ed swamp lakes and bays
adjoining, trading and thieving and serving the skipper's obscure
ends.

Only now, when he turned up Cote Blanche Bay, some hundred miles west
of the Mississippi passes, to make the last twenty miles of swamp
channel to his landing, he faced his old problem. Summer long the
water hyacinths were a pest to navigation on the coastal bayous, but
this June they were worse than Tedge had ever seen. He knew the
reason: the mighty Mississippi was at high flood, and as always then,
a third of its yellow waters were sweeping down the Atchafalaya River
on a "short cut" to the Mexican Gulf. And somewhere above, on its west
bank, the Atchafalaya levees had broken and the flood waters were all
through the coastal swamp channels.

Tedge grimly knew what it meant. He'd have to go farther inland to
find his free range, but now, worst of all, the floating gardens of
the coast swamps were coming out of the numberless channels on the
_crevasse_ water.

He expected to fight them as he had done for twenty years with his
dirty bayou boat. He'd fight and curse and struggle through the _les
flotantes_, and denounce the Federal Government, because it did not
destroy the lilies in the obscure bayous where he traded, as it did on
Bayou Teche and Terrebonne, with its pump-boats which sprayed the
hyacinths with a mixture of oil and soda until the tops shrivelled and
the trailing roots then dragged the flowers to the bottom.

"Yeh'll not see open water till the river cleans the swamps of
lilies," growled Crump. "I never seen the beat of 'em! The high
water's liftin' 'em from ponds where they never been touched by a
boat's wheel and they're out in the channels now. If yeh make the
plantations yeh'll have to keep eastard and then up the Atchafalaya
and buck the main flood water, Tedge!"

Tedge knew that, too. But he suddenly broke into curses upon his
engineer, his boat, the sea and sky and man. But mostly the lilies. He
could see a mile up the bayou between cypress-grown banks, and not a
foot of water showed. A solid field of green, waxy leaves and upright
purple spikes, jammed tight and moving. That was what made the master
rage. They were moving--a flower glacier slipping imperceptibly to the
gulf bays. They were moving slowly but inexorably, and his dirty
cattle boat, frantically driving into the blockade, was moving
backward--stern first!

He hated them with the implacable fury of a man whose fists had lorded
his w