And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi
water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is
low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east
side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you
get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all
thick and yaller the rest of the way across. Then they talked about how
to keep tobacco from getting moldy, and from that they went into ghosts
and told about a lot that other folks had seen; but Ed says -
'Why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves? Now let me
have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right
along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss
of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick
Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard - gaping and
stretching, he was - and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed
his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe,
and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says -
'"Why looky-here," he says, "ain't that Buck Miller's place, over yander
in the bend."
'"Yes," says I, "it is - why." He laid his pipe down and leant his head
on his hand, and says -
'"I thought we'd be furder down." I says -
'"I thought it too, when I went off watch" - we was standing six hours on
and six off - "but the boys told me," I says, "that the raft didn't seem
to hardly move, for the last hour," says I, "though she's a slipping
along all right, now," says I. He give a kind of a groan, and says -
'"I've seed a raft act so before, along here," he says, "'pears to me
the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin' the last
two years," he says.
'Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around
on the water. That started me at it, too. A body is always doing what
he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn't be no sense in it.
Pretty soon I see a black something floating on the water away off to
stabboard and quartering behind us. I see he was looking at it, too. I
says -
'"What's that?" He says, sort of pettish, -
'"Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l."
'"An empty bar'l!" says I, "why," says I, "a spy-glass is a fool to your
eyes. How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?" He says -
'"I don't know; I reckon it ain't a bar'l, but I thought it might be,"
says he.
