“Convenience! D——nation! Didn’t I tell you that a man’s got to know the
river in the night the same as he’d know his front hall?”
“Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it _is_ the
front hall; but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark
and did not tell me which hall it is; how am I to know?”
“Well, you’ve _got_ to, on the river!”
“All right. Then I’m glad I never said anything to Mr. W.”
“I should say so! Why, he’d have slammed you through the window and
utterly ruined a hundred dollars’ worth of window-sash and stuff.”
I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me
unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody who had the name of
being careless and injuring things.
I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the
eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands
on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded
point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go
laboriously photographing its shape into my brain; and just as I was
beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and
the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the
bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing up in the very
point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into
the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I
got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long
enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as
dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the
hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing ever had the same shape when I
was coming down-stream that it had borne when I went up. I mentioned
these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby. He said:
“That’s the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn’t change
every three seconds they wouldn’t be of any use. Take this place where
we are now, for instance. As long as that hill over yonder is only one
hill, I can boom right along the way I’m going; but the moment it splits
at the top and forms a V, I know I’ve got to scratch to starboard in a
hurry, or I’ll bang this boat’s brains out against a rock; and then the
moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind the other, I’ve got to
waltz to larboard again, or I’ll have a misunderstanding with a snag
that would snatch the keelson out of this steamboat as neatly as if it
were a sliver in your hand. If that hill didn’t change its shape on bad
nights there would be an awful steamboat graveyard around here inside of
a year.”
It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the
different ways that could be thought of,—upside down, wrong end first,
inside out, fore-and-aft, and “thortships,”—and then know what to do on
gray nights when it hadn’t any shape at all. So I set about it. In the
course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my
self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed,
and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me in this
fashion:
“How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-Wall,
trip before last?”