“Undoubtedly!” he said. “I don’t think the rabbit’s foot alone could have done it; but when you combine the foot with a bit of gold ring, certain atomic forces are liberated which are difficult to control. Then by adding three or four bits of old glass, the isothermal pressure becomes tremendous. A lock of hair of course increases the equilibrium in the proportion of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle. But we were very lucky, after all. That was only a forefoot of a rabbit. If it had been a hindfoot, we’d all been drowned, sure.” “That’s just my opinion of it,” the clerk replied, seriously shaking his head; and Dick moved away. The process of building a bulkhead was easily described, but the work itself took more than twenty-four hours, and the boat lay close to the Kentucky shore till early on Monday morning. A plank was laid from the upper deck to the rocky bluff on shore, and all who chose were at liberty to go ashore and spend the time in Louisville, only three or four miles away. But Dick was too busy for that. He was trying hard to “keep up with his facts,” as he put it; and he spent much of the time in his stateroom writing. “I’d like to know why it is,” he said to himself, “that something unusual happens wherever I go. Is it because I’m on the lookout for such things, I wonder? Or do I have better luck than most correspondents? First, a riot in the cars put down by a celebrated preacher, then a bewitched steamboat, and now a little shipwreck. Why, I couldn’t have done better so far if I’d managed the program myself. But if this thing keeps on, Mr. Dick Sumner, you’re going to run into an accident some day that will put a sudden end to your newspaper writing.” Slowly the boat made her way down the river, stopping at all the principal towns to take in cargo. Furniture, wagons, sash and blinds, bales of hay, bags of feed--a thousand different things were taken aboard till all the deck room was filled, and even the Texas deck was piled up high, making the boat look twice as large as she had looked before. Sometimes the stop was only for two or three hours, at others it lasted all day or all night. There was no pretence of hurry. Dick would have caught up easily with his facts in this slow journey, only new facts, new subjects for articles, were accumulating all the time. The passengers he thought were worthy of a letter to themselves; many of the river towns were worth describing. He could not turn in any direction without adding new material. The young fellows who wore flannel shirts and carried guns, and there were fifteen or more of them, were “swampers,” he learned. Having finished their summer and fall work on northern farms, they were on their way to the Red River swamps in Louisiana to cut cypress timber, and late in the spring they would return. Of course they were full of good stories and Dick gathered them all in.