“I would have been a married man with an interesting family to-day,” he remarked after a pause, with a sigh, “if that friend of mine hadn’t been so everlastingly clever. He had a dish-faced trotter he had bought up in Kentucky, at one of Shanklin’s sales, that could go a mile in that Alabama sand in about five minutes, and do it with such a rip and tear and splutter and dirt throwing that you would think he was trotting ’round the world in eighty days. I had often bragged on the beast, just to please my clerking friend, who thought I knew every trotting horse personally, in the world, and now I got in to it by being so complimentary. Nothing would do but I must drive that old, shying, crow-hopping fool. And I had it to do. After I got him out of town he quit shying at the tree shadows and the black-jack stumps on the road side, and I thought I was getting along pretty well. Considering the fact that I was looking into a pair of blue eyes all the way, and putting a ring on an imaginary finger every mile I went, while the trusting hand to which it was attached nestled coyly between my two big ones, and I smelt the sweet perfume of violets in a wavy mass of auburn hair that nestled, in my mind’s eye, on my breast, I got along without any other accident; but was about to drive into a pretty rapid sheet of water in my dreaming, and perhaps end my own and Old Crow’s—the horse’s—career at the same time, when I heard a gruff voice with true Southern accent and a native nonchalance, say: “‘You doan’t wanter go in washin’ this early in the season, do you, sah?” “Well, I didn’t, and I waked up in time to stop the fool horse and back him out. The stranger watched me get out and then proceeded to tell me what I hadn’t had sense enough to see before—that Raccoon Creek was on a boom and Dead Deer Slough, into which I was driving, would swim a horse most anywhere. Now, a slough, in the far South, is a low, marshy place near the borders of a creek or lake, and, while generally dry in summer, in winter it manages to get plenty of water from the overflowing creek or lake nearby. This one ran directly across the road leading up to the foot of the bridge spanning Raccoon Creek beyond, and, though the bridge was partly under water, I could see it was all right and fully half of it, on the highest curve, was clear of water. Moreover, the other part was built on the bluff side of the creek and seemed to be entirely clear. So if I could only get to the bridge I would be all right.