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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The River Prophet, by Raymond S. Spears
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The River Prophet
+
+Author: Raymond S. Spears
+
+Illustrator: Ralph Pallen Coleman
+
+Release Date: May 16, 2009 [EBook #28848]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 Caesars 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," Rasba smiled as he looked into the man's eyes, "I'm one of
+you. I 'low we uns'll git thar together, 'cordin' as we die. Look! This
+gem'men gives me bread an' meat; he quenches my thirst, too. An' I take
+hit out'n his hands. 'Peahs like he owns this boat!"
+
+"Yas, suh," someone affirmed.
+
+"Then I shall not shake hit's dust off my feet when I go," Rasba
+declared, sharply. Buck stared; Rasba did not look at even his shoes;
+Buck caught his breath. Whatever Rasba meant, whatever the other
+listeners understood, Buck felt and broke beneath those statements which
+brought to him things that he never had known before.
+
+"He'll not shake the dust of this gambling dive from his feet!" Buck
+choked under his breath. "And this is how far down I've got!"
+
+Rasba, conscious only of his own shortcomings, had no idea that he had
+fired shot after shot, let alone landed shell after shell. He knew only
+that the men sat in respectful, drawn-faced silence. He wondered if they
+were not sorry for him, a preacher, who had fallen so far from his
+circuit riding and feastings and meetings in churches. It did not occur
+to him that these men knew they were wicked, and that they were
+suffering from his unintentional but overwhelming rebuke.
+
+They turned away impatiently, and went in their boats to the village
+landing across the river; a night's sport spoiled for them by the coming
+of a luck-breaking parson. Others waited to hear more of what they knew
+they needed, partly in amusement, partly in curiosity, and partly
+because they liked the whiskery fellow who was so interesting. At the
+same time, what he said was stinging however inoffensive.
+
+"Game's closed for the night!" Buck announced, and the gamesters took
+their departure. They made no protest, for it was not feasible to
+continue gambling when everyone knows a parson brings bad luck to a
+player.
+
+The outside lights were extinguished, and Buck brought Slip from the
+kitchen inside to Rasba.
+
+"This is Slip," Buck explained, and the two shook hands, the fugitive
+staring anxiously at the other's face, expecting recognition.
+
+"Don't yo' know me, Parson?" Slip exclaimed. "Jock Drones. Don't yo'
+know me?"
+
+"Jock Drones?" Rasba cried, staring. "Why, Sho! Hit is! Lawse--an' I
+found yo' right yeah--thisaway!"
+
+"Yassuh," Jock turned away under that bright gaze, "but I'm goin' back,
+Parson! I'm goin' back to stand trial, suh! I neveh knowed any man, not
+a blood relation would think so much of me, as to come way down yeah to
+tell me my mammy, my good ole mammy, wanted me to be safe----"
+
+"An' good, Jock!" Rasba cried.
+
+"An' good, suh," the young man added, obediently.
+
+"I'd better go over and see our sick man," Buck turned to Slip.
+
+"A sick man?" Rasba asked. "Where mout he be?"
+
+"In that other shanty-boat, that little boat," Slip exclaimed. "We'll
+all go!"
+
+When they entered the little boat, which sagged under their combined
+weights, Slip held the light so it would shine on the cot.
+
+"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "Hyar's my friend who got shot by a lady!"
+
+"Yes, suh, Parson!" Prebol grinned, feebly. "Seems like I cayn't get
+shut of yo' nohow, but I'm shore glad to see yo'. These yeah boys have
+took cyar of me great. Same's you done, Parson, but I wa'nt your kind,
+swearin' around, so I pulled out. Yo' cayn't he'p me much, but
+likely--likely theh's some yo' kin."
+
+"I'd shore like to find them," Rasba declared, smoothing the man's
+pillow. "But there's not so many I can he'p. Yo' boys are tired; I'll
+give him his medicine till to'd mornin'. Yo'd jes' soon, Prebol?"
+
+"Hit'd be friendly," Prebol admitted. "Yo' needn't to sit right
+yeah----"
+
+"I 'low I shall," Rasba nodded. "I got some readin' to do. I'll git my
+book, an' come back an' set yeah!"
+
+He brought his Bible, and looking up to bid the two good-night, he
+smiled.
+
+"Hit's considerable wrestle, readin' this yeah Book! I neveh did git to
+understand hit, but likely I can git to know some more now. I've had
+right smart of experiences, lately, to he'p me git to know."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+Terabon possessed a newspaper man's feeling of aloofness and detachment.
+When he went afloat on the Mississippi at St. Louis he had no intention
+of becoming a part of the river phenomena, and it did not occur to his
+mind that his position might become that of a participator rather than
+an observer.
+
+The great river was interesting. It had come to his attention several
+years before, when he read Parkman's "La Salle," and a little later
+he had read almost a column account of a flood down the Mississippi.
+The A. P. had collected items from St. Louis, Cincinnati, Memphis,
+Cairo, Natchez, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, and fired
+them into the aloof East. New York, Boston, Bangor, Utica, Albany, and
+other important centres had learned for the first time that a
+"levee"--whatever that might be--had suffered a cravasse; a steamboat
+and some towbarges had been wrecked, that Cairo was registering 63.3 on
+the gauge; that some Negroes had been drowned; that cattle thieves were
+operating in the Overflow, and so on and so forth.
+
+The combination of La Salle's last adventure and the Mississippi flood
+caught the fancy of the newspaper man.
+
+"Shall I ever get out there?" Terabon asked himself.
+
+His dream was not of reporting wars, not of exploring Africa, not of
+interviewing kings and making presidents in a national convention. Far
+from it! His mind caught at the suggestion of singing birds in their
+native trees, and he could without regret think of spending days with a
+magnifying glass, considering the ant, or worshipping at the stalk of
+the flowering lily.
+
+He was astonished, one day, to discover that he had several hundred
+dollars in the Chambers Street Savings Bank. It happened that the city
+editor called him to the desk a few minutes later and said:
+
+"Go see about this conference."
+
+"You go to hell!" the reporter replied, smilingly, gently replacing the
+slip on the greenish desk.
+
+"T-t-t-t-t----" Mr. Dekod sputtered. There _is_ something new under the
+sun!
+
+Lester Terabon strolled forth with easy nonchalance, and three days
+later he was in the office of the secretary of the Mississippi River
+Commission, at St. Louis, calmly inquiring into the duties and
+performance thereof, involving the efforts of 100,000 Negroes, 40,000
+mules, 500 contractors, 10,000 government officials, a few hundred
+pieces of floating plant, and sundry other things which Terabon had
+conceived were of importance.
+
+He had approached the Mississippi River from the human angle. He knew of
+no other way of approach. His first view of the river, as he crossed the
+Merchants Bridge, had not disturbed his equilibrium in the least, and he
+had floated out of an eddy in a 16-foot skiff still with the
+human-viewpoint approach.
+
+Then had begun a combat in his mind between all his preconceived ideas
+and information and the river realities. Faithfully, in the notebooks
+which he carried, he put down the details of his mental disturbances.
+
+By the time he reached Island No. 10 sandbar he had about resigned
+himself to the whimsicalities of river living. He had, however,
+preserved his attitude of aloofness and extraneousness. He regarded
+himself as a visiting observer who would record the events in which
+others had a part. It still pleased his fancy to say that he was
+interviewing the Mississippi River as he might interview the President
+of the United States.
+
+But as Lester Terabon rowed his skiff back up the eddy above New Madrid,
+and breasted the current in the sweep of the reach to that little
+cabin-boat half a mile above the Island No. 10 light, his attitude was
+undergoing a conscious change. While he had been reporting the
+Mississippi River in its varying moods something had encircled him and
+grasped him, and was holding him.
+
+For some time he had felt the change in his position; glimmerings of its
+importance had appeared in his notes; his mind had fought against it as
+a corruption, lest it ruin the career which he had mapped out for
+himself.
+
+When the New Madrid fish-dock man told him to carry the warning that a
+"detector" was hunting for a certain woman, and that the detective had
+gone on down with some river fellows, his place as a river man was
+assured. River folks trusted and used him as they used themselves.
+Moreover, he was possessed of a vital river secret.
+
+Nelia Crele, _alias_ Nelia Carline, was the woman, and they were both
+stopping over at the Island No. 10 sandbar. He knew, what the fish-dock
+man probably did not know, that the pursuer was the woman's husband.
+
+"What'll I tell her?" Terabon asked himself.
+
+With that question he uncovered an unsuspected depth to his feelings. It
+was a dark, dull day. The waves rolled and fell back, sometimes the wind
+seeming the stronger and then the current asserting its weight. With the
+wind's help over the stern, Terabon swiftly passed the caving bend and
+landed in the lee above the young woman's boat.
+
+He carried some things he had bought for her into the kitchen and they
+sat in the cabin to read newspapers and magazines which he had
+obtained.
+
+"I heard some news, too," he told her.
+
+"Yes? What news?"
+
+"The fish-dock man at New Madrid told me to tell the people along that a
+detective has gone on down, looking for a woman."
+
+"A detective looking for a woman?" she repeated.
+
+"A man the name of Carline----"
+
+"Oh!" she shrugged her shoulders. "Why didn't you tell me!"
+
+He flushed. Almost an hour had elapsed since he had returned. He had
+found it difficult to mention the subject.
+
+"I did not tell you either," he apologized, "that I happened to meet Mr.
+Carline up at Island No. 8, when I had no idea the good fortune would
+come to me of meeting you, whose--whose pictures he showed me. I could
+not--I saw----There was----"
+
+"And you didn't tell me," she accused him.
