98 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
get to 103, and in that case we'll run it. We are drawing—how
much ?'
' Six feet aft,—six and a half forward.*
' Well, you do seem to know something.1
' But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep
up an everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred
miles, month in and month out ?'
4 Of course I'
My emotions were too deep for words for a while. Presently I
said—
* And how about these chutes ? Are there many of them 1 *
11 should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river tfrfa trip
as you've ever seen it run. before— so to speak. If the river begins to
rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen standing
out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house; we'll cut across
low places that you've never noticed at all, right through the middle
of bars that cover three hundred acres of river; well creep through
cracks where you've always thought was solid land; we'll dart
through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one
side; we'll see the hind-side of every island between New Orleans and
Cairo.'
* Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as
I already know/
* Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it/
1 Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went
into this business/
1 Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not be when
you've learned it/
* Ah, I never can learn it/
* I will see that you do.9
By and by I ventured again—
* Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the
river—shapes and all—and so I can run it at night 7'
* Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one end of
the river to the other, that will help the bank tell you when there is
water enough in each of these countless places—like that stump, you
know. When the river first begins to rise you can run half a dozen