Driftwood (Spears)/Chapter 10

N government business!" Sibley stared at Mr. Kalas in astonishment.

Sibley had done well the work that had appeared for him to do. With Jimmy he had braved the overflow, dared the drift, gone through the Reelfoot crevasse, and then had undertaken to pilot Mr. Kalas down the flood; but it had been merely a case of going from one task to another. Never had he been under greater strain than when bringing the captured pirate boat down the bayou. There had been moments of excitement, long hours of weary endurance and care, and occasions for quick, irrevocable decisions. Now the man whose big hands had toiled for years on river work, and who had told his doings in the annual reports, had somehow read through the unspoken hope in Sibley’s heart and said:

"You’re on goverment [sic] business, now!"

What did it mean? Sibley could not ask the question. He had to think that matter out for himself. Was taking Mr. Kalas down the river government business?

Of course it was. The services of Sibley and Jimmy had been requisitioned, and their knowledge of the river used. The good motor-boat had had a good deal to do with it. But Sibley felt that there was something more to the quiet remark Kalas had made. The engineer was a tall, grim, gnarly man, who sometimes looked at people sideways, and smiled, and who sometimes looked at Old Mississip out of the corners of his eyes—and smiled—and who said things without smiling that made one feel warm and happy for half a day.

By and by Kalas grinned a little.

"When you are helping somebody else, in times like these especially, it’s government business. We drop all our own little personal affairs, and everybody, black and white, young and old, turns to tasks for the common good. You don’t know the names of half the people you brought out of the overflow yesterday, do you?"

"Why, no!" the two youths admitted with quick surprise.

"Exactly. We’re working night and day for people we never have seen, nor heard of, and never shall see again, probably. It’s often that way with big work; the best you do is often for people who don’t know you did it. Just look down that reach!"

They had dropped below Caruthersville and turned the bend. They could see fifteen miles straightaway down-stream in the clearing air. Five miles away were some flickering branches in midstream—the trees of the towhead of Island No. 18, all submerged except the tops. The black drift rested on the surface, in a long wavering line that flickered in the daylight.

Stopping the motor, to drift in a closed pool, waiting for an opening through the drift, they floated in silence that was broken by the cheery songs of birds in trees along shore—yellow hammers, robins, orioles, jays, mocking-birds, and many others. These song-birds were piping away with their heads thrown back in an ecstasy of spring joy, in sharp contrast to the terror of a million humans caused by the frightful flood.

Spring green was in the tree-tops, and many fruit-trees were blossoming. The fragrance of the flowers floated in waves out over the flood, and it seemed almost as though in the presence of the magnificent display of Nature’s power, the river-rise, there ought to be full happiness instead of discomfort and actual suffering and deadly peril.

"If it wasn’t for that little dirt bank over there," Kalas said to his companions, pointing to the levee, "we’d like this sight, wouldn’t we?"

"There’s an awful lot of it!" Jimmy exclaimed, awed.

"Yes, sir—kind of introduction to what will come, some day, when instead of three little floods out of the Missouri, upper Mississippi, and Ohio valleys we have three maximum floods meet at Cairo and sweep down through here! That’s what we old river engineers are thinking about. Suppose the river goes to forty-five feet at St. Louis, instead of around thirty-odd, where it is now; suppose the Ohio goes to seventy-five feet at Louisville, instead of forty five or fifty; suppose both those maximums come down to Cairo. Sho-o-o! How high would the levees have to be to hold it? Why, there isn’t a hydraulic engineer in the world who would dare to tell you! And if the Missouri sand and gravel are filling up the lower river-bottoms, the way some claim—um-m!"

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The idea of puny humans having the ambition to put that mass of water in a strait-jacket!

"But we’re going to do the job!" he suddenly declared grimly. "We keep gaining. It’s only once in a while we lose nowadays. I don’t believe there’ll be more than two dozen crevasses this year! And this year we’ll not have to abandon more than five million cubic yards of levee, on account of cavings and washing out and new projects and changed river régime. The people will see after a while that spending two hundred million dollars to prevent damage like this—which may amount to fifty million dollars this year—would be a good investment at an average expenditure of ten to thirty millions a year. There’s one thing certain: if you don’t throw Old Mississip and put him flat on his back, he’ll throw you—same as he’s doing this year!"

He talked in enormous figures, and they seemed small enough as the boys saw the thing those figures related to. He told them that two million cubic feet of water was pouring down with them, every second. They knew that they were part of the great spring tide phenomenon; they were in the scene, and never had they felt so much a part of anything as at that moment they felt a part of the river. Kalas gave them the idea.

