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The River Prophet

by Raymond S. Spears · English · Gutenberg #28848 · 403,332 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The River Prophet

Author: Raymond S. Spears

Illustrator: Ralph P. Coleman


        
Release date: May 16, 2009 [eBook #28848]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

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        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVER PROPHET ***




Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









[Illustration: "_She snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom
and ... fired. The man stumbled back with a cry._"]




THE RIVER PROPHET

By

Raymond S. Spears

Frontispiece by

Ralph Pallen Coleman

Garden City New York

Doubleday, Page & Company

1920




COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1920, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN




THE RIVER PROPHET




THE RIVER PROPHET

CHAPTER I


Elijah Rasba lived alone in a log cabin on Temple Run. He was a long,
lank, blue-eyed young man, with curly brown hair and a pale, almost
livid complexion. His eye-brows were heavy and dark brown, and the blue
steel of his gaze was fixed unwaveringly upon any object that it
distinguished.

Two generations before, Old Abe Rasba had built a church on a little
brook, a tributary of Jackson River, away up in the mountains. The
church was laid up of flat stones, gathered in fields, from ledges of
rock and up the wooded mountain side. It was large enough to hold all
the people for miles around, and the roof was supported by massive hewn
timbers, and some few attempts had been made to decorate the structure.

Old Abe had called his church "The Temple," had preached from a big
hollow oak stump, and laid down the Law of the Bible, which he had
memorized by heart, and expounded from experience. Elijah Rasba,
grandson of Old Abe, thus came honestly by reverence and religion, but
the strange glory which had surrounded the old Temple had departed from
the ruin, and of all the congregation, only Elijah remained.

Land-slips had ruined a score of farms cleared on too-steep hills;
lightning had destroyed the overshot grist mill, and the two big stones
had been cracked in the hot flames; a feud had opened graves before the
allotted time of the victims. It seemed to Elijah, sitting there in his
cabin, as though damnation had visited the faithful, and that death was
the reward of belief.

The ruins of the old Temple stood melancholy where the heavy stone wall,
built by a man who believed in broad, firm foundations, had split an
avalanche, but without avail, for the walls had given way and let the
roof beams drop in. No less certain had been the fate of the
congregation; they, too, were scattered or dead. There remained but one
dwelling in the little valley, with a lone occupant, who was wrestling
with his soul, trying to understand, for he knew in his heart that he
must read the truth and discover the meaning of all this trouble,
privation, disaster, and death.

He was quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little
garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle,
and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire
for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be
extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from its den.

An Almanac, a Bible, and a "Resources of Tennessee" comprised the
library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder,
about a hundred miles, perhaps--anyhow, from New York. The "Resources of
Tennessee" had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was
rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, an
inheritance.

It was a very small article, apparently, to create all the disturbances
that seemed to have followed its interpretations there on Temple Run.
Elijah would hold it out at arms length and stare at it with those sharp
eyes of his, wondering in his soul how it could be that the fate of
nations, the future of humanity, the very salvation of every soul rested
within the compass of that leather-covered, gilt-edged parcel of thin
paper which weighed rather less than half as much as a box of
cartridges.

Elijah did not spare himself in the least. He toiled at whatever task
appeared for him to do. As he required for his own wants fifty bushels
of corn for a year, he planted enough to shuck a hundred bushels. Once,
in the fervour of the hope that he was called upon to raise corn for
humanity, he raised five hundred bushels, only to give it all away to
poor white trash who had not raised enough for themselves.

Again he felt the call to preach, and he went forth with all the
eagerness of a man who had at last discovered his life's calling. He
went on foot, through storms, over mountains, and into a hundred
schoolhouses and churches, showing his little leather-skinned Bible and
warning sinners to repent, Christians to keep faith, and Baal to lower
his loathly head.

He had returned from his five months' pilgrimage with the feeling that
his utmost efforts had been futile, and that for all his good will, it
had not been vouchsafed him to leave behind one thought in fertile soil.
The matter had been brought home to him by an incident of the last
meeting he had addressed, over on Clinch.

In the Painted Church he had volunteered a sermon, and no sermons had
been preached there in years. Feuds, inextricably tangled, had involved
five different families, and members of all those families were in the
church, answering to his challenge.

They sat there with rifles or shotguns between their knees, with their
pistols on their hips, and eternal vigilance in their eyes. While
listening to his sermon they kept their gaze fastened upon one another,
lest an unwary moment bring upon them the alert shot of an enemy.

As he had stood there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the
torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as
though the final burden had been heaped upon him, and that he must
break under the weight on his mind.

"What can I say to you all?" he burst out with sudden passion. "Theh yo'
set with guns in yo' hands an' murder in yo' souls--to listen to the
word of God! How do yo' expect the Prince of Peace to come to yo' if yo'
set there thataway?"

His indignation rose as he saw them, and his scorn unbridled his tongue,
so that in a few minutes the congregation watched one another less, the
preacher more, and all settled back, to listen and blink under his
accusations and his declarations. It really seemed, for the time, as
though he had caught and engaged their attention. But when the sermon
ended and he had taken his departure, before he was a hundred yards down
the road he heard loud words, angry shouts, and then the scream of a
woman.

The next instant there came a salvo of gun and pistol shots and in all
directions up and down the cross-roads people fled on horseback. Three
men had been killed, five wounded and a dozen become fugitives from
justice at the end of the church service.

Elijah Rasba fled homeward, his will and hopes broken, and sank
dejectedly into a slough of despondency. All his good intentions, all
the inspiration of his endeavour, his very spiritual exaltation had
terminated in a tragedy, as inexplicable as it was depressing.

His conscience would neither let him rest nor work. He looked at his
Bible, inside and out, the very fibres of his brain struggling by
reason, by effort, by main strength, to discover what his duty was. No
answer soothed his waking hours or gave him rest from his dreams. On him
rested a kind of superstitious scorn and fear, and he began to believe
the whisperings of his neighbours which reached his ears. They said:

"He's possessed!"

To his own freighted mind the statement seemed to be true. He did not
know what new sin he had committed, nor could he look back on long years
of his youth and young manhood and discover any sin which he had not
already expiated, over and over again. He had obeyed the scriptural
injunctions to the best of his knowledge, and the reward was this daily
and nightly torment, the scorn of his fellows, and the questioning of
his own soul.

Worst of all, constructively, he had given feud fighters the chance to
do murder upon one another. Under the guise of preaching for them for
the good of their souls, he had enabled them to meet in antagonism,
watch in wrath, and kill without mercy. Too late he realized that he
should have foreseen the tragedy, and that he should have provided
against it by going first to each faction, preaching to each family, and
then, when he had brought them to their knees, united them in the common
cause of religion.

"On me is Thy wrath!" he cried out in the anguish of his soul. "Give thy
tortured slave something good to do, ere I go down!"

There was no reply, immediate or audible; he was near the limits of his
endurance; he drew his arm back to throw the Bible into the flames of
his fireplace, but that he could not do. He tossed it upon the shelf,
drew his hat down upon his ears and at the approach of night started
over the ridges to the Kalbean stillhouse.

He stalked down a ridge into that split-board shack of infamy. He found
five or six men in the hot, sour-smelling place. They started to their
feet when they saw the mountain preacher among them.

"Gimme some!" he told Old Kalbean. "I'm a fool! I'm damned. I'll go with
the rest of ye to Hell! Gimme some!"

"Wha--What?" Old Kalbean choked with horror. "Yo' gwine to drink,
Parson?"

"Suttinly!" Rasba cried. "Hit ain' no ust for me to preach! I preach,
an' the congregation murders one anotheh! Ef I don't preach, I cayn't
live peaceable! They say hit makes a man happy--I ain' be'n happy, not
in ten, not in twenty yeahs!"

He caught up the jug that rested on the floor, threw the tin cup to one
side, up-ended the receptacle, and the moonshiner and his customers
stared.

"Theh!" Rasba grunted, when he had to take the jug down for breath. He
reached into his pocket, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to the
amazed mountain man.

"Theh!" he repeated, defiantly. "I've shore gone to Hell, now, an' I
don't give a damn, nuther. S'long, boys! D'rectly, yo'l heah me jes' a
whoopin', yas suh! Jes' a whoopin'!"

He left them abruptly and he went up into the darkness of the laurels.
They heard him crashing away into the night. When he was gone the men
looked at one another:

"Yo' 'low he'll bring the revenuers?" one asked, nervously.

"Bring nothin'!" another grinned. "No man eveh lived could drink fifteen
big gulps, like he done, an' git furder'n a stuck hog, no, suh!"

They listened for the promised whoops; they strained their ears for the
cries of jubilation; but none came.

"Co'rse," the stiller explained, as though an explanation were needed,
"Parson Rasba ain' used to hit; he could carry more, an' hit'll take him
longer to get lit up. But, law me, when hit begins to act! That's three
yeah old, boys, mild, but no mewl yo' eveh saw has the kick that's got,
apple an' berry cider, stilled down from the ferment!"




CHAPTER II


Virtue had not been rewarded. This much was clear and plain to the
consciousness of Nelia Carline. Looking at herself in the glass
disclosed no special reason why she should be unhappy and suffering. She
was a pretty girl; everybody said that, and envy said she was too
pretty. It seemed that poor folks had no right to be good-looking,
anyhow.

If poor folks weren't good-looking, then wealthy young men, with nothing
better to do, wouldn't go around looking among poor folks for pretty
girls. Augustus Carline had, apparently, done that. Carline had a
fortune that had been increased during three generations, and now he
didn't have to work. That was bad in Gage, Illinois. It had never done
any one any good, that kind of living. One of the fruits of the matter
was when Nelia Crele's pretty face attracted his attention. She lived in
a shack up the Bottoms near St. Genevieve, and he tried to flirt with
her, but she wouldn't flirt.

In some surprise, startled by his rebuff, he withdrew from the scene
with a memory that would not forget. The scene was a wheat field near
the Turkey bayou, where he was hunting wild ducks with a shotgun. She
had been gathering forty pounds of hickory nuts to eke out a meagre food
supply.

Poor she might be; ill clad was her strong young figure; her face showed
the strain of years of effort; her eyes had the fire of experience in
suffering; and she stood, a supple girl of heightened beauty while the
hunter, sure of his welcome, walked up to her, and, as both her hands
held the awkward bushel basket, ventured to tickle her under the chin.

She dropped the basket and before it reached the ground she caught the
rash youth broad-handed from cheek to back of the ear, and he stumbled
over a pile of wheat sheaves and fell headlong. As he had dropped his
shotgun, she picked it up and with her thumb on the safety, her finger
on the trigger, and her left hand on the breech, showed him how a $125
shotgun looks in the hands of one who could and would use it on any
further provocation.

He took his departure, and she carried the gun and hickory nuts home
with her. Thus began the inauspicious acquaintance of Nelia Crele and
Augustus Carline. The shotgun was very useful to the young woman. She
killed gray and fox squirrels, wild turkeys, geese and ducks, several
saleable fur-bearers, and other game in her neighbourhood. She told no
one how she obtained the weapon, merely saying she had found it; and
Augustus Carline did not pass any remarks on the subject.

By and by, however, when the tang of the slap and the passion of the
moment had left him, he knew that he had been foolish and cowardly. He
had some good parts, and he was sorry that he had been precipitate in
his attentions. After that encounter, he found the girls he met at
dances lacked a certain appearance, a kindling of the eye, a complexion,
and, a figure.

He ventured again into the river bottoms across from St. Genevieve and
fortune favoured him while tricking her. He apologized and gave his
name.

Nelia was poor, abjectly poor. Her father was no 'count, and her mother
was abject in suffering. One brother had gone West, a whisky criminal; a
sister had gone wrong, with the inheritance of moral obliquity. Nelia
had, somehow, become possessed with a hate and horror of wrong. She had
pictured to herself a home, happiness, and a life of plenty, but she
held herself at the highest price a woman demands.

That price Augustus Carline was only too willing to pay. He had found a
girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness
of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of
everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days
mansion in Gage.

There he installed her with everything he thought she needed,
and--pursued his usual futile life. Too late she learned that he was
weak, insignificant, and, like her own father, no 'count. Augustus
Carline was a brute, a creature of appetites and desires, who by no
chance rose to the heights of his wife's mental demands.

Nelia Carline regarded the tragedy of her life with impatience. She
studied the looking glass to see wherein she had failed to measure up to
her duty; she ransacked her mind, and compared it with all the women she
met by virtue of her place as Gus Carline's wife. Those women had not
proved to be what she had expected grand dames of society to be.

"I want to talk learning," she told herself, "and they talk hairpins and
dirty dishes and Bill-don't-behave!"

Now one of those women, a kind of a grass widow, Mrs. Plosell, had
attracted Gus Carline, and when he came home from her house, he was
always drunk. When Nelia remonstrated, he was ugly. He had thrown her
down and gone back to the grass widow's the night before. Nelia
considered that grim fact, and, having made up her mind, acted.

In her years of poverty she had learned many things, and now she put
into service certain practical ideas. She had certain rights, under the
law, since she had taken the name of Augustus Carline. There were, too,
moral rights, and she preferred to exercise her moral rights.

Part of the Carline fortune was in unregistered stocks and bonds, and
when Gus Carline returned from the widow's one day he found that Nelia
was in great good humour, more attractive than he had ever known her,
and so very pleasant during the two days of his headache that he was
willing to do anything she asked.

She asked him to have a good time with her, and put down on the table
before him a filled punch bowl and two glasses. He had never known the
refinements of intoxicating liquors. Now he found them in his own home,
and for a while forgot all else.

He sang, danced, laughed and, in due course, signed a number of papers,
receipts, bills and checks to settle up some accounts. These were sort
of hit-or-miss, between-the-acts affairs, to which he paid little
attention.

To Nelia, however, they represented a rite as valid as any solemn court
procedure could be, for to her river-trained instinct there was no moral
question as to the justice of her claim upon a part of Carline's
fortune. Her later experience, her reading, had taught her that society
and the law also held with the principle, if not the manner of her
primitive method, for obtaining her rights to separate support.

When Carline awakened, Nelia was gone. Nelia had departed that morning,
one of the servants said. The girl did not know where she had gone. She
had taken a box of books, two trunks, two suitcases and was dressed up,
departing in the automobile, which she drove herself.

He had a feeling of alarm, which he banished as unworthy. Finally toward
night he went down to the post office where he found several letters.
One seared his consciousness;

  Gus:

  Don't bother to look for me. I'm gone, and I'm going to stay gone.
  You have shown yourself to be a mere soak, a creature of appetite
  and vice, and with no redeeming mental traits whatever. I hate you,
  and worse yet, I despise you. Get a divorce get another woman--the
  widow is about your calibre. But, I give you fair warning, leave me
  alone. I'm sick of men.

                                                                Nelia.




CHAPTER III


Elijah Rasba stalked homeward from the still in the dark, grimly and
expectantly erect. Now he was going to have that period of happiness
which he knew was the chief reason for people drinking moonshine
whiskey. He looked forward to the sensation of exuberant joy very much
as a man would look forward to five hours of happiness, to be followed
by hanging by the neck, till dead.

The stars were shining, and the over-ridge trail which he followed was
familiar enough under his feet, once he had struck into it from the
immediate vicinity of the lawbreakers. He saw the bare-limbed oak trees
against the sky, and he heard rabbits and other night runners scurrying
away in the dead leaves. The stars fluttering in the sky were stern eyes
whose gaze he avoided with determined wickedness and unrepentance.

Arriving at his own cabin, he stirred up the big pine-root log, and drew
his most comfortable rocking chair up before the leaping flames. He sat
there, and waited for the happiness of mind which was the characteristic
of his idea of intoxication.

He waited for it, all ready to welcome it. If it had come into his
cabin, all dressed up like some image of temptation or allurement, he
would not have been in the least surprised. He rather expected a real
and tangible manifestation, a vision of delight, clothed in some fair
figure. He sat there, rigidly, watching for the least symptom of unholy
pleasure. He had no clock by which to tell the time, and his watch was
thoroughly unreliable.

Again and again he poked up the fire. He was surprised, at last, to
hear a far-away gobble, the welcome of a wild turkey for the first false
dawn. By and by he became conscious of the light which was crowding the
fire flare into a subordinate place.

Day had arrived, and as yet, the delight which everybody said was in
moonshine whiskey had failed to touch him. However, he knew that he was
not properly in a receptive mood for happiness. His soul was still
stubborn against the allurements of sin. He stirred from his chair,
fried a rabbit in a pan, and baked a batch of hot-bread in a dutch oven,
brewing strong coffee and bringing out the jug of sorghum molasses.

He ate breakfast. He was conscious of a certain rigidity of action, a
certain precision of motion, ascribing them to the stern determination
which he had that when he should at last discover the whiskey-happiness
in his soul, he would let go with a whoop.

"Some hit makes happy, and some hit makes fightin' mad!" Rasba suddenly
thought, with much concern, "S'posen hit'd make me fightin' mad?"

A fluttering trepidation clutched his heart. The bells ringing in his
ears fairly clanged the alarm. He hadn't looked for anything else but
joy from being drunk, and now suppose he should be stricken with a mad
desire to fight--to kill someone!

No deadlier fear ever clutched a man's heart than the one that seized
Elijah Rasba. Suppose that when the deferred hilarity arrived, he was
made fighting drunk instead of joyous? The thought seized his soul and
he looked about himself wondering how he could chain his hands and save
his soul from murder, violence, fighting, and similar crimes! No
feasible way appeared to his frightened mind.

He dropped on his knees and began to pray for happiness, instead of for
violence, when the drink that he had had should seize him in its
embrace. He prayed with a voice that roared like thunder and which made
the charcoal fall from the log in the fireplace, and which alarmed the
jays and inquisitive mockingbirds about the little clearing.

He prayed while his voice grew huskier and huskier, and his head bowed
lower and lower as he wrestled with this peril which he had not
foreseen. All he asked was that when the moonshine began to operate, it
make him laugh instead of mad, but terrible doubts smote him. A glance
at his rifle on the wall made him fairly grovel on the floor, and he
knew that in his hands the andirons, the axe, the very hot-bread rolling
pin would be deadly weapons.

He hoped that he would not be able to shoot straight, but this hope was
instantly blasted, for a flock of wild turkeys came down into the
cornfield about ninety yards from his cabin, and although he seldom shot
anything in his own clearing, he now tried a shot at the turkey gobbler
and shot it dead where it strutted. If he should be stricken with anger
instead of with joy, no worse man could possibly live! There was no
telling what he would do if the liquor would work "wrong" on him. He
could kill men at two hundred yards!

He determined that he would see no human beings that day. Few people
ever visited him in his cabin, but he took no chances. He crept up the
mountain and skulking through the woods found an immense patch of
laurels. He crawled into it, and sat down there for hours and hours, so
that no one should have an opportunity to speak to him and stir the
latent devil of violence.

He returned to his cabin long after dark, and raking some hot coals out
of the ashes, whittled splinters and started a blaze. He was assailed
by hunger, and he baked corn pones and dry-salted pork, then added a
great flapjack of delicious sage sausage to the meal. He brought out
cans of fruit, whose juice assuaged his increasing thirst. Having eaten
heartily he resumed his vigil before the fireplace, and then he noticed
that some one had tied something on the stock of his rifle.

It was a letter which a passer-by had brought up from the Ford Post
Office, and when he opened it and looked at the writing, remorse
assailed him:

  Dear Parsun:

  Ever senct you preched here I ben sufrin count of my boy JocK. You
  know Him for he set right thar, frade of no man, not the Tobblys,
  nor the Crents. When tha drawed DOWN to shoot, he stud right thar an
  shot back shoot fer shoot, an now he has goned awa down the Rivehs
  an I am worited abot his soul because he is a gud boy an neveh was
  no whars in all his borned days an an i hear now he is gettin bad
  down thataway on Misipy riveh where thas all Bad Peple an i wisht
  yud prey fer him so's he wont get bad. Mrs. drones panted church on
  Clinch.

Rasba read the letter for the words at first. Then he went back after
the meaning, and the meaning struck him like a blow in the heart.

"Me pray fo' any man again," he gasped. "Lawse! Lawse!"

He didn't feel fit to pray for himself, let alone for any other sinner,
but there came to his memory a picture of Mrs. Drones, a motherly little
woman who had taken him home to a dinner at which seven kinds of
preserved fruit were on the table, and where the family laughed around
the fireplace--only to see Jock a fugitive the next night, and the
terrors of a feud war upon them.

"And Jock's getting bad down the Mississippi River!" Rasba repeated to
himself, striving to grapple with that fact. He could not think clearly
or coherently. The widow's voice, however, was as clearly speaking in
his thoughts as though she stood there, instead of merely having written
to him. He took to walking up and down the floor, back and forth, on one
plank.

He had forgotten that there was such a thing for humans as sleep. The
incongruity of his having been wide awake for two days and two nights
did not occur to him till suddenly his eyes turned to the bed in the
corner of the room and its purpose was recalled to his mind. He blinked
at it. His eyes opened with difficulty. He threw chunks on the fire and
went toward the bed, but as he stood by it the world grew black before
his eyes and clutching about him, he sank to the floor.