+
+"It seemed to me none of my affair. I'm a newspaper man--I----"
+
+"And did that excuse you from letting me know of his--of that pursuit of
+me?"
+
+His newspaper impartiality had failed him, and he hung his head in doubt
+and shame. She claimed, and she deserved, his friendship; the last
+vestige of his pretence of mere observation was torn from him. He was a
+human among humans--and he had a fervid if unexpected thought about the
+influence and exasperation of the river out yonder.
+
+"I could not tell you!" he cried. "I didn't think--it seemed----"
+
+"You know, then, you saw why I had left him?"
+
+"Liquor!" he grasped at the excuse. "Oh, that was plain enough."
+
+"Perhaps a woman could forgive liquor," she suggested, thoughtfully,
+"but not--not stupidity and indifference. He never disturbed the dust on
+any of the books of his library. Oh, what they meant my books mean to
+me!"
+
+She turned and stared at her book shelves.
+
+"Suppose you hadn't found books?" he asked, glad of the opportunity for
+a diversion.
+
+"I'd be dead, I think," she surmised, "and one day, I did deliberately
+choose."
+
+"How was that?"
+
+"Get your notebook!" she jeered. "I thought if he was going to rely on
+the specious joys of liquor I would, and tried it. It was a blizzard day
+last winter. He had gone over to see the widow, and there was a bottle
+of rum in the cupboard. I took some hot milk, nutmeg, sugar, and rum.
+I've never felt so happy in my life, except----"
+
+"With what exception?" he asked.
+
+"Yesterday," she answered, laughing, "and last night and to-day! You
+see, I'm free now. I say and do what I please. I don't care any more.
+I'm perfectly brazen. I don't love you, but I like you very much. You're
+good company. I hope I am, too----"
+
+"You are--splendid!" he cried, almost involuntarily, and she shivered.
+
+"Let's go walking again, will you?" she said. "I want to get out in the
+wind; I want to have the sky overhead, a sandbar under my feet, and all
+outdoors at my command. You don't mind, you'd like to go?"
+
+"To the earth's end!" he replied, recklessly, and her gay laugh showed
+how well he had pleased her mood.
+
+They kept close up to the north side of the bar because down the wind
+the sand was lifting and rolling up in yellow clouds. They went to
+Winchester Chute, and followed its winding course through the wood
+patch. There was a slough of green water, with a flock of ducks which
+left precipitately on their approach. They returned down to the sandbar,
+and pressed their way through the thick clump of small willows into the
+switch willows and along the edge of the unbroken desert of sand. They
+could see the very surface of the bar rolling along before the wind, and
+as they walked along they found their feet submerged in the blast.
+
+But when they arrived at the boat night was near at hand, and the
+enveloping cold became more biting and the gloom more depressing.
+
+Just when they had eaten their supper together, and had seated
+themselves before the fire, and when the whirl and whistle of the wind
+was heard in the mad music of a river storm, a motorboat with its
+cut-out open ploughed up the river through the dead eddy and stopped to
+hail.
+
+Jim Talum, a fisherman whose line of hoop nets filled the reach of
+Island No. 9 for eight or ten miles, was on his way to his tent which he
+had pitched at the head of Winchester Chute.
+
+He tramped aboard, and welcomed a seat by the fire.
+
+"'Lowed I'd drap in a minute," he declared. "Powerful lonesome up on the
+chute where I got my tent. Be'n runnin' my traps down the bank, yeah,
+an' along of the chute, gettin' rats. Yo' trappin'?"
+
+"No, just tripping," Terabon replied. "I was down to New Madrid this
+morning."
+
+"I'm just up from there. Ho law! Theh's one man I'd hate to be down
+below. I expect yo've hearn tell of them Despard riveh pirates? No!
+Well, they've come drappin' down ag'in, an' they landed into New Madrid
+yestehd'y evenin'. Likely they 'lowed to raid some commissary down
+b'low--cayn't tell what they did 'low to do. But they picked good
+pickin's down theh! Feller come down lookin' fo' a woman, hisn's I
+expect. Anyhow, he's a strangeh on the riveh. He's got a nice power
+boat, an' likely he's got money. If he has, good-bye! Them Despards'd
+kill a man for $10. One of 'em, Hilt Despard's onto the bo't with him,
+pretendin' to be a sport, an' they've drapped out. The rest the gang's
+jes' waitin' fo' the wind to lay, down b'low, an' down by Plum P'int,
+some'rs, Mr. Man'll sudden come daid."
+
+The fisherman had been alone so much that the pent-up conversation of
+weeks flowed uninterruptedly. He told details; he described the
+motorboat; he laughed at the astonishment the man would feel when the
+pirates disclosed their intentions with a bullet or knife; and he
+expected, by and by, to hear the story of the tragedy through the medium
+of some whiskey boater, some river gossip coming up in a power boat.
+
+For an hour he babbled and then, as precipitately as he had arrived, he
+took his departure. When he was gone, Nelia Crele turned to Terabon with
+helpless dismay. Augustus Carline was worthless; he had been faithless
+to her; he had inflicted sufferings beyond her power of punishment or
+forgiveness.
+
+"But he's looking for me!" she recapitulated, "and he doesn't know. He's
+a fool, and they'll kill him like a rat! What can I do?"
+
+Obviously there was nothing that she could do, but Lester Terabon rose
+instantly.
+
+"I'd better drop down and see if I can't help him--do something. I know
+that crew."
+
+"You'll do that for me!" her voice lifted in a cry of thankfulness. "Oh,
+if you would, if you would. I couldn't think of his being--his being
+killed, trying to find me. Get him; send him home!"
+
+"I'd better start right down," Terabon said, "it's sixty or seventy
+miles, anyhow. They'll not hurry. They can't, for the gang's in a
+shanty-boat."
+
+She walked up to him with her arms raised.
+
+"How can I thank you?" she demanded. "You do this for me--a stranger!"
+
+"Why not, if I can help?" he asked.
+
+"Where shall I see you again?"
+
+He brought in his book of river maps, and together they looked down the
+tortuous stream; he rested the tip of his pencil on Yankee Bar below
+Plum Point.
+
+"It's a famous pirate resort, this twenty miles of river!" he said.
+"I'll wait at Fort Pillow Landing. Or if you are ahead?"
+
+"We'll meet there!" she cried. "I'll surely find you there. Or at
+Mendova--surely at Mendova."
+
+She followed him out on the bow deck.
+
+"Just a minute," she whispered, "while I get used to the thought of
+being alone again. I did not know there were men like you who would
+rather do a favour than ask for kisses."
+
+"It isn't that we don't like them!" he blurted out. "It's--it's just
+that we'd rather deserve them and not have them than have them and not
+deserve them!"
+
+She laughed. "Good-bye--and don't forget, Fort Pillow!"
+
+"Does a man forget his meals?" he demanded, lightly, and with his duffle
+packed low in his skiff he rowed out into the gray river and the black
+night.
+
+Having found a lee along the caving bank above New Madrid he
+gain-speeded down the current behind the sandbar, but when he turned the
+New Madrid bend he pulled out into mid-river and with current and wind
+both behind him, followed the government lights that showed the
+channel.
+
+He had expected to linger long down this historic stretch of river with
+its Sunk Lands of the New Madrid earthquakes, with its first glimpse of
+the cotton country, and with its countless river phenomena.
+
+"But Old Mississip' has other ideas," he said to himself, and miles
+below he was wondering if and when he would meet the girl of Island No.
+10 again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Pirates have infested the Mississippi from the earliest days. The
+stranger on the river cannot possibly know a pirate when he sees one,
+and even shanty-boaters of long experience and sharp eyes penetrate
+their disguises with difficulty. How could Gus Carline suspect the
+loquacious, ingratiating, and helpful Renald Doss?
+
+Lonely; pursued by doubts, ignorance, and a lurking timidity, Carline
+was only too glad to take on a companion who discoursed about all the
+river towns, called river commissioners by their first names, knew all
+the makes of motors, and called the depth of the water in Point Pleasant
+crossing by reading the New Madrid gauge.
+
+He relinquished the wheel of his boat to the dapper little man, and fed
+the motor more gas, or slowed down to half speed, while he listened to
+volumes of river lore.
+
+"You've been landing along down?" Doss asked.
+
+"All along," Carline replied, "everywhere."
+
+"Seen anybody?"
+
+"I should say so; there was a fellow come down pretending to be a
+reporter. He stopped over with me, got me full's a tick, and then robbed
+me."
+
+"Eh--_he_ robbed you?"
+
+"Yes, sir! He got me to drinking heavy. I like my stew a little, but he
+fixed me. Then he just went through me, but he didn't get all I had, you
+bet!"
+
+This was rich!
+
+"Lucky he didn't hit you on the head, and take the boat, too!" Doss
+grinned.
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"Yes, sir! Lots of mean men on this river, they play any old game. They
+say they're preachers, or umbrella menders, or anything. Every once in a
+while some feller comes down, saying he's off'n some magazine. They come
+down in skiffs, mostly. It's a great game they play. Everybody tells 'em
+everything. If I was going to be a crook, I bet I'd say I was a hist'ry
+writer. I'd snoop around, and then I'd land--same's that feller landed
+on you. Get much?"
+
+"Two--three hundred dollars!"
+
+The little man laughed in his throat. He handled the boat like a river
+pilot. His eyes turned to the banks, swept the sandbars, gazed into the
+coiling waters alongside, and he whispered names of places as he passed
+them--landings, bars, crossings, bends, and even the plantations and log
+cuttings. He named the three cotton gins in Tiptonville, and stared at
+the ferry below town with a sidelong leer.
+
+Carline would have been the most astonished man on the Mississippi had
+he known that nearly all his money was in the pockets of his guest. He
+babbled on, and before he knew it, he was telling all about his wife
+running away down the Mississippi.
+
+"What kind of a boat's she in?" Doss asked.
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"How do you expect to find her if you don't know the boat?"
+
+"Why--why, somebody might know her; a woman alone!"
+
+"She's alone?"
+
+"Why--yes, sir. I heard so."
+
+"Good looker?"
+
+Without a word Carline handed the fellow a photograph. Doss made no
+sign. For two minutes he stared at that fine face.
+
+"I bet she's got an awful temper," he half whispered.
+
+"She's quick," Carline admitted, fervently.
+
+"She'd just soon shoot a man as look at him," Doss added, with a touch
+of asperity.
+
+"Why--she----" Carline hesitated. He recalled a day in his own
+experience when she took his own shot gun from him, and stood a fury,
+flaming with anger.
+
+"Yes, sir, she would," Doss declared, with finality.
+
+Doss had seen her. By that time a thousand shanty-boaters had heard
+about that girl's one shot of deadly accuracy. The woman folks on a
+thousand miles of reach and bend had had a bad example set before them.
+Doss himself felt an anger which was impotent against the woman who had
+shot Jest Prebold down. Probably other women would take to shooting,
+right off the bat, the same way. He despised that idea.
+
+Carline, doubtful as to whether his wife was being insulted,
+congratulated, or described, gazed at the photograph. The more he
+looked, the more exasperated he felt. She was a woman--what right had
+she to run away and leave him with his honour impugned? He felt as
+though he hadn't taught her her place. At the same time, when he looked
+at the picture, he discovered a remembrance of his feeling that she was
+a very difficult person to teach anything to. Her learning always had
+insulted his own meagreness of information and aptness in repartee. Next
+to not finding her, his big worry had become finding her.
+
+They steered down the river without great haste. Doss studied the
+shanty-boats which he saw moored in the various eddies, large and small.
+Some he spoke of casually, as store-boats, fishermen, market hunters,
+or, as they passed between Caruthersville and the opposite shore, a
+gambling boat. Even the river pirate, gloating over his prey, and
+puzzled only as to the method of making the most of his victim, could
+not penetrate the veil which it happened the Mississippi River
+interposed between them and the river gambling den--for the moment.
+There is no use seeking the method of the river, nor endeavouring to
+discover the processes by which the lives of thousands who go afloat
+down the Mississippi are woven as woof and warp in the fabric of river
+life and river mysteries. The more faithful an effort to select one of
+the commonest and simplest of river complications, the more improbable
+and fanciful it must seem.
+
+Doss, in intervals when he was not consciously registering the smile of
+good humour, the generosity of an experienced man toward the chance
+visitor, and the willingness to defer to the gentleman from Up the Bank,
+brought his expression unconsciously to the cold, rough woodenness of
+blank insensitiveness--the malignance of a snapping turtle, to mention a
+medium reptilian face. A whim, and the necessity of delay, led Doss to
+suggest that they take a look up the Obion River as a likely hiding
+place. Of course, Doss knew best, and they quit the tumbling Mississippi
+for the quiet wooded aisle of the little river.
+
+When they emerged, two days later, Augustus Carline could well thank his
+stars, though he did not know it, that he was still on the boat. All
+unconscious of the real nature and habits of river rats he had given the
+little wretch a thousand opportunities to commit one of the many crimes
+he had in mind. But he developed a reluctance to choose the easiest one,
+when from hint after hint he understood that a mere river piracy and
+murder would be folly in view of the opportunity for a more profitable
+stake which a man of means offered.
+
+As he steered by the government boat which was surveying Plum Point
+bars, Doss showed his teeth like an indignant cat. Five or six miles
+below he offered the supine and helpless Carline the information:
+
+"There's Yankee Bar. We'll swing wide and land in below, so's not to
+scare up any geese or ducks that may be roosting there."
+
+Eagerly Doss searched through the switch willows for a glimpse of the
+setback of the water beyond the bar. Away down in the old eddy he
+discovered a shanty-boat, and to cover his involuntary exclamation of
+satisfaction he said:
+
+"Shucks! There's somebody theh. I hoped we'd have it to ourselves but
+they may be sports, too. If they are, we'll sure have a good time. Some
+of these shanty-boaters are great sports. We'll soon find out!"
+
+He steered into the eddy and the two men stepped out on the flat boat's
+deck to greet them.
+
+"Seems like I've seen them before," Doss said in a low voice; "I believe
+they're old timers. Hello, boys! Hunting?"
+
+"Yes, suh! Lots of game. Sho, ain' yo' Doss, Ren Doss?"
+
+"You bet. I knew you! I told Mr. Carline, here, that I knew you, that
+I'd seen you before! I'm glad to see you boys again. Catch a line
+there."
+
+No doubt about it, they were old friends. In a minute they were shaking
+hands all around, then went into the shanty-boat, and they sat down in
+assorted chairs, and Doss, Jet, and Cope exchanged the gossip of a river
+year.
+
+Carline's eyes searched about him with interest, and the three men
+watched him more and more openly. When he walked toward the bow of the
+boat, where the slope of the yellow sand led up to the woods of Flower
+Island, one of them casually left his seat and followed.
+
+Carline looked at the stand of guns in the cabin corner and started
+with surprise. He reached and picked up one of them to look at it.
+
+"Why," he shouted, "this is my shot gu----"
+
+No more. His light went out on the instant and he felt that he was
+suspended in mid-air, poised between the abyss and the heavens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Fortune, or rather the Father of Waters, had favoured Parson Elijah
+Rasba in the accomplishment of his errand. It might not have happened in
+a decade that he locate a fugitive within a hundred miles of Cairo,
+where the Forks of the Ohio is the jumping-off place of the stream of
+people from a million square miles.
+
+Rasba knew it. The fervour of the prophets was in his heart, and the
+light of understanding was brightening in his mind. Something seemed to
+have caught the doors of his intelligence and thrown them wide open.
+
+In the pent-up valleys of the mountains, with their little streams,
+their little trails, their dull and hopeless inhabitants, their wars
+begun in disputes over pigs and abandoned peach orchards, their
+moonshine and hate of government revenues, there had been no chance for
+Parson Rasba to get things together in his mind.
+
+The days and nights on the rivers had opened his eyes. When he asked
+himself: "If this is the Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?" he found
+a perspective.
+
+Sitting there beside the wounded Jest Prebol, by the light of a big
+table lamp, he "wrestled" with his Bible the obscurities of which had
+long tormented his ignorance and baffled his mental bondage.
+
+The noises of the witches' hours were in the air. Wavelets splashed
+along the side and under the bow of the Prebol shanty-boat. The mooring
+ropes stretched audibly, and the timber heads to which they were
+fastened squeaked and strained; the wind slapped and hissed and whined
+on all sides, crackling through the heavy timber up the bank. The great
+river pouring by seemed to have a low, deep growl while the wind in the
+skies rumbled among the clouds.
+
+No wonder Rasba could understand! He could imagine anything if he did
+not hold fast to that great Book which rested on his knees, but holding
+fast to it, the whisperings and chucklings and hissings which filled the
+river wilderness, and the deep tone of the flood, the hollow roar of the
+passing storm, were but signs of the necessity of faith in the presence
+of the mysteries.
+
+So Rasba wrestled; so he grappled with the things he must know, in the
+light of the things he did know. And a kind of understanding which was
+also peace comforted him. He closed the Book at last, and let his mind
+drift whither it would.
+
+Panoramas of the river, like pictures, unfolded before his eyes; he
+remembered flashes taken of men, women, and children; he dwelt for a
+time on the ruin of the church up there in the valley, standing vainly
+against a mountain slide; his face warmed, his eyes moistened. His mind
+seized eagerly upon a vision of the memory, the pretty woman, whose
+pistol had shot down the deluded and now stricken wretch there in the
+cabin.
+
+The anomaly of the fact that he was caring for her victim was not lost
+on his shrewd understanding. He was gathering up and helping patch the
+wreckage she was making. It was a curious conceit, and Elijah Rasba,
+while he smiled at the humour of it, was at the same time conscious of
+its sad truth.
+
+Her presence on the river meant no good for any one; Prebol was but one
+of her victims; perhaps he was the least unfortunate of them all! Others
+might perish through her, while it was not too much to hope that Prebol,
+through his sufferings, might be willing to profit by their lesson.
+Rasba was glad that he had not overtaken her that night of inexplicable
+pursuit. Her brightness, her prettiness, her appeal had been
+irresistible to him, and he could but acknowledge, while he trembled at
+the fact, that for the time he had been possessed by her enchantment.
+
+Thus he meditated and puzzled about the things which, in his words, had
+come to pass. Before he knew it, daylight had arrived, and Jock Drones
+came over to greet him with "Good mo'nin', Parson!" Prebol was sleeping
+and there was colour in his cheeks, enough to make them look more
+natural. When Doctor Grell arrived, just as the three sat down to
+breakfast, he cheered them with the information that Prebol was coming
+through though the shadow had rested close to him.
+
+None of them admitted, even to himself, the strain the wounded man had
+been and was on their nerves. Under his seeming indifference Buck was
+near the breaking point; Jock, victim of a thousand worries, was bent
+under his burdens. Grell, having fought the all-night fight for a human
+life, was still weak with weariness from the effort. Rasba, a newcomer,
+brought welcome reserves of endurance, assistance, and confidence.
