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 whiskey. 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.
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