CHAPTER IV


Nelia Carline would not return to that miserable little river-bottom
cabin where she had grown up in unhappy privation. She had other plans.
She drove the little automobile down to Chester, put it in the Star
Garage, then walked to the river bank and gave the eddy a critical
inspection.

For years she had lived between the floods of the river and the poverty
of the uplands. Her life had often crossed that of river people, and
although she had never been on the river, she had frequently gone
visiting shanty-boaters who had landed in for a night or a week at the
bank opposite her own shack home. She knew river men, and she had no
illusions about river women. Best of all now, in her great emergency,
she knew shanty-boats, and as she gazed at the eddy and saw the fleet of
houseboats there her heart leaped exultantly.

No less than a score of boats were landed along the eddy bank, and
instantly her eyes fell upon first one and then another that would serve
her purpose. She walked down to the uppermost of the boats, and hailed
from the bank:

"U-whoo!"

A lank, stoop-shouldered woman emerged from the craft and fixed the
well-favoured young woman with keen, bright eyes.

"You-all know if there's a shanty-boat here for sale--cheap?" Nelia
asked, without eagerness.

The woman looked at the bank, reflectively.

"I expect," she admitted at last. "This un yaint, but theh's two spo'ts
down b'low, that's quittin' the riveh, that blue boat theh, but theh's
spo'ts."

"I 'lowed they mout be," Nelia dropped into her childhood vernacular as
she looked down the bank, "Likely yo' mout he'p me bargain, er
somebody?"

"I 'low I could!" the river woman replied. "Me an' my ole man he'ped a
feller up to St. Louis, awhile back, who was green on the river, but he
let us kind of p'int out what he'd need fo' a skift trip down this away.
Real friendly feller, kind of city-like, an' sort of out'n the country,
too. 'Lowed he was a writin' feller, fer magazines an' books an'
histries an' them kind of things. Lawsy! He could ask questions, four
hundred kinds of questions, an' writin' hit all down into a writin'
machine onto paper. We shore told him a heap an' a passel, an' he writes
mornin' an' nights. Lots of curius fellers on Ole Mississip'. We'll sort
of look aroun'. Co'se, yo' got a man to go 'long?"

"No."

"Wha-a-t! Yo' ain' goin' to trip down alone?"

"I might's well."

"But, goodness, gracious sake, you're pretty, pretty as a picture! I
'lowed yo' had a man scoutin' aroun'. Why somethin' mout happen to a
lady, if she didn't have a man or know how to take cyar of herse'f."

Nelia shrugged her shoulders. Mrs. Tons, the river woman, gazed for a
minute at the pretty, partly averted face. It was almost desperate,
quite reckless, and by the expression, the river woman understood. She
thought in silence, for a minute, and then looked down the eddy at a
boat some distance away.

"Theh's a boat. Like the looks of it?"

"It's a fine boat, I 'low," Nelia said. "Fresh painted."

"Hit's new," the woman said.

"Is it for sale?"

"We'll jes walk down thataway," the river woman suggested. "Two ladies
is mostly safe down thisaway."

"My name's Nelia Crele. We used to live up by Gage, on the Bottoms----"

"Sho! Co'se I know Ole Jim Crele, an' his woman. My name's Mrs. Tons. We
stopped in thah 'bout six weeks ago. I hearn say yo'd--yo'd married
right well!"

"Umph!" Nelia shrugged her shoulders, "Liquor spoils many a home!"

"Yo' maw said he was a drinkin' man, an' I said to myse'f, from my own
'sperience.... Yo' set inside yeah, Nelia. I'll go down theh an' talk
myse'f. We come near buyin' that bo't yistehd'y. Leave hit to me!"

Nelia sat down in the shanty-boat, and waited. She had not long to wait.
A tall, rather burly man returned with the woman, who introduced the
two;

"Mis' Crele, this is Frank Commer. His bo't's fo' sale, an' he'll take
$75 cash, for everything, ropes, anchor, stoves, a brass bedstead, an'
everything and I said hit's reasonable. Hit's a pine boat, built last
fall, and the hull's sound, with oak framing. Co'se, hit's small, 22
foot long an' 7 foot wide, but hit's cheap."

"I'll take it, then," Nelia nodded.

"You can come look it over," the man declared. "Tight hull and tight
roof. We built it ourselves. But we're sick of the river, and we'll sell
cheap, right here."

The three went down to the boat, and Nelia handed him seventy-five
dollars in bills. He and his partner, who came down from the town a few
minutes later, packed up their personal property in two trunks. They
left the dishes and other outfit, including several blankets.

The four talked as the two packed up. One of them suddenly looked
sharply at Nelia:

"You dropping down alone?"

She hesitated, and then laughed:

"Yes."

"It's none of my business," the man said, doubtfully, "but it's a mean
old river, some ways. A lady alone might get into trouble. River
pirates, you know."

It was a challenge. He was a clear-eyed, honest man, hardly twenty-five
years of age, and not an evil type at all. What he had to suggest he did
boldly, sure of his right at such a time, under such circumstances, to
do. He was entirely likeable. In spite of herself, Nelia wavered for a
moment. She knew river people; the woman by her side would have said she
would be safer with him than without his protection. There was only one
reason why Nelia could not accept that protection.

"I'll have to take care of myself," she shook her head, without rebuke
to the youth. "You see, I'm running away from a mean scoundrel."

"Hit's so," the river woman approved, and the men took their departure
without further comment.

The two women, disapproving the men's housekeeping, scrubbed the boat
and washed all the bedding. Nelia brought down her automobile and the
two carried her own outfit on board. Then Nelia took the car back to the
garage, and said that she would call for it in the morning.

"All right, Mrs. Carline," the garage man replied, without suspicion.

Back at the landing, Nelia bade the river woman good-bye.

"I got to be going," she said, "likely there'll be a whole pack after me
directly----"

"Got a gun?" the woman asked.

"Two," Nelia smiled. "Bill gave me a goose rifle and Frank let me have
this--he said it's the Law down Old Mississip'!"

"The Law" was a 32-calibre automatic pistol in perfect condition.

"Them boys thought a heap of yo', gal!" The river woman shook her head.
"Frank'd sure made you a good man!"

"Oh, I know it," replied Nelia, "but I'm sick of men--I hate men! I'm
going to go droppin' along, same's the rest."

"Don't let go of that pistol. Theh's mean, bad men down thisaway,
Nelia!"

Nelia laughed, but harshly. "I don't give a damn for anything now; I
tell you that!"

"Don't forget it. Shoot any man that comes."

Nelia, who could row a skiff with any one, set her shanty-boat sweeps on
their pins, coiled up the two bow lines by which the boat was moored to
the bank, and which the river woman untied, then rowed out of the eddy
and into the main current.

"It's good floating right down," Mrs. Tons called after her, "till yo'
git to Grand Tower Rock--thirty mile!"

The river rapidly widened below Chester, and the little houseboat swung
out into mid-stream. Nelia knew the river a little from having been down
on a steamer, and the misery she left behind was in contrast to the
sense of freedom and independence which she now had.

Stillness, peace, the sense of vast motion in the river torrent
comforted her. The moment of embarking alone on the river had been full
of nervous tenseness and anxiety, but now those feelings were left
behind and she could breathe deeply and confront the future with a calm
spirit. The veil that the blue mist of distance left behind her was
penetrable by memory, but the future was hidden from her gaze, as it was
hidden from her imagination.

The determination to dwell in the immediate present caught up her soul
with its grim, cold bonds, and as the sun was setting against the sky
beyond the long, sky-line of limestone ledges, she entered the cabin,
and looked about her with a feeling of home such as she had never had
before.

"I'll stand at the breech of my rifle, to defend it," she whispered to
herself. "Men are mean! I hate men!"

She found a flat book on a shelf which held a half hundred magazines.
The book was bound in blue boards, and backed with yellow leather. When
she opened it, out of curiosity, she discovered that it was full of
maps.

"Those dear boys!" she whispered, almost regretfully. "They left this
map book for me, because they knew I'd need it; knew everybody down
thisaway needs a map!"

They had done more than that; they had left the equally indispensable
"List of Post Lights," and when dusk fell and she saw a pale yellow
light revealed against a bank the little book named it "Wilkinson
Island." She pulled toward the east bank into the deadwater below
Lacours Island, cast over her anchor, and came to rest in the dark of a
starless night.




CHAPTER V


In mid-afternoon, the man who had so desperately and as a last resource
tested the efficiency of moonshine whiskey as a palliative for mental
misery awaked gradually, in confusion of mind and aching of body. Noises
filled his ears, and streaking lights blurred the keenness of his eyes.
Reason had but little to do with his first thoughts, and feelings had
nearly everything. There did not seem to be any possible atonement for
him to make. Too late, as it seemed, he realized the enormity of his
offence and the bitterness of inevitable punishment.

There remained but one thing for him to do, and that was go away down
the rivers and find the fugitive Jock Drones, whose mother feared for
him. No other usefulness of purpose remained in his reach. If he stood
up, now, before any congregation, the imps of Satan, the patrons of
moonshiners, would leer up at him in his pulpit, reminding him that he,
too, was one of them.

He went over to the corner of his cabin, raised some planks there and
dug down into the earth till he found a jug. He dragged the jug into the
cabin and out of it poured the Rasba patrimony, a hidden treasure of
gold, which he put into a leather money belt and strapped on. There was
not much in the cabin worth taking away, but he packed that little up
and made ready for his departure.

It was but a few miles over to Tug River, and he readily engaged a wagon
to carry him that far. On the wooded river bank he built a flatboat with
his own hands, and covered one end of it with a poplar-wood cabin,
purchased at a near-by sawmill. He floated out of the eddy in his
shack-boat and began his journey down the rivers to the Mississippi,
where he would perform the one task that remained for him to do in the
service of God. He would find Jock, give him his mother's message, and
after that expiate his own sins in the deserved misery of an exiled
penitent.

Tug River was in flood, a heavy storm having cast nearly two inches of
rainfall upon part of the watershed. On the crest of the flood it was
fast running and there was no delay, no stopping between dawn and dusk.
Standing all day at the sweeps Rasba cleared the shore in sharp bends,
avoided the obstacles in mid stream, and outran the wave crests and the
racing drift, entering the Big Sandy and emerging into the unimaginable
breadths of the Ohio.

He had no time to waste on the Ohio. The object of his search was on the
Mississippi, hundreds of miles farther down, and he could not go fast
enough to suit him. But at that, pulling nervously at his sweeps and
riding down the channel line, he "gain-speeded," till his eyes were
smarting with the fury of the changing shores, and his arms were aching
with the pulling and pushing of his great oars, and he neither
recognized the miles that he floated nor the repeated days that ensued.

Long since he had escaped from his own mountain environment. The trees
no longer overhung his course; railroad trains screamed along endless
shores, bridges overhung his path like menacing deadfalls, and the
rolling thunder of summer storms was mingled with the black smoke of ten
thousand undreamed-of industries. The simplicity of the mountain
cornfields of his youth had become a mystery of production, of activity,
of passing phenomena which he neither knew nor understood. In his
thoughts there was but one beacon.

His purpose was to reach the Mississippi, take the young man in hand,
and redeem him from the evils into which he had fallen. His object was
no more than that, nor any less. From the confusion of his experiences,
efforts, and humiliations, he held fast to one fact: the necessity of
finding Jock Drones. All things else had melted into that.

The river banks fell apart along his course; the river ridges withdrew
to wide distances, even blue at times; mere V-gullies or U-gorges,
widened into vast corn fields. A post-office store-house at a rippling
ford gave way to smoking cities, rumbling bridges, paved streets, and
hurrying throngs. The lone fisherman in an 18-foot dugout had changed
insensibly to darting motorboats and to huge, red-wheeled, white-castled
monsters, whose passage in the midst of vast waters was attended by the
sighs of toiling engines and the tossing of troubled seas.

Except for that one sure demand upon him, Elijah Rasba long since would
have been lost in the confusion and doubts of his transition from narrow
wooded ridges and trembling streamlets to this succession of visions.
But his soul retained its composure, his eyes their quickness to seize
the essential detail, and he rode the Tug River freshet into the Ohio
flood tide bent upon his mission of redeeming one mountain youth who had
strayed down into this far land, of which the shores were washed by the
unimaginable sea of a river.

When at the end of a day he arrived in a way-side eddy and moored his
poplar-bottom craft against a steep bank and the last twilight had faded
from his vision, he would eat some simple thing for supper, and then, by
lamp-light, try to read his exotic life into the Bible which accompanied
him on his travels. He knew the Book by heart, almost; he knew all the
rivers told about in it; he knew the storms of the various biblical
seas; he knew the Jordan, in imagination, and the Nile, the Euphrates,
the Jabbok, and the Brook of Egypt, but they did not conform in his
imagination with this living tide which was carrying him down its
course, over shoal, around bend and from vale to vale of a size and
grandeur beyond expression.

Elijah was speechless with amazement; the spies who had gone into
Canaan, holding their tongues, and befriended by women whose character
Elijah Rasba could not identify, were less surprised by the riches which
they discovered than Rasba by the panorama which he saw rolled out for
his inspection day by day.

Other shanty-boaters were dropping down before the approach of winter.
Sometimes one or another would drift near to Rasba's boat and there
would be an exchange of commonplaces.

"How fur mout hit be, strangeh?" he would ask each man. "'Low hit's a
hundred mile yet to the Mississippi?"

A hundred miles! They could not understand that this term in the
mountain man's mind meant "a long ways," if need be a thousand or ten
thousand miles. When one answered that the Mississippi was 670 miles,
and another said it was a "month's floating," their replies were equally
without meaning to his mind. Rasba could not understand them when they
talked of reaches, crossings, wing dams, government works, and chutes
and islands, but he would not offend any of them by showing that he did
not in the least understand what they were talking about. He must never
again hurt the feelings of any man or woman, and he must perform the one
service which the Deity had left for him to perform.

Little by little he began to understand that he was approaching the
Mississippi River. He saw the Cumberland one day, and two hours later,
he was witness to the Tennessee, and that long, wonderful bridge which a
railroad has flung from shore to shore of the great river. The current
carried him down to it, and his face turned up and up till he was swept
beneath that monument to man's inspiration and the industry of countless
hands.

Rasba had seen cities and railroads and steamboats, but all in a kind of
confusion and tumult. They had meant but incidents down the river; this
bridge, however, a structure of huge proportions, was clearly one piece,
one great idea fixed in steel and stone.

"How big was the man who built that bridge?" he asked himself.

While yet the question echoed in his expanding soul he hailed a passing
skiff:

"Strangeh! How fur now is it to the Mississippi River?"

"Theh 'tis!" the man cried, pointing down the current. "Down by that air
willer point!"




CHAPTER VI


Those first free days on the Mississippi River revealed to Nelia Crele a
woman she had never known before. Daring, fearless, making no reckoning,
she despised the past and tripped eagerly into the future. It was no
business of any one what she did. She had married a man who had turned
out to be a scoundrel, and when fate treated her so, she owed nothing to
any one or to anything. Even the fortune which she had easily seized
through the alcoholic imbecility of her semblance of a man brought no
gratitude to her. The money simply insured her against poverty and her
first concern was to put that money where it would be safe from raiders
and sure to bring her an income. This, watchfulness and alertness of
mind had informed her, was the function of money.

She dropped into Cape Girardeau, and sought a man whom she had met at
her husband's house. This was Duneau Menard, who had little interest in
the Carlines, but who would be a safe counsellor for Nelia Crele. He
greeted her with astonishment, and smiles, and told her what she needed
to know.

"I was just thinking of you, Nelia," he said, "Carline's sure raising a
ruction trying to find you. He 'lows you are with some man who needs
slow killing. He telephoned to me, and he's notified a hundred sheriffs,
but, shucks! he's a mean scoundrel, and I'm glad to see yo'."

"I want to have you help me invest some money," she said. "It's mine,
and he signed every paper, for me. Here's one of them."

He took the sheet and read:

  I want my wife to share up with me all my fortune, and I hereby
  convey to her stocks, bonds, and cash, according to enclosed signed
  certificates, etc.

                                                     Augustus Carline.

"How come hit?" the man asked.

"He was right friendly, then," she replied, grimly. "For what you-all
said about the daughter of my mother I come here to claim your help. You
know about money, about interest and dividends. I want it so I can have
money, regular, like Gus did----"

"I shall be glad to fix that," he said, wiping his glasses. "What you
wish is a diversified set of investments. How much is there?"

She stacked up before him wads, rolls, briquettes, and bundles. He
counted it, slip by slip and when he had completed the tally and
reckoned some figures on the back of an envelope, he nodded his
approval.

"I expect that this will bring you around twelve or fifteen hundred
dollars a year, safe, and a leetle besides, on speculation."

"That'll do," she said, approvingly.

No one in town connected her with the sensation up around Gage. She was
just one of those shanty-boat girls who come down the Mississippi every
once in a while, especially below St. Louis. In a hundred cities and
towns people were looking for Mrs. Augustus Carline, supposed to be
cutting a dashing figure, and probably in company with a certain Dick
Asunder, who had been seen in Chester, with his big black automobile on
the same day that Mrs. Carline abandoned her husband's automobile
there.

Of course, the shanty-boaters did not tell, if they knew; the River
tells no tales. Certainly, of all the women in the world this casual
visitor at Attorney Menard's need not attract attention. Menard always
did have strange clients, and it was nothing new to see a shanty-boat
land in and some man or woman walk up to his corner office and sit down
to tell him in legal confidences things more interesting to know than
any one not of his curiosity and sympathy would ever dream.

Attorney Menard kept faith with river wastrels, floating nomads who are
akin to gypsies, but who are of all bloods--tramps of the running
floods. He listened to narratives stranger than any other attorney; in
his safe he had documents of interest to sweethearts and wives, to
husbands and sons, to fugitives and hunters. Letters came to him from
all parts of the great basin, giving him directions, or notifying him of
the termination of lives whose passing had a significance or a meaning.

Nelia's mother knew him, and Nelia herself recalled his good-humoured
smile, his weathered face, his appeal to a girl for her confidence, and
the certainty that her confidence would be respected. She had gone to
him as naturally as she would have gone to a decent father or a wise
mother. She took from him his neatly written receipt, but with the
feeling that it was superfluous. In a little while she returned to the
shanty-boat and dropped out of the eddy on her way down the river. She
floated under the big Thebes Bridge, and landed against the west bank
before dark, there to have the luck to shoot a wild goose. The maps
showed that she was approaching the Lower Mississippi.

When she had left Cape Girardeau, she had noticed a little brick-red
shanty-boat which landed in just below her own. Without looking up, she
discovered that a man leaned against the roof of his low cabin whose
eyes did not cease to watch her every motion while she cast off, coiled
her ropes, and leaned to the light sweeps.

When she was a safe distance down the river, she ventured to look up
stream, and saw that the little red shanty-boat had left its mooring,
and that the man was coming down the current astern of her. It was a
free river; any one could go whither he pleased, but the certainty that
she had attracted the man's attention revealed to her the necessity of
considering her position there alone and dependent on her own
resources.

She remembered the two market hunters, and their warnings. The man
astern was a patient, lurking, menacing brute, who might suspect her of
having property enough to make a river piracy worth while; or he might
have other designs, since she was unfortunately good-looking and
attractive. Night would surely be his opportunity and the test of her
soul.

She could have landed at Commerce, where there were several shanty-boats
and temporary safety; she could have floated on down at night and
slipped into the shore in the dark, her lights out; she could have tried
flight down the river hoping to lose the brick-red boat; she decided
against all these.

Boldly she pulled into an eddy just before sunset, and had made fast to
a snag and a live root when the little boat came dropping down in the
edge of the current hardly forty feet distant, with the man leaning on
his sweeps, watching her every motion, especially fastening his gaze
upon her trim figure.

As he came opposite she turned and faced him; her jaws set.

"Hello, girlie!" he called, leaning upon his sweeps to carry his
skiff-like boat into the same eddy.

On the instant she snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom and,
dropping the muzzle, fired. The man stumbled back with a cry. He stood
grabbing at his shoulder, his florid face turning white, his eyes
starting with terror and pain. She saw him reel and fall through the
open hatch of his cabin and his boat go drifting on into the crossing
below. It occurred to her numbed brain that she was delivered from that
peril, but as dusk fell she hated the misery of her loneliness.




CHAPTER VII


The Ohio had the Mississippi eddied. The rains that had fallen over the
valleys of Kentucky and southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had brought
a tide down the big branch and as there was not much water running out
of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi, the flood had backed up the
Mississippi for a little while, stopping the current almost dead.

Elijah Rasba, running full tilt in the mid Ohio current, looked ahead
that afternoon, and he had a full view of the thing to which he had
come, seeking the wandering son of Mrs. Drones.

He arrived at the moment when the Mississippi, having been banked up
long enough, began to feel the restraint of the Ohio and resent it. The
gathered waters moved down against the Ohio flood and pressed them back
against the Kentucky side. Once more the Mississippi River resumed its
sway. On the loosed waters was a little cigar-box of a shanty-boat, and
Rasba rowed toward it across the saucer-like sucks and depressions where
the two currents of different speeds dragged by each other.

He pulled alongside, hailed, and, for answer, heard a groan, a weak
cry:

"Help!"

He carried a line across to the stranger's deck and made it fast. Then
he saw, stretched upon the floor, a stricken man, from whose side a pool
of blood had run. Working rapidly, Elijah discovered the wound and as
gunshot injuries were only too familiar in his mountain experience he
well knew what he should do. Examination showed that it was a painful
and dangerous shoulder shot. He cleared away the stains, washed the
hole, plucked the threads of cloth out of it, turned the man on his face
and, with two quick slashes of a razor, cut out the missile which had
done the injury.

Healing liniment, the inevitable concoction of a mountaineer's cabin,
soothed while it dressed the wound. Pads of cotton, and a bandage
supplied the final need, and Rasba stretched his patient upon the
cabin-boat bunk, then looked out upon the world to which he had
drifted.

It was still a vast river, coming from the unknown and departing into
the unknown. He knew it must be the Mississippi, but he acknowledged it
with difficulty.

He did not ask the man about the bullet. Born and bred in the mountains,
he knew that that would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette. But the
wounded man was uneasy, and when he was eased of his pain, he began to
talk:

"I wa'nt doin' nothing!" he explained, "I were jes' drappin' down, up
above Buffalo Island, an' b'low Commerce, an' a lady shot me--bang! Ho
law! She jes' shot me thataway. No 'count for hit at all."

"A lady you knowed?" Rasba asked.

"No suh! But she's onto the riveh, into a shanty-boat, purty, too, an'
jes' drappin' down, like she wa'nt goin' no wheres, an' like she mout of
be'n jes' moseyin'. I jes 'lowed I'd drap in, an' say howdy like, an'
she drawed down an' shot--bang!"

"Was she frightened?"

"Hit were a lonesome reach, along of Powerses Island," the man admitted,
whining and reluctant. "She didn't own that there riveh. Hain't a man no
right to land in anywheres? She shot me jes' like I was a dawg, an' she
hadn't no feelin's nohow. Jes' like a dawg!"

"Did you know her?"

"No, suh. We'd be'n drappin' down, an' drappin' down--come down below
Chester, an' sometimes she'd be ahead, an' sometimes me, an' how'd I
know she wouldn't be friendly? Ain't riveh women always friendly? An'
theh she ups an' shoots me like a dawg. She's mean, that woman, mean an'
pretty, too, like some women is!"

Rasba wondered. He had been long enough on the Ohio to get the feeling
of a great river. He saw the specious pleading of the wounded wretch,
and his quick imagination pictured the woman alone in a vast, wild wood,
at the edge of that running mile-wide flood.

"Of co'rse!" he said, half aloud, "of co'rse!"

"Co'rse what?" the man demanded, querulously.

"Co'rse she shot," Rasba answered, tartly. "Sometimes a lady jes'
naturaly has to shoot, fearin' of men."

Rasba landed the two boats in at the foot of a sandbar, and made them
fast to old stakes driven into the top of the low reef. He brought his
patient some hot soup, and after they had eaten supper, he sat down to
talk to him, keeping the man company in his pain, and leading him on to
talk about the river, and the river people.

In that first adventure at the Ohio's forks Rasba had discovered his own
misconceptions, and the truth of the Mississippi had been partly
revealed to him. What the Tug was to the Big Sandy, what the Big Sandy
was to the Ohio, the Ohio was to the Mississippi. What he had looked to
as the end was but the beginning, and Rasba was lost in the immensity of
the river that was a mile wide, thousands of miles long, and unlike
anything the mountain preacher had ever dreamed of. If this was the
Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?

"My name's Prebol," the man said, "Jest Prebol. I live on Old
Mississip'! I live anywhere, down by N'Orleans, Vicksburg--everywhere!
I'm a grafter, I am--"

"A grafter?" Rasba repeated the strange word.

"Yas, suh, cyards, an' tradin' slum, barberin' mebby, an' mebby some
otheh things. I can sell patent medicine to a doctor, I can! I clean
cisterns, an' anything."

"You gamble?" Rasba demanded, grasping one fact.

"Sho!" Prebol grinned. "Who all mout _yo'_ be?"

"Elijah Rasba," was the reply. "I am seeking a soul lost from the
sheepfold of God. I ask but the strength to find him."

"A parson?" Prebol asked, doubtfully, his eyes resting a little in their
uneasy flickerings. "One of them missionaries?"

"No, suh." Rasba shook his head, humbly. "Jes' a mountang parson,
lookin' for one po'r man, low enough fo' me to he'p, maybe."

Prebol made no reply or comment. His mind was grappling with a fact and
a condition. He could not tell what he thought. He remembered with some
worriment, that he had cursed under the pain of the dressing of the
wound. He knew that it never brought any man good luck to swear within
ear-range of any parson.

He could think of nothing to do, just then, so he pretended weariness,
which was not all pretense, at that. Rasba left him to go to sleep on
his cot, and went over to his own boat, where, after an audible session
on his knees, he went to bed, and fell into a sound and dreamless
sleep.

In the morning, when the parson awakened, his first thought was of his
patient, and he started out to look after the man. He looked at the face
of the sandbar reef against which the little red shanty-boat had been
moored. The boat was gone!

Rasba, studying the hard sand, soon found the prints of bare feet, and
he knew that Prebol had taken his departure precipitately, but the
reason why was not so apparent to the man who had read many a wild
turkey track, deer runway, and trails of other game.

From sun-up till nearly noon, while he made and ate his breakfast, and
while he turned to the Scriptures for some hint as to this river man's
mind, his thoughts turned again and again to the pictures which Prebol's
tales, boastings, whinings, and condition had inspired.

He felt his own isolation, strangeness, and ignorance. He could not
understand the man who had fled from assistance and succour; at the same
time the liveliness of his fancy reverted again and again to the woman
living alone in such a desolation, shooting whoever menaced.

That type was not new to him. Up in his own country he had known of
women who had stood at their rifles, returning shot for shot of feud
raiders. The pathetic courage of the woman who had shot Prebol appealed
to him.

The wounded man, wicked beyond measure, and the woman assailed, he
realized, were like hundreds of other men and women whose shanty-boats
he had seen down the Ohio River, and which lurked in bends and reaches
on both sides of the Mississippi.

"Give thyself no rest!" he read, and he obeyed. He believed that he had
a black sin to expiate, and he dared not begin what his soul was
hungering to do, because knowing wickedness, he had deliberately
sinned.

Alternately, he read his Bible and prayed. Late in the day he dropped
out of the eddy and floated on down.

"I 'low I can keep on huntin' for Jock Drones," he told himself. "I
shore can do that, yes, indeed!"




CHAPTER VIII


Having rid herself of the leering river rat, Nelia Crele trembled for a
time in weak dismay, the reaction from her tense and fiery determination
to protect herself at all costs. But she quickly gathered her strength
and, having brewed a pot of strong coffee, thrown together a light
supper, and settled back in her small, but ample, rocking chair, she
reviewed the incidents of her adventure; the flight from her worthless
husband and her assumption of the right to protect herself.

After all, shooting a man was less than running away from her husband.
She could regard the matter with a rather calm spirit and even a
laughing scorn of the man who had thought to impose himself on her,
against her own will.

"That's it!" she said, half aloud, "I needn't to allow any man to be
mean to me!"

She had given her future but little thought; now she wondered, and she
pondered. She was free, she was independent, and she was assured of her
living. She had even been more shrewd than old Attorney Menard had
suspected; the money she had left with him was hardly half of her
resources. She had another plan, by which she would escape the remote
possibility of Menard's proving faithless to his trust, as attorneys
with his opportunities sometimes have proved.

Nelia Crele could not possibly be regarded as an ordinary woman, as a
mere commonplace, shack-bred, pretty girl. Down through the years had
come a strain of effectiveness which she inherited in its full strength;
she was as inexplicable as Abraham Lincoln. Her stress of mind relieved,
she regarded the shooting of the man with increasing satisfaction,
since by such things a woman could be assured of respect.

Gaiety had never been a part of her childhood or girlhood; she had
withstood the insidious attacks and menaces that threatened her down to
the day when Gus Carline had come to her. Courted by him, married, and
then living in the clammy splendour of the house of a back-country rich
man, she had found no happiness, but merely a kind of animal comfort.
She had had the Carline library to read, and she had brought with her
the handy pocket volumes which had been her own and her delight. She was
glad of the foresight which enabled her to put into a set of book
shelves the companions which had, alone, been her comfort and
inspiration during the few years of her wedded misery.

Now, on the Mississippi, in the shanty-boat, she need consult only her
own fancy and whim. Mistress of her own affairs, as she supposed, she
could read or she could think.

"I do what I please!" she thought, a little defiantly. "It's nobody's
business what I do now; what'd Mrs. Plosell care what people said about
her? I'll read, if I want to, and I'll flirt if I want to--and I'll do
anything I want to----"

She reckoned without the Mississippi. Everybody does, at first. Her
money was but a means to an end. She knew its use, its value, and the
perfect freedom which it gave her; its protection was not
underestimated.

At the same time, sloth was no sin of hers. Living on the river insured
physical activity; her books insured her mental engagement.

She had lived so many years in combat with grim necessity that the
lesson of thrift of all her resources had been brought home to her.
Having been waylaid by circumstance so often, she took grim care now to
count the costs, and to insure her getting what she was seeking. The
trouble was she could not disassociate her feelings from her ideas. They
were inextricably interwoven. The brief years of her wedlock had been in
one way a disillusionment, in another a revelation.

She had found her own hunger for learning, her own strength and
weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly
seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and
shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she had found her
own ability.

For hours she debated there by her pretty lamp, with the curtains down,
and the comforting and reassuring weight of the automatic pistol in her
lap. She knew that she must never have that weapon at arm's length from
her, but as she remembered where it had come from she wondered to think
that she had so easily refused the suggestion of Frank, the market
hunter.

"It's all right, though," she shrugged her shoulders, "I can take care
of myself, and being alone, I can think things out!"

In mid-morning she cut loose from the bank and floated away down stream.
The river was very wide, and covered with crossing-ripples. She looked
down what the map showed was the chute of Hacker Tow Head, and then the
current carried her almost to the bank at the head of Buffalo Island.

Here there was a stretch of caving bank; the earth, undercut by the
river current, was lumping off in chunks and slices. Her boat bobbed and
danced in the waves from the cave-ins, and the rocking pleased her
fancy.

The names along this bit of river awakened her interest; Blackbird
Island was clearly described: Buffalo Island harked back many years into
tradition; Dogtooth Island was a matter of river shape; but Saladin,
Tow Head and Orient Field stirred her imagination, for they might reveal
the scene of steamboat disasters or some surveyor's memory of the
Arabian Nights. Below Dogtooth Island, under Brooks Point, were a number
of golden sandbars and farther down, in the lower curve of the famous
S-bends she read the name "Greenleaf," which was pretty and
picturesque.

She was living! Every minute called upon some resource of her brain. She
had read in old books things which gave even the name Cairo, at the foot
of the long, last reach of the Upper Mississippi, a significance of far
lands and Egyptian mysteries. Gratefully she understood that the
Mississippi was summoning ideals which ought to have been called upon
long since when in the longings of her girlhood she had been circumspect
and patient, keeping her soul satisfied with dreams of fairies playing
among the petals of hill-side flowers, or gnomes wandering among the
stalks of toll-yielding cornfields.

Mature, now; fearless--and, as the word romped through her mind in all
its changes, free--free!--she played with her thoughts. But below
Greenleaf Bend, as another day was lost in waning evening, she early
sought a sandbar mooring at the foot of Missouri Sister Island, where
there were two other shanty-boats, one of them with two children on the
sand. She need not dread a boat where children were found. Possibly she
would be able to talk to another woman, which would be a welcome change,
having had so much of her own thoughts!

This other woman was Mrs. Disbon, out of the Missouri. She and her
husband had been five years coming down from the Yellowstone, and they
had fished, trapped, and enjoyed themselves in their 35-foot cabin-boat
home. Of course, taking care of two children on a shanty-boat was a good
deal of work and some worry, for one or the other was always falling
overboard, but since they had learned to swim it hadn't been so bad, and
they could take care of themselves.

"You all alone?" Mrs. Disbon asked.

"I'm alone," Nelia admitted, having told her name as Nelia Crele.

"Well, I don't know as I blame you," Mrs. Disbon declared, looking at
her husband doubtfully. "Seems to me that on the average, men are more
of a nuisance than they're worth. It's which and t'other about them. I
see you've had experience?"

Nelia looked down at her wedding ring.

"Yes, I've had experience," she nodded.

"Going clear down?"

"You mean----?"

"N'Orleans?"

"Why, I hadn't thought much about it."

"The Lower River's pretty bad." Disbon looked up from cleaning his
repeating shotgun. "My first trip was out of the Ohio and down to
N'Orleans. I wouldn't recommend to no woman that she go down thataway,
not alone. Theh's junker-pirates use up from N'Orleans, and, course,
there's always more or less meanness below Cairo. Above St. Louis it
ain't so bad, but mean men draps down from Little Klondike."

"I haven't made up my mind," Nelia said, adding, with a touch of
bitterness, "I don't reckon it makes so much difference!"

"Lots that comes down feel thataway," Mrs. Disbon nodded, with sympathy,
"Seems like some has more'n their share, and some considerable less!"

Nelia remained there three days, for there was good company, and a
two-day rain had set in between midnight and dawn on the following
morning. There was no hurry, and she was going nowhere. She had the
whole family over to supper the second night, and she ate two meals or
so with them.

The other shanty-boat, about a hundred yards down stream, was an old
man's. He had a soldier's pension, and he lived in serene restfulness,
reading General Grant's memoirs, and poring over the documents of the
Rebellion, discovering points of military interest and renewing his own
memories of his part in thirty-odd battles with Grant before Vicksburg
and down the line with the Army of the Potomac.

Nelia could have remained there indefinitely, but restlessness was in
her mind, as long as she had so much money on board her little
shanty-boat. Disbon knew so many tales of river piracy that she saw the
wisdom of settling her possessions, either at Cairo or Memphis,
whichever should prove best.

Landing against the bank just above the ferry, she walked over to Cairo
and sought for a man who had hired her father to help him hunt for wild
turkeys. He was a banker, and would certainly be the right kind of a man
to help her, if he would.

"Mr. Brankeau," she addressed him in his office, "I don't know if you
remember me, but you came hunting to the River Bottoms below St.
Genevieve, one time, and you and Father went over into Missouri, hunting
turkeys."

"Remember you?" he exclaimed. "Why--you--of course! Mrs. Carline--Nelia
Crele!"

She met his questioning gaze unflinchingly.

"I know I can trust you," she said, simply. "If you'd known Gus
Carline!"

"I knew his father," Brankeau said. "I reckon as faithless a scoundrel
as ever lived. Old man Carline left his first wife and two babies up in
Indiana--I know all about that family! I saw by the newspapers----"

"I want some railroad stocks, so I can have interest on my money," she
said by way of nature of her presence there. "When we separated, he let
me have this paper, showing he wanted me to share his fortune----"

"He was white as that?" Brankeau exclaimed, astonished at the paper
Carline had signed.

"He was that white," she replied, her eyes narrowing. Brankeau from the
wideness of his experience, laughed. She, an instant later, laughed,
too.

"So you settled the question between you?" he suggested, "I thought from
the newspapers he hadn't suspicioned--this paper--um-m!"

"It's not a forgery, Mr. Brankeau," she assured him. "He was one of
those gay sports, you know, and, for a change, he sported around with
me, once. I came away between days. You know his failing."

"Several of them, especially drink," the man nodded "It's in cash?"

"Every dollar, taken through his own banks, on his own orders."

"And you want?"

"Railroads, and some good industrial or two. Here's the amount----"

She handed him a neatly written note. He took out a little green covered
book, showing lists of stocks, range of prices, condition of companies,
and, together, they made out a list. When they had finished it, he read
it into the telephone.

Within an hour the stocks had been purchased, and a week later, he
handed her the certificates. She rented a safe deposit box and put them
into it, subject only to her own use and purposes.

"Thank you, Mr. Brankeau," she said, and turned to leave.

"Where are you stopping?" he asked.

"I'm a shanty-boater."

"You mean it? Not alone?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"I wish I were twenty years younger," he mourned.

"Do you, why?" she looked at him, and, turning, fled.

He caught up his top-coat and hat, but he went to the Ohio River,
instead of to the Mississippi, where Nelia stood doubtfully staring down
at her boat from the top of the big city levee.

At last, she cast off her lines and dropped on down into The Forks.

She sat on the bow deck of her boat, looking at the place where the
pale, greenish Ohio waters mingled with the tawny Missouri flood.

A gleam of gold drew her attention, as she glanced downward and she was
startled to see her wedding ring, with its guard ring, still on her left
hand; it had never been off since the day her husband placed it there.

For a minute she looked at it, and then deliberately, with sustained
calmness, removed the thin guard, and slipped the ring from its place.
She put it upon the same finger of her right hand, where it was snug and
the guard was not necessary.




CHAPTER IX


A whisper, that became a rumour, which became a report, reached Gage and
found the ears of Augustus Carline, whose wife had disappeared sometime
previously. After two wild days of drinking Carline suddenly sobered up
when the fact became assured that Nelia had gone and really meant to
remain away, perhaps forever.

The thing that startled him into certainty was the paper which he found
signed by himself, at the bank. He had forgotten all about signing the
papers that night when Nelia had shown herself to be the gayest sport of
them all. Now he found that he had signed away his stocks and bonds, and
that he had given over his cash account.

The amount was startling enough, but it did not include his real estate,
of which about two thirds of his fortune had been composed. If it had
been all stocks and bonds, he thought he would have been left with
nothing. He considered himself at once fortunate and unlucky.

"I never knew the old girl was as lively as that!" he told himself, and
having tasted a feast, he could not regard the Widow Plosell as more
than a lunch, and a light lunch, at that.

Nelia had been easily traced to Chester. Beyond Chester the trail seemed
to indicate that Dick Asunder had eloped with her, but ten days later
Asunder returned home with a bride whom he had married in St. Louis.

Beyond Chester Nelia had left no trace, and there was nothing even to
indicate whether she had taken the river steamer, the railroad train, or
gone into flight with someone who was unknown and unsuspected. When
Carline, sobered and regretful, began to make searching inquiries, he
learned that there were a score, or half a hundred men for whom Old
Crele had acted as a hunter's and fisher's guide. These sportsmen had
come from far and wide during many years, and both Crele and her wistful
mother admitted that many of them had shown signs of interest and even
indications of affection for the girl as a child and as a pretty maid,
daughter of a poor old ne'er-do-well.

"But she was good," Carline cried. "Didn't she tell you she was
going--or where she'd go?"

"Never a word!" the two denied.

"But where would she go?" the frantic husband demanded. "Did she never
talk about going anywhere?"

"Well-l," Old Crele meditated, "peahs like she used to go down an' watch
Ole Mississip' a heap. What'd she use to say, Old Woman? I disremember,
I 'clar I do."

"Why, she was always wishing she knowed where all that river come from
an' where all it'd be goin' to," Mrs. Crele at last recollected.

"But she wouldn't dare--She wouldn't go alone?" Carline choked.

"Prob'ly not, a gal favoured like her," Old Crele admitted, without
shame. "I 'low if she was a-picking, she'd 'a' had the pick."

Cold rage alternated with hot fear in the mind of Gus Carline. If she
had gone alone, he might yet overtake her; on the other hand, if she had
gone with some man, he was in honour bound to kill that man. He was
sensitive, now, on points of honour. The Widow Plosell, having succeeded
in creating a favourable condition, from her viewpoint, sought to take
advantage of it. She was, however, obliged to go seeking her recent
admirer, only to discover that he blamed her--as men do--for his
trouble. She consulted a lawyer to see if she could not obtain financial
redress for her unhappy position, only to learn of her own financial
danger should Mrs. Carline determine upon legal revenge.

Carline, between trying to convince himself that he was the victim of
fate and the innocent sufferer from a domestic tragedy brought upon
himself by events over which he had no control, fell to hating liquor as
the chief cause of his discomfiture.

Then a whisper that became a rumour, which at last seemed to be a fact,
said that Nelia Carline was somewhere down Old Mississip'. Someone who
knew her by sight was reported to have seen her in Cape Girardeau, and
the husband raced down there in his automobile to see if he could not
learn something about the missing woman, whose absence now proved what a
place she had filled in his heart.

There was no doubt of it. Nelia had been there, but no one had happened
to think to tell Carline about it. She had landed in a pretty
shanty-boat, the wharf-master said, and had pulled out just before a
river man in a brick-red cabin-boat of small size had left the eddy. The
river man had dropped in just behind her, and, according to the
wharf-master:

"I shore kept my eyes on that man, for he was a riveh rat!"

The thought was sickening to Carline. His wife floating down the river
with a river rat close behind presented but two explanations: she was
being followed for crime, or the two were just flirting on the river,
together.

He bought a pretty 28-foot motorboat, 22-inch draft with a 7-foot beam
and a raised deck cabin. Having stocked up with supplies, he started
down the Ohio to find his woman.

He could not tell what his intention was, not even to himself; his mind,
long weakened and depraved by liquor, lacked clarity of thought and
distinctiveness of purpose. One hour he raged with anger, and murder
blackened his heart; another minute, his shattered nerves left him in a
panic of fears and remorse, and he hoped for nothing better than to beg
his wife and sweetheart for forgiveness. At all times dread of what he
might find at the end of the trail tormented him from terror to
despair.

His anguish overcame all his other sensations. It even overcame his lust
for liquor. He grew sturdier under his affliction, so that when he
arrived at Cairo, and swung his craft smartly up to the wharf-boat, his
eyes were clear and his skin was honestly coloured by sunshine and pure
winds. Here fortune favoured him with more news of his wife. The
engineer of the Cairo-Missouri ferryboat had seen a young and pretty
woman moored at the bank some distance from the landing. She had
remained there upward of a week, having no visitors, and making daily
visits over the levee into the little city.

"One day she stood there, I bet half an hour, looking back, like she was
waiting," the engineer said. "I seen her onto the levee top. Then she
come down, jumped aboard with her lines, an' pulled out to go on
trippin' down. I wondered then wouldn't some man be following of her."

When Carline passed below the sandbar point, at which the Ohio and
Mississippi mingle their waters, and the human flotsam from ten thousand
towns is caught by swirling eddies, he found himself subdued by a shadow
that fell athwart his course, dulling the fire of his own spirit with a
doubt and an awe which he had never before known.

His wife had gone past the Jumping Off Place; he had heard a thousand
jests about that fork of the rivers, without comprehending its deeper
meaning, till in his own experience he, too, was flung down the tide by
forces now beyond his control, though he himself had set them in motion.
His suffering was no less acute, his mind was no less active, but it
dawned slowly on him that, after all, the acute pain which was in his
heart was no greater than the sorrow, the suffering, the poisoned
deliriums of the thousands who had given themselves to this mighty
flood, which was so vast and powerful that it dwarfed the senses of
mortals to a feeling of the proper proportion of their affairs in the
workings of the universe.

Insensibly, but surely, his pride began to fade and his selfishness
began to give way to better understanding and kindlier counsels. That
much the River Spirit had done for him. He would not give up the search,
but rather would he increase its thoroughness, and redouble his efforts.
But he would never again be quite without sympathy, quite without
understanding of sensations and experiences which were not of his own
heart and soul.

The river was a mile wide; its current surged from the deeps; it
flowed down the bend and along the reach with a noiselessness, a
resistlessness, a magnitude that seemed to carry him out of his whole
previous existence--and so it did carry him. Still human, still finite,
prone to error and lack of comprehension, nevertheless Augustus
Carline entered for the moment upon a new life recklessly and
willingly.




CHAPTER X


For a minute Elijah Rasba, as the Mississippi revealed itself to him,
contemplated a greater field for service than he had ever dreamed of.
Then, humbled in his pride at the thought of great success, he felt that
it could not be; for such an opportunity an Apostle was needed, and
Rasba's cheeks warmed with shame at the realization of the vanity in his
momentary thought.

He was grateful for the privilege of seeing the panorama that unrolled
and unfolded before his eyes with the same slow dignity with which the
great storm clouds boiled up from the long backs of the mountains of his
own homeland. He missed the elevations, the clustered wildernesses, and
ledges of stone against a limited sky, but in their places he saw the
pale heavens in a dome that was uninterrupted from horizon to horizon.
There seemed to be hardly any earth commensurate with the sky, and the
river seemed to be flowing between bounds so low and insignificant that
he felt as though it might break through one side or the other and fall
into the chaos beyond the brim of the world.

Instinctively he removed his hat in this Cathedral. Familiar from
childhood with mountains and deep valleys, the sense of power and motion
in the river appealed to him as the ocean might have done. He looked
about him with curiosity and inquiry. He felt as though there must be
some special meaning for him in that immediate moment, and it was a long
time before he could quite believe that this thing which he witnessed
had continued far back beyond the memory of men, and would continue into
the unquestionable future.

He floated down stream from bend to bend, carried along as easily as in
the full run of time. He looked over vast reaches, and hardly recognized
other houseboats, tucked in holes along the banks, as craft like his
own. The clusters of houses on points of low ridges did net strike him
as veritable villages, but places akin to those of fairyland.

All the rest of the day he dropped on down, not knowing which side he
should land against, and filled with doubts as to where his duty lay.
Once he caught up his big oars and began to row toward a number of
little shanty-boats moored against a sandbar, close down to a wooded
bank, only to find that the river current carried him away despite his
most muscular endeavours, so he accepted it as a sign that he should not
land there.

For a time Rasba thought that perhaps he had better just let the river
carry him whither it would, but upon reflection he remembered what an
old raftsman, who had run strands of logs down Clinch and Holston, told
him about the nature of rivers:

"Come a falling tide, an' she drags along the banks and all that's
afloat keeps in the middle; but come a fresh an' a risin' tide, an' the
hoist of the water is in the mid-stream, and what's runnin' rolls off to
one side or the other, an' jams up into the drift piles."

The philosophy of that was, for this occasion, that if Old Mississip'
was falling, Elijah Rasba might never get ashore, not in all the rest of
his born days, unless he stirred his boots. So catching up his sweep
handles he began to push a long stroke toward the west bank, and his
boat began to move on the river surface. Under the two corners of his
square bow appeared little swirls and tiny ripples as he approached the
bank and drifted down in the edge of the current looking for a place to
land.

Before he knew it, a big patch of woods grew up behind him, and when he
felt the current under the boat slacken he discovered that he had run
out of the Mississippi River and was in a narrow waterway no larger than
Tug Fork.

"Where all mout I be?" he gasped, in wonderment.

He saw three houseboats just below him, moored against a sandbar, with
hoop nets drying near by, blue smoke curling out of tin pipes, and two
or three people standing by to look at the stranger.

He rowed ashore and carried out a big roped stone, which he used as
anchor; then he walked down the bar toward the man who watched his
approach with interest.

"I am Elijah Rasba," he greeted him. "I come down out of Tug River; I am
looking for Jock Drones; he's down thisaway, somewheres; can yo' all
tell me whichaway is the Mississippi River?"

"I don't know him," the fisherman shook his head. "But this yeah is Wolf
Island Chute; the current caught you off of Columbus bluffs, and you
drifted in yeah; jes' keep a-floatin' an' d'rectly you'll see Old
Mississip' down thataway."

"It's near night," Rasba remarked, looking at the sun through the trees.
"I'm a stranger down thisaway; mout I get to stay theh?"

"Yo' can land anywhere's," the man said. "No man can stop you all!"

"But a woman mout!" Rasba exclaimed, with sudden humour. "Yistehd'y
evenin', up yonway, by the Ohio River, I found a man shot through into
his shanty-boat. He said he 'lowed to land along of the same eddy with a
woman, an' she shot him almost daid!"

"Ho law!" the fisherman cried, and another man and three or four women
drew near to hear the rest of the narrative. "How come hit?"

Rasba stood there talking to them, a speaker to an audience. He told of
his floating down into the Mississippi, and of his surprise at finding
the river so large, so without end. He said he kind of wanted to ask the
way of a shanty-boat, for a poor sinner must needs inquire of those he
finds in the wilderness, and he heard a groan and a weak cry for help.

"I cyard for him, and he thanked me kindly; he said a woman had shot him
when he was trying to be friendly; a pretty woman, young and alone.
Co'rse, I washed his wound and I linimented it, and I cut the bullet out
of his back; law me, but that man swore! Come night, an' he heard say I
was a parson, he apologized because he cursed, and this mo'nin' he'd
done lit out, yas, suh! Neveh no good-bye. Scairt, likely, hearin' me
pray theh because I needed he'p, an' 'count of me being glad of the
chanct to he'p any man in trouble."

"Sho! Who all mout that man be, Parson?"

"He said his name were Jest Prebol----"

"Ho law! Somebody done plugged Jest Prebol!" one of the women cried out,
laughing. "That scoundrel's be'n layin' off to git shot this long time,
an' so he's got hit. I bet he won't think he's so winnin' of purty women
no more! He's bad, that man, gamblin' an' shootin' craps an' workin' the
banks. Served him right, yes, indeedy. But he'd shore hate to know a
parson hearn him cussin' an' swearin' around. Hit don't bring a gambler
any luck, bein' heard swearin', no."

"Nor if any one else hears him; not if he thinks swearin' in hisn's
heart!" Rasba shook his head gravely. "How come hit yo' know that man?"

"He's used down this riveh ten-fifteen years; besides, he married my
sister what's Mrs. Dollis now. Hit were a long time ago, though, 'fore
anybody knowed he wa'n't no good. I bet we hearn yo' was comin',
Parson. Whiskey Williams said they was a Hallelujah Singer comin' down
the Ohio--said he could hear him a mile. I bet yo' sing out loud
sometimes?"

"Hit's so," Rasba admitted. "I sung right smart comin' down the Ohio.
Seems like I jest wanted to sing, like birds in the posey time."

"Prebol shore should git to a doctor, shot up thataway. He didn't say
which lady shot him, Parson?" a woman asked.

"No; jes' a lady into an eddy into a lonesome bend." Rasba shook his
head. "A purty woman, livin' alone on this riveh. Do many do that?"

"Riveh ladies all do, sometimes. I tripped from Cairo to Vicksburg into
a skift once," a tall, angular woman said. "My man that use to be had
stoled the shanty-boat what I'd bought an' paid for with my own money. I
went up the bank at Columbus Hickories, gettin' nuts; I come back, an'
my boat was gone. Wa'n't I tearin' an' rearin'! Well, I hoofed hit down
to Columbus, an' I bought me a skift, count of me always havin' some
money saved up."

"I bet Vicksburg's a hundred mile!" Rasba mused.

"A hundred mile!" the woman said with a guffaw. "Hit's six hundred an'
sixty-three miles from Cairo to Vicksburg, yes, indeed. A hundred mile!
I made hit in ten days, stoppin' along. I ketched it theh."

"You found yo' man?"

"Shucks! Hit wa'n't the man I wanted, hit were my boat--a nice, reg'lar
pine an' oak-frame boat. I bet me I chucked him ovehbo'd, an' towed back
up to Memphis. Hit were a good $300 bo't, sports built, an' hits on the
riveh yet--Dart Mitto's got hit, junkin'. You'll see him down by
Arkansaw Old Mouth if yo's trippin' right down."

"I expect to," Rasba replied, doubtfully. Never in his life before had
he talked in terms of hundreds of miles, cities, and far rivers,

"Yo'll know that boat; he's went an' painted hit a sickly yeller, like a
railroad station. I hate yeller! Gimme a nice light blue or a right
bright green."

"Hyar comes anotheh bo't!" one of the men remarked, and all turned to
look up the chute, where a little cabin-boat had drifted into sight.

No one was on deck, and it was apparent that the Columbus banks had
shunted the craft clear across the river and down the chute, just as
Rasba himself had been carried. The shadow of the trees on the west side
of the chute fell across the boat and immediately brought the tripper
out of the cabin.

A shadow is a warning on wide rivers. It tells of the nearness of a
bank, or towhead, or even of a steamboat. In mid-stream there is little
need for apprehension, but when the current carries one down into a
caving bend and close to overhanging trees or along the edges of short,
boiling eddies, it is time to get out and look for snags and
jeopardies.

Seeing the group of people on the sandbar, the journeyer, who was a
woman, took the sweeps of her boat and began to work over to them.

"Hit handles nice, that bo't!" one of the fishermen said. "Pulls jes'
like a skift. Wonder who that woman is?"

"I've seen her some'rs," the powerful, angular woman, Mrs. Cooke, said
after a time. "Them's swell clothes she's got on. She's all alone, too,
an' what a lady travels alone down yeah for I don't know. She's purty
enough to have a husband, I bet, if she wants one."

"Looks like one of them Pittsburgh er Cincinnati women," Jim Caope
declared.

"No." Mrs. Caope shook her head. "She's off'n the riveh. Leastwise, she
handles that bo't reg'lar. I cayn't git to see her face, but I seen her
some'rs, I bet. I can tell a man by hisns walk half a mile."

In surprise she stared at the boat as it came nearer, and then walked
down to the edge of the bar to greet the newcomer.

"Why, I jes' knowed I'd seen yo' somers! How's yer maw?" she greeted.
"Ho law! An' yo's come tripping down Ole Mississip'! I 'clare, now, I'd
seen yo', an' I knowed hit, an' hyar yo' be, Nelia Crele. Did yo' git
shut of that up-the-bank feller yo' married, Nelia?"

"I'm alone," the girl laughed, her gaze turning to look at the others,
who stood watching.

"If yo' git a good man," Mrs. Caope philosophized, "hang on to him.
Don't let him git away. But if yo' git somebody that's shif'less an' no
'count, chuck him ovehbo'd. That's what I b'lieve in. Well, I declare!
Hand me that line an' I'll tie yo' to them stakes. Betteh throw the
stern anchor over, fo' this yeah's a shallows, an' the riveh's eddyin',
an' if hit don't go up hit'll go down, an'----"

"Theh's a head rise coming out the Ohio," someone said. "Yo' won't need
no anchor over the stern!"

"Sho! I'm glad to see yo'!" Mrs. Caope cried, wrapping her arms around
the young woman as she stepped down to the sand, and kissing her. "How
is yo' maw?"

"Very well, indeed!" Nelia laughed, clinging to the big river woman's
hand. "I'm so glad to find someone I know!"

"You'll know us all d'rectly. Hyar's my man, Mr. Caope--real nice
feller, too, if I do say hit--an' hyar's Mrs. Dobstan an' her two
darters, an' this is Mr. Falteau, who's French and married May, there,
an' this feller--say, mister, what is yo' name?"

"Rasba, Elijah Rasba."

"Mr. Rasba, he's a parson, out'n the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy, comin'
down. Miss Nelia Crele, suh. I disremember the name of that feller yo'
married, Nelia."

"It doesn't matter," Nelia turned to the mountain man, her face
flushing. "A preacher down this river?"

"I'm looking for a man," Rasba replied, gazing at her, "the son of a
widow woman, and she's afraid for him. She's afraid he'll go wrong."

"And you came clear down here to look for him--a thousand, two thousand
miles?" she continued, quickly.

"I had nothing else to do--but that!" he shook his head. "You see,
missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"

He turned and walked away with bowed head. They all watched him with
quick comprehension and real sympathy.




CHAPTER XI


Jest Prebol, sore and sick with his bullet wound, but more alarmed on
account of having sworn so much while a parson was dressing his injury,
could not sleep, and as he thought it over he determined at last to cut
loose and drop on down the river and land in somewhere among friends, or
where he could find a doctor. But the practised hand of Rasba had
apparently left little to do, and it was superstitious dread that
worried Prebol.

So the river rat crept out on the sandbar, cast off the lines, and with
a pole in one hand, succeeded in pushing out into the eddy where the
shanty-boat drifted into the main current. Prebol, faint and weary with
his exertions, fell upon his bunk. There in anguish, delirious at
intervals, and weak with misery, he floated down reach, crossing, and
bend, without light or signal. In olden days that would have been
suicide. Now the river was deserted and no steamers passed him up or
down. His cabin-boat, but a rectangular shade amidst the river shadows,
drifted like a leaf or chip, with no sound except when a coiling jet
from the bottom suckled around the corners or rippled along the sides.

The current carried him nearly six miles an hour, but two or three times
his boat ran out of the channel and circled around in an eddy, and then
dropped on down again. Morning found him in mid-stream, between two
wooded banks, as wild as primeval wilderness, apparently. The sun, which
rose in a white mist, struck through at last, and the soft light poured
in first on one side then on the other as the boat swirled around. Once
the squirrels barking in near-by trees awakened the man's dim
consciousness, but a few minutes later he was in mid-stream, making a
crossing where the river was miles wide.

He passed Hickman just before dawn, and toward noon he dropped by New
Madrid, and the slumping of high, caving banks pounded in his ears down
three miles of changing channel. Then the boat crossed to the other side
and he lay there with eyes seared and staring. He discovered a grave
stone poised upon the river bank, but he could not tell whether it was
fancy or fact that the ominous thing bent toward him and fell with a
splash into the river, while a wave tossed his boat on its way. He heard
a quavering whine that grew louder until it became a shriek, and then
fell away into silence, but his senses were slow in connecting it with
one of the Tiptonville cotton gins. He heard a voice, curiously human,
and having forgotten the old hay-burner river ferry, worried to think
that he should imagine someone was driving a mule team on the
Mississippi. For a long time he was in acute terror, because he thought
he was blind, and could not see, but to his amazed relief he saw a river
light and knew that another night had fallen upon him, so he went to
sleep once more.

Voices awakened him. He opened his eyes, and the surroundings were
familiar. He smelled iodine, and saw a man looking over a doctor's case.
Leaning against the wall of the cabin-boat was a tall, slender young man
with arms folded.

"How's he comin' Doc'?" the young man was saying.

"He'll be all right. How long has he been this way?"

"Don't know, Doc; he come down the riveh an' drifted into this eddy. I
see his lips movin', so I jes' towed 'im in an' sent fo' yo'!"

"Just as well, for that wound sure needed dressing. I 'low a horse
doctor fixed hit first time," the physician declared. "He'll need some
care now, but he's comin' along."

"Oh, we'll look afteh him, Doc! Friend of ourn."

"I'll come in to-morrow. It's written down what to do, and about that
medicine. You can read?"

"Howdy," Prebol muttered, feebly.

"He's a comin' back, Doc!" the young man cried, starting up with
interest.

"Well, old sport, looks like you'd got mussed up some?" the doctor
inquired.

"Yas, suh," Prebol grinned, feebly, his senses curiously clear. "Hit
don't pay none to mind a lady's business fo' her, no suh!"

"A lady shot you, eh?"

"Yas, suh," Prebol grinned. "'Peahs like I be'n floatin' about two mile
high like a flock o' ducks. Where all mout I be?"

"Little Prairie Bend."

"Into that bar eddy theh?"

"Yas, suh--the short eddy."

"Much obliged, Doc. Co'se I'll pay yo'----"

"Your friend's paid!"

"Yas, suh," Prebol whispered, sleepily, tired by the exertion and
excitement.

"Sleep'll do him good," the doctor said, and returned to his little
motorboat.

The young man went on board his own boat which was moored just below
Prebol's. As he entered the cabin, a burly, whiskered man looked up and
said:

"How's he coming, Slip?"

"Doc says he's all right. Jest said a woman shot him for tryin' to mind
her business, kind-a laughed about hit."

"Theh! I always knowed a man that'd chase women the way he done'd git
what's comin'. A woman'll make trouble quicker'n anything else on Gawd's
earth, she will."

"Sho! Buck, yo's soured!"

"Hit's so 'bout them women!" Buck protested.

"If a man'd mind his business, an' not try to mind their business,
women'd be plumb amusin'," Slip laughed.

"Wait'll yo've had experience," Buck retorted.

"Shucks! Ain't I had experience?"

"Eveh married?"

"No-o."

"Eveh have a lady sic' yo' onto some'n bigger'n yo' is?"

"No-o; reckon I pick my own people to scrap."

"Theh! That shows how much yo' don't know about women. Never had no
woman yo' 'lowed to marry?"

"Huh! Catch me gittin' married--co'se not."

"Sonny, lemme tell yo'; hit ain't yo'll do the catchin', an' hit won't
be yo' who'll be decidin' will yo' git married. An' hit won't be yo'
who'll decide how long yo'll stay married, no, indeed."

"Peah's like yo' got an awful grouch ag'in women, Buck."

"Why shouldn't I have?" Buck started up from shuffling and throwing a
book of cards. "Look't me. If Jest Prebol's shot most daid by a woman,
look't me. Do you know me--where I come from, where the hell I'm goin'?
Yo' bet you don't. I've been shanty-boatin' fifteen years, but I ain't
always been a shanty-boater, no, I haven't. Talk to me about women. When
I think what I've took from one woman--Sho!"

He stared at the floor, his teeth clenched and his strong face set.
Slip stared. His pal had disclosed a new phase of character.

Buck turned and glared into Slip's eyes.

"I'll tell you, Slip, you're helpless when it comes to women. They've
played the game for ten thousand years, practised it every day, wearing
down men's minds and men never knew it. Read history, as I've done.
Study psychology, as I have. Go down into the fundamentals of human
experience and human activities, and learn the lesson. Fifteen years
I've been up and down these rivers, from Fort Benton to the Passes, from
the foothills of the Rockies to the headwaters of Clinch and Holston in
the Appalachians. Why? Because one woman sang her way into my heart, and
because she tied my soul to her little finger, and when she found that I
could not escape--when she had--when she had--What do you know about
women?"

Slip stared at him. His pal, partner in river enterprises, an old river
man, who talked little and who played the slickest games in the slickest
way, had suddenly emerged like a turtle's head, and spoken in terms of
science, education, breeding--regular quality folks' talk--under stress
of an argument about women. And they had argued the subject before with
jest and humour and without personal feeling.

Buck turned away, bent and shivering.

"I 'low I'll roast up them squirrels fo' dinner?" Slip suggested.

"They'll shore go good!" Buck assented. "I'll mux around some hot-bread,
an' some gravy."

"I got to make some meat soup for that feller, too."

"Huh! Jest Prebol's one of them damned fools what tried to forget a
woman among women," Buck sneered.

At intervals during the day Slip went over and gave Prebol his medicine,
or fed him on squirrel meat broth; toward night they floated their
35-foot shanty-boat out into the eddy, and anchored it a hundred yards
from the bank, where the sheriff of Lake County, Tennessee, no longer
had jurisdiction. In the late evening Slip lighted a big carbide light
and turned it toward the town on the opposite bank.

Pretty soon they heard the impatient dip of skiff oars, a river
fisherman came aboard, and stood for a minute over the heater stove,
warming his fingers. He soon went to the long, green-topped crap table
in the end of the room, and Slip stood opposite, to throw bones against
him. A tiny motorboat crossed a little later; and three men, two heavy
set and one a slim youth, entered, to sit down at one of the little
round tables and play a game.

One by one other patrons appeared, and soon there were fourteen or
fifteen. Slip and Buck glided about among them quietly, their eyes
alert, their hats drawn down over their eyes, taking a hand here,
throwing bones there, poking up the coal fire, putting on coffee, making
sandwiches, every moment on the _qui vive_, communicating with each
other by jerks of the hand, lifting of shoulders, or the faintest of
whisperings.

A jar against the side of the boat sent one or other of the two out to
look, to greet a newcomer or to fend off a drift log. A low whistle from
the stern took Buck through the aisle between the staterooms to the
kitchen where a rat-eyed little man waited him on the stern deck,

"Lo, Buck! I'm drappin' down in a hurry; I learn yo' was heah. Theh's a
feller drapping down out the Ohio; he's lookin' fo' a feller name of
Jock Drones--didn't hear what for. Yo' know 'im?"

"Nope, but I'll pass the word around."

"S'long!"

"Jock Drones--huh!" Buck repeated, turning into the lamp-lit kitchen
where Slip was sniffing the coffee pot.

"Friend of mine just stopped," Buck whispered. "There's a detective
coming down out of the Ohio. Told me to pass the word around. He's after
somebody by the name of Drones, Dock or Jock Drones."

Slip started, turned white, and his jaws parted. Buck's eyes opened a
little wider.

"S'all right, Slip! Keep your money in your belt, to be ready to run or
swim. It's a long river."

Slip could not trust himself to speak. Buck, patting him on the
shoulder, went on into the card room and closed the kitchen door behind
him, drawing the aisle curtains shut, too, so that no one would go back
until Slip had recovered his equilibrium.




CHAPTER XII


Augustus Carline instinctively slowed down his motorboat and took to
looking at the wide river, its quivering, palpitating surface; its
vistas at which he had to "look twice to see the end," as the river man
says with whimsical accuracy.

Negligent and thoughtless, he could now feel some things which had never
occurred to him before: his loneliness, his doubts, his very
helplessness and indecision. His wife had been like an island around
which he sailed and cruised, sure in his consciousness that he could
return at any time to that safe mooring. He had returned to find the
island gone, himself adrift on a boundless ocean, and he did not know
which way to turn. The cays and islets, the interesting rocks and the
questionable coral reefs supplied him with not the slightest semblance
of shelter, support, or safety.

He did not even know which side of the river to go to, nor where to
begin his search. He was wistful for human companionship, but as he
looked at the distant shanty-boats, and passed a river town or two, he
found himself diffident and shamed.

He saw a woman in a blue mother-hubbard dress leaning against the cabin
of her low, yellow shanty-boat, a cap a-rake on her head, one elbow
resting on her palm, and in the other a long-stemmed Missouri
meerschaum. Her face was as hard as a man's, her eyes were as blue and
level as a deputy sheriff's in the Bad Lands, and her lips were straight
and thin. How could a man ask her if she had seen his wife going down
that way?

He stopped his motor and let his boat drift. He wondered what he could
or would say when he overtook Nelia. There struck across his
imagination the figure of a man, the Unknown who had, perhaps, promised
her the care he had never given her, the affection which she had almost
never had from him. Having won her, this Unknown would likely defy him
down there in that awful openness and carelessness of the river.

He found a feeling of insignificance making its way into his mind. He
had been vain of his looks, but what did looks amount to down there? He
had been proud of his money, but what privilege did money give him on
that flood? He had rejoiced in his popularity and the attention women
paid him, but the indifferent gaze of that smoking Amazon chilled his
self-satisfaction. He cringed as he seemed to see Nelia's pretty eyes
glancing at him, her puzzled face as she apparently tried to remember
where she had seen him. The river wilted the crumpling flower of his
pride.

As his boat turned like a compass needle in the surface eddies he saw a
speck far up stream. He brought out his binoculars and looked at it,
thinking that it was some toy boat, but to his astonishment it turned
out to be a man in a skiff.

It occurred to Carline that he wished he could talk to someone, to any
one, about anything. He had no resources of his own to draw on. He had
always been obliged to be with people, talk to people, enjoy people; the
silences of his wife's tongue had been more difficult for him to bear
than her edged words. The skiff traveller, leisurely floating in that
block of river, drew him irresistibly. He kicked over the flywheel and
steered up stream, but only enough partly to overcome the speed of the
current. The sensation of being carried down in spite of the motor
power, complicated with the rapid approach of the stranger in his skiff,
was novel and amusing. When he stopped the motor, the rowboat was
within a hundred feet of him, and the two men regarded each other with
interest and caution.

The traveller was unusual, in a way. On his lap was a portable
typewriter, in the stern of the boat a bundle of brown canvas; a brass
oil stove was on the bottom at the man's feet; behind him in the bow
were a number of tins, cans, and boxes.

Neither spoke for some time, and then Carline hailed:

"Nice, pretty day on the river!"

"Fine!" the other replied. "Out the Ohio?"

"No--well, yes--I started at Evansville, where I bought this boat, but I
live up the Mississippi, at Kaskaskia--Gage, they call it now."

"Yes? I stopped at Menard's on my way down from St Louis."

"When was that?"

"About ten days ago--tell you in a minute--Monday a week!" A big quarto
loose-leaf notebook had revealed the day and date.

"Well, say--I----?" Carline's one question leaped to his lips but
remained unasked. For the minute he could not ask it. The thing that had
been his rage, and then his wonder, suddenly drew back into his heart as
a secret sorrow.

"Won't you come over?" Carline asked, "it'd be company!"

"Yes, it'll be company," the other admitted, and with a pull of his oars
brought the skiff alongside. He climbed aboard, painter in hand, and
making the light line fast to one of the cleats, sat down on the locker
across from his host.

"My name's Carline."

"Mine's Lester Terabon; a newspaper let me come down the river to write
stories about it; it's the biggest thing I ever saw!"

"It's an awful size!" Carline admitted, looking around over his
shoulder, and Terabon watched the face.

"Are you a river man?" the visitor asked.

"No. My father was a big farmer, and he made some money when they put a
railroad through one of his places."

"Just tripping down to see the river?"

"No-o--well----" Carline hesitated, looking overside at the water.

"That must be Wolf Island over there?" the reporter suggested.

Carline looked at the island. He looked down the main river and over
toward the chute toward which the Columbus bluffs had shunted them. Then
he started the motor and steered into the main channel to escape the
rippling shoals which flickered in the sunshine ahead of them, past an
island sandbar.

"I don't know if it's Wolf Island." Carline shook his head. "I'm looking
for somebody--somebody who came down this way."

The traveller waited. He looked across the current to the bluffs now
passing up stream, Columbus and all.

"I don't suppose you find very much to write about, coming down?"
Carline changed his mind.

For answer Terabon drew his skiff alongside and reached for his
typewriter. As he began to write, he said: "I write everything down--big
or little. A man can't remember everything, you know."

"Make good money writing for the newspapers?"

"Enough to live on," Terabon replied, "and, of course, it's living,
coming down Old Mississip'!"

"You like it travelling in that skiff? Where do you sleep?"

"I stretch that canvas between the gunwales in those staples; I put
those hoops up, and draw a canvas over the whole length of the boat. I
can sleep like a baby in its cradle."

"Well, that's one way," Carline replied, doubtfully. "If I owned this
old river, you could buy it for two cents."

Terabon laughed, and after a minute Carline joined in, but he had told
the truth. He hated the river, and he was cowed by it; yet he could not
escape its clutches.

"I fancy it hasn't always treated you right," Terabon remarked.

"Treated me right!" Carline doubled his fists and stiffened where he
sat. "It's!--it's----"

He could not speak for his emotion, but his little pointed chin trembled
a minute later as he relaxed and looked over his shoulder again. The
typewriter clicked along for minutes, Terabon's fingers dancing over the
keys as he put down, word for word, and motion for motion, the man who
was afraid of the river and yet was tripping down it. It seemed as
though the man afraid must have some kind of courage, too, because he
was going in spite of his fears.

"It's passing noon, and I think I'll get something to eat," Terabon
suggested; "I'll get up my----"

"I forgot to eat!" Carline said. "I've got everything, and that knob
there is a three-burner oil stove. We'll eat on board. Never mind your
stuff, I've got so much it'll spoil--but I ain't much of a cook!"

"I'm the original cook the Cæsars wanted to buy for gold!" Terabon
boasted. "I got some squirrels, there, I killed up on Buffalo Island,
and we'll fry them."

Nor did he fail to make his boast good, for he soon had hot-bread, gravy
browned in the pan, boiled sweet potatoes, and canned corn ready for the
table. When they sat down to eat, Carline confessed that he hadn't had
a real meal for a week except one he ate in a Cairo restaurant.

"I could have got a kind of a meal," he admitted, "but you see I was
worried a good deal. Did you stop at Stillhouse Island?"

"Where's that?"

"Just above Gage, kind of across from St. Genevieve."

"Let's see--oh, yes. There was an old fellow there, what's his name? He
told me if I happened to see his daughter I should tell her to write
him, for her mother wanted to hear."

"He said that! And you--it was Crele, Darien Crele said that?"

"That's the name--Nelia, his daughter."

"Yes, sir. I know. I guess I know! She's my wife--she was--It's
her----"

"You're looking for?"

"Yes, sir; she ran away and left me. She came down here."

"Kind of a careless girl, I imagine?"

"Careless! God, no! The finest woman you ever saw. It was me--I was to
blame. I never knew, I never knew!"

For a minute he held up his arms, looking tensely at the sky, struggling
to overcome the emotion that long had been boiling up in his heart,
rending the self-complacency of his mind. Then he broke down--broke down
abjectly, and fell upon the cabin floor, crying aloud in his agony,
while the newspaper man sitting there whispered to himself:

"Poor devil, here's a story! He's sure getting his. I don't want to
forget this; got to put this down. Poor devil!"




CHAPTER XIII


"And he says he's a sinner himself," Nelia repeated, when she returned
on board her cabin-boat in the sheltering safety of Wolf Island chute,
with Mamie Caope, Parson Rasba, and the other shanty-boaters within a
stone's toss of her.

Till she was among them, among friends she trusted, she had not noticed
the incessant strain which she endured down those long, grim river
miles. Now she could give way, in the privacy of her boat, to feminine
tears and bitterness. Courage she had in plenty, but she had more
sensitiveness than courage. She was not yet tuned to the river
harmonies.

Something in Rasba's words, or it was in his voice, or in the quick,
full-flood of his glance, touched her senses.

"You see, missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"

What had he meant? If he had meant that she, too, was a sinner, was that
any of his business? Of course, being a parson--she shrugged her
shoulders. Her thoughts ran swiftly back to her home that used-to-be.
She laughed as she recalled the deprecatory little man who had preached
in the church she had occasionally attended. She compared the trim,
bird-like perspicuity and wing-flap gestures of Rev. Mr. Beeve with the
slow, huge turn and stand-fast of Parson Rasba.

She was glad to escape the Mississippi down this little chute; she was
glad to have a phrase to puzzle over instead of the ever-present problem
of her own future and her own fate; she was glad that she had drifted in
on Mrs. Mame Caope and Jim and Mr. Falteau and Mrs. Dobstan and Parson
Rasba, instead of falling among those other kinds of people.

Mrs. Caope was an old acquaintance of her mother who had lived all her
life on the rivers. She was a better boatman than most, and could pilot
a stern-wheel whiskey boat or set hoop nets for fish.

"If I get a man, and he's mean," Mrs. Caope had said often, "I shift
him. I 'low a lady needs protection up the bank er down the riveh, but I
'low if my cookin' don't pay my board, an' if fish I take out'n my nets
ain't my own, and the boat I live in ain't mine--well, I've drapped two
men off'n the stern of my boat to prove hit!"

Mrs. Caope had not changed at all, not in the years Nelia could recall,
except to change her name. It was the custom, to ask, perfectly
respectfully, what name she might be having now, and Mrs. Mame never
took offence, being good natured, and understanding how hard it was to
keep track of her matrimonial adventures, episodes of sentiment but
without any nonsense.

"Sho!" Mrs. Caope had said once, "I disremember if I couldn't stand him
er he couldn't stand me!"

Nelia, adrift in her own life, and sure now that she never had really
cared very much for Gus Carline, admitted to herself that her husband
had been only a step up out of the poverty and misery of her parents'
shack.

"You see, missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"

Her ears had caught the depths of the pathos of his regret and sorrow,
and she pitied him. At the same time her own thoughts were ominous, and
her face, regular, bright, vivacious, showed a hardness which was alien
to it.

Nelia went over to Mrs. Caope's for supper, and Parson Rasba was there,
having brought in a wild goose which he had shot on Wolf Island while
going about his meditations that afternoon. Mrs. Caope had the goose
sizzling in the big oven of her coal range--coal from Pittsburgh barges
wrecked along the river on bars--and the big supper was sweeter smelling
than Rasba ever remembered having waited for.

Mrs. Caope told him to "ask one of them blessin's if yo' want, Parson!"
and the four bowed their heads.

Jim Caope then fell upon the bird, neck, wings, and legs, and while he
carved Mrs. Caope scooped out the dressing, piled up the fluffy
biscuits, and handed around the soup tureen full of gravy. Then she
chased the sauce with glass jars full of quivering jellies, reaching
with one hand to take hot biscuits from the oven while she caught up the
six-quart coffee pot with the other.

"I ain't got no patience with them women that don't feed their men!" she
declared. "About all men want's a full stomach, anyhow, an' if you could
only git one that wa'n't lazy, an' didn't drink, an' wasn't impedent,
an' knowed anything, besides, you'd have something. Ain't that so,
Nelia?"

"Oh, indeed yes," Nelia cried, from the fullness of her experience,
which was far less than that of the hostess.

After they had eaten, they went from the kitchen into the sitting room,
where Rasba turned to Nelia.

"You came down the river alone?" he asked.

"Yes," she admitted.

"I wonder you wouldn't be scairt up of it--nights, and those lonesome
bends?"

"It's better than some other things." Nelia shook her head. "Besides,
you've come alone down the Ohio yourself."

He looked at her, and Mrs. Caope chuckled.

"But--but you're a woman!" Rasba exclaimed.

"Suppose a mean man came aboard your boat, and--and tried to rob you,"
Nelia asked, level voiced, "what would you do?"

"Why, course, I'd--I'd likely stop him."

"You'd throw him overboard?"

"Well--if hit were clost to the bank an' he could swim, I mout."

Nelia and the Caopes laughed aloud, and Rasba joined in the merriment.
When the laughter had subsided, Rasba said:

"The reason I was asking, as I came by the River Forks I found a little
red boat there with a man on the cabin floor shot through----"

"Dead?" Nelia gasped.

"No, just kind of pricked up a bit, into one shoulder. He said a lady
shot him because he 'lowed to land into the same eddy with her."

"But--where----?" Nelia half-whispered. "Where did he go?"

"Hit were Jest Prebol," Mrs. Caope said. "You was tellin' of him,
Parson."

"Hit were Prebol," Rasba nodded, "an' he shore needed shooting!"

"Yas, suh. That kind has to be shot some to make 'em behave
theirselves," Mrs Caope exclaimed, sharply. "If it wa'n't fer ladies
shootin' men onct in awhile, down Old Mississip', why, ladies couldn't
git to live here a-tall!"

"And women, sometimes, don't do men any good," Rasba mused, aloud, "I've
wondered right smart about hit. You see, a parson circuit rides around,
an' he sees a sight more'n he tells. Lawse, he shore do!"

The two women glared at him, but he was studying his huge hands, first
the backs and then the calloused palms. He was really wondering, so the
two women glanced at each other, laughing. The idea that probably some
men needed protection from women could not help but amuse while it
exasperated them.

"Prebol said," Rasba continued, "hit were a pretty woman, young an'
alone. 'How'd I know?' he asked. 'How'd I know she were a spit-fire an'
mean, theh all alone into a lonesome bend? How'd I know?'"

"I 'low he shore found out," Mrs. Caope spoke up, tartly, and Nelia
looked at her gratefully. "Hit takes a bullet to learn fellers like Jest
Prebol--an' him thinkin' he's so smart an' such a lady killer. I bet he
knows theh's some ladies that's men killers, too, now. Next time he
meets a lady he'll wait to be invited 'fore he lands into the same eddy
with her, even if hit's a three-mile eddy."

"Theh's Mrs. Minah," Jim Caope suggested.

"Mrs. Minah!" Mrs. Caope exclaimed. "Talk about riveh ladies--theh's
one. She owns Mozart Bend. Seventeen mile of Mississippi River's her'n,
an' nobody but knows hit, if not to start with, then by the end. She
stands theh, at the breech of her rifle, and, ho law, cayn't she shoot!
She's real respectable, too, cyarful an' 'cordin' to law. She's had
seven husbands, four's daid an' two's divorced, an' one she's got yet,
'cordin' to the last I hearn say about it. I tell you, if a lady's got
any self-respect, she'll git a divorce, an' she'll git married ag'in.
That's what I say, with divorces reasonable, like they be, an' costin'
on'y $17.50 to Mendova, or Memphis, er mos' anywheres."

"How long--how long does it take?" Nelia asked, eagerly.

"Why, hardly no time at all. You jes' go theh, an' the lawyer he takes
all he wants to know, an' he says come ag'in, an' next day, er the next
trip, why, theh's yo' papers, an' all for $17.50. Seems like they's got
special reg'lations for us shanty-boaters."

"I'm glad to know about that," Nelia said. "I thought--I never knew much
about--about divorces. I thought there was a lot of--of rigmarole and
testimony and court business."

"Nope! I tell yo', some of them Mendova lawyers is slick an'
'commodatin'. Why, one time I was in an awful hurry, landin' in 'long of
the upper ferry, an' I went up town, an' seen the lawyer, an' told him
right how I was fixed. Les' see, that wa--um-m----Oh, I 'member now,
Jasper Hill. I'd married him up the line, I disremember--anyhow, 'fore
I'd drapped down to Cairo, I knowed he'd neveh do, nohow, so I left him
up the bank between Columbus an' Hickman--law me, how he squawked! Down
by Tiptonville, where I'd landed, they was a real nice feller, Mr.
Dickman. Well, we kind of co'ted along down, one place an anotheh, an'
he wanted to git married. I told how hit was, that I wasn't 'vorced, an'
so on, but if he meant business, we'd drap into Mendova, which we done.
He wanted to pay for the divorce, but I'm independent thataway. I think
a lady ought to pay for her own 'vorces, so I done hit, an' I was
divorced at 3 o'clock, married right next door into the Justice's, an'
we drapped out an' down the riveh onto our honeymoon. Mr. Dickman was a
real gentleman, but, somehow, he couldn't stand the riveh. It sort of
give him the malary, an' he got to thinking about salmon fishin' so he
went to the Columbia. We parted real good friends, but the Mississippi's
good 'nough for me, yes, indeed. I kind of feel zif I knowed hit, an'
hit's real homelike."

"It is lovely down here," Nelia remarked. "Everything is so kind
of--kind of free and easy. But wasn't it dreadful--I mean the first
time--the first divorce, Mamie?"

"Course, yes, course," Mrs. Caope admitted, slowly, with a frown, "I
neveh will forget mine. I'd shifted my man, an' I was right down to
cornmeal an' bacon. Then a real nice feller come along, Mr. Darlet. I
had to take my choice between a divorce an' a new weddin' dress, an' I
tell you hit were real solemocholy fer me decidin' between an' betwixt.
You know how young gals are, settin' a lot by dresses an' how they look,
an' so on. Young gals ain' got much but looks, anyhow. Time a lady gits
experience, she don't set so much store by looks, an' she don't have to,
nohow. Well, theh I was, with a nice man, an' if I didn't divorce that
first scoundrel where'd I be? So I let the dress go, an' mebby you'll
b'lieve hit, an' mebby yo' won't, but I had $18.97, an' I paid my $17.50
real reg'lar, an' I had jest what was left, $1.47, an' me ready to bust
out crying, feelin' so mean about marryin' into an old walking skirt.

"I was all alone, an' I had a good notion to run down the back way, an'
trip off down the riveh without no man, I felt so 'shamed. An' theh,
right on the sidewalk, was a wad of bills, $99 to a penny. My lan'! I
wropped my hand around hit, an' yo' should of seen Mr. Darlet when he
seen me come walking down, new hat, new dress, new shoes, new silk
stockings--the whole business new. I wa'n't such a bad-lookin' gal,
afteh all. That taught me a lesson. I've always be'n real savin' sinct
then, an' I ain't be'n ketched sinct with the choice to make of a 'vorce
er a weddin' dress. No, indeed, not me!"

Parson Rasba looked at her, and Nelia, her eyes twinkling, looked at the
Parson. Nelia could understand the feelings in all their minds. She had
her own viewpoint, too, which was exceedingly different from those of
the others. The strain of weeks of questioning, weeks of mental
suffering, was relieved by the river woman's serious statement and
Parson Rasba's look of bewilderment at the kaleidoscopic matrimonial
adventuring. At the same time, his wonder and Mrs. Caope's unconscious
statement stirred up in her thoughts a new questioning.

When Nelia returned on board her boat, and sat in its cabin, a freed
woman, she very calmly reckoned up the advantages of Mrs. Caope's
standards. Then seeing that it was after midnight, and that only the
stars shone in that narrow, wooded chute, she felt she wanted to go out
into the wide river again, to go where she was not shut in. She cast off
her lines and noiselessly floated out and down the slow current.

She saw Parson Rasba's boat move out into the current behind her and
drift along in the soft, autumn night. Her first thought was one of
indignation, but when a little later they emerged into the broad river
current and she felt the solitude of the interminable surface, her mood
changed.

What the big, quizzical mountain parson had in mind she did not know. It
was possible that he was a very bad man, indeed. She could not help but
laugh under her breath at his bewilderment regarding Mrs. Caope, which
she felt was a genuine expression of his real feelings. At the same
time, whatever his motive in following her, whether it was to protect
her--which she could almost believe--or to court her, which was not at
all unlikely, or whether he had a baser design, she did not know, but
she felt neither worry nor fear.

"I don't care," she shook her head, defiantly, "I like him!"




CHAPTER XIV


Carline recovered his equilibrium after a time. His nerves, long on the
ragged edge, had given way, and he was ashamed of his display of
emotion.

"Seems as though some things are about all a man can stand," he said to
Terabon, the newspaper man. "You know how it is!"

"Oh, yes! I've had my troubles, too," Terabon admitted.

"It isn't fair!" Carline exclaimed. "Why can't a man enjoy himself and
have a good time, and not--and not----"

"Have a headache the next day?" Terabon finished the sentence with a
grave face.

"That's it. I'm not what you'd call a hard drinker; I like to take a
cocktail, or a whiskey, the same as any man. I like to go out around and
see folks, talk to 'em, dance--you know, have a good time!"

"Everybody does," Terabon admitted.

"And my wife, she wouldn't go around and she was--she was----"

"Jealous because you wanted to use your talents to entertain?"

"That's it, that's it. You understand! I'm a good fellow; I like to joke
around and have a good time. Take a man that don't go around, and he's a
dead one. It ain't as though she couldn't be a good sport--Lord! Why,
I'd just found out she was the best sport that ever lived. I thought
everything was all right. Next day she was gone--tricky as the devil!
Why, she got me to sign up a lot of papers, got all my spare cash,
stocks, bonds--everything handy. Oh, she's slick! Bright, too--bright's
anybody. Why, she could talk about books, or flowers, or birds--about
anything. I never took much interest in them."

"And brought up in that shack on Distiller's Island?"

"Stillhouse Island, yes, sir. What do you know about that?"

"A remarkable woman!"

"Yes, sir--I--I've got some photographs," and Carline turned to a
writing desk built into the motorboat. He brought out fifteen or twenty
photographs. Terabon looked at them eagerly. He could not associate the
girl of the pictures with the island shack, with this weakling man, nor
yet with the Mississippi River--at least not at that moment.

"She's beautiful," he exclaimed, sincerely.

"Yes, sir." Carline packed the pictures away.

He started the motor, straightened the boat out and steered into
mid-stream, looking uncertainly from side to side.

"There's no telling," he said, "not about anything."

"On the river no one can tell much about anything!" Terabon assented.

"You're just coming down, I suppose, looking for hist'ries to write?"

"That's about it. I just sit in the skiff, there, and I write what I
see, on the machine: A big sandbar, a flock of geese, a big oak tree
just on the brink of the bank half the roots exposed and going to fall
in a minute or a day--everything like that!"

"I bet some of these shanty-boaters could tell you histories," Carline
said. "I tell you, some of them are bad. Why, they'd murder a man for
ten dollars--those river pirates would."

"No doubt about it!"

"But they wouldn't talk, 'course. It must be awful hard to make up them
stories in the magazines."

"Oh, if a man gets an idea, he can work it up into a story. It takes
work, of course, and time."

"I don't see how anybody can do it." Carline shook his head. "There's a
man up to Gage. He wants to write a book, but he ain't never been able
to find anything to write about. You see, Gage ain't much but a little
landing, you might say."

"Chester, and the big penitentiary is just below there, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes!"

"I'd think there might be at least one story for him to write there."

"Oh, he don't want to write about crooks; he wants to write about nice
people, society people, and that kind, and big cities. He says it's
awful hard to find anybody to write about."

"You've got to look to find heroes," Terabon admitted. "I came more than
a thousand miles to see a shanty-boat."

"You di-i-d? Just to see a shanty-boat!" Carline stared at Terabon in
amazement.

In spite of Terabon being such a queer duck he made a good companion. He
was a good cook, for one thing, and when they landed in below Hickman
Bend, he went ashore and killed three squirrels and two black ducks in
the woods and marsh beyond the new levee.

When he returned, he found a skiff landed near by on the sandbar.
Carline was talking to the man, who had just handed over a gallon jug.
The man pulled away swiftly and disappeared down the chute. Carline
explained:

"He's a whiskey pedlar; a man always needs to have whiskey on board;
malaria is bad down here, and a fellow might catch cold. You see how it
is if a man don't have some whiskey on board."

"I understand," Terabon admitted.

After supper Carline decided that there was a lot of night air around,
and that a man couldn't take too many precautions against that deadly
river miasma whose insidious menace so many people have ignored to their
great cost. As for himself, Carline didn't propose to be taken bad when
he had so universal a specific, to take or leave alone, just as he
wanted.

Terabon, having put up the hoops of his skiff and stretched the canvas
over them, retired to his own boat and spent two hours writing.

In the morning, when he stirred out, he found Carline lying in the
engine pit, oblivious to the night air that had fallen upon him,
protected as he was by his absorption of the sure preventive of night
air getting him first. The jug was on the floor, and Terabon, after a
little thought, poured out about two and a half quarts which he replaced
with distilled water from the motorboat's drinking bottle. Then he
dropped down the chute into the main river to resume his search for
really interesting "histories."

The river had never been more glorious than that morning. The sun shone
from a white, misty sky. It was warm, with the slight tang of autumn,
and the yellow leaves were fluttering down; squirrels were barking, and
a flock of geese, so high in the air that they sparkled, in the
sunshine, were gossiping, and the music of their voices rained upon the
river surface as upon a sounding board.

Terabon was approaching Donaldson's Point, Winchester Chute, Island No.
10, and New Madrid. An asterisk on his map showed that Slough Neck was
interesting, and sure enough, he found a 60-foot boat just above Upper
Slough Landing, anchored off the sandbar. This was a notorious whiskey
boat, and just below it was a flight of steps up the steep bank. No
plantation darky ever used those steps. He would rather scramble in the
loose silt and risk his neck than climb that easy stairway--yes,
indeed!

Terabon, drifting by, close at hand, gazed at the scene. From that craft
Negroes had gone forth to commit crime; white men had gone out to do
murder, and one of them had rolled down those steps, shot dead. On the
other side of Slough Neck, just outside of Tiptonville, there was a tree
on which seven men had been lynched.

He pulled across to the foot of Island No. 10 sandbar, to walk up over
that historic ground, and to visit the remnants of Winchester Chute
where General Grant had moored barges carrying huge mortars with which
to drop shells into the Confederate works on Island No. 10.

He hailed a shanty-boat just below where he landed, and as the window
opened and he saw someone within, he asked:

"Will you kindly watch my skiff? I'm going up over the island."

"Yes, glad to!"

"Thank you." He bowed, and went upon his exploration.

It was hard to believe that this sandbar, grown to switch willows which
increased to poles six or seven inches in diameter, had once been a big
island covered with stalwart trees, with earthworks, cannon, and
desperate soldiers. Its serene quiet, undulating sands and casual
weed-trees, showing the stain of floods that had filled the bark with
sediment, proved the indifference of the river to fleeting human
affairs--the trifling work of human hands had been washed away in a
spring tide or two, and Island No. 10 was half way to the Gulf by this
time.

Terabon returned to his skiff three or four hours later, and taking up
his typewriter, began to write down what he had seen, elaborating the
pencil notes which he had made. As he wrote he became conscious of an
observer, and of the approach of someone who was diffident and
curious--a familiar enough sensation of late.

He looked up, started, and reached for his hat. It was a woman, a young
woman, with bright eyes, grace, dignity--and much curiosity.

"I didn't mean to disturb you," she apologized. "I was just wondering
what on earth you could be doing!"

"Oh, I'm writing--making notes----"

"Yes. But--here!"

"I'm a newspaper writer," he made his familiar statement. "My name is
Lester Terabon. I'm from New York. I came down here from St. Louis to
see the Mississippi."

"You write for newspapers?" she repeated.

She came and sat down on the bow deck of his skiff, frankly curious and
interested.

"My name's Nelia Crele," she smiled. "I'm a shanty-boater. That's my
boat."

"I'm sure I'm glad to meet you," he bowed, "Mrs. Crele."

"You find lots to write about?"

"I can't write fast enough," he replied, enthusiastically, "I've been
coming six weeks--from St. Louis. I've made more than 60,000 words in
notes already, and the more I make the more I despair of getting it all
down. Why, right here--New Madrid, Island 10, and--and----"

"And me?" she asked. "Did you stop at Gage?"

"At Stillhouse Island," he admitted, circumspectly. "Mr. Crele there
said I should be sure and tell his daughter, if I happened to meet her,
that her mother wanted her to be sure and write and let her know how she
is getting along."

"Oh, I'll do that," she assured him. "I was just writing home when you
landed in. Isn't it strange how everybody knows everybody down here, and
how you keep meeting people you know--that you've heard about? You knew
me when you saw me!"

"Yes--I'd seen your pictures."

"Mammy hadn't but one picture of me!" She stared at him.

"That's so," he thought, unused to such quick thought.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she asked him, looking around her. "Do you try to
write all that, too--I mean this sandbar, and those willows, and that
woods down there, and--the caving bank?"

"Everything," he admitted. "See?"

He handed her the page which he had just written. Holding it in one
hand--there was hardly a breath of air stirring--she read it word for
word.

"Yes, that's it!" She nodded her head. "How do you do it? I've just been
reading--let me see, '... the best romance becomes dangerous if by its
excitement it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting,
and--and----' I've forgotten the rest of it. Could anything make this
life down here--anything written, I mean--seem uninteresting?"

He looked at her without answering. What was this she was saying? What
was this shanty-boat woman, this runaway wife, talking about? He was
dazed at being transported so suddenly from his observations to such
reflections.

"That's right," he replied, inanely. "I remember reading
that--somewhere!"

"You've read Ruskin?" she cried. "Really, have you?"

"Sesame and Lilies--there's where it was!"

"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed, looking at him. He caught the full flash
of her delight, as well as surprise, at finding someone who had read
what she quoted, and could place the phrase.

"The sun's bright," she continued. "Won't you come down on my boat in
the shade? I've lots of books, and I'm hungry--I'm starving to talk to
somebody about them!"

It was a pretty little boat, sweet and clean; the sitting room was
draped with curtains along the walls, and there was a bookcase against
the partition. She drew a rocking chair up for him, drew her own little
sewing chair up before the shelves, and began to take out books.

He had but to sit there and show his sympathy with her excitement over
those books. He could not help but remember where he had first heard her
name, seen the depressed woman who was her mother. And the bent old
hunter who was her father. It was useless for him to try to explain
her.

Just that morning, too, he had left Nelia Crele's husband in an
alcoholic stupor--a man almost incredibly stupid!

"I know you don't mind listening to me prattle!" she laughed, archly.
"You're used to it. You're amused, too, and you're thinking what a story
I will make, aren't you, now?"

"If--if a man could only write you!" he said, with such sincerity that
she laughed aloud with glee.

"Oh, I've read books!" she declared. "I know--I've been miserable, and
I've been unhappy, but I've turned to the books, and they've told me.
They kept me alive--they kept me above those horrid little things which
a woman--which I have. You've never been in jail, I suppose?"

"What--in jail? I've been there, but not a prisoner. To see prisoners."

"You couldn't know, then, the way prisoners feel. I know. I reckon most
women know. But now I'm out of jail. I'm free."

He could not answer; her eyes flashed as they narrowed, and she fairly
glared at him in the intensity of her declaration.

"Oh, you couldn't know," she laughed, "but that's the way I feel. I'm
free! Isn't the river beautiful to-day? I'm like the river----"

"Which is kept between two banks?" he suggested.

"I was wrong," she shook her head. "I'm a bird----"

"I can well admit that," he laughed.

"Oh," she cried, in mock rebuke, "the idea!"

"It's your own--and a very brilliant one," he retorted, and they laughed
together.

There was no resisting the gale of Nelia Crete's effervescent spirits.
It was clear that she had burst through bonds of restraint that had
imprisoned her soul for years. Terabon was too acute an observer to
frighten the sensitive exhilaration. It would pass--he was only too sure
of that. What would follow?

The sandbar was miles long, miles wide; six or seven miles of caving
bend was visible below them, part of it over another sandbar that
extended out into the river. There was not a boat, house, human being,
or even fence in sight in any direction. Across the river there was a
cotton field, but so far away it was that the stalks were but a purple
haze under the afternoon sun.

"You think I'm queer?" she suddenly demanded.

"No, but I would be if----"

"If what?"

"If I didn't think you were the dandiest river tripper in the world," he
exclaimed.

"You're a dear boy," she laughed. "You don't know how much good you've
done me already. Now we'll get supper."

"I've two black ducks," he said. "I'll bet they'll make a good----"

"Roast," she took his word. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook, too!"




CHAPTER XV


The Mississippi River brings people from the most distant places to
close proximity; Pittsburg and even Salamanca meet Fort Benton and St.
Paul at the Forks of the Ohio. On the other hand, with uncanny
certainty, those most eager to meet are kept apart and thrown to the
ends of the world.

Parson Rasba saw Nelia Crele's boat drift out into the current and drop
down the Chute of Wolf Island, and impelled by solitude and imagination
he followed her. She had awakened sensations in his heart which he had
never before known, so he acted with primitive directness and moved out
into the Mississippi.

The river carried him swiftly toward a town whose electric lights
sparkled on a high bluff, Hickman, and he saw the cabin-boat of the
young and venturesome woman clearly outlined between him and the town.
For nearly an hour he was conscious of the assistance of the river in
carrying him along at an even pace, permitting him to remain as guardian
of the woman. He felt that she needed him, that he must help her, and
there grew in his heart an emotion which strangely made him desire to
sing and to shout.

He watched the cabin-boat drift down right into the pathway of
reflections that fell from the lights on Hickman bluffs. His eyes were
apparently fixed upon the boat, and he could not lose sight of it. The
river carried him right into the same glare, and for a few minutes he
looked up at the arcs, and shaded his eyes to get some view of the town
whose sounds consisted of the mournful howling of a dog.

Rasba looked back at the town, and felt the awe which a sleeping
village inspires in the thoughts of a passer-by. He thought perhaps he
would never again see that town. He wondered if there was a lost soul
there whose slumberings he could disturb and bring it to salvation. He
looked down the river, and the next instant his boat was seized as by a
strong hand and whirled around and around, and flung far from its
course. He remembered the phenomenon at the Forks of the Ohio, and again
at Columbus bluff's. With difficulty he found his bearings.

He looked around and saw to his surprise that he was drifting up stream.
He looked about him in amazement. He searched the blackness of the
river, and stared at the blinding lights of the town. He began to row
with his sweeps, and look down stream whither had disappeared the
cabin-boat whose occupant he had felt called upon to guard and protect.

That boat was gone. In the few minutes it had disappeared from his view.
He surmised, at last, that he had been thrust into an eddy, for the
current was carrying him up stream, and he rowed against it in vain.
Only when he had floated hundreds of yards in the leisurely reverse
current below the great bar of Island No. 6 and had drifted out into the
main current again, almost under the Hickman lights once more, was he
able in his ignorance to escape from the time-trap into which he had
fallen.

Standing at his oars, and rowing down stream, he tried to overtake the
young woman whose good looks, bright eyes, sympathetic understanding,
and need of his spiritual tutoring had caught his mind and made it
captive.

Dawn, following false dawn, saw him passing New Madrid, still rowing
impatiently, his eyes staring down the wild current, past a graveyard
poised ready to plunge on the left bank, and then down the baffling
crossing at Point Pleasant and through the sunny breadths up to
Tiptonville, half sunk in the river, only to fall away toward Little
Cypress--and still no sight of the lost cabin-boat.

In mid-afternoon, weary and worn by sleeplessness and expectancy, he
pulled his boat into the deadwater at the foot of an eddy and having
thrown over his stone anchor, sadly entered his cabin and, without
prayer, subsided into sleep.

If he dreamed he was not awakened to consciousness by his visions. He
slept on in the deep weariness which followed the wakefulness that had
continued through a night of undiminished anxiety into a day of doubt
and increasing despair. It had not occurred to him, in his simplicity,
that the young woman would escape from him. The shadow and the gloom
next to the bank on either side had not suggested his passing by the
object of his intention. His thought was that she must have gone right
on down stream, though he might have divined from his own condition that
she, too, long since must have been weary.

He awakened some time in the morning, after twelve hours or so of
uninterrupted slumber. He turned out into the fascinating darkness of
early morning on the Mississippi. A gust of chill wind swept down out of
the sky, rippling the surface and roaring through the woods up the bank.
The gust was followed by a raw calm and further blanketing of the few
stars that penetrated the veil of mist.

He had in mind the further pursuit of Nelia, and hauling in his anchor
he pulled out into mid-current and then by lamp-light prepared his
breakfast. While he worked, he discovered that dawn was near, and at
lengthening intervals he went out to look ahead, hoping to see the
object of his pursuit. Perhaps he would have gone on down to New
Orleans, only it is not written in Mississippi weather prophecies that
the tenor of one's way shall be even.

He heard wind blowing, and felt his boat bobbing about inexplicably. He
went out to look about him, and in the morning twilight he discovered
that the whole aspect of the Mississippi had changed. With the invisible
sunrise had come an awe-inspiring spectacle which excited in his mind
forebodings and dismay.

First, there was the cold wind which penetrated his clothes and
shrivelled the very meat of his bones. The river's surface, which he had
come to regard as a shimmering, polished floor, was now rumpled and
broken into lumpy waves, like mud on a road, and the waves broke into
dull yellow foam caps. There was not a light gleam on the whole surface,
and dark shadows seemed to crawl and twist about in the very substance
of the heavy and turgid waters.

Rasba stared. Born and trained in mountains, where he remembered clear
streams of pale, beautiful green, catching reflections of white clouds
and clean foliage, with only occasional patches of sullen clay-bank
wash, he refused to acknowledge the great tawny Mississippi at its best,
as a relation of the streams he knew. Certainly this menacing dawn
reminded him of nothing he had ever witnessed. Waves slapped against his
boat, waves which did not conceal, but rather accentuated, the sullen
and relentless rush of the vast body of the water. While the surface
leaped and struggled, wind-racked, the deeps moved steadily on. Elijah
saw that his boat was being driven into a river chute, and seizing his
sweeps, he began to row toward a sandbar which promised shoal water and
a landing.

He managed to strike the foot of the bar, and threw out his anchor rock.
He let go enough line to let the boat swing, and went in to breakfast.
While he was eating, he noticed that the table turned gray and that a
yellowish tinge settled upon everything. When he went out to look
around, he found that the air was full of a cloud that filled his eyes
with dust, and that a little drift of sand had already formed on the
deck of his boat, gritting under his feet. The cloud was so thick that
he could hardly see the river shores; a gale was blowing, and a whole
sandbar, miles long, was coming down upon him from the air. The sandbar,
when he looked at it, seemed fairly to be running, like water.

Parson Rasba remembered the storms of biblical times, and better
understood the wrath that was visited upon the Children of Israel.

