LEARNING THE RIVER
Once more I didn't know.
"Well, this beats anything! Tell me the name of any point or place I told you."
I studied awhile and decided that I couldn't.
"Look here! What do you start from, above Twelve-Mile Point, to cross over?"
"I—I—don't know."
" 'You you don't know,'" mimicking my drawling manner of speech. "What do you know?"
"I—I—Nothing, for certain."Bixby was a small, nervous man, hot and quick-firing. He went off now, and said a number of severe things. Then:
"Look here, what do you suppose I told you the names of those points for?"
I tremblingly considered a moment then the devil of temptation provoked me to say: "Well to to be entertaining, I thought."
This was a red flag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judged it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was, because he was brimful, and here were subjects who would talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I had never heard before. . . . When he closed the window he was empty. Presently he said to me, in the gentlest way:
"My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A-B-C."
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