He stretched his big arms wearily and wiped away the sweat that was streaming out from beneath his piratical-looking bandage. “Wal,” he said, as he sat down, “I promised Tad I’d git him to New Orleans ’most as soon as the mail, an’ you noticed no steamboats have passed us yet.” “Don’t worry,” said Allen. “They will. I jest heard one whistlin’ up above the bend, four or five minutes ago.” Sure enough, before Abe had swallowed the last of his tea, they heard a loud blast close astern, and one of the stately white river steamers came plowing down the channel. Allen jumped to the sweep and Abe to the bow oars, and they had barely time to swing the _Katy Roby_ over toward the right, when the nose of the big craft went sweeping by. Abe held the flatboat on her course as the wash from the paddles rocked her. Then he turned, leaning on his oars, and watched the steamer bear away to the east, rounding a bend. “Maybe she won’t beat us by so much, at that,” said the big rower with a laugh. “I’ve got a sort of an idee that that narrow cut, ahead thar, will save us a few miles.” Instead of following the steamboat around the curve of the main river, Abe steered straight for the mouth of the cut, where a channel a hundred feet wide led between low banks of willow. The current flowing through this cut was not as rapid as they had found it in some of the chutes farther north, and Tad remarked on the fact. “I suppose it’s just because the whole river moves slower down here near the Gulf,” he said. Abe made no reply but pulled steadily forward between the close banks rank with tropical vegetation. For a mile or more the cut ran fairly straight. Then it began to twist disconcertingly, first west, then north, then west and south again. Big live oaks and dark, mysterious-looking cypresses began to appear along the shores. The water, instead of having the yellow hue they had seen for the last thousand miles, was a dark brown, but clear enough to see the snags and weed-clumps two or three feet below the surface. Rounding still another bend, they came suddenly on a wide reach, unlike any section of the river they had yet encountered. Enormous trees shut it in on both sides with high, thick walls of green. There were flowering vines twining high into the branches of these trees, and in some places the vermilion-tinted blossoms glowed like a flame against the dark background. Along the shores, in the edge of the stream, grew other flowers--solid masses of pink and purple water hyacinths, like low islands of bloom. A little breeze came up the reach from the south, and Tad saw a section of one of these islands detach itself and go drifting up the channel like a gay-colored pleasure barge.