Work of the other sort he avoided,
overlooked, refused to recognize, but never any labor for which he was
qualified by his talents or training. Piloting suited him exactly, and
he proved an apt pupil.
Horace Bixby said to the writer of this memoir: "Sam was always
good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. He had a fine
memory and never forgot what I told him."
Yet there must have been hard places all along, for to learn every crook
and turn and stump and snag and bluff and bar and sounding of that twelve
hundred miles of mighty, shifting water was a gigantic task. Mark Twain
tells us how, when he was getting along pretty well, his chief one day
turned on him suddenly with this "settler":
"What is the shape of Walnut Bend?"
He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of
protoplasm. I replied respectfully and said I didn't know it had
any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of
course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of
adjectives ....I waited. By and by he said:
"My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is
all that is left to steer by on a very dark night.
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