Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [83]
“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 whisky. 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—so 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 quarterless.”
[My! Was this Rob Styles? This mustached and stately figure? A slim enough cub, in my time. How he has improved in comeliness in five and twenty years—and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] After these musings, I said aloud—
“I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn’t have done much good, because they could come back again right away.”
“If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn’t talk like that. You dredge an alligator once and he’s convinced. It’s the last you hear of him. He wouldn’t come back for pie. If there’s one thing that an alligator is more down on than another, it’s being dredged. Besides, they were not simply shoved out of the way; the most of the scoopful were scooped aboard; they emptied them into the hold; and when they had got a trip, they took them to Orleans to the Government works.”
“What for?”
“Why, to make soldier shoes out of their hides. All the Government shoes are made of alligator hide. It makes the best shoes in the world. They last five years, and they won’t absorb water. The alligator fishery is a Government monopoly. All the alligators are Government property—just like the live oaks. You cut down a live oak, and Government fines you fifty dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision of treason—lucky duck if they don’t hang you, too. And they will, if you’re a Democrat. The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South, and you can’t touch him; the alligator is the sacred bird of the Government, and you’ve got to let him alone.”
“Do you ever get aground on the alligators now?”
“Oh, no! It hasn’t happened for years.”
“Well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?”
“Just for police duty—nothing more. They merely go up and down now and then. The present generation of alligators know them as easy as a burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming, they break camp and go for the woods.”
After rounding out and finishing up and polishing off the alligator business, he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein, and told of some tremendous feats of half a dozen old-time