One night these swampers gave Dick a capital story. The wooded shore on the north was in Illinois, on the other side lay Kentucky. It was a bright moonlight night and every mark in the river was plain as day. But for some reason the captain decided to stop for the night, and he took the boat close up to the Illinois shore and tied her, bow and stern, to two immense chestnut trees. “What’s the matter, captain?” Dick asked. “Why don’t you go on?” “Oh, we might as well give the old thing a rest!” was the only reason the captain cared to give. The swampers decided that it was exactly the proper sort of night for a coon hunt, and southern Illinois exactly the proper place. They got out a plank and went ashore and built a rousing bonfire, around which they sat and played their fiddles and sang songs till midnight. When they started on the hunt Dick borrowed a gun and went with them, for he was acquainted with them all. “That’s article number nine,” he said to himself when he returned. “Coon Hunt in Illinois. Odd duty for a New York reporter, too, to go coon hunting in Illinois.” On the eleventh day after leaving Cincinnati, the Belle of the River reached Paducah, Kentucky, and Dick had his first opportunity to see the working of a marine railway. There was a hill rising from the river, and at the top of the hill a long shed in which immense wooden cylinders were revolved by an engine. Wooden tracks reached some distance up the hill, and great iron chains ran down to the water, the upper ends being made fast to the cylinders. These chains were fastened around the boat, and when the cylinders revolved they were wound up and drew the boat sideways out of the water. Out she came, with crew, freight, and passengers all on board; not only out of the water, but twenty or thirty feet up the hill, where the workmen could reach her bottom to repair her. This was not done at once, however. Another boat was in the way at first, and two days passed before Dick’s boat was raised. Then two more days dragged along without any sign of the repairs beginning. The delay gave Dick a grand chance to write, but he soon began to feel that he was wasting the Transport’s time. “How long will it take to repair the boat, after they begin?” he asked the captain. “Not more than two or three days,” was the answer. “And when will they begin?” “Oh, I shouldn’t wonder if they’d begin to-morrow or next day.” “That’s too slow for me!” Dick exclaimed. “I’ll have to leave you, captain, and finish the journey to Memphis by rail. I believe there is a railroad from here to Memphis.” He went ashore and made inquiries in Paducah, and found that there was a train for Memphis at seven in the evening. By bedtime he was bowling across Kentucky in a railway car, through endless cotton fields, with the withered cotton stalks standing like skeleton sentinels in the moonlight. At two o’clock in the morning he was in Memphis.