“What a solid old fellow Darling is!” he thought as he took out a volume of Tennyson and began to read. “And how much better he knows the world than I, though I am seeing so much more of it. I can see how a man’s ideas enlarge as he grows older. Now there was that telegraphing scheme of mine. I was determined to learn to send and receive a message. That was not many months ago, but my mind has changed about it entirely. I shouldn’t think of wasting time over it. Reading will be of much more use to me.” At two o’clock in the morning, long after Dick had laid aside his book and gone to writing, he heard a man’s voice on the forward deck of the little stern-wheeler. He went out to see what it meant, and got his first clear idea of navigating the upper Ohio. One man was on the lower deck, forward, taking soundings with a pole. Dick could not see him, but he heard his constant calling of the depths: “One half;” “One quarter;” “M-a-r-k O-n-e!” meaning a fathom and a half, a fathom and a quarter, one fathom. As fast as these calls came, the man on the upper deck repeated them to the pilot, who was in his house on the highest deck of all the “Texas”; and the pilot repeated them too, to make sure that he received them correctly. In a minute the figures became larger. “Five nalf,” came from down below. “Five.” “Four nalf.” “Four.” “Is that fathoms?” Dick asked of the man on the upper deck. “Not much!” the man answered. “That’s feet!” Almost at the same instant the boat’s bottom grazed the sand, and there was a slight jar that brought Dick’s Porto Rico experience to mind. But it was over in a moment, and the boat went on. “That was a tight squeeze!” the man exclaimed. “Sand bar; the river’s full of ’em. That’s the way we get it, when the water’s low. We can’t quite travel over a heavy dew with this boat, as some people say; but we’re all right as long as they give us three feet of water.” It was about ten o’clock in the morning when the Crescent reached Wheeling, and she went no farther. Dick immediately began to make inquiries for another boat to carry him on to Cincinnati, but the prospects were discouraging. “’Tain’t likely no boat can get through under two or three weeks,” he was told. “If there should come a heavy rain, there might be a boat in four or five days; but that’s doubtful.” That would not do. Although he was to take his time, it would not be fair to waste a week or more in Wheeling. He inquired about railway trains, and finding that a train started for Cincinnati at two o’clock he had his trunk transferred to the railway station and bought a ticket. How slow the boats seemed, when the train was under way! In ten minutes he was crossing the river by a bridge that the boat had gone under hours before it reached Wheeling. He was in Ohio now, and by seven o’clock he should be in Columbus; by one next morning, in Cincinnati.