The keel-boat left them some distance astern while Abe was getting dinner, but later in the day they sighted it again, and for the next forty-eight hours the two craft were rarely more than a few miles apart. Allen did not wake up until nearly dark, and even then he had little stomach for the sizzling hog meat that Abe was frying. Next morning, however, he was feeling like himself once more, and was even ready to brag about his experiences ashore in Memphis, if Abe’s cutting sarcasm had not quieted him. They went down swiftly on the flood-water, twisting and turning through new channels, and dashing through chutes where the river had straightened its course and ran like a mill race. Occasionally they saw the roofs of submerged cabins, and once or twice, when there seemed a chance that people might be left in them, they stopped to see if they could be of any help. In one house, floating with a gable end thrust up at a crazy angle, they saw the body of a drowned woman caught by the clothing to a window frame and trailing pitifully in the water. But aside from that they found no human trace in all the desolate welter of the river. On the third day after leaving Memphis they passed the mouth of a great river--the Arkansas--a raging tide that bore witness to heavy floods in the back country. For miles below, the surface of the Mississippi was littered with gruesome débris. There were limbs of trees, parts of houses, bloated bodies of farm animals. A huge flock of buzzards circled and settled, on tilting black wings, and a stench of death filled the air. Once, when Tad was perched high astern, swinging the steering-oar, he caught sight of the carcass of a pig a little distance off. And even as he watched, it was suddenly yanked under, leaving only a gurgling eddy in the stream. The St. Louis keel-boat was not far away, and her red-bearded captain called across to Tad. “Did ye see that?” he cried. “Big alligator done it. We’ll find lots of ’em below here.” Sure enough, as they cast off next morning from the high bank topped with cottonwoods where they had spent the night, a row of gnarled gray logs below them came alive, turned with a swish of tails, and went lumbering into the water. “Don’t reckon we’ll be so keen to go swimmin’, from here down,” Abe chuckled. There were other signs that told them they had come into the real South. Cotton plantations replaced the woods and squatters’ farms on the higher ground. Broad, stout levees held the river in check for miles along the steaming bottom lands. The weather was uncomfortably hot, even in the scanty costumes which the boys wore. They kept out of the sun as much as possible during the heat of the day, but their faces, arms, and ankles were burned the color of an Indian’s. Abe, who had been reading _Othello_, told Allen solemnly that he looked like the Moor of Venice.