+
+"Yo' men shore have done yo' duty by a man in need," he told them, and
+none of them could understand why that truthful statement should make
+them feel so very comfortable.
+
+They left the sick man to go on board the gaming boat, and they sat on
+the stern deck, where they looked across the river and the levee to the
+roofs of Caruthersville. If they looked at the horizon, their attention
+was attracted and their gaze held by the swirling of the river current.
+Their eyes could not be drawn away from that tremendous motion, the rush
+of a thousand acres of surface; the senses were appalled by the
+magnitude of its suggestion.
+
+"Going to play to-night?" Grell asked, uneasily.
+
+"No," Buck replied, instantly.
+
+"So!" the doctor exclaimed.
+
+"Slip's going up on the steamboat."
+
+"For good?"
+
+"So'm I!" Buck continued, breathlessly; "I'm quitting the riveh, too!
+I've been down here a good many years. I've been thinking. I'm going
+back. I'm going up the bank again."
+
+"What'll you do with the boat?" Grell continued.
+
+"Slip and I've been talking it all over. We're through with it. We
+guessed the Prophet, here, could use it. We're going to give it to
+him."
+
+"Going to give hit to me!" Rasba started up and stared at the man.
+
+"Yes, Parson; that poplar boat of yours isn't what you need down here."
+Buck smiled. "This big pine boat's better; you could preach in this
+boat."
+
+Tears started in Rasba's eyes and dripped through his dark whiskers.
+Buck and Jock had acted with the impulsiveness of gambling men.
+Something in the fact that Rasba had come down those strange miles had
+touched them, had given Drones courage to go back and face the music,
+and to Buck the desire to return into his old life.
+
+"We're going up on the _Kate_ to-morrow morning," Buck explained.
+"Slip'd better show you how to run the gasolene boat if you don't know
+how, Parson!"
+
+Dazed by the access of fortune, Rasba spent the mid-afternoon learning
+to run the 28-foot gasolene launch which was used to tow the big
+houseboat which would make such a wonderful floating church. It was a
+big boat only a little more than two years old. Buck had made it
+himself, on the Upper Mississippi, for a gambling boat. The frame was
+light, and the cabin was built with double boards, with building paper
+between, to keep out the cold wintry winds.
+
+"Gentlemen," Rasba choked, looking at the two donors of the gift, "I'm
+going to be the best kind of a man I know how----"
+
+"It's your job to be a parson," Buck laughed. "If it wasn't for men like
+us, that need reforming, you'd be up against it for something to look
+out for. You aren't much used to the river, and I'll suggest that when
+you drop down you land in eddies sheltered from the west and south
+winds. They sure do tear things up sometimes. I've had the roof tore off
+a boat I was in, and I saw sixty-three boats sunk at Cairo's Kentucky
+shanty-boat town one morning after a big wind."
+
+"I'll keep a-lookin'," Rasba assured him, "but I've kind-a lost the
+which-way down heah. One day I had the sun ahead, behind, and both
+sides----"
+
+"There's maps in that pile of stuff in the corner," Buck said, going to
+the duffle. "You're on Sheet 4 now. Here's Caruthersville."
+
+"Yas, suh. Those red lines?"
+
+"The new survey. You see, that sandbar up in Little Prairie Bend has cut
+loose from Island No. 15, and moved down three miles, and we're at the
+foot of this bar, here. That's moved down, too, and that big bar down
+there was made between the surveys. You see, they had to move the levee
+back, and Caruthersville moved over the new levee----"
+
+"Sho!" Rasba gasped. "What ails this old riveh?"
+
+"She jes' wriggles, same's water into a muddy road downhill," Kippy
+laughed. "Up there in Little Prairie Bend hit's caved right through the
+old levee, and they had to loop around. Now they've reveted it."
+
+"Reveted?"
+
+"They've woven a willow mattress and weighted it down with broken rock
+from up the river--more than a mile of it, now, and they'll have to put
+down another mile before they can head the river off there."
+
+"Put a carpet down. How wide?"
+
+"Four hundred feet probably----"
+
+"An' a mile long!" Rasba whispered, awed. "Every thing's big on the
+riveh!"
+
+"Yes, sir--that's it--big!" Buck laughed.
+
+Thus the four gossiped, and when Doctor Grell had taken his departure
+the three talked together about the river and its wonders. At intervals
+they went over to look after Prebol whose chief requirement was quiet,
+meat broths, and his medicines.
+
+As night drew down Drones turned to Buck:
+
+"It's goin' to be hard leaving the riveh! I neveh will forget, Buck. If
+I'm sent to jail for all my life, I'll have something to remember. If
+they hang me, I shore will come back to walk with those that walk in the
+middle of the river."
+
+"What's that?" Rasba turned and demanded.
+
+"Riveh folks believe that thousands of people who died down thisaway,
+sunk in snagged steamers, caught in burned-up boats, blown to kingdom
+come in boiler explosions, those that have been murdered, and who died
+along the banks, keep a-goin' up and down."
+
+"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "Yo' b'lieve that?"
+
+"A man believes a heap more after he's tripped the riveh once or twice,
+than he ever believed in all his borned days, eh, Buck?"
+
+"It's so!" Buck cried out. "Last night I was thinking that I'd wasted my
+life down here; years and years I've been a shanty-boater, drifter,
+fisherman, trapper, market hunter, and late years, I've gambled. I've
+been getting in bad, worse all the while. The Prophet here, coming
+along, seemed to wake me up--the man I used to be--I mean. It wasn't so
+much what you said, Parson, but your being here. Then I've been thinking
+all over again. I've an idea, boys, that when I go back up to-morrow I
+won't be so sorry for what I've been, as glad that I didn't grow worse
+than I did. It won't be easy, boys--going back. I'm taking the old river
+with me, though. I've framed its bends and islands, its chutes and
+reaches, like pictures in my mind. Old Parson here, too, coming in on us
+the way he did, saying that this was hell, but he'd come here to live in
+it. That's what waked me up, Parson! I could see how you felt. You'd
+never seen such a place before, but you said in your heart and your eyes
+showed it, Parson, that you would leave God's country to help us poor
+devils. It's just a point of view, though. I'm going right up to my
+particular hell, and I'll look back here to this thousand miles of river
+as heaven. Yes, sir! But my job is up there--in that hell!"
+
+So they talked, and always their thoughts were on the river channel, and
+their minds groping into the future.
+
+When the _Kate_ whistled way down at Bell's Landing, Rasba took the two
+across to Caruthersville and bade them good-bye at the landing.
+
+The _Kate_ pulled out and Parson Rasba crossed to the three houseboats,
+two of them his own. He went in to see Prebol, who was lonesome and
+wanted to talk a little.
+
+"What you going to do, Parson?" Prebol asked.
+
+"I'd kind-a like to get to see shanty-boaters, and talk to them," the
+man answered. "I wonder couldn't yo' sort of he'p me; tell me where I
+mout begin and where it'd he'p the most, an' hurt people's feelin's the
+least? I'd jes' kind-a like to be useful. Course, I got to get you
+cured up an' took cyar of first."
+
+"I cayn't say much about being pious on Old Mississip'," Prebol grinned,
+"but theh's two ways of findin' trouble. One's to set still long enough,
+and then, again, you can go lookin' fo' hit. Course, yo' know me! I've
+hunted trouble pretty fresh, an' I've found hit, an' I've lived onto
+hit. I cayn't he'p much about doin' good, an' missionaryin', an' River
+Prophetin'."
+
+When Prebol's voice showed the strain of talking Rasba bade him rest.
+Then he went over to the big boat, a gift that would have sold for
+$1,000. He looked at the crap table, the little poker tables with the
+brass-slot kitties; he stared at the cabinet of cards and dice.
+
+"All mine!" he said.
+
+He walked out on the deck where he could commune with the river, using
+his eyes, his ears, and the feeling that the warm afternoon gave him.
+The sun shone upon him, and made a narrow pathway across the rushing
+torrent. The sky was blue and cloudless. Of the cold, the wind, the sea
+of liquid mud, not one trace remained.
+
+He looked down and up the river, and his eyes caught a flicker which
+became a flutter, like the agitation of a duck preening its feathers on
+a smooth surface.
+
+He watched it for a long time. He did not know what it was. As a river
+man, his curiosity was excited, but there was something more than mere
+curiosity; the river instinct that the inexplicable and unknown should
+be watched and inquired into moved him almost unconsciously to watch
+that distant agitation which became a dot afloat in a mirage of light. A
+little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the
+thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling currents at the bend.
+
+The sun drew nearer the tree tops. The little cabin-boat was seeking a
+place to land or anchor for the night. If it was an old river man, the
+boat would drop into some little eddy at Caruthersville or down below;
+but a stranger on the river would likely shoot across into the gamblers'
+eddy tempted, perhaps, by the three boats already there.
+
+The boat drew swiftly near, and as it ran down, the navigator rowed to
+make the shanty-boat eddy. Parson Rasba discovered that it was a woman
+at the sweeps, and a few strokes later he knew that it was a slim, young
+woman. When she coasted down outside the eddy, to swing in at the foot,
+and arrived opposite him, he recognized her.
+
+"God he'p me!" he choked, "hit's Missy Nelia. Hit's Missy Nelia! An'
+she's a runned away married woman--an' theh's the man she shot!"
+
+"Hello-o, Parson!" she hailed him, "did you see a skiff with a reporter
+man drop by?"
+
+"No, missy!" he shook his head, his heart giving a painful thump
+
+"I'm a-landing in, Parson!" she cried. "I want to talk with you!"
+
+With that she leaned forward, drove the sweeps deep, and her boat
+started in like a skiff. It seemed to Parson Rasba that he had never
+seen a more beautiful picture in all his days.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+Lester Terabon rowed down the rolling river waters in the dark night. He
+had, of course, looked out into the Mississippi shades from the security
+of landing, anchorage, and sandbar; he knew the looks of the night but
+not the activities of currents and bends when a gale is sweeping by and
+the air is, by turns, penetrated by the hissing of darting whitecaps and
+the roar of the blustering winds.
+
+He would not from choice have selected a night of gale for a pull down
+the Mississippi, and his first sensation as he sought a storm wave
+stroke was one of doubt. What dangers might engulf him was not plain,
+not the waves, for his skiff bobbed and rocked over them; not river
+pirates bent on plunder, for they could not see him; perhaps a snag in
+the shallows of a crossing; perhaps the leap of a sawyer, a great tree
+trunk with branches fast in the mud and the roots bounding up and down
+in the current; perhaps a collision with some other craft.
+
+He had salt-water rowlocks on his boat, open-topped "U" sockets, and the
+oars he used were cased with a foot of black leather and collars of
+leather strips; the tips were covered with copper sheets which gave them
+weight and balance. At first he pulled awkwardly, catching crabs in the
+hollows and backing into the heft of the waves, but after a time he felt
+the waves as they came, and the oars feathered and caught. While he
+watched ahead and searched the black horizon for the distant sparkle of
+government lights, he fell into the swing of his stroke before he knew
+it, and he was interested and surprised to observe that he swayed to the
+side-wash while he pulled to the rhythm of the waves.
+
+The government lights guided him. He had not paid much attention to them
+before; he had seen their white post standards as he dropped down, day
+after day, but his skiff, drawing only five inches of water, passed over
+the shallowest crossings and along the most gradually sloping sandbars.
+Now he must keep to the deep water, follow the majestic curves and
+sweeps of the meandering channel, lest he collide with a boiling eddy,
+ram the shore line of sunken trees, or climb the point of a towhead.
+
+It was all a new experience, and its novelty compelled him at times to
+pause in his efforts to jot down a few hasty words by light of a little
+electric flash to preserve in his memory the sequence of the constantly
+varying features of the night, beginning with the curtain of the
+shanty-boat which flicked its good luck after him, passing the bright,
+clear lights of New Madrid. After leaving far behind their glow against
+the thin haze in the night he "made" the scattered shoals of Point
+Pleasant, and hugged down vanishing Ruddles Point, taking a glimpse of
+Tiptonville--which withdraws year by year from the fatal caving brink of
+its site--wishing as he passed that he might return to that strange
+place and visit Reelfoot Lake three or four miles beyond, where the New
+Madrid earthquakes drowned a forest whose dead stubs rise as monuments
+to the tragedy.
+
+In Little Cypress Bend, twenty-five miles below where he had left the
+young woman, he heard the splash and thud of a caving bank, and felt the
+big rollers from the falling earth twisting and tumbling him about for a
+third of a mile.
+
+It was after 1 o'clock when he looked at his watch. He was beginning to
+feel the pull on his shoulders, and the crick which constantly looking
+over his shoulder to see the lights ahead caused him. The dulness of
+his vision, due to inevitable fatigue, compelled him constantly to sit
+more alert and dash away the fine spray which whipped up from the waves.
+A feeling of listlessness overpowered him. He could not row on forever,
+without resting at all. Taking advantage of a moment of calm in the
+wind, he pulled the bow around and drifted down stern first.
+
+He had lost track of his position; he had not counted the lights, and
+now for many miles there was no town distinguishable. He had felt the
+loneliness of a mile-breadth; now he wondered whether he was in Missouri
+or Arkansas, whether he had come forty miles or eighty, and after a
+little he began to worry for fear he might have gone more than a
+hundred.
+
+With the wind astern or nearly astern, he knew that he had pulled four
+or five miles an hour, and he did not know how fast the current of the
+river ran; it might be four miles or eight miles. In ten hours he might
+leave more than a hundred miles of river bank behind him.
+
+A new sensation began to possess him: the feeling that he was not alone.
+He looked around, while he rested trying to find what proximity thus
+affected him. The wind? Those dull banks, seemingly so distant? Perhaps
+some fellow traveller? It was none of those things.
+
+It was the river! The "feel" of the flood was that of a person. He could
+not shake off the sensation, which seemed absurd. He shook his head
+resolutely and then searched through the gloom to discover what eyes
+might be shining in it. He saw the inevitable government lights between
+which was deep water and a safe channel. He had but to keep on the line
+between the lights, cutting across when he spied another one far ahead.
+The lights but accentuated the certainty that on all sides, but a little
+way from him, a host of invisible beings speculated on his presence and
+influenced his course.
+
+A newspaper man of much experience could not help but protest in
+his practical mind against such a determination of the invisible
+and the unknown to give him such nonsensical ideas. He had in play,
+in intellectual persiflage, and with some show of traditional
+reasonableness, called Nelia Crele "a river goddess." She was very
+well placed in his mind--a reckless woman, pretty, with a fine
+character for a masterpiece of fiction (should he ever get to the
+story-writing stage) and a delight to think about; commanding, too,
+mysterious and exacting; and now he thought it might be the
+laughter of her voice that carried in the wind, not a mocking
+laugh, nor a jeering one, but one of sweet encouragement which
+neither distance nor circumstances could dismiss from a distressed
+and reluctant heart, let alone a heart so willing to receive as
+his.
+
+Lester Terabon accepted the possibility of river lore and proclaimed
+beliefs. Fishermen, store-boaters, trippers, pirates, and all sorts of
+the shanty-boaters whom he had interviewed on his way down had solemnly
+assured him that there were spirits who promenaded down mid-stream, and
+who sometimes could be seen.
+
+Terabon was sorry when his cool, calculating mind refused to believe his
+eyes, which saw shapes; his flesh, which felt creeps; his ears, which
+heard voices; and his nostrils, which caught a whiff of a faint, sweet
+perfume more exquisite than any which he remembered. He knew that when
+he had kissed the river goddess whose eyes were blue, whose flesh was
+fair, whose grace was lovely, he had tasted that nectar and sniffed that
+ambrosia. He wondered if she were near him, watching to see whether he
+performed well the task which she had set for him, the rescue of the
+husband who had forfeited her love, and yet who still was under her
+protection since in his indignant sorrow he had supposed himself capable
+of finding and retaining her.
+
+Terabon would have liked nothing better than to believe what the
+Grecians used to believe, that goddesses and gods do come down to the
+earth to mingle among mankind. He fought the impossibility with his
+reason, and night winds laughed at him, while the voices of the waves
+chuckled at his predicament. They assailed him with their presence like
+living things, and then roared away to give room to new voices and new
+presences.
+
+"Anyhow," Terabon laughed, in spite of himself, "you're good company,
+Old Mississip'!"
+
+Yet he felt the chilling and depressing possibility that he might never
+again see that woman who would remain as a "river goddess" in his
+imagination. He had been heart-free, a bystander in the world's affairs.
+Now he knew what it was to see the memory of a woman rise unbidden to
+disturb his calculations; more than that, too, he was a part of the
+affairs of the River People.
+
+As a reporter "back home" he had never been able quite to reconcile
+himself to his constant position as a spectator, a neutral observer,
+obliged to write news without feeling and impartially. A politician
+could look him in the eye and tell him any smooth lie, and he could not,
+with white heat, deny the statement. He could not rise with his own
+strength to champion the cause of what he knew to be right against
+wrong; he could not elaborate on the details of things that he felt most
+interested in, but must consult the fancies of a not-particularly
+discriminating public, whose average intelligence, according to some
+learned students, must be placed at seventeen-years plus. As he was
+twenty-four plus, Terabon was immensely discouraged with the public when
+he had set forth down the Mississippi.
+
+Now he was on the way from a river goddess to interfere with the
+infamous plans of river pirates, through a dry gale out of the north, on
+the winding course of the Mississippi, a transition which troubled the
+self-possession while it awakened the spirit of the young man.
+
+Dawn broke on the troubled river, and the prospect was enchanting to the
+heroic in the mind of the skiff-tripper. He could not be sure which was
+east or west, for the gray light appeared on all sides, in spots and
+patches of varying size. No gleam reflected from the yellow clay of the
+tumbling and tortured waters. As far as he could see there was light,
+but not a bright light. Dull purples, muddy waters, gray tree trunks,
+black limbs against dark clouds; Terabon felt the weariness of a desert,
+the melancholy of a wet, dripping-tree wilderness, and of a tumbling
+waste of waters; and yet never had the solid body of the stream been so
+awe-inspiring as in that hour of creeping and insinuating dawn.
+
+He ran out into the main river again, and a wonderful prospect opened
+before his eyes. Sandbars spread out for miles across the river and
+lengthwise of the river; the bulk of the stream seemed broken up into
+channels and chutes and wandering waterways. He saw column after column
+of lines of spiles, like black teeth, through which the water broke with
+protesting foam.
+
+When he thought to reckon up, as he passed Osceola Bar, he found that he
+had come ninety-five miles. Yankee Bar was only five or six miles below
+him, and he eagerly pulled down to inspect the long beaches, the chutes
+and channels, which the river pirates had used for not less than 150
+years; where they still had their rendezvous.
+
+Wild ducks and geese were there in many flocks. There were waters
+sheltered from the wind by willow patches. The woods of Plum Point
+Peninsula were heavy and dark. The river main current slashed down the
+miles upon miles of Craighead Point, and shot across to impinge upon
+Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1, where a made dirt bank was silhouetted against
+the sky.
+
+Not until his binoculars rested upon the bar at the foot of Fort Pillow
+Bluff did Terabon's eyes discover any human beings, and then he saw a
+white houseboat with a red hull. He headed toward it to ask the familiar
+river question.
+
+"No, suh!" the lank, sharp-eyed fisherman shook his head. "Theh's no
+motorboat landed up theh, not this week. Who all mout you be?"
+
+"Lester Terabon; I'm a newspaper writer; I live in New York; I came down
+the Mississippi looking for things to tell about in the newspapers. You
+see, lots of people hardly know there's a Mississippi River, and it's
+the most interesting place I ever heard of."
+
+"Terabon? I expect you all's the feller Whiskey Williams was tellin'
+about; yo'n a feller name of Carline was up by No. 8. He said yo' had
+one of them writin' machines right into a skift. Sho! An' yo' have! The
+woman an' me'd jes' love to see yo' all use hit."
+
+"You'll see me," Terabon laughed, "if you'll let me sit by your stove.
+I've some writing I could do. Here's a goose for dinner, too."
+
+"Sho! The woman shore will love to cook that goose! I'm a fisherman but
+no hunter. 'Tain't of'en we git a roast bird!"
+
+So Terabon sat by the stove, writing. He wrote for more than an
+hour--everything he could remember, with the aid of his pencilled
+midnight notes, about that long run down. With his maps before him he
+recognized the bends and reaches, the sandbars and islands which had
+loomed up in the dark. Of all the parts of the river, the hundred miles
+from Island No. 10 down to Fort Pillow became the most familiar to his
+thoughts, black though the night had been. Even each government light
+began to have characteristics, and the sky-line of levee, wilderness,
+sandbar, and caving bank grew more and more defined.
+
+Having written his notes, and Jeff Slamey having fingered the nine
+loose-leaf sheets with exclamatory interest and delight, Terabon said he
+must go rest awhile.
+
+"Yas, suh," the fisherman cried, "when a man's pulled a hundred mile he
+shore needs sleep. When the woman's got that goose cooked, I bet yo'll
+be ready to eat, too."
+
+So Terabon turned in to sleep. He was awakened at last by the sizzling
+of a goose getting its final basting. He started up, and Slamey said:
+
+"Hit's ready. I bet yo' feel betteh, now; six hours asleep!"
+
+It didn't seem like six minutes of dreamless recreation.
+
+With night the wind fell. The flood of sunset brilliance spread down the
+radiant sandbars and the bright waterways. The trees were plated with
+silver and gold, and the sweep of the caving bend was a dark shadow
+against which the river current swept with ceaseless attack.
+
+For hours that night Terabon amused his host with his adventures, except
+that he made but most casual mention of the woman whom Carline was
+seeking. He was cautious, too, about the motorboat and the companion
+who had taken Carline down the river, till Slamey burst out:
+
+"I know that feller. He's a bad man; he's a river rat. If he don't kill
+Gus Carline, I don't know these yeah riveh fellers. They use down
+thisaway every winter. I know; I know them all. I leave them alone, an'
+they leave me alone. I knew they was comin'. They got three four boats
+now. One feller, name of Prebol--he's bad, too--was shot by a lady above
+Cairo. He's with a coupla gamblers to Caruthersville now. Everybody
+stops yeah; I know everybody; everybody knows me."
+
+The next day was calm all day long, and Terabon went up the bank to
+shoot squirrels or other woods game; he went almost up to the Plum
+Point, killed several head of game, and rejoiced in the bayous and
+sloughs and chutes of a changing land.
+
+The following morning he was hailed by Slamey:
+
+"Hi--i, Terabon! Theh's a shanty-boat up the head of Flower Island Bar
+jes' drappin' in. They've floated down all night!"
+
+Through his glasses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the
+dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.
+
+They were too far away for him to distinguish their personalities, but
+one was a tall, active man, the other obviously chunky, and when they
+ran their lines out and made fast to half-buried snags, it was with the
+quick decision of men used to work against currents and to unison of
+effort. There was something suggestive in their bearing, their scrutiny
+up and down the river, their standing close to each other as they
+talked. If Terabon had not suspected them of being pirates, their
+attitude and actions would have betrayed them.
+
+Terabon, after a little while, pulled up the eddy toward them; he was
+willing to take a long chance. Few men resent a newspaper man's
+presence. The worst of them like to put themselves, their ideas, right
+with the world. Terabon risked their knavery to win their approbation.
+Come what might, he would seek to save Augustus Carline from the
+consequences of his ignorance, money, folly, and remorse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+The flow of the Mississippi River is down stream--a perfectly absurd and
+trite statement at first thought. On second thought, one reverts to the
+people who are always trying to fight their way up that adverse current,
+with the thrust of two miles perpendicular descent and the body of a
+thousand storms in its rush.
+
+There are steamers which endeavour to stem the current, but they make
+scant headway; sometimes a fugitive afraid of the rails will pull up
+stream; the birds do fly with the spring winds against the retreat of
+winter; but all these things are trifles, and merely accentuate the fact
+that everything goes down.
+
+The sandbars are not fixed, they are literally rivers of sand flowing
+down, tormenting the current, and keeping human beings speculating on
+their probable course and the effect, when after a few years on a point,
+they disappear under the water. Later they will lunge up and out into
+the wind again, gallumphing along, some coarse gravel bars, some yellow
+sand, some white sand, some fine quicksand, some gritty mud, and others
+of mud almost fit to use in polishing silver.
+
+Thousands of people in shanty-boats, skiff's, fancy little yachts, and
+jon-boats, rag-shacks on rafts, and serviceable cruisers drift down with
+the flood, and are a part of it.
+
+Autumn was passing; most of the birds had speeded south when the wild
+geese brought the alarm that a cold norther was coming. When the storm
+had gone by, shanty-boaters, having shivered with the cold, determined
+not to be caught again. The sunshine of the evening, when the wind died,
+saw boats drifting out for the all-night run. Dawn, calm and serene,
+found boats moving out into mid-channel more or less in haste.
+
+So they floated down, sometimes within a few hundred feet of other
+boats, sometimes in merry fleets tied together by ropes and common
+joyousness, sometimes alone in the midst of the vacant waters. The
+migration of the shanty-boaters was watched with mingled hate, envy, and
+admiration by Up-the-Bank folks, who pretend to despise those who live
+as they please.
+
+And Nelia Carline pulled out into the current and followed her river
+friend, Lester Terabon, who had gone on ahead to save her husband from
+the river pirates. She despised her husband more as she let her mind
+dwell on the man who had shown no common frailties while he did enjoy a
+comradeship which included the charm of a pretty woman, recognizing her
+equality, and not permitting her to forget for a moment that he knew she
+was lovely, as well as intelligent.
+
+She had not noticed that fact so much at the time, as afterward, when
+she subjected him to the merciless scrutiny of a woman who has
+heretofore discovered in men only depravity, ignorance, selfishness, or
+brutality. Her first thought had been to use Terabon, play with him,
+and, if she could, hurt him. She knew that there were men who go about
+plaguing women, and as she subjected herself to grim analysis, she
+realized that in her disappointment and humiliation she would have hurt,
+while she hated, men.
+
+The long hours down the river, in pleasant sunshine, with only an
+occasional stroke of the oar to set the boat around broadside to the
+current, enabled her to sit on the bow of her boat and have it out with
+herself. She had never had time to think. Things crowded her
+Up-the-Bank. Now she had all the time in the world, and she used that
+time. She brought out her familiar books and compared the masters with
+her own mind. She could do it--there.
+
+"Ruskin, Carlyle, Old Mississip', Plato, Plutarch, Thoreau, the Bible,
+Shelley, Byron, and I, all together, dropping down," she chuckled,
+catching her breath. "I'm tripping down in that company. And there's
+Terabon. He's a good sport, too, and he'll be better when I've--when
+I've caught him."
+
+Terabon was just a raw young man as regards women. He might flatter
+himself that he knew her sex, and that he could maintain a pose of
+writing her into his notebooks, but she knew. She had seen stunned and
+helpless youth as she brought into play those subtle arts which had
+wrenched from his reluctant and fearful soul the kiss which he thought
+he had asked for, and the phrase of the river goddess, which he thought
+he had invented. She laughed, for she had realized, as she acted, that
+he would put into words the subtle name for which she had played.
+
+It all seemed so easy now that she considered the sequence of her
+inspired moves. Drifting near another shanty-boat, she passed the time
+of day with a runaway couple who had come down the Ohio. They had dinner
+together on their boat. A solitaire and an unscarred wedding ring
+attested to the respectability of the association.
+
+"Larry's a river drifter," the girl explained, "and Daddy's one of those
+set old fellows who hate the river. But Mamma knew it was all right.
+Larry's saved $7,000 in three years. He'd never tell me that till I
+married him, but I knew. We're going clear down to N'Orleans. Are you?"
+
+"Probably."
+
+"And all alone--aren't you afraid?"
+
+"Oh, I'll be all right, won't I?" She looked at the stern-featured
+youth.
+
+"If you can shoot and don't care," Larry replied without a smile.
+
+"I can shoot," Nelia said, showing her pistol.
