Only now, when he turned up Cote Blanche Bay, some hundred miles west of the Mississippi passes, to make the last twenty miles of swamp channel to his landing, he faced his old problem.  Summer long the water hyacinths were a pest to navigation on the coastal bayous, but this June they were worse than Tedge had ever seen.  He knew the reason:  the mighty Mississippi was at high flood, and as always then, a third of its yellow waters were sweeping down the Atchafalaya River on a “short cut” to the Mexican Gulf.  And somewhere above, on its west bank, the Atchafalaya levees had broken and the flood waters were all through the coastal swamp channels.

Tedge grimly knew what it meant.  He’d have to go farther inland to find his free range, but now, worst of all, the floating gardens of the coast swamps were coming out of the numberless channels on the crevasse water.

He expected to fight them as he had done for twenty years with his dirty bayou boat.  He’d fight and curse and struggle through the les flotantes, and denounce the Federal Government, because it did not destroy the lilies in the obscure bayous where he traded, as it did on Bayou Teche and Terrebonne, with its pump-boats which sprayed the hyacinths with a mixture of oil and soda until the tops shrivelled and the trailing roots then dragged the flowers to the bottom.

“Yeh’ll not see open water till the river cleans the swamps of lilies,” growled Crump.  “I never seen the beat of ’em!  The high water’s liftin’ ’em from ponds where they never been touched by a boat’s wheel and they’re out in the channels now.  If yeh make the plantations yeh’ll have to keep eastard and then up the Atchafalaya and buck the main flood water, Tedge!”

Tedge knew that, too.  But he suddenly broke into curses upon his engineer, his boat, the sea and sky and man.  But mostly the lilies.  He could see a mile up the bayou between cypress-grown banks, and not a foot of water showed.  A solid field of green, waxy leaves and upright purple spikes, jammed tight and moving.  That was what made the master rage.  They were moving—­a flower glacier slipping imperceptibly to the gulf bays.  They were moving slowly but inexorably, and his dirty cattle boat, frantically driving into the blockade, was moving backward—­stern first!

He hated them with the implacable fury of a man whose fists had lorded his world.  A water hyacinth—­what was it?  He could stamp one to a smear on his deck, but a river of them no man could fight.  He swore the lilies had ruined his whisky-running years ago to the Atchafalaya lumber camps; they blocked Grand River when he went to log-towing; they had cost him thousands of dollars for repairs and lost time in his swamp ventures.

Bareheaded under the semi-tropic sun, he glowered at the lily-drift.  Then he snarled at Crump to reverse the motor.  Tedge would retreat again!

“I’ll drive the boat clean around Southwest Pass to get shut of ’em!  No feed, huh, for these cows!  They’ll feed sharks, they will!  Huh, Mr. Cowman, the blisterin’ lilies cost me five hundred dollars already!”