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"Better keep an eye out for logs or pilings," Scotty warned. "No rocks in the area, so we don't have to worry about shoals." The wooded shore slid by, the trees gradually giving way to low scrub and marsh grass as they neared the mouth of the Little Choptank. Rick alternately kept an eye out ahead and checked their position on the chart.
It was a pleasure to see that she so readily took our measurements for it. But how she got there perplexed us not a little, as we remembered the row of pilings across the stream that had stopped the houseboat, and which, even in our ardour to restore the colonial setting, we had not once thought to remove. Back and forth across our isthmus played the old-time life of the colony.
Even the stones themselves tell of fatigue the fatigue of being crushed by one another's weight for thousands of years; the suffering that comes of having been too exactly carved, and too nicely placed one above the other, so that they seem to be riveted together by the force of their mere weight. Oh! the poor stones of the base that bear the weight of these awful pilings!
Doubtless, in her haste, she was quite put out when we threw the wheel to starboard as she was passing Court House Creek, and carried her somewhat out of her way. All that we did it for was to run in close to look at some "stobs" just showing above the water. At the mouths of most of the creeks along the James are such "stobs" or broken pilings.
Light ... along with the cold, there was a phosphorescence on the water white patches floating, dipping, riding the waves. Some of them gathered under the pier, clustering about the pilings. And the fog thinned with their coming, as if those irregular blotches absorbed and fed upon the mist. The Terran could see now he had reached the land end of the jetty.
Surely while we have been telling the story of Westover, Gadabout has had time to reach the steamboat pier above the house; and we may take it that she is safely tied to the pilings. Once ashore, Nautica and the Commodore found that a short walk along the river bluff brought them to an entrance to the Westover grounds.
Beneath the pilings, and above the high-water mark, was a little hut. It was not over six feet square, constructed of all sorts of old pieces of boxes, scraps of tin, or remnants of canvas. Overhead rumbled continuously the heavy drays, shaking down, through the cracks the dust of the roadway. Against one outside wall of this crazy structure an old man sat, chair tilted in the sun.
The drainage thus afforded made it constantly drier as we advanced. It assumed now more the character of a heavy loam. Still farther on we began passing occasional houses the outskirts of the city itself. They were square, single-story, ugly little buildings, built of reddish stone and clay, flat-roofed, and raised a foot or two off the ground on stone pilings.
They are the ruins of old-time piers, the last vestige of a vanished, picturesque river trade. Ancient pilings have lasted well in the James; and these evidently once belonged to the piers of up-creek colonial planters. They tell of the day when ships from England, Holland, and the Indies sailed up the river for barter with the colonists.
Then we attacked the bridge; and, as the pilings to which our boat was fastened did not have any connection with that structure, we felt no misgivings as the troublesome modernism faded away. The bridge disposed of, we bethought us that the road with which it had connected was also a latter-day feature.
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