An hour before sunset, Mr. Bixby took the wheel and Mr. W — — stepped aside. For the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in his hand and was restless, silent, and uneasy. At last somebody said, with a doomful sigh —
‘Well, yonder’s Hat Island — and we can’t make it.’ All the watches closed with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered something about its being ‘too bad, too bad — ah, if we could only have got here half an hour sooner!’ and the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment. Some started to go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land. The sun dipped behind the horizon, the boat went on. Inquiring looks passed from one guest to another; and one who had his hand on the door-knob and had turned it, waited, then presently took away his hand and let the knob turn back again. We bore steadily down the bend. More looks were exchanged, and nods of surprised admiration — but no words. Insensibly the men drew together behind Mr. Bixby, as the sky darkened and one or two dim stars came out. The dead silence and sense of waiting became oppressive. Mr. Bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from the big bell floated off on the night. Then a pause, and one more note was struck. The watchman’s voice followed, from the hurricane deck —
‘Labboard lead, there! Stabboard lead!’
The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.
‘M-a-r-k three!… M-a-r-k three!… Quarter-less three!… Half twain!… Quarter twain!… M-a-r-k twain!… Quarter-less — ’
Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. The steam began to whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on — and it is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the lot was watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. Nobody was calm and easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down and stand on a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me) utterly invisible marks — for we seemed to be in the midst of a wide and gloomy sea — he would meet and fasten her there. Out of the murmur of half-audible talk, one caught a coherent sentence now and then — such as —
‘There; she’s over the first reef all right!’
After a pause, another subdued voice —
‘Her stern’s coming down just exactly right, by George!’
‘Now she’s in the marks; over she goes!’
Somebody else muttered —
‘Oh, it was done beautiful — BEAUTIFUL!’
Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the stars being all gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest work; it held one’s heart still. Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than that which surrounded us. It was the head of the island. We were closing right down upon it. We entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent seemed the peril that I was likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest impulse to do SOMETHING, anything, to save the vessel. But still Mr. Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back.
‘She’ll not make it!’ somebody whispered.
The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman’s cries, till it was down to —
‘Eight-and-a-half!…. E-i-g-h-t feet!…. E-i-g-h-t feet!…. Seven-and — ’
Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer —
‘Stand by, now!’
‘Aye-aye, sir!’
‘Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and — ’
We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing, shouted through the tube, ‘NOW, let her have it — every ounce you’ve got!’ then to his partner, ‘Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!’ The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby’s back never loosened the roof of a pilothouse before!
There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night; and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked about by river men.
Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within arm’s reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of steamboat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain.
The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby, uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said —
‘By the Shadow of Death, but he’s a lightning pilot!’
CHAPTER 5
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 smooth-bore 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.’
‘How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?’
‘How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know the shape of it. You can’t see it.’
‘Do you mean to say that I’ve got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?’
‘On my honor, you’ve got to know them BETTER than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.’
‘I wish I was dead!’
‘Now I don’t want to discourage you, but — ’
‘Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.’
‘You see, this has got to be learned; there isn’t any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws