en't got five hundred dollars in money," Sam said; "I've got a lot
of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I'll give you two
thousand acres of that."

Bixby dissented.

"No; I don't want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already."

Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela's
husband without straining his credit.

"Well, then, I'll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I
earn it."

Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby's heart. His slow,
pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident
sincerity of purpose--these were externals, but beneath them the pilot
felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the
world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were agreed upon. The
deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and
was receiving pilot's wages. During Mr. Bixby's daylight watches his
pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing
him and nursing his sore foot. Any literary ambitions Samuel Clemens may
have had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans he had almost
forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would
be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a
directing hand had taken charge of his affairs.

From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to St.
Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come
steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee
fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked
with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little
up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue--a towering
front of trade. It was glorious to nose one's way to a place in that
stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet. At
St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary to make up
his first payment, and so concluded his contract. Then, when he suddenly
found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water
that he seemed perched on a mountain--a "sumptuous temple"--his happiness
seemed complete.

XXIII

THE SUPREME SCIENCE

In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition of
the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and
keeping a knowledge requisite for that