Life on The Mississippi by Mark Twain Page A

don’t you tell something that you’ve seen yourselves? Now let me have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard—gaping and stretching, he was—and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe, and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says—
    “ ‘Why looky-here,’ he says, ‘ain’t that Buck Miller’s place, over yander in the bend?’
    “ ‘Yes,’ says I, ‘it is—why?’ He laid his pipe down and leant his head on his hand, and says—
    “ ‘I thought we’d be furder down.’ I says—
    “ ‘I thought it too, when I went off watch’—we was standing six hours on and six off—‘but the boys told me,’ I says, ‘that the raft didn’t seem to hardly move, for the last hour,’ says I, ‘though she’s a-slipping along all right, now,’ says I. He give a kind of a groan, and says—
    “ ‘I’ve seed a raft act so before, along here,’ he says, ‘ ’pears to me the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin’ the last two years,’ he says.
    “Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around on the water. That started me at it, too. A body is always doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn’t be no sense in it. Pretty soon I see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard and quartering behind us. I see he was looking at it, too. I says—
    “ ‘What’s that?’ He says, sort of pettish—
    “ ‘Tain’t nothing but an old empty bar’l.’
    “ ‘An empty bar’l!’ says I, ‘why’ says I, ‘a spyglass is a fool to your eyes. How can you tell it’s an empty bar’l?’
    He says—
    “ ‘I don’t know; I reckon it ain’t a bar’l, but I thought it might be,’ says he.
    “ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a body can’t tell nothing about it, such a distance as that,’ I says.
    “We hadn’t nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it. By and by I says—
    “ ‘Why looky here, Dick Allbright, that thing’s a-gaining on us, I believe.’
    “He never said nothing. The thing gained and gained, and I judged it must be a dog that was about tired out. Well, we swung down into the crossing, and the thing floated across the bright streak of the moonshine and, by George, it was a bar’l. Says I—
    “ ‘Dick Allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar’l, when it was a half a mile off,’ says I. Says he—
    “ ‘I don’t know.’ Says I—
    “ ‘You tell me, Dick Allbright.’ He says—
    “ ‘Well, I knowed it was a bar’l; I’ve seen it before; lots has seen it; they says it’s a hanted bar’l.’
    “I called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there, and I told them what Dick said. It floated right along abreast, now, and didn’t gain any more. It was about twenty foot off. Some was for having it aboard, but the rest didn’t want to. Dick Allbright said rafts that had fooled with it had got bad luck by it. The captain of the watch said he didn’t believe in it. He said he reckoned the bar’l gained on us because it was in a little better current than what we was. He said it would leave by and by.
    “So then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song, and then a break-down; and after that the captain of the watch called for another song; but it was clouding up, now, and the bar’l stuck right thar in the same place, and the song didn’t seem to have much warm-up to it, somehow, and so they didn’t finish it, and there warn’t any cheers, but it sort of dropped flat, and nobody said anything for a minute. Then everybody tried to talk at once, and one chap got off a joke, but it warn’t no use, they