+
+"That's river Law!" Larry cried, smiling. "That's Law. You came out the
+Upper River?"
+
+"Yes," she nodded.
+
+"Then I bet----" the girl-wife started to speak, but stopped, blushing.
+
+"Yes," Nelia smiled a hard smile. "I'm the woman who shot Prebol above
+Buffalo Island--I had to."
+
+"You did right; men always respect a lady if she don't care who she
+shoots," Larry cried, enthusiastically. "Wish you'd get my wife to learn
+how to shoot. She's gun shy!"
+
+So Nelia coaxed the little wife to shoot, first the 22-calibre repeating
+rifle and then the pistol. When Nelia had to go down they parted good
+friends and Larry thanked her, saying that probably they would meet down
+below somewhere.
+
+"You'll make Caruthersville," Larry told her. "There's a good eddy on
+the east side across from the town. There's likely some boats in there.
+They'll know, perhaps, if the folks you are looking for are around.
+There's an old river man there now, name of Buck. He's a gambler, but
+he's all right, and he'll treat you all right. He's from up in our
+country, on the Ohio. Hardly anybody knows about him. He was always a
+dandy fellow, but he married a woman that wasn't fit to drink his
+coffee. She bothered the life out of him, and--well, he squared up. He
+gave her to the other fellow with a double-barrelled shotgun."
+
+When Nelia ran down to the gambling boat and found Parson Rasba there,
+she enjoyed the idea. Certainly the River Prophet and the river gambler
+were an interesting combination. She was not prepared to find that Buck
+had taken his departure and that Parson Rasba was converting the
+gambling hell into a mission boat. Least of all was she prepared when
+Parson Rasba said with an unsteady voice:
+
+"Theh's a man sick in that other boat, and likely he'd like to see
+somebody."
+
+"Oh, if there's anything I can do!" she exclaimed, as a woman does.
+
+He led the way to the brick-red little boat, the like of which could be
+found in a thousand river eddies. She followed him on board and over to
+the bed. There she looked into the wan countenance and startled eyes of
+Jest Prebol.
+
+"Hit's Mister Prebol," Rasba said. "I know you have no hard feelings
+against him, and I know he has none against you, Missy Carline!"
+
+An introduction to a contrite river pirate, whom she had shot, for the
+moment rendered the young woman speechless. Prebol was less at loss for
+words.
+
+"I'm glad to git to see yo'," he said, feebly. "If I'd knowed yo', I
+shore would have minded my own business. I'm bad, Missy Carline, but I
+ain' mean--not much. Leastwise, not about women. I reckon the boys shore
+will let yo' be now. I made a mistake, an' I 'low to 'pologise to yo'."
+
+"I was--I was scairt to death," she cried, sitting in a chair. "I was
+all alone. I was afraid--the river was so big that night. I was so far
+away. I should have given you fair warning. I'm sorry, too, Jest."
+
+"Lawse!" Prebol choked. "Say hit thataway ag'in----"
+
+"I'm sorry, too, Jest!"
+
+"I cayn't thank yo' all enough," the man-whispered. "I've got friends
+along down the riveh. I'll send word along to them, they'll shore treat
+yo' nice. Treat friends of yourn nice, too. Huh! 'Pologizin' to me afteh
+what I 'lowed to do!"
+
+"We'll be good friends, Jest. The Prophet here and I are good friends,
+too. Aren't we, Parson?"
+
+"I hearn say, Missy," the Prophet said, slowly, picking his words, "I
+hearn say you've a power and a heap of book learning! Books on yo' boat,
+all kinds. What favoured yo' thataway?"
+
+"Oh, I read lots!" she exclaimed, surprised by the sudden shift of
+thought. "Somehow, I've read lots!"
+
+"In my house I had a Bible, an almanac, and the 'Resources of
+Tennessee,' Yo' have that many books?"
+
+"Why, I've a hundred--more than a hundred books!" she answered.
+
+"A Bible?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Would you mind, Missy, comin' on board this boat to-night, an' tellin'
+us about these books you have? I'm not educated; my daddy an' I read the
+Bible, an' tried to understand hit. Seems like we neveh did git to know
+the biggest and bestest of the words."
+
+"You had a dictionary?"
+
+"A which?"
+
+"A dictionary, a book that explains the meaning of all the words!"
+
+"Ho law! A book that tells what words mean, Missy. Where all kin a man
+git to find one of them books?"
+
+"Why, I've got----I'm hungry, Mr. Rasba, I must get something to eat.
+After supper we'll bring some books over here and talk about them!"
+
+"My supper is all ready, keeping warm in the oven," Rasba said. "I
+always cook enough for one more than there is. Yo' know, a vacant chair
+at the table for the Stranger."
+
+"And I came?" she laughed.
+
+"An' yo' came, Missy!" he replied.
+
+"Parson," Prebol pleaded, "I'm alone mos' the time. Mout yo' two eat
+hyar on my bo't? The table--hit'd be comp'ny."
+
+"Certainly we'll come," Nelia promised, "if he'd just soon."
+
+"I'd rather," Rasba assented, and at his tone Nelia felt a curious
+sensation of pity and mischievousness. At the same time, she recovered
+her self-possession. She demanded that Rasba let her help him bring over
+the supper, add a feminine relish, and set the table with a daintiness
+which was an addition to the fascination of her presence. Gaily she fed
+Prebol the delicate things which he was permitted to eat, then sat down
+with Rasba, her face to the light, and Prebol could watch her bantering,
+teasing, teaching Parson Rasba things he had never known he lacked.
+
+After supper she brought over a basket full of books, twenty volumes.
+She dumped them onto the table, leather, cloth, and board covers, of
+red, blue, gray, brown, and other gay colours. Parson Rasba had seen
+government documents and even some magazines with picture covers, but in
+the mountains where he had ridden his Big Circuit with such a disastrous
+end he had never seen such books. He hesitated to touch one; he cried
+out when three or four slipped off the pile onto the floor.
+
+"Missy, won't they git muddied up!"
+
+"They're to read!" she told him. "Listen," and she began to
+read--poetry, prose at random.
+
+The Prophet did not know, he had never been trained to know--as few men
+ever are trained--how to combat feminine malice and spoiled power. He
+listened, but not with averted eyes. Prebol, himself a spectator at a
+scene different from any he had ever witnessed, was still enough more
+sophisticated to know what she was doing, and he was delighted.
+
+By and by the injured man drifted into slumber, but Rasba gave no sign
+of flagging interest, no traces of a mind astray from the subject at
+hand. He felt that he must make the most of this revelation, which came
+after the countless revelations which he had had since arriving down the
+river. There was a fear clutching at his heart that it might end; that
+in a moment this woman might depart and leave him unenlightened, and
+unable ever to find for himself the unimaginable world of words which
+she plucked out of those books and pinned into the great vacant spaces
+of his mind which he had kept empty all these years--not knowing that he
+was waiting for this night, when he should have the Mississippi bring
+into his eddy, alongside his own mission boat, what he most needed.
+
+He sat there, a great, pathetic figure, shaggy, his heart thumping,
+taking from this trim, neat, beautiful woman the riches which she so
+casually, almost wantonly, threw to him in passing.
+
+The corridors of his mind echoed to the tread of hosts; he heard the
+rumblings of history, the songs of poets whose words are pitched to the
+music of the skies, and he hung word pictures which Ruskin had painted
+in his imagination.
+
+Fate had waited long to give him this night. It had waited till the man
+was ready, then with a lavish hand the storehouses of the master
+intellects of the world were opened to him, for him to help himself.
+Nelia suddenly started up from her chair and looked around, herself the
+victim of her own raillery, which had grown to be an understanding of
+the pathetic hunger of the man for these things.
+
+It was daylight, and the flood of the sunrise was at hand.
+
+"Parson," she said, "do you like these things--these books?"
+
+"Missy," he whispered, "I could near repeat, word for word, all those
+things you've said and read to me to-night."
+
+"There are lots more," she laughed. "I want to do something for your
+mission boat, will you let me?"
+
+"Lawse! Yo've he'ped me now more'n yo' know!"
+
+She smiled the smile that women have had from all the ages, for she knew
+a thousand times more than even the Prophet.
+
+"I'll give you a set of all these books!" she said; "all the books that
+I have. Not these, my old pals--yes, these books, Mr. Rasba. If you'll
+take them? I'll get another lot down below."
+
+"Lawd God! Give me yo' books!"
+
+"Oh, they're not expensive--they're----"
+
+"They're yours. Cayn't yo' see? It's your own books, an' hit's fo' my
+work. I neveh knowed how good men could be, an' they give me that boat
+fo' a mission boat. Now--now--missy--I cayn't tell yo'--I've no
+words----"
+
+And with gratitude, with the simplicity of a mountain parson, he dropped
+on his knees and thanked God. As he told his humility, Prebol wakened
+from a deep and restful sleep to listen in amazement.
+
+When at last Rasba looked up Nelia was gone. The books were on the table
+and he found another stack heaped up on the deck of the mission boat.
+But the woman was gone, and when he looked down the river he saw
+something flicker and vanish in the distance.
+
+He stared, hurt; he choked, for a minute, in protest, then carried that
+immeasurable treasure into his cabin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Renn Doss, the false friend, saw the danger of the recognition of the
+firearms by Carline. The savage swing of a half pound of fine shot
+braided up in a rawhide bag, and a good aim, reduced Carline to an inert
+figure of a man. "Renn Doss" was Hilt Despard, pirate captain, whose
+instantaneous action always had served him well in moments of peril.
