” he said in a low voice. “That wasn’t meant fer us. Here he comes, now.”

Past the point there shot a long, low dugout canoe. A man knelt a little aft of the middle, driving her along with short, quick paddle strokes. As he caught sight of the broadhorn he paused with paddle lifted, as if in astonishment. Then he changed his course and came slowly toward them.

They saw as he approached that he was a handsome young fellow, with olive skin and long dark hair--a typical Creole of the river parishes. In the canoe just in front of him lay a fine silver-mounted shotgun, and beside it they saw the snowy white plumage of an egret.

“Howdy, friend,” said Abe. “Could you tell us about whar we might be, now?”

The youth looked them over calmly and a trifle patronizingly.

“I thing you come from up the big riv’,” said he. “_Mais_, you done los’ the way, huh? You mus’ come t’rough the cut. Dat ain’ righd. The Mississip’, she make a beeg ben’. This w’ere you are, it is Bayou Tante Lisette.”

“Thank ye,” said Abe. “I reckon that means we’ve jest got to pull back.” He dipped deeply with the starboard oar and swung the blunt nose of the flatboat around.

“Adieu,” said the Creole with a grave little bow, and turned his canoe down the bayou, in the opposite direction.

Around the tortuous bends Abe retraced his course. It was hard rowing, and he had very little sympathy from the rest of the crew.

“Seems to me,” snickered Allen, “I recall a feller up near the Wabash mouth that got a smart answer when he asked whar’bouts he was. Pore devil of a mover, he was, too, with a hull family o’ kids--not a tip-top, high-rollin’ river hand like you.”

Abe grinned good-naturedly. “That was up in God’s own country, whar I knew a thing or two,” he answered. “We all make mistakes when we git in a strange place. But you kin gamble on it, I won’t make this one twice.”

The afternoon was half gone when they got back into the main river. Tad had translated the French name of the picturesque backwater into which they had blundered, and Allen made frequent remarks about Abe’s excursion to “Aunt Lizzie’s Bay,” as he called it. The long-legged Hoosier stood it for a while in silence, then made a casual reference to Memphis and Natchez that effectually silenced his tormentor. Abe had been rowing almost without a stop since morning and as soon as they reached the broad yellow flood of the Mississippi once more, he turned the oars over to Allen.

“I’m glad, as a matter o’ fact, that we got in thar,” the big backwoodsman told Tad, as he sat down to rest. “Fer years I’ve heard tell, from the men on the river, about these bayous that go stragglin’ off from the big channel an’ wander through the swamps into the Gulf. Now I’ve seen one, which I most likely never would, if we hadn’t lost our way.”

After supper Abe mounted the fore deck again, and they pushed on steadily until dusk fell. There was a small landing with two or three houses in sight on the west bank, and to it they directed their course. Other flatboats were moored along the levee. As Abe tied up close to them, he hailed the occupants of the nearest craft.

“How fur do ye figger it is to New Orleans?” he asked.

“Not more’n twenty-five mile,” the other flatboat hand replied. “We aim to make it by noon.”

They spread their blankets and said their good-nights. Tad could not go to sleep at first for thinking of the morrow. Only a half-day’s journey to New Orleans and his father! For the twentieth time his eager mind anticipated their meeting. Would he be recognized? Allen had said even his own Pappy wouldn’t know him, but he had no fear of that. Tad could guess at Allen’s thoughts as he lay there on the verge of sleep. They would be full of the Creole girls and the pretty quadroons, and what a dashing figure he would cut amongst them in his store clothes.

And Abe--what was he thinking, rolled in his blanket on the forward deck, under the stars? Not about girls. Tad knew him well enough to be sure of that. The big young river-man had ideas, queer, searching ideas about people--all sorts of people, rich and poor--about niggers, even--and about right and wrong. He wrestled with them just as he had wrestled with the Tennessee bear-hunter, long and hard, until they were down.

Tad had some inkling of what this trip meant to him--getting out of the little backwoods world where he had been raised, and seeing the great valley and the cities of the South. He thought a lot of Abe. He liked the big, homely, raw-boned youngster better than any friend he had ever had. He hoped his father would like him, too. Perhaps he could give him a good job in the New Orleans office. Perhaps ... but sleep overtook Tad in the middle of his perhapsing, and he was kidnapped over the border into dreamland.