said we'd be the only kids there?” I asked.
“Who said it? Why, I said it. You don't think any kids will go to school this afternoon, do you? Everybody will be down at the levee—men and everybody. If the river don't drop this afternoon she'll go over the island levee. And you sit around in school like it was a common day! Why, it's like—like election, or Fourth of July, or something like that! It's worse than when the ice goes out.”
Well, I never knew a boy to get licked for staying out of school when the ice was going out of the river. He gets kept in the next day, or something, but nobody can blame a boy for wanting to see the ice go out, not even a teacher. So I guessed I'd go with Swatty, if I could sneak it. Bony didn't want to go much, but he didn't like both of us to call him a 'fraid-cat, so he came. We climbed out of my barn window, because Swatty said we'd have to be careful; but I guess it wasn't much use, because if we had gone out of the back gate it would have done just as well, and if we had gone out of the front gate nobody would have thought anything but that we were going to school. We kept in the alley all the way down to Indian Creek, and Indian Creek was worth seeing, I tell you.
Mostly there is nothing in it but a little bit of water twisting along in the wet sand, away down in the bottom of the creek bed, but now the creek was full right up to the top, and there were rowboats moored in it. We played in the rowboats a while, until a man came and chased us away, and then we went down along the creek to the river. I tell you, she was some river!
She went rushing along, all big and muddy and foamy, and she was half covered with floating stuff—bark and whole haystacks and old trees and boards and boxes and things. It scared a fellow just to look at her. It made me feel the way a little baby feels when a big twelve-wheel mogul engine comes roaring up to the depot platform, only ten times as scary. It was like a whole ocean starting out to rush away somewhere. We just stood and looked at it, and pretty soon Swatty says, “Gosh!” Only he always says “Garsh!” And I said, “Gee!” That was all we said, and Bony didn't say anything. He just stepped backward three or four steps and looked frightened. That's the way you always feel when you see the old Mississippi on a rampage. You feel as if you ought to do something to stop it, and you know you can't—that nobody can. When it gets going it is going to keep right on. So we went down to the levee.
Well, there wasn't any levee! Our levee is just a long down-hill of sand, and it wasn't there. The river had backed clean up to the railroad tracks and was sploshing against the second rail of the outside track, and at the down-river end of the levee it had gone under the tracks and was all over Front Street at the corner. The ferry dock, that was usually away down at the bottom of the levee, was tied right up close to the railroad track, and the ferry was tied in behind the steamboat warehouse, so she wouldn't wash away. The water was clean up over the floor of the steamboat warehouse, too, and nothing looked the way it used to look. It was worth forty lickings just to see how different everything was. We just stood and looked and couldn't believe it.
“Come on,” said Swatty, all at once, “let's have some fun. Let's take off our shoes and stockings and have some fun.”
We went across the street and asked a man if we could leave our shoes and stockings in his store, and he said we could, and then we went back and began to wade where the water wasn't very deep. There were a few other boys there, wading, and a lot of men standing around, looking at the water. Some would come down and look a while and then go away again, and all at once Swatty said, “Garsh! What if our fathers came down here!”
So we got away from there, quick. We went down below the steamboat warehouse, where the ferryboat was tied, because nobody was apt to come down there, and nobody did. We played on the ferryboat a while and then we got off her, and Swatty saw where somebody had fastened a lot of logs and bridge timbers to the railway track. I guess they were stuff some men had gone out in skiffs to catch as they floated by, before the river got so rampageous. The way they fastened them was to drive a spike in one end and tie a rope to that, and then tie the other end to the railway track. So Swatty said, “Come on! Let's have some fun with these logs and bridge timbers,” or something like that; so we did. We walked on them, and some of them would sink under us, and then we would jump to another.
Well, there below the steamboat warehouse the water made an eddy, and the bark and foam and some sticks kept going around and around in the eddy, and pretty soon Swatty said: “Let's ride on these logs,” and that was all right, too, because we could sit straddle of a log or a bridge timber and paddle with our feet. So we did that. Swatty cut three of them loose, and we each took a bridge timber, because they didn't turn over like the logs did, and we paddled around in the eddy and played we were steamboats. I was the “War Eagle,” and Swatty was the “Mary Morton,” and Bony was the “Centennial.” We played that a long time and then we took boards for paddles, and we could go better that way so we played Indians in canoes, and I got on Swatty's timber and let mine go, which was all right because the timbers would just go around and around in the eddy. But Bony wouldn't get on with us, because he was afraid the timber would sink.
It got along to about five o'clock, and Bony said we had better go home. He was always the first to want to go home. He told Swatty that Swatty would be late going for his cow if he didn't start right away, but Swatty said he didn't care if the old cow never got home. He said it wouldn't hurt the old cow to wait a while, anyway. So we started to paddle around the eddy again, and that time we got almost too far out, I guess, and the end of the timber stuck out beyond the eddy into the swift water.
“Back her up! Quick!” Swatty yelled, and we both tried to back her with our board paddles, but it was too late. The swift water caught her on the side and swung her right out into the current. Gee, but she went! Right away she was half a block away from Bony and I began to cry, for there was no telling where she'd stop. You couldn't expect her to stop this side of St. Louis or New Orleans. So I began to cry, and I stooped down and hung onto the timber with both arms. It was all I could think of to do. But Swatty let on he wasn't scared at all. He tried to paddle toward shore, but there was so v much driftwood and stuff floating that he couldn't do it.
“Aw, shut up! Don't be a cry-baby!” he yelled at me. “This ain't nothing. Grab your paddle, and we'll paddle out to the Tow Head and we'll be all right.”
The Tow Head is the big island in the river below town, but more to this side of the river than to the other side. It is shaped like a horseshoe, with the two ends down-stream. Me and Swatty knew it pretty well because sometimes we used to row down there. It was all trees except a strip of sand on each side, and in low water there used to be a sandbar below it. It looked like a good idea to get to the Tow Head if we could; but I was afraid to sit up so I just stayed the way I was. But Swatty paddled like a good fellow. I guess the current helped him some. In low water there are two channels, one on each side of the Tow Head, but when the river is on a rampage it don't care anything about channels—it just goes. But it kind of bends below town and I guess that helped Swatty.
He kept yelling at me not to be a 'fraid-cat and to paddle, but I didn't dare. So he paddled, and pretty soon I saw he was going to hit the Tow Head all right. That made me feel better and I kind of raised up on my hands and stopped crying, but when I looked I was scared worse than ever. It looked as if the Tow Head was coming up-stream like a big packet at full tilt. It didn't look as if we were floating down to it, but as if it was tearing up-stream toward us, and it was coming lickety-split. At its nose, where the water hit it, the river reared up in a big yellow wave, like the bow wave of a ship, and was cut into foam and spray where it hit the trees and then rushed away on either side like mad. So I saw Swatty had made a mistake in trying to land on the Tow Head.
There wasn't really any Tow Head to land on. The river was way up in the branches of the trees, and I guess the water was ten feet deep all over the Tow Head, or deeper, and rushing through the trees like it was crazy. But we didn't have time to think much about it. We just had time to be
