’Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well, when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock, over sixty feet high and two miles long.  All washed away but that.’ [This with a sigh.]

I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing, in any ordinary way, would be too good for him.

Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting aloft on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance, he indifferently drew attention to it, as one might to an object grown wearisome through familiarity, and observed that it was an ‘alligator boat.’

‘An alligator boat?  What’s it for?’

‘To dredge out alligators with.’

‘Are they so thick as to be troublesome?’

’Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down.  But they used to be.  Not everywhere; but in favorite places, here and there, where the river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point, and Stack Island, and so on—­ places they call alligator beds.’

‘Did they actually impede navigation?’

’Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that we didn’t get aground on alligators.’

It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk.  However, I restrained myself and said—­

‘It must have been dreadful.’

’Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting.  It was so hard to tell anything about the water; the damned things shift around so—­ never lie still five minutes at a time.  You can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef—­that’s all easy; but an alligator reef doesn’t show up, worth anything.  Nine times in ten you can’t tell where the water is; and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain’t there when you get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime.  Of course there were some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for it; it wasn’t a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it.  Let me see:  there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell, and Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and Billy Gordon, and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood—­all A 1 alligator pilots.  They could tell alligator water as far as another Christian could tell whiskey.  Read it?—­Ah, couldn’t they, though!  I only wish I had as many dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half off.  Yes, and it paid them to do it, too.  A good alligator pilot could always get fifteen hundred dollars a month.  Nights, other people had to lay up for alligators, but those fellows never laid up for alligators; they never laid up for anything but fog.  They could smell the best alligator water it was said; I don’t know whether it was so or not, and I think a body’s got his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself, without going around backing up other people’s say-so’s, though there’s a plenty that ain’t backward about doing it, as long as they can roust out something wonderful to tell.  Which is not the style of Robert Styles, by as much as three fathom—­maybe quarter-less.’