Page:Six months in Kansas.djvu/36

32 Five hours! The moon is up brightly. The boat's crew, after most exhausting efforts, have pushed her off into four feet of water. She moves heavily, and as though contending with a power by which she has once been vanquished. Everybody is standing near the railing looking over anxiously. The mate is the most villianous rascal I ever saw. How he does treat those tired sailors. Every second word is an oath, uttered in the voice of a fiend, and accompanied often with the weight of his hand or foot

Now, two men are standing one on either side of the lower deck, sounding. Their voices go up cheerfully, or sadly, as the lead sinks more or less. Their report is taken up by another man, leaning over the third deck, and thus reaches the captain, at the wheel, up still another story, mid-ships. When the report sends forth the sound, "four feet large," then everybody says, we shall get on, our notions of water being at ebb tide just now.

The river here is very broad, with prominent sand-bars here and there, of an acre or more in extent. Nearer the opposite shore is another steamer, fast in the mud. Her pas-