I set perfectly still then, listening to my heart thump, and I reckon I didn't draw a breath while it thumped a hundred. I just give up then.  I knowed what the matter was.  That cut bank was an island, and Jim had gone down t'other side of it.  It warn't no towhead that you could float by in ten minutes.  It had the big timber of a regular island; it might be five or six miles long and more than half a mile wide. I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen minutes, I reckon.  I was floating along, of course, four or five miles an hour; but you don't ever think of that.  No, you _feel_ like you are laying dead still on the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by you don't think to yourself how fast _you're_ going, but you catch your breath and think, my! how that snag's tearing along.  If you think it ain't dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it once--you'll see. Next, for about a half an hour, I whoops now and then; at last I hears the answer a long ways off, and tries to follow it, but I couldn't do it, and directly I judged I'd got into a nest of towheads, for I had little dim glimpses of them on both sides of me--sometimes just a narrow channel between, and some that I couldn't see I knowed was there because I'd hear the wash of the current against the old dead brush and trash that hung over the banks.  Well, I warn't long loosing the whoops down amongst the towheads; and I only tried to chase them a little while, anyway, because it was worse than chasing a Jack-o'-lantern.  You never knowed a sound dodge around so, and swap places so quick and so much. I had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four or five times, to keep from knocking the islands out of the river; and so I judged the raft must be butting into the bank every now and then, or else it would get further ahead and clear out of hearing--it was floating a little faster than what I was. Well, I seemed to be in the open river again by an