He dwelt in that storm all that day. He shut the door to keep the sand
out, but it spurted through the cracks. He could see the puffing gusts
as they burst through the keyhole, and he could hear the heavier grains
rattling upon the thin, painted boards of his roof. His clothes grayed,
his hands gritted, his teeth crunched fine stone; he pondered upon the
question of what sin he had committed to bring on him this ancient
punishment.

For a long time his finite mind was without inspiration, without
understanding, and then he choked with terror and regret. He had
beguiled himself into believing that it was his duty to take care of
Nelia Crele, the fair woman of the river. He had believed only too
readily that his duty lay where his heart's desire had been most eager.
He sat there in dumb horror at the sin which had blinded him.

"I come down yeah to find Jock Drones for his mother!" He reminded
himself by speaking his mission aloud, adding, "And hyar I've be'n
floating down looking for a woman, looking for a pretty woman!"

And because he could remember her shoes, the smooth leather over those
exquisite ankles, Parson Rasba knew that his sin was mortal, and that no
other son of man had ever strayed so far as he.

No wonder he was caught in a desert blizzard where no one had ever said
there was a desert!

"Lord God," he cried out, "he'p this yeah po'r sinner! He'p! He'p!"




CHAPTER XVI


Jock, _alias_ "Slip," Drones, was discovering how small the world really
is. Like many another man, he had figured that no one would know him, no
one could possibly find him, down the Mississippi River, more than a
thousand miles from home. Having killed, or at least fought his man in a
deadly feud war, he had escaped into the far places. His many months of
isolation had given him confidence and taken the natural uneasiness of
flight from his mind.

Now someone was coming down the Mississippi inquiring for Jock Drones! A
detective, as relentless, as sure as a bullet in the heart, was coming.
He might even then be lurking in the brush up the bank, waiting to get a
sure drop. He might be dropping down that very night. He might step in
among the players, unnoticed, unseen, and wait there for the moment of
surprise and action.

Slip's mind ransacked the far places of which he had heard: Oklahoma,
the Missouri River, California, the Mexican border, Texas. Far havens
seemed safest, but against their lure he felt the balance of Buck's
comradeship.

Caruthersville had a sporting crowd with money, lots of money. The
people there were liberal spenders, and they liked a square game better
than any other sport in the world. The boat was making good money, big
money. The two partners had only to break even in their own play to make
a big living out of the kitty in the poker tables, and there was always
a big percentage in favour of the boat, because Buck and Slip understood
each other so well. Slip's share often amounted to more in a week than
he had earned in two years up there in the mountains felling trees,
rafting them in eddies, and tripping them down painfully to the
sawmills. These never did pay the price they were advertised to pay for
timber, and one had to watch the sealers to see that they didn't short
the measure in the under water and goose-egg good logs.

He remembered Jest Prebol, who was lying shot through in the boat
alongside, and he went over to the boat, lighted the lamp, and sat down
by the wounded man. Prebol was a little delirious, and Slip went over on
his own boat, and called Buck out.

"We got a sick man on our hands," he whispered. "Ain't Doc Grell come
oveh yet?"

"Come the last boat," Buck said, and called the doctor out.

"Say, Doc, that sick feller out here, will you look't him?"

Doctor Grell went over to the boat. He looked at the wounded man, and
frowned as he took the limp wrist. He tried the temperature, too, and
then shook his head.

"He's a sick man, Slip," he said. "Thought he was coming all right last
night. Now----"

He looked at the wound, and gazed at the great, blue plate around the
bullet hole.

"He's bad?" Slip said, in alarm. "Poison's workin', Doc?"

"Mighty bad!"

There was nothing for it. Doctor Grell's night of pleasure had turned
into one of life-saving and effort. He sent Slip over to drag away one
of the young men from his game, and they rigged up two square trunks and
a waterproof tarpaulin into an operating table. Then, as Slip was faint
and sick, the two drove him back to the gambling boat, while they, the
graduate and the student, entered upon a gamble with a human life the
stake.

Of that night's efforts, fighting the "poison" with the few sharp
weapons at their command--later reinforced by a hasty trip across the
river to get others--the two need never tell. While they worked, they
could hear at intervals the shout of a winner in the other boat. In
moments of perfect quiet they heard the quick rustling of shuffled
cards; they heard the rattling of dice in hard, muffled boxes; they
heard, at intervals, the rattling of stove lids and smelt the soft-coal
smoke which blew down on them from the kitchen chimney. Slip, not
forgetful of them, brought over pots of black coffee and inquired after
the patient. He found the two men paler on each visit, and stripped down
more and more, till they were merely in their sweaty undershirts.

Toward morning the wind began to blow; it began to grow cold. The noises
on the neighbouring boat grew fainter in the low rumble of a stormy wind
out of the northwest, and the shanty-boat lifted at intervals on a wave
that rolled out of the main current and across the eddy, making their
operating room even more unstable.

Under their onslaught the death which was taking hold of Jest Prebol was
checked, and the river rat whose life had been forfeited for his sly
crimes became the object of a doctor's sentiment and belief in his own
training.

Long after midnight, when some few of the patrons of the games had
already taken their departure, the doors opened oftener and oftener,
letting the geometrical shaft of the yellow light flare out across the
waters, and the grotesque shadows of those who departed stood out
against the night and waters as the men shivered in the wind and bent to
feel their way into the boats.

After dawn Doctor Grell and his assistant, peaked and white, limp with
their tremendous effort, and shivering with exhaustion of mind and body,
walked out of the little shanty-boat, up to the big one, sat down with
Buck and Slip to breakfast, and then took their own course across the
ruffled and tumble-surfaced river.

"I 'low he'll pull through," Doctor Grell admitted, almost reluctantly.
"He's in bad shape, though, with the things the bullet carried into him,
but we sure swabbed him out. How'd the game go to-night, boys?"

"Purty good." Buck shook his head. "Tammer sure had luck his way--won a
seventy-dollar pot onct."

"I sure wanted to play," Grell shook his head, "but in my profession you
aren't your own, and you cayn't quit."

"We owe you for it," Buck said. "He's our friend----"

"And he's ourn, too," Grell declared, "so we'll split the difference. I
expect it was worth a hundred dollars what we two did to-night. That'll
be fifty, boys, if it's all right."

"Yes, suh," Slip said, handing over five ten-dollar bills, and Grell
handed two of them to his companion, who shook his head, saying:

"Nope, Doc! Ten only to-night. My first fee!"

"And you'll never have a more interesting case," Grell declared. "No,
indeed! You'll see cases, come you go to college, but none more
interesting, and if we've pulled him through, you'll never have better
reason for satisfaction."

The two got into a little motorboat and went bounding and rocking in the
wind and waves toward the town behind the levee on the far bank. The
two gamblers watched the little boat rocking along till it was but a
black fleck in the midst of the weltering brown waters.

"I don't reckon any one'll drap down to-day," Slip muttered, looking up
the river.

"We'll keep our eyes open," Buck replied. "You needn't to worry, you're
plumb worn out, Slip. Git to bed, now, an' I'll slick up around."

It was a cold, dry gale. From sharp gusts with near calms between the
wind grew till it was a steady, driving storm that flattened against the
shanty-boat sides, and whistled and roared through the trees up the
bank. And instead of dying down at dusk, it increased so much that the
big acetylene light was not hung out, and if any one came down to the
opposite shore he saw that there would be no game that night.

Buck went in and sat down by the wounded man's bed, giving him the
medicines Doctor Grell had left. For the attentions Prebol, in lucid
intervals, showed wondering looks of gratitude, like an ugly dog which
has been trapped and then set free. What he had suffered during the
night even he could hardly recall in the enfeebled condition of his
mind, but the spoonfuls of broth, the medicine that thrilled his body,
the man's very companionship, lending strength, took away the feeling of
despair which a man in the extremities of anguish and alone in the world
finds hardest to resist.

Buck, sitting there, gazed at the wan countenance, studying it. Prebol
had forgotten, but when Buck first arrived on the river, the pirate, a
much younger man then, had carelessly and perhaps for display told the
stranger and softpaw many things about the river which were useful. It
occurred to Buck that he was now paying back a debt of gratitude.

Something boiled up in his thoughts, and he swore to himself that
he owed nothing, that the world owed him, and he bridged the years of
his disappointment and desolation back to the hour when he had stormed
out of the life he had known, to come down the Mississippi to be a
gambler. Prebol, in his lapses into delirium, called a woman's name,
Sadie--always Sadie! And if he would have cursed that name in his
consciousness, out of the depths of his soul it came with softness and
gentleness of affection.

Buck wondered what Jest Prebol had done to Sadie that she had driven him
down there, and he cursed with his own lips, while he stifled in the
depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been
wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life
was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of
memories and reflections. He wondered what had become of the woman for
love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this heartless
occupation of common gambler?

True to Slip, he had watched the river for the stranger whose inquiries
had been carried down in fair warning to all the river people--and Buck,
suddenly conscious of his own part in that river system, laughed in
surprise.

"Why," he said to himself, "humans are faithful to one another! It's
what they live for, to be faithful to one another!"

It was an incredible, but undeniable theory. In spite of his own wilful
disbelief in the faith of mankind, here he was sitting by one poor
devil's bed while he kept his weather eye out upon the rough river in
the interests of another--a murderer! He pondered on the question of
whether any one kept faith with him. His mind cried out angrily, "No!"
but on second thought, in spite of himself, he realized distinctly that
he had let one person's faithlessness overcome his trust of all others.

No day on the Mississippi is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a
dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which
depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling
wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry
gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an early spring.
Steamboats are driven into the refuge of landing or eddy, and if the
power craft cannot stand the buffetings, much less are the exposed
little houseboats, toys of current and breeze, able to escape the
resistless blasts. So the wind possesses itself of the whole river
breadth and living creatures are driven to shelter.

Prebol, shot through and conscious of the reward of his manner of
living; Slip, a fugitive under the menace of a murderer's fate; and
Buck, given over to melancholy, were but types on the lengths and
tributaries of the indifferent flood.

Nothing happened, nothing could happen. The arrival of Slip from his
restless bunk relieved Buck of his vigil, and he went to bed and slept
into the dawn of another day--a day like the previous one, and fit to
drive him up the bank, into the woods, and among the fallen branches of
rotten trees seeking in physical activity to check the mourning and
tauntings of a mind over which he found, as often before, that he had no
control.

And yet, when the storm suddenly blew itself out with a light puff and a
sudden flood of sunshine, just as the sun went down, Prebol's condition
took a sudden turn for the better, Slip forgot his fears, and Buck burst
into a gay little whistled tune, which he could never whistle except
when he was absurdly and inexplicably merry.




CHAPTER XVII


Terabon's notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the
Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long,
lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little
bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off
there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more
into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or
cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood
itself.

His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and
gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump
under the term of "histories," but now, after his hundreds of miles of
association with the river, his thought took but brief note of those
trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as "river towns." He had
passed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the
prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!--bound but wearing away
its bonds.

Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed,
in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a
young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the
Mississippi River "spirit"--as he always quoted it in his calm and
dispassionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions--had
encompassed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him
down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been
called a "compromising position."

That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a
drunken stupor, and now in the late evening the fugitive wife was
taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat--and he
had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which
could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a
vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home--he thought the
phrase with difficulty--and he remembered the word "chaperon" as from a
foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.

His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of
uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the
occasion. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook," she had said, and while he
followed her on board the boat, with the two big black ducks to help
prepare, he wondered and remembered and, in spite of his life-long
avoidance of all appearance of evil, submitted to this irresistible
circumstance, wherever it might lead.

So he built the fire in her kitchen stove. She mixed up dressing and
seasoned the birds, made biscuit batter for hot-bread, brought out
stacks and stores of things to eat, or to eat with, and they set the
table, ground the coffee, and got the oven hot for the roasting and
baking.

One thing took the curse off their position: They had to have all the
windows and doors wide open so that they seemed fairly to be cooking on
an open sandbar at the edge of the river. Terabon took an inward
satisfaction in that fact. It is not possible to feel exceedingly wicked
or depraved when there is a mile-wide Mississippi on the one hand and a
mile-wide sandbar on the other side, and the sun is shining calmly upon
the bright and innocent waters.

As the ducks were young and tender, their cooking took but an hour, or a
little more, and the interim was occupied in the countless things that
must be done to prepare even a shanty-boat feast. He stirred some
cranberry sauce, and she had to baste the ducks, get the flour stirred
with water, and condensed cream for gravy, besides setting the table and
raising the biscuits, to have them ready for the ducks. She must needs
wonder if she'd forgotten the salt, and for ten minutes she was almost
in a panic at the thought, while he watched her in breathless
wonderment, and took covert glances up the Mississippi River, fearful
of, and yet almost wishing to see, that pursuing motorboat come into
view.

When at last the smoking viands were on the ample table and they sat
with their knees under it, and he began to carve the ducks and dish out
the unblessed meal, he glanced up stream through the cabin window on his
right. He caught a glimpse of a window pane flashing miles distant in
the light of the setting sun--the whiskey boat without doubt. He saw a
flock of ducks coming like a great serpent just above the river surface,
then a shadow lifted as out of the river, swept up the trees in the lost
section of Kentucky opposite, and from spattering gold the scene turned
to blue which rapidly became purple, darkening visibly.

Through the open doors and windows swept the chill of twilight, and
while she lighted the big lamp he did her bidding and closed the doors
and windows. Those shelves of books, classics and famous, time-tried
fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of titles, the blues
and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself
struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and
carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all those
master minds warn the young against evil?

But they talked over the ducks of what a pity it was that all towns
could not engage themselves in thought the way Athens used to do, and
they wondered to each other when the hurrying passion of greed and its
varying phenomena would become reconciled to a modest competence and the
simplicity which they, for example, were enjoying down the Mississippi.

When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at
him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made
him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at
least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful,
though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own
success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden,
risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position.

Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked
a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood
grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty.

"I think I'd better put up my canvas top," he blurted out, and she
assented.

"And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of
dishes," she added.

"Oh, of course!" he exclaimed.

"I'll help with the canvas," she said, and he dared not look at her.

By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat
from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the
strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the
bar, and the river in the dark, running by.

They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power,
its resistlessness.

"It's overwhelming," he whispered. "When you can't see it you hear it,
or you feel it!"

"And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so
perfectly negligible," she added, consciously, and then with vivacity:
"I'll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me
for a walk up this sandbar!"

"Gladly," he laughed, "but I'll help with the dishes as well!"

She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they
romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber,
not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could
see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different,
wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like
hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the
gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes
side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle--they remembered Thoreau's
"Cape Cod" and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now
under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings
and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had accumulated a
vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the
simple superstitions with which the river people beguile themselves and
add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.

"An old river man can look at the river and tell when a headrise is
coming," he told her. "He knows by the looks of the water when the river
is due to fall again. When he dreams, he says he knows what is going to
happen, and where to find buried treasure, and if there is going to be
an earthquake or a bad storm."

"They get queer living alone!" she said, thoughtfully. "Lots of them
used to stop in at our slough on Kaw River. I was afraid of them!"

"You afraid of anything!" he exclaimed. "Of any one!"

"Oh, that was a long time ago--ages ago!" She laughed, and then gave
voice to that most tragic riverside thought. "But now--nothing at all
matters now!"

She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing,
that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin's
most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a
human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring
tears.

He knew in that very moment, as by revelation, that he had caught from
her lips one of the bitterest phrases which the human mind is capable of
forming. He was glad of the favour which fate had bestowed upon him, and
he thrilled, while he regretted, that in that hour he could not forget
that he was a seeker of facts, a gatherer of information.

To match her mood was beyond his own power. By a simple statement of
fact she had given herself a place in his thought comparable to--he went
at making ideas again, despite himself--comparable to one of those
wonderful widows which are the delight, while they rend to tatters the
ambitions of delvers into the mysteries of Olympian lore. This bright,
pretty, vivacious young woman had suffered till she had arrived at a
Helen's recklessness--nothing mattered!

There was a pause.

"I think you are in a fair way to become unforgetable in connection with
the Mississippi River," he suggested, with even voice.

"What do you mean?" she demanded, quickly.

"Well, I'll tell you," with the semblance of perfect frankness. "I've
been wondering which one of the Grecian goddesses you would have been
if you had lived, say, in Homer's time."

"Which one of them I resemble?" she asked, amused.

"Exactly that," he declared.

"Oh, that's such a pretty compliment," she cried. "It fits so well into
the things I've been thinking. The river grows and grows on me, and I
feel as though I grew with it! You don't know--you could never
know--you're a man--masculine! For the first time in my life I'm
free--and--and I don't--I don't care a damn!"

"But the future!" he protested, feebly.

"That's it!" she retorted. "For a river goddess there is no future. It's
all in the present for her, because she is eternal."

They had walked clear up to the southernmost tip of the sandbar point.
They could hear someone, perhaps a chorus of voices, singing on the
whiskey boat at the Upper Landing. They could see the light of the
boat's windows. There they turned and started back down the sandbar,
reaching the two boats moored side by side in the deadwater.

"Shall I help with those dishes to-night?" he asked.

"No, we'll do them in the morning," she replied without emphasis and as
a matter of course, which left him unassisted in his obvious
predicament.

"Well," he drawled, after a time, "it's about midnight. I must say a
river goddess is--is beyond my most vivid dreams. I wonder----"

"What do you wonder?"

"If you'll let me kiss you good-night now?"

"Yes," she answered.

The stars twinkled as he put his arm around her and took the kiss which
her lips gave--smiling.

"I'll help with those dishes in the morning," he said, helping her up
the gang plank of her boat. "Good-night!"

"Good-night," she answered, and entered the cabin, the dim light of her
turned-down lamp flashing across the sandbar and revealing his face for
a moment. Then the door closed between them.

He went to his skiff, raised the cover, and crawled into his canvas
hammock which was swung from both sides of his boat. Before going to
sleep he looked under the canvas at the river, at the stars, at the dark
cabin-boat forty feet distant in the eddy.

At the same moment he saw a face against a window pane in the cabin.

"What does it mean?" he asked himself, but there was no answer. The
river, when asked, seldom answers. Just as he was about to go to sleep,
he started up, wide awake.

For the first time on the river, he had forgotten to post up his notes.
He felt that he had come that day, as never before, to the forks in the
road--when he must choose between the present and the future. He lighted
his lantern, sat up in his cot, and reached for his typewriter.

He wrote steadily, at full speed, for an hour. When he had those
wonderful and fleeting thoughts and observations nailed down and safe,
he again put out his lantern, and turned in once more.

Then he heard a light, gay laugh, clear and distinct-a river voice
beyond question--full of raillery, and yet beneath the mocking note was
something else which he could neither identify nor analyze, which he
hoped was not scorn or mere derision, which he wished might be
understanding and sympathy--till he thought of his making those notes.

Then he despised himself, which was really good for his soul. His
conscience, instead of rejoicing, rebuked him as a cad. He swore under
his breath.




CHAPTER XVIII


Augustus Carline was a long time recovering even his consciousness. A
thousand dreams, a thousand nightmares tormented his thoughts while the
mangling grip of unnumbered vises and ropes sank deep into his flesh;
ploughs and harrows dragged through his twisted muscles.

Yet he did rise at last out of his pit and, leaning against the cabin of
his boat, look about him to see what hell he had escaped into. The sun
was shining somewhere, blinding his eyes, which were already seared. A
river coiled by, every ripple a blistering white flame. He heard birds
and other music which sounded like an anvil chorus performing in the
narrow confines of a head as large as a cabin.

He remembered something. It was even worse than what he was undergoing,
but he could not quite call the horror to the surface of the weltering
sea of his feelings; he did not even know his name, nor his place, nor
any detail except the present pain--and he didn't want to know. He
fought against knowing, till the thing pressed exuberantly forward, and
then he knew that the beautiful girl, the woman he loved and to whom he
was married, had left him. That was the exquisite calamity of his soul,
and he flinched from the fact as from a blow. He was always flinching,
he remembered. He was always turning from the uncomfortable and the
bothering to seek what was easy and unengaging. Now, for the moment, he
could not undertake any relief from his present misery.

Acres and lakes of water were flowing by, but his thirst was worse than
oceans could quench. He wanted to drink, but the thought of drinking
disgusted him beyond measure. It seemed to him that a drop of water
would flame up in his throat like gasolene on a bed of coals, and at
that moment his eyes fell upon the jug which stood by the misty engine
against the intangible locker. The jug was a monument of comfort and
substantiality.

At the odour which filled the air when he had taken out the cork his
very soul was filled with horror.

"But I got to drink it!" he whimpered. "It's the only thing that'll cure
me, the only thing I can stand. If I don't I'll die!"

Not to drink was suicide, and to drink was living death! He could not
choose between the suggestions; he never had been trained to face fate
manfully. His years' long dissipation had unfitted him for every
squarely made decision, and now with horror on one side and terror on
the other, he could not procrastinate and wonder what folly had brought
him to this state.

"Why couldn't it smell good!" he choked. "The taste'll kill me!"

