Undertaken voluntarily, a twenty-foot dive is no great matter, but it is a horse of quite another color to be chucked into space and fall that distance like a bag of meal. I struck the water feet first, as it happened, and came to the top spluttering, half-strangled, but otherwise none the worse. Right quickly I found that I’d merely exchanged one antagonist for another. The current set strongly out from the wharf, and it cost me many a stroke to get back to it, and then I saw that I was no better off. Contrary to the usual thing the piles offered no avenue of escape, for they were planked up, a smooth wooden wall that I could not possibly climb. I felt my way toward shore, but the out-sweeping current was too strong. So I hooked my fingers in a tiny crack and proceeded to shed what clothing still burdened me. Of my coat only a fragmentary portion remained. It had been ripped up the back in the fracas above, and the side containing my ticket and most of my money had been torn clear off me. There was little left save the sleeves. My shoes and shirt and trousers I cast upon the waters with little thought of their return; and then, clad in a suit of thin underclothes I struck out for the next pier below, thanking my stars that I was a fair swimmer. But I could not make it. The channel of the Mississippi threw the full head of a powerful current against the St. Louis side at that particular point; it struck the wharf-lined bank and swerved out again with the strength of an ocean tide, and I was in the out-going curve of it. The next wharf was not for me nor yet its fellow beyond. Steadily I was carried into mid-stream. Shouting for help across the black space that lay between me and the wharves soon exhausted what wind and strength I did not use up in a footless attempt to swim against the current. I stopped yelling then; it seemed to be sink or swim, and I began to conserve my energies a bit. Slipping along in plain view of myriad lights, hearing the fiendish screaming of steamer whistles, seeing the moving bulk of them dimly in the night, I felt in no immediate danger—not half as much alarm disturbed the soul of me as when the fingers of those night-hawks were clawing at my throat. I knew I could keep afloat an indefinite length of time, and some craft or other, I reasoned, would pick me up if I failed to make shore. By and by I rapped my hand smartly against some hard object as I cleft the water, and gripping it I found myself the richer by a four-foot stick of cordwood on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. This served to bear me up without any exertion on my part, and gave me that much better chance to buck the current. I was now well out from the wharves, and straining my eyes for passing boats.