Knot by knot, the brine of the Mexican Gulf was being left behind, and the noises of the woods and odors of the trees and the swamps were closing in upon them. The swell fanning out from the steamer’s wake wetted the alligators in their basking-places behind the saw-grass; and the reek from her smoke-stacks scared the stilt-legged waterfowl afish in the shallows. She coasted round a bayou of black water, walled in by stern ranks of cypress-trees; she cut across another with graceful-leaved palmetto-scrub on either hand, and ragged cabbage-palms sprouting out from above. And then she swung again where the river forked, and steamed down a straight, unswerving water-line, which led to the very heart of the Everglades. But the pace was slowing now; slowing, indeed, till the steamer would hardly steer against the current, which ever and anon gripped her by the head or the tail, and carried her with sullen sheerings on to mangrove cluster or tree-clad bluff. And the reason was that the head of steam was failing. Captain Owen Kettle, as more Christian men have done before, ignored his own previous preachings when the application came in, and proved only human soon after he had taken up the _rôle_ of fireman. Driven half lunatic by the heat and the work, he kept dipping his lips in the water-bucket, and drinking heavy draughts. As a consequence, that unpoetical complaint, cramp in the stomach, overtook him at last, and tied him into those ungainly knots of torture which he had so frequently observed upon scientifically in others. But, as there was no one at hand to administer the heroic remedy of chlorodyne _cum_ rhubarb _cum_ laudanum _cum_ pill, and give him something else to think about, in the original kind of knots he remained. The donkeyman, with a hearty Belfast curse, tried to do double work; but, as he had been laboring quite to the top of his strength for many hours previously, the effort did not meet with unqualified success. As anyone with less dogged, wooden pluck might have known, it is impossible for one man to fire a twelve-furnace steamer, wheel himself coal from the bunkers, and act as engineer and greaser when required, however great be the initial supply of brute force with which God has endowed him. Every time he wiped the wet from his eyes and looked at the steam-gauge, it had climbed down since the time before; and however furiously he might heave new fuel on to the caking clinkers, that jumping index would continue its downward crawl. The oiled rumbling of the engines slowed, and grew more sluggish, and then the ponderous cranks took to stopping on a turn, as though to gain strength for the next round. But this did not go on for long. The donkeyman felt a gentle heave of the foot-plates beneath him, and then a heel which was not recovered. “And begor!” said he, “the bucking old tramp’s tuk the ground at last, thanks be!”