Taste he must, or perish! The taste was all that he had anticipated, and
melted iron could hardly have been more painful than that first torture
of cold, fusil acid. Gulping it down, he was willing to congratulate
himself on his endurance and wisdom, his very heroism in undertaking
that deadly specific.

After it was over with, however, the raw chill, which the heat of the
sun did not help, began to yield to a glow of warmth. He straightened
his twisted muscles and after a hasty look around retreated into his
cabin and flung himself on his bunk.

What length of time he spent in his recovery from the attacks of his
enemy, or rather enemies of a misspent youth, he could not surmise. He
did at last stir from his place and look with subdued melancholy into a
world of woe. He recalled the visitor, the man who wrote for newspapers,
and in a panic he searched for his money.

The money was gone; $250, at least, had disappeared from his pockets. An
empty wallet on the cabin floor showed with what contemptuous calm the
funds had been abstracted from his pockets. He turned, however, to a
cunning little hiding place, and found there his main supply of
currency--a thousand dollars or more.

No man likes to be robbed, and Carline, fixing upon his visitor Terabon
as his assailant, worked himself into a fine frenzy of indignation. The
fellow had purposely encouraged him to drink immoderately--Carline's
memory was clear and unmistaken on that point--and then, taking
advantage of his unconsciousness, the pseudo writer had committed
piracy.

"I'd ought to be glad he didn't kill me!" Carline sneered to himself,
looking around to conjure up the things that might have been.

The prospect was far from pleasing. The sky was dark, although it was
clearly sometime near the middle of a day--what day, he could but guess.
The wind was raw and penetrating, howling through the trees, and
skipping down the chute with a quick rustling of low, breaking waves.
The birds and animals which he had heard were gone with the sunshine.

When Carline took another look over his boat, he found that it had been
looted of many things, including a good blanket, his shot gun and rifle,
ammunition, and most of his food supply--though he could not recall that
he had had much food on board.

He lighted the coal-oil heater to warm the cabin, for he was chilled to
the bone. He threw the jug overboard, bound now never again to touch
another drop of liquor as long as he lived--that is, unless he happened
to want a drink.

Wearily he set about cleaning up his boat. He was naturally rather
inclined to neatness and orderliness. He picked up, folded, swept out,
and put into shape. He appeased his delicate appetite with odds and ends
of things from a locker full of canned goods which had escaped the
looter.

As long as he could, Carline had not engaged his thoughts with the
subject of his runaway wife. Now, his mind clearing and his body numb,
his soul took up the burden again, and he felt his helplessness thrice
confounded. He did not mind anything now compared to the one fact that
he had lost and deserved to lose the respect of the pretty girl who had
become his wife. He took out the photographs which he had of her, and
looked at them, one by one. What a fool he had been, and what a
scoundrel he was!

He could not give over the pursuit, however; he felt that he must save
her from herself; he must seek and rescue her. He hoisted in his anchor
and starting the motor, turned into the chute and ran down before the
wind into the river. Never had he seen the Mississippi in such a dark
and repellent mood.

When he had cleared the partial shelter of Island No. 8, he felt the
wind and current at the stern of his boat, driving it first one way then
the other. Steering was difficult, and fear began to clutch at his
heart. He felt his helplessness and the hopelessness of his search down
that wide river with its hundred thousand hiding places. He knew nothing
of the gossiping river people except that he despised them. He could not
dream that his ignorance of things five or ten miles from his home was
not typical of the shanty-boaters; he could not know that where he was a
stranger in the next township to his own home, a shanty-boater would
know the landing place of his friends a thousand miles or so down
stream.

Without maps, without knowledge, without instinct, he might almost as
well have been blind. His careless, ignorant glance swept the eight or
nine miles of shoreline of sandbar from above Island No. 10 clear down
to the fresh sloughing above Hotchkiss's Landing, opposite the dry
Winchester Chute--in which deep-draft gun-barges had been moored fifty
years or so before. He did not even know it was Island No. 10,
Donaldson's Point; he didn't know that he was leaving Kentucky to skirt
Tennessee; much less did he dream that he was passing Kentucky again. He
looked at a shanty-boat moored at the foot of a mile-long sandbar; saw,
without observing, a skiff against the bar just above the cabined scow.
His gaze discovered smoke, houses, signs of settlement miles below, and
he quickened the beat of his motor to get down there.

He longed for people, for humanity, for towns and cities; and that was a
big sawmill and cotton-gin town ahead of him, silhouetted along the top
of a high bank. He headed straight for it, and found his boat
inexplicably slowed up and rebuffed. Strangers on the river always do
find themselves baffled by the big New Madrid eddy, which even power
boats engage with difficulty of management. He landed at last against a
floating dock, and found that it was a fish market.

Having made fast, he went up town and spent hours, till long after dark,
buying supplies, talking to people, getting the lonesomeness out of his
system, and making veiled inquiries to learn if anything had been heard
about a woman coming down the Mississippi. He succeeded in giving the
impression that he was a detective. In the restaurant he talked with a
cocky little bald-headed man all spruced up and dandyish.

"I'm from Pittsburgh," the man said. "My name's Doss, Ronald Doss; I'm a
sportsman, but every winter I drop down here, hunting and fishing;
sometimes on the river, sometimes back in the bottoms. I suppose, Mr.
Carline, that you're a stranger on the river?"

"Why, yes-s, down this way; I live near it, up at Gage."

"I see, your first trip down. Got a nice gasolene boat, though!"

"Oh, yes! You're stopping here?"

"Just arrived this morning; trying to make up my mind whether I'll go
over on St. Francis, turkey-and deer-hunting, or get a boat and drop
down the Mississippi. Been wondering about that."

"Well, say, now--why can't you drop down with me?"

"Oh, I'd be in the way----"

"Not a bit----"

"Costs a lot to run a motorboat, and I'd have to----"

"No, you wouldn't! Not a cent! Your experience and my boat----"

"Well, of course, if you put it that way. If it'd be any accommodation
to you to have an old river man--I mean I've always tripped the river,
off and on, for sport."

"It'd be an education for me, a great help!"

"Yes, I expect it would be an education, if you don't know the river."
Doss smiled.

They walked over to the river bank. An arc light cast its rays upon the
end of the street, down the sloping bank, and in a light circle upon the
rocking, muddy waters where the fish dock and several shanty-boats
rested against the bank.

Doss whistled a little tune as he rested on his cane.

The front door of the third houseboat up the eddy opened and closed. A
man climbed the bank and passed the two with a basket on his arm.

"Come on down," Carline urged.

"Not to-night," Doss said. "I've got my room up at the hotel, and I'll
have to get my stuff out of the railroad baggage room. But I'll come
down about 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning. Then we'll fit up and drop
down the river. Good-night!"

Doss watched Carline go down to the dock and on to his boat. Then he
went up the street and held earnest confab with a man who had a basket
on his arm. They whispered ten minutes or so, then the man with the
basket returned to his shanty-boat, and within half an hour was back up
town, carrying two suitcases, a gun case, and a duffle bag.

Doss went to the smaller hotel with these things and registered. He
walked down to the river in the morning and noticed that the third
shanty-boat had dropped out into the river during the night, in spite of
the storm that was blowing up. He went down and ate breakfast with
Carline, and the two went up and got Doss's outfit at the hotel. They
returned to the motorboat, and, having laid in a supply of groceries,
cast off their lines and steered away down the river.

"Yes, sir, we'll find that girl if it takes all winter!" the fish-market
man heard Doss tell Carline in a loud voice.

That afternoon a man in a skiff came down the river and turned into the
dock. As he landed, the fish-market man said to him:

Yes.

"If you see any lady coming down, tell her a detector is below, lookin'
fo' her. He's a cheap skate, into a motorboat--but I don't expect he'll
be into hit long, 'count of some river fellers bein' with him. But he
mout be bad, that detector. If you should see a nice lady, tell her."

"You bet!" the skiff man, who was Lester Terabon, exclaimed.




CHAPTER XIX


For long hours Parson Rasba endured the drifting sand and the biting
wind which penetrated the weather-cracks in his poplar shanty-boat. It
was not until near nightfall that it dawned on him that he need not
remain there, that it was the simplest thing in the world to let go his
hold and blow before the wind till he was clear of the sandblast.

He did haul in his anchor and float away. As he rode the waves and
danced before the wind the clouds of sand were flung swiftly down upon
the water, where the surface was covered with a film and a sheet of
dust.

Standing at his sweeps, he saw that he was approaching the head of
another sandbar, and as he felt the water shoaling under the boat he
cast over the anchor and rode in clear air again. He was not quite
without a sense of humour.

Shaking the dust out of his long hair and combing it out of his
whiskers, he laughed at his ignorance and lack of resource. He swept the
decks and floor of his cabin, and scooped the sand up with an ash shovel
to throw overboard. A lesson learned on the Mississippi is part of the
education of the future--if there is anything in the pupil's head to
hold a memory of a fact or experience.

Even though he knew it was his own ignorance that had kept him a
prisoner in that storm, Parson Rasba did not fail to realize that his
ignorance had been sin, and that his punishment was due to his
absorption in the fate of a pretty woman.

Certainly after such a sharp rebuke he could not fail to return to his
original task, imposed upon him because of his fault in bringing the
feud fighters of his home mountains together, untrained and
unrepentant, to hear the voice of his pride declare the Word for the
edification of sinners. Parson Rasba did not mince his words as he
contemplated the joy he had felt in being eloquent and a "power" of a
speaker from the pulpits of the mountain churches. The murdering by the
feud fighters had taught him what he would never forget, and his frank
acknowledgment of each rebuke gave him greater understanding.

While the gale lasted he watched the river and the sky. The wild fowl
flying low, and dropping into woods behind him led to forays seeking
game, and in a bayou a mile distant he drew down with deadly aim on one
of a flock of geese. He killed that bird, and then as its startled and
lumbering mates sought flight, he got two more of them, missing another
shot or two in the excitement.

The three great birds made a load for him, and he returned to his boat
with a heart lighter than he had known in many a day because it seemed
to him a "sign" that he need not hate himself overmuch. The river
consoled him, and its constancy and integrity were an example which he
could not help but take to heart.

Gales might blow, fair weather might tempt, islands might interpose
themselves in its way, banks and sandbars might stand against the flood,
but come what might, the river poured on through its destined course
like a human life.

He entertained the whimsical fancy, as his smallest goose was roasting,
that perhaps the Mississippi might sin. In so many ways the river
reminded him of humankind. He had stood beside a branch of the
Mississippi which was so small and narrow that he could dam it with his
ample foot, or scoop it up with a bucket--and yet here it was a mile
wide! In its youth it was subject to the control of trifling things, a
stone or a log, or the careless handiwork of a man. Down here all the
little threads of its being had united in a full tide of life still
subject to the influences of its normal course, but wearing and tearing
along beyond any power to stop till its appointed course was run.

Insensibly Parson Rasba felt the resources of his own mind flocking to
help him. Just being there beside that mighty torrent helped him to get
a perspective on things. Tiny things seemed so useless in the front of
that overwhelming power. What were the big things of his own life? What
were the important affairs of his existence?

He could not tell. He had always meant to do the right thing. He could
see now, looking back on his life, that his good intentions had not
prevented his ignorance from precipitating a feud fight.

"I should have taken them, family by family, and brought them to their
own knees fustest," he thought, grimly. "Then I could have helt 'em all
together in mutual repentance!"

Having arrived at that idea, he shrugged his shoulders almost
self-contemptuously. "I'm a learnin'. That's one consolation, I'm a
learnin'!"

And then Rasba heard the Call!

It was Old Mississip's voice; the river was heaping duties upon him more
and more. So far, he had been rather looking out for himself, now he
recalled the houseboats which he had seen moored down the reaches and in
the bends. Those river people, dropping down incessantly with the river
current, must sometimes need help, comfort, and perhaps advice. His
humility would not permit him to think that he could preach to them or
exhort them.

"Man to man, likely I could he'p some po'r sinner see as much as I can
see. If I could kind of get 'em to see what this big, old riveh is like!
Hit's carryin' a leaf er a duck, an' steamboats an' shanty-bo'ts; hit
carries the livin' an' hit carries the daid; hit begrudges no man it's
he'p if he comes to it to float down a log raft er a million bushels of
coal. If Ole Mississip'll do that fo' anybody, suttin'ly hit's clear an'
plain that God won't deny a sinner His he'p! Yas, suh! Now I've shore
found a handle to keep hold of my religion!"

Peace of mind had come to him, but not the peace of indolence and
neglect. Far from that! He saw years of endless endeavour opening before
him, but not with multitudes looking up to him as he stood, grand and
noble, in the bright light of a thousand pulpits, circuit riding the
earth. Instead, he would go to a sinning man here, a sorrowing woman
there, and perhaps sit down with a little child, to give it comfort and
instruction.

People were too scattered down the Mississippi to think of
congregations. All days were Sunday, and for him there could be no
day of rest. If he could not do big work, at least he could meet
men and women, and he could get to know little children, to
understand their needs. He knew it was a good thought, and when he
looked across the Mississippi, he saw night coming on, but between
him and the dark was sunset.

The cold white glare changed to brilliant colours; clouds whose
gray-blue had oppressed the soul of the mountain man flashed red and
purple, growing thinner and thinner, and when he had gazed for a minute
at the glow of a fixed government light he was astonished by the
darkness of night--only the night was filled with stars.

Thus the river, the weather, the climate, the sky, the sandbars, and the
wooded banks revealed themselves in changing moods and varying lights to
the mountain man whose life had always been pent in and narrowed,
without viewpoint or a sense of the future. The monster size of the
river dwarfed the little affairs of his own life and humbled the pride
which had so often been humbled before. At last he began to look down on
himself, seeing something of the true relation of his importance to the
immeasurable efforts of thousands and millions of men.

The sand clouds carried by the north wind must ever remain an epoch in
his experience. Definitely he was rid of a great deal of nonsense,
ignorance, and pride; at the same time it seemed, somehow, to have
grounded him on something much firmer and broader than the vanities of
his youth.

His eyes searched the river in the dark for some place to begin his
work, and as they did so, he discovered a bright, glaring light a few
miles below him across the sandbar at the head of which he had anchored.
He saw other lights down that way, a regular settlement of lights across
the river, and several darting firefly gleams in the middle of the
stream which he recognized were boats, probably small gasolene craft.

In forty minutes he was dipping his sweep blades to work his way into
the eddy where several small passenger craft were on line-ends from a
large, substantial craft which was brightly lighted by lanterns and a
big carbide light. Its windows were aglow with cheeriness, and the
occupants engaged in strange pastimes.

"Come, now, come on, now!" someone was crying in a sing-song. "Come
along like I said! Come along, now--Seven--Seven--Seven!"

Parson Rasba's oar pins needed wetting, for the strain he put on the
sweeps made them squeak. The splash of oars down the current was heard
by people on board and several walked out on the deck.

"Whoe-e-e!" one hailed. "Who all mout yo' be?"

"Rasba!" the newcomer replied. "Parson Elijah Rasba, suh. Out of the
Ohio!"

"Hi-i-i!" a listener cried out, gleefully, "hyar comes the Riveh Prophet
after yo sinners. Hi-i-i!"

There was a laugh through the crowd. Others strolled out to see the
phenomenon. A man who had been playing with fortune at one of the poker
tables swore aloud.

"I cayn't neveh git started, I don't shift down on my luck!" he whined.
"Las' time, jes' when I was coming home, I see a piebald mewl, an' now
hyar comes a parson. Dad drat this yeah ole riveh! I'm goin' to quit.
I'm gwine to go to Hot Springs!"

These casual asides were as nothing, however, to the tumult that stirred
in the soul of Jock Drones, who had been cutting bread to make
boiled-ham sandwiches for their patrons that night. His acute hearing
had picked up the sound of the coming shanty-boat, and he had felt the
menace of a stranger dropping in after dark. Few men not on mischief
bent, or determined to run all night, run into shanty-boat eddies.

He even turned down the light a little, and looked toward the door to
see if the way was clear. The hail relieved the tension of his mind
strain, but only for a minute. Then he heard that answer.

"Rasba!" he heard. "Parson Elijah Rasba, suh. Out of the Ohio!"

In a flash he knew the truth! Old Rasba, whose preaching he had
listened to that bloody night away up in the mountains, had come down
the rivers. A parson, none else, was camping on the mountain fugitive's
trail. That meant tribulation, that meant the inescapableness of sin's
punishment--not in jails, not in trial courts, not on the gallows, but
worse than that!

"Come abo'd, Parson!" someone shouted, and the boats bumped. There was a
scramble to make a line fast, and then the trampling of many feet, as
the Prophet was introduced to that particular river hell, amid stifled
cries of expectancy and murmurs of warning. Next to being raided by the
sheriff of an adjacent county, having a river prophet come on board is
the greatest excitement and the smartest amusement of the bravados down
the river.

"Hyar's the Prophet!" a voice shouted. "Now git ready fo' yo' eternal
damnation. See 'im gather hisse'f!"

Rasba gathering himself! Jock could not help but take a peep. It was
Rasba, gaunt, tall, his head up close to the shanty-boat roof and his
shoulders nearly a head higher than the collars of most of those men who
stood by with insolence and doubtful good humour.

"Which'd yo' rather git to play, Parson?" someone asked, slyly. "Cyards
er bones er pull-sticks?"

"I've a friend down yeah, gentlemen." The Prophet ignored the insult.
"His mother wants him. She's afeared likely he mout forget, since he was
jes' a boy friendly and needing friends. He's no runt, no triflin'
no-'count, puppy man, like this thing," in the direction whence the
invitation had come, "but tall an' square, an' honourable, near six
foot, an' likely 160 pounds. Not like this little runt thing yeah, but a
real man!"

There was a yell of approval and delight.

"Who all mout yo' friend be?" Buck asked, respectfully, seeing that this
was not a raid, but a visit.

"Jock, suh, Jock Drones, his mammy wants him, suh!"

Buck eyed the visitor keenly for a minute. Someone said they never had
heard of him. Buck, who saw that the visitor was in mind to turn back,
suggested:

"Won't yo' have a cup of coffee, suh? Hit's raw outside to-night, fresh
and mean. Give him a chair, boys! I'm friendly with any man who takes a
message from a mother to her wandering son."

A dozen chairs were snatched out to the stove, and when Parson Rasba had
accepted one, Buck stepped into the kitchen. He found Slip, _alias_ Jock
Drones, standing with beads of sweat on his forehead. No need to ask the
first question; Buck poured out a cup of coffee and said:

"What'll I tell him, Slip?"

"I cayn't go back, Buck!" Slip whimpered. "Hit's a hanging crime!"

"Something may have changed," Buck suggested.

"No, suh, I've heard. Hit were my bullet--I've heard. Hit's a trial, an'
hit's--hit's hanging!"

"Sh-h! Not so loud!" Buck warned. "If it's lawyer money you need?"

"I got 'leven hundred, an' a trial lawyer'll cost only a thousand, Buck!
Yo's a friend--Lawse! I'd shore like to talk to him. He's no detector,
Parson Rasba yain't. Why, he's be'n right into a stillhouse, drunk the
moonshine--an' no revenue hearn of hit, the way some feared. My sister
wrote me. I want to talk to him, Buck, but--but not let them outside
know."

"I'll fix it," Buck promised, carrying out steaming coffee, a plate of
sandwiches, and two big oranges for the parson.

He returned, filled up the trays for the others, and took them out. Soon
the crowd were sitting around, or leaning against the heavy crap table,
talking and listening.

"Yo' come way down from the mountangs to find a mammy's boy?" someone
asked, his tone showing better than his words how well he understood the
sacrifice of that journey.

"Hit's seo," Rasba nodded. "I'm partly to blame, myse'f, for his coming
down. I was a mountain preacher, exhorter, and I 'lowed I knowed hit
all. One candlelight I had a congregation an' I hit 'er up loud that
night, an' I 'lowed I'd done right smart with those people's souls.
But--but hit were no such thing. This boy, Jock, he runned away that
night, 'count of my foolishness, an' we know he's down thisaway; if I
could git to find him, his mammy'd shore be comforted. She's a heap more
faith in me'n I have, but I come down yeah. Likely I couldn't do much
for that boy, but I kin show I'd like to."

"Trippin' a thousand miles shows some intrust!" somebody said.

"I lived all my life up theh in the mountangs, an' hit's God's country,
gem'men! This yeah--" he glanced around him till his glance fell upon
the card cabinet on the wall between two windows, full of decks of cards
and packets of dice and shaker boxes--"this yeah, sho! Hit ain't God's
country, gem'men! Hit's shore the Devil's, an' he's shore ketched a
right smart haul to-night! But I live yeah now!"

Buck, who had been coming and going, had stopped at the parson's voice.
He did not laugh, he did not even smile. The point was not missed,
however. Far from it! He went out, bowed by the truth of it, and in the
kitchen he looked at Slip, who was sitting in black and silent
consideration of that cry, carried far in the echoes.

"You're one of us, Parson!" a voice exclaimed in disbelief.

"Yas, suh," Rasb

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