A VOYAGE IN THE WOODS
It was long past midnight when Phil aroused one of his comrades to take
his place on watch and at the pump. For the young captain had a good
deal of careful thinking to do, and he could do it better alone in the
dark than when surrounded by his crew. Moreover, he knew that until his
thinking should be done he could not sleep even if he should try.
“I might as well stay on deck and let the other fellows sleep,” he said
to himself, “as to lie awake for hours in my bunk.”
In the morning Phil called a “council of war.”
“Now listen to me first, without interrupting,” he said. “I’ve thought
out the situation as well as I can, and have made up my mind what we
ought to do. After I’ve told you my plan and the reasons for it, you can
make any suggestions you like, and I’ll adopt any of them that seem good
to me.”
“That’s right,” said Irv. “Let’s hear what you’ve thought and what your
plan is. Then we’ll carry it out.”
“No,” said Phil. “I want you to criticise it first, so that if it’s
wrong I can change it.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“First of all, then, we’re out here in the woods. It isn’t a comfortable
or a proper place for a flatboat to be in, and we must get out of it as
quickly as we can.”
“But how?” broke in Will. “We’re ten or twenty or maybe thirty or forty
miles from the river, and we can’t possibly get back again.”
“I don’t know so well about that,” said Phil. “Of course we can’t get
back to the river at the point where we left it. But I’m not so sure
that we can’t get back to it somewhere else, and at any rate, I’m going
to try. Listen, now! The water we’re in is thirty-five feet deep.”
“How do you know?” asked Constant.
“I’ve sounded it. So we’ve plenty of water, and there is no danger of
our going aground. But we’re not in any river, for we’re in the midst of
the woods, and woods don’t grow in rivers. But this water that we’re in
is running toward somewhere at the rate of six or eight miles a hour,
and we must go with it. Somehow or somewhere it must run into some
river, and that river must somewhere and somehow empty itself into the
Mississippi.”
“Why?” asked Constant.
“Because there isn’t anything else for it to run into, and of course it
can’t stop running. Now my idea is this. We must cast the boat loose and
let her float with the current. It will be very hard work to keep her
from smashing into these big trees, but we must do all the hard work
necessary. We’ll tie up every night so long as we’re in the woods, and
we’ll float all day. Sooner or later we’ll run out of the woods and into
a river, and when we do that we’ll follow the river to its end, wherever
it may happen to be.”
“But have you any idea where we are?” asked Will.
“No,” said Phil, “except that we are somewhere in the northern part of
the state of Mississippi.”
“I know where we are,” drawled Irv Strong.
“Where?”
“We’re in the woods.”
“I’m pleased to observe that you still have ‘lucid intervals,’ Irv,”
said Ed Lowry. “But I have a rather more definite idea than that of our
whereabouts. I studied it out on the map early this morning.”
“Good, good! Where are we?” cried out all the boys in a breath, and with
great eagerness.
“Come here and see,” said Ed, unrolling his great river map. “You
observe that a number of rivers originate in northern Mississippi and
western Tennessee, almost under the levees of the Mississippi. There are
the Big Sunflower, the Coldwater, and the Tallahatchie, with the
Yalobusha only a little way off. All of them run into the Yazoo, which
in its turn runs into the Mississippi near Vicksburg. All of them are
marked on my map as navigable for a part of their course. All of them
lie in a great flat basin or lowland swamp. But for the levees the
Mississippi would flow into them whenever it rises to any considerable
extent. In fact, they must originally have been mere bayous of the great
river, running out of it and back into it again. The Mississippi levees
have stopped all that ordinarily, but the levees have given way this
time, and so the Mississippi is now pouring its water into these rivers,
and as there is too much of it for them to hold, it has filled the
entire swamp country between them, making one vast stream of them all in
effect. We are somewhere in between those rivers, and if we can keep our
flatboat afloat and not wreck her among these trees, the current will
sooner or later carry us into the natural channel of one or the other of
them. That I understand to be Phil’s idea, and he is right.”
“That’s all right,” said Phil, who was restlessly pacing up and down the
deck. “But has anybody any suggestion to make?”
Nobody had anything to offer.
“Very well, then,” said the young captain, “let’s get to work. We’ve
talked enough. We must keep one fellow at a pump all the time. We can’t
do much with the sweeps while we’re in the woods, and our greatest
danger is that of running the boat into one of these big trees and
wrecking her. To prevent that I want you, Irv, and you, Constant,--for
you are the stoutest oarsmen,--to get into a skiff and carry a line
about a hundred feet in advance of the boat. She slews around pretty
easily under a pull, and I want you two to guide her with a line. I’ll
tell you when you are to row to right or left to avoid trees, and the
rest of the time you’ve only to keep the line taut so as to be ready for
emergencies. Get into the skiff at once, and take a light line with
you.”
As soon as the skiff was in position and the guiding line stretched,
Phil directed Will Moreraud to jump into another skiff and release the
flatboat from her moorings.
It was perilous business navigating thus through a dense subtropical
forest. Phil stood at the bow, intently watching and giving his commands
in a restrained voice and with an apparent calm that sadly belied his
actual condition of mind. Will and Ed “stood by” the sweeps, working the
pumps, but holding themselves ready to pull on the great oars whenever
Phil should find that mode of guiding the boat practicable.
Every now and then Phil would call to Irv and Constant in the skiff
ahead, to pull with all their might to the right or left, and many times
the flatboat, in spite of this diligence, had narrow escapes from
disaster.
It was terribly hard work, and the mental strain of it which fell upon
Phil was worse even than the tremendous physical exertion put forth by
the other boys. There was no midday meal served that day, for it would
have meant destruction for any one of the boys to leave his post of duty
long enough even to prepare the simplest food.
About four o’clock in the afternoon Phil suddenly called to Irv:--
“Carry your line around a tree and check speed all you can!” Then
turning to Will:--
“Jump into a skiff, Will, and take out another line, just as you did
yesterday. When the boat stops, make fast!”
The boys obeyed promptly, and a few minutes later _The Last of the
Flatboats_ was securely tied to two great trees--one in front and one
astern.
Then Phil threw himself down on the deck and closed his eyes as if in
sleep, and the boys in the skiffs came back on board.
The captain was manifestly exhausted. The strain of watching and
directing the course of the boat through so many hours and under
circumstances so difficult, the still greater strain put upon his mind
by his consciousness that he alone was responsible for the safety of
boat and crew and cargo, and finally the sudden relief caused by a
glimpse ahead which his comrades had been too busy to share, had brought
on something very like collapse.
The boys said nothing, lest they disturb him. He lay still for a quarter
of an hour perhaps. Then he got up, stripped off his clothing, and
leaped overboard.
Five minutes later he returned to the deck refreshed by his bath, and
almost himself again.
As he dried himself with a towel, he said:--
“Two of you go below and get supper. Make it a big one, for we are all
starving. And get it as quickly as you can.” Then, after a brief pause,
he added:--
“You didn’t notice it, I suppose, but we’re out of the woods!”
“How so?” asked Ed and Irv in unison.
“There’s an open river just ahead,” replied Phil. “Go forward and look.
I’m going to sleep now. Wake me up when supper is ready.”
And in a moment the exhausted boy was sound asleep, stretched out upon a
hard plank, without pillow or other comfort of any kind.
“Poor fellow!” said Irv. “He’s got the big end of this job all the
time.”
With that he dived below, and returning, placed a pillow under Phil’s
bandaged head, and spread a blanket over him, for the air was chill.