Chapter 15 - Page 2

answering, till by and by it was in front of me again,
and I knowed the current had swung the canoe's head
down-stream, and I was all right if that was Jim and
not some other raftsman hollering. I couldn't tell
nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don't look
natural nor sound natural in a fog.

The whooping went on, and in about a minute I
come a-booming down on a cut bank with smoky
ghosts of big trees on it, and the current throwed me
off to the left and shot by, amongst a lot of snags that
fairly roared, the currrent was tearing by them so swift.

In another second or two it was solid white and still
again. I set perfectly still then, listening to my heart
thump, and I reckon I didn't draw a breath while it
thumped a hundred.

I just give up then. I knowed what the matter was.
That cut bank was an island, and Jim had gone down
t'other side of it. It warn't no towhead that you
could float by in ten minutes. It had the big timber
of a regular island; it might be five or six miles long
and more than half a mile wide.

I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen
minutes, I reckon. I was floating along, of course,
four or five miles an hour; but you don't ever think
of that. No, you FEEL like you are laying dead still on
the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by
you don't think to yourself how fast YOU'RE going, but
you catch your breath and think, my! how that snag's
tearing along. If you think it ain't dismal and lone-
some out in a fog that way by yourself in the night,
you try it once -- you'll see.

Next, for about a half an hour, I whoops now and
then; at last I hears the answer a long ways off, and
tries to follow it, but I couldn't do it, and directly I
judged I'd got into a nest of towheads, for I had little
dim glimpses of them on both sides of me -- sometimes
just a narrow channel between, and some that I
couldn't see I knowed was there because I'd hear the
wash of the current against the old dead brush and
trash that hung over the banks. Well, I warn't long
loosing the whoops down amongst the towheads; and
I only tried to chase them a little while, anyway, be-
cause it was worse than chasing a Jack-o'-lantern.
You never knowed a sound dodge around so, and
swap places so quick and so much.

I had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four
or five times, to keep from knocking the islands out of
the river; and so I judged the raft must be butting
into the bank every now and then, or else it would get
further ahead and clear out of hearing -- it was floating
a little faster than what I was.

Well, I seemed to be in the open river again by and
by, but I couldn't hear no sign of a