Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/216

 at by a nation which owes no little of its prosperity to-day to his tireless, uncomplaining industry.

Captain Silas Martin, a burly fellow born beside the river and bred to thread its ever-shifting channels, was an old acquaintance of Colonel Lagrange. He made that worthy man and his friends heartily welcome to the good ship "Crescent Queen," of which he was part owner and sole commander. He was a jovial soul, full of native wit and abounding in anecdotes of his life upon the river. He remembered one trip made in the old troublous times, when he had stood at the wheel under the guard of two armed Union officers who watched him day and night. One false turn of the wheel in that puzzling, sinuous channel, and his life would have been forfeit.

He had been captured, and placed at the wheel of a war transport bound from New Orleans to a point higher up the river with a cargo of ammunition and stores. Of little use were the government pilots,—Northern men,—on a river which from week to week shifts its course, now swerving to the right and stealing a piece of territory on that side, and leaving a shoal on the other hand, again building an island or washing away a spit of the soft bottom land. One who belonged to the free masonry of Mississippi pilots must guide the