You can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef--that's all easy; but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth anything.

Nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is; and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there when YOU get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime.

Of course there were some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for it; it wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it.

Let me see: there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell, and Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and Billy Gordon, and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood--all A 1 alligator pilots.

THEY could tell alligator water as far as another Christian could tell whiskey.