Quick as quick, Jeb handed her his rod and took hers, and patiently, with much waiting, reeled in the string hand over hand. Finally he brought up a struggling catfish, which he hit on the head with the haft of his knife, before carefully taking the hook out of its mouth and stringing a piece of string between its gills. Then he tied the piece of string to the raft and dropped the fish over the side.

“What—” she asked.

“I knocked it out, an’ the water flowin’ through’ll keep it alive till we git t’other side. That way it’ll be fresher when we et it, than it’d be if I gutted it now.” He re-baited the hook and let it back into the water, then grinned at her. “I was a-hopin’ y’all’d hev beginner’s luck.”

Slowly Jeb persuaded Anna to pull up her skirt a little and let her feet dangle in the water. She was still unreasonably afraid, right up until the point where she actually did it, that the water, or something in it, was somehow going to grab her feet and pull her in. After nothing of the sort happened, she relaxed, as the ferry chuffed its slow way upstream north and east to the landing point.

“Why don’t the ferry go straight across?” she asked Jeb when she had caught her third fish and he his second.

“Two reasons. On account’o this’s still Soddy Crick, the water’s a-flowin’ south, an’ if y’all tried t’go straight across y’all’d end up south of where y’all wanted to land. T’other reason is on account’o the carts are mostly goin’ east empty an’ west full, like mine. So Clem gets the he’p o’ the Crick when his load is heavier a-goin’ west by letting the Crick do most’o th’ work for ’im, an’ saves on the coal by goin’ downstream. Comin’ this way, we’re lighter, an’ it don’ take as much coal t’head upstream.”

It was nearly suppertime by Anna’s reckoning when the ferry chuffed and wallowed its way into the dock on the other side. He overshot the dock, which alarmed Anna all over again, until she understood he was letting the stream help him turn the unwieldy craft so that Daisy and the front of the cart would be getting straight off rather than having to be backed off. Clem left Jeb to do the tying up; he was fussing with his little steam engine and just gave them a dismissive wave from the shed. Anna got off ahead of the cart; the poles, fishing tackle, and fish, still somewhat alive and now wrapped in wet cheesecloth, went into the back of it, and Jeb led Daisy out onto the dock. By this time Anna knew how to get up onto the seat herself; she pulled herself up next to Jeb and off they went.

Jeb frowned at the sun, though, which made her worry. “Reckon it’s jest as well we got corn’n fish,” he said. “Gonna be too late to stir up m’farmer, so best we set up camp fer the night. This here—” he waved at an inlet just to their right “—is Blue Springs Slough. There’s a nice liddle crick runs inter it, Blue Springs Crick; we kin use the crick fer water, an’ there’s plenty’o green stuff fer Daisy. We’ll be all right.”