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.