"We’ve our parts to do, boys;" he said solemnly. "I could have gone down in one of the big steamers, of course, but you want to get down close to the water, in a motor-boat or a skiff, to get the feel of it, and to learn what the big brute has on his mind. They’re afraid of that levee over there, but there the pressure isn’t so bad, in proportion, as in some other places. About seventy or eighty miles below here let the people look out! But there are some weak places right over here. You see, the best land’s right up next to the river bank. They build the levee close to the bank, and then the water s under, or it overtops; or it just opens a passage like a pair of folding doors. Then there are people who have to be taken care of, too. Um-m! You’ve no idea what a lot there is to some of these things. Over there’s Duer County. It’s all woods. The people on the west side can build their levee right up to the river bank, and we can revet it, to keep it from caving, but that crowds the current over into those woods, there, and wears away those banks—and look at it! See that current coming out of the woods over there? Well, that’s where Reelfoot crevasse waters are coming through Reelfoot Lake, through the Scatters.

"They’ve brought their guns," Kalas remarked, as the night watch of the levees came on duty. "If they hadn’t, that levee wouldn’t last through the next night, because somebody would blow—um-m! Jimmy, I wonder if you’ll do something for me."

"Yes, sir!"

"I knew you would. I want to know what some people are talking about down below a way. We’ll be across pretty quick. A friend of mine’s in a shanty-boat over in those trees at Rosa Lee landing. We’ll run in there. Then you’ll go over on the levee and walk down to Badoria. Talk around among the little chaps, and see what they say about the levee holding. Find out if they think their levee is stronger than that one across the river, and if they have any ideas about it. You understand?"

"Yes, sir. I’ve been on the river a long time, Mr. Kalas," Jimmy said, "and I guess I know what you want. You want to find out if those Badoria fellows, or any of them, just hate the levee across the river."

"Saw right through me, didn’t you?" Kalas laughed. "That’s another reason I wanted to drop down with you. But remember, if they’ve a scheme on foot, and they know you know it, and that you’re a friend of mine—"

"I understand," Jimmy nodded. "I’ll go down."

"Here’s some money, if—"

"I have sixty-nine dollars in my money-belt," Jimmy grinned, "from drift I caught myself, or whacked up with Jep."

"You are all right, aren’t you?" Kalas exclaimed, staring at the youth.

They managed to drive over as they ran down the crossing from Gold Dust into the foot of Ashport Bar Chute. Up inside the old levee they found shanty-boats moored in the cotton field bay, and Jimmy clambered out on the old levee and started off with his coat collar up, his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders humped over—for all the world like a homeless refugee.

Kalas made the boat fast to the stern of a shanty-boat, and with Sibley went over to look at the levee up the line. Kalas opened a book he carried, which contained inch-to-the-mile maps of the Mississippi. Sheet No. 5 covered the place where they had landed in, and the red levee line was shown coming straight down through Mississippi County, Arkansas, until within five miles above Round Lake landing. There the red line swerved toward the river, making a reverse curve more than two miles out toward Ashport Bar, right up to Island No. 28 Chute. A straight levee would have been five miles long across that section; but about nine miles of protection had been built, so as to surround about four miles naturally outside the levee line.

"You see that?" Kalas pointed to the great loop. "There’s a lot of caving bend in Canadian Reach, and by and by it’ll come down to that levee in the woods. I wonder why they built the levee out that way. There are many things down the river we can’t explain, yet, but I want to tell you there’s strategy in the way levees are located. If we built them according to the best way to hold the river floods, and protect the land and at least expense, there’d be more war with local levee boards and politicians and land-owners, and—well, and everything! You can’t go ahead just exactly the way you want to, but must consider the power of certain people and follow the line of least resistance."

When they had walked six or seven miles up and down the levee, Kalas took Sibley into one of the house-boats and they had a river supper with the shanty-boater, a short, chunky river-man who could cook as well as a woman, and who listened more than he talked, at first.

"Any news around?" Kalas asked.

"No." The man shook his head. "A few thousand head of cattle drowned out in the bottoms, and a shot-gun levy on labor to make ’em work, and everybody sure the levee is going to break if something isn’t done."

"That’s all, eh?"

"Everything worth mentioning."

"What do they think ought to be done to prevent a break?"

"I value my life," the shanty-boater grinned.