+
+The three men carried Carline to a bunk and dropped him on it. They
+covered him up and emptied a cupful of whiskey on his pillow and
+clothes. They even poured a few spoonfuls down his throat. They thus
+changed him to what might be called a "natural condition."
+
+Then, sitting around the stove, they whispered among themselves,
+discussing what they had better do. Half a hundred possibilities
+occurred to their fertile fancies and replete memories. Men and women
+who have always led sheltered lives can little understand or know what a
+pirate must understand and know even to live let alone be successful.
+
+"What's Terabon up to?" Despard demanded. "Here he is, drappin' down by
+Fort Pillow Landing, running around. Where's that girl he had up above
+New Madrid? What's his game? Coming up here and talking to us? Asking us
+all about the river and things--writin' it for the newspapers?"
+
+"That woman's this Carline's wife!" Jet sneered.
+
+"Sure! An' here's Terabon an' here's Carline. Terabon don't talk none
+about that woman--nor about Carline," Dock grumbled.
+
+"I bet Terabon would be sorry none if Carline hyar dropped out. Y' know
+she's Old Crele's gal," Jet said. "Crele's a good feller. Sent word
+down to have us take cyar of her, an' Prebol, the fool, didn't know 'er,
+hadn't heard. Look what she give him, bang in the shoulder! That old
+Prophet'll take cyar of him, course. See how hit works out. She shined
+up to Terabon, all right."
+
+"I 'low I better talk to him," Despard suggested. "Terabon's a good
+sport. He said, you' know, that graftin' and whiskey boatin', an'
+robbin' the bank wa'n't none of his business. He said, course, he could
+write it down in his notes, but without names, 'count of somebody might
+read somethin' in them an' get some good friend of his in Dutch. He said
+it wouldn't be right for him to know about somebody robbin' a
+commissary, or a bank, or killin' somebody, because if somebody like a
+sheriff or detective got onto it, they might blame him, or somethin'."
+
+"I like that Terabon!" Jet declared. "Y'see how he is. He says he's
+satisfied, makin' a fair living, gettin' notes so's he can write them
+magazine stories, an' if he was to try to rob the banks, he'd have to
+learn how, same's writin' for newspapers. An' probably he wouldn't have
+the nerve to do it really, 'count of his maw and paw bein' the kind they
+was. He told me hisself that they made him go to Sunday school when he
+was a kid, an' things like that spoil a man for graftin'. Stands to
+reason, all right, the way he talks. I like him; he knows enough to mind
+his own business."
+
+"He's comin' up to-night to go after geese on the bar. We'll talk to
+him. He'll look that business over, level-headed. That motorboat any
+good?"
+
+"Nothin' extra. He's got ready money, though, I forgot that," Despard
+grinned, walking over to the hapless victim of his black-jack skill.
+
+The three divided nearly thirteen hundred dollars among them. The money
+made them good humoured and they had some compassion for their prisoner.
+One of them noticed that a skiff was coming up from Fort Pillow Landing,
+and fifteen minutes later Terabon was talking to Despard on the snag to
+one prong of which was fastened the line of Carline's motorboat.
+
+"I was wondering where I'd see you again," Terabon said. "Didn't have a
+chance at New Madrid, saw you was in business, so I didn't follow up
+none."
+
+"I was wondering if you had a line on that," Despard said, doubtfully.
+"Y'know that woman you was staying with up on Island Ten Bar? Well, we
+got her man in here full's a fish. Lookin' for his woman, an' he's no
+good. Fell off the cabin, hit a spark in the back of the head when the
+water sucked when that steamboat went by this morning. He'd ought to go
+down to Memphis hospital, but--Well, we can't take 'im. You know how
+that is."
+
+"Be glad to help you boys out any way I can," Terabon said. "I'll run
+him down."
+
+"Say, would you? We don't want him on our hands," the pirate explained.
+"We'd get to see you down b'low some'rs."
+
+"Sure, I would," Terabon exclaimed. "Fact is, the woman said it'd be a
+favour to her, too, if I'd get him home. She'll be dropping down likely.
+Darn nice girl, but quick tempered."
+
+"That's right; quick ain't no name for it. She plugged a friend of mine
+up by Buffalo Island----"
+
+"Prebol? I heard about him. She was scairt."
+
+"She needn't be, never again!" Despard grinned. "When a lady can handle
+a river Law like she does, us bad uns are real nice!"
+
+Terabon laughed, and the two went into the cabin-boat where Carline lay
+on the bunk. Terabon ran his hand around the man's head and neck, found
+the lump near the base of the skull, found that the neck wasn't broken,
+and made sure that the heart was beating--things a reporter naturally
+learns to do in police-station and hospital experience.
+
+Jet brought the motorboat down to the stern of the cabin-boat, and the
+four carried Carline on board. They put him in his bunk, and Terabon,
+his skiff towing astern, steered out into the main current and soon
+faded down by Craighead Point Bar.
+
+"I knowed he'd be all right," Despard declared. "He'll take him down to
+Memphis, and out of our way. I'd 'a' hated to kill him; it ain't no use
+killin' a man less'n it's necessary. We got what we was after. Course,
+if we'd rewarded him, likely we'd got a lot, but it ain't safe, holdin'
+a man for rewards ain't."
+
+"That boat'd been a good one to travel in," Jet suggested.
+
+"Everybody'd knowed it was Carline's, an' it wa'n't worth fixing over.
+Hull not much good, and the motor's been abused some. We'll do better'n
+that."
+
+They had rid themselves of an incumbrance. They had made an acquaintance
+who was making himself useful. They were considerably richer than they
+had been for some time.
+
+"I'd like to drap into Mendova," Jet mused. "We ain't had what you'd
+call a time----"
+
+"Let's kill some birds first," Gaspard suggested. "I got a hunch that
+Yankee Bar's a good bet for us for a little while. We dassn't look into
+Memphis, 'count of last trip down. Mendova's all right, but wait'll
+we've hunted Yankee Bar."
+
+The money burned in their pockets, but as they stood looking out at the
+long, beautiful Yankee Bar its appeal went home. For more than a hundred
+years generations of pirates had used there, and no one knows how many
+tragedies have left their stain in the great band around from Gold Dust
+Landing to Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1.
+
+After dark they rowed over to the point and put out their decoys, dug
+their pits, screened them, and brushed over their tracks in the sand.
+Then they played cards till midnight, turned in for a little sleep, and
+turned out again in the black morning to go to their places with
+repeating shotguns and cripple-killer rifles in their hands.
+
+When they were in their places, and the river silence prevailed, they
+saw the stars overhead, the reflections on sand and water around them,
+and the quivering change as air currents moved in the dark--the things
+that walk in the night. They heard, at intervals, many voices. Some they
+knew as the fluent music of migrant geese flying over on long laps of
+their fall flight, but some they did not know, except that they were
+river voices.
+
+Ducks flew by no higher than the tops of the willow trees up the bar,
+their wings whistling and their voices eager in the dark. The lurkers
+saw these birds darting by like black streaks, tempting vain shots, but
+they were old hunters, and knew they wanted at least a little light.
+Over on the mainland they heard the noises of wilderness animals, and
+away off yonder a mule's "he-haw" reverberated through the bottoms and
+over bars and river.
+
+For these things, if the pirates had only known it, they found the world
+endurable. Each in his own pit, given over to his own thoughts, they
+thrilled to the joy of living. All they wanted, really, was this kind of
+thing; hunting in fall and winter, fishing in the summer, and occasional
+visits to town for another kind of thrill, another sort of excitement.
+But their boyhood had been passed in privation, their youth amid
+temptations of appetite and vice, and now they were hopelessly mixed as
+to what they liked, what they didn't like, what the world would do for
+them, and what they would do to the world. Weaklings, uneducated,
+without balance; habit-ridden, yet with all that miserable inheritance
+from the world, they waited there rigid, motionless, their hearts
+thrilling to the increasing music of the march of dawn across the
+bottoms of the Mississippi.
+
+False dawn flushed and faded almost like a deliberate lightning flash.
+Then dawn appeared, marking down the gray lines of the wilderness trees
+with one stroke, sweeping out all the stars with another brush,
+revealing the flocks of birds glistening against the sky while yet the
+earth was in shade. The watchers spied a score of birds, great geese far
+to the northward, coming right in line with them. They waited for a few
+seconds--ages long. Then one of the men cried:
+
+"They're stoopin', boys! They're comin'!"
+
+The wild geese, coming down a magnificent slant from a mile height,
+headed straight for Yankee Bar. Will birds never learn? They ploughed
+down with their wings folding, and poised. Their voices grew louder and
+louder as they approached.
+
+With a hissing roar of their wings they pounded down out of the great,
+safe heights and circled around and inward. With a shout the three men
+started up through their masks and with levelled guns opened fire.
+
+Too late the old gander at the point of the "V" began to climb; too late
+the older birds in the point screamed and gathered their strength. The
+river men turned their black muzzles against the necks of the young tail
+birds of the feathered procession and brought them tumbling down out of
+the line to the ground, where on the hard sand two of them split their
+breasts and exposed thick layers of fat dripping with oil.
+
+The cries of the fleeing birds, the echoes of the barking guns, died
+away. The men shouted their joy in their success, gathered up their
+victims, scurried pack to cover, brushing over their tracks, and
+crouched down again, to await another flock.
+
+Hunger drove them to their cabin-boat within an hour. They had thought
+they wanted to get some more birds, but in fact they knew they had
+enough. They went over to their boat, cooked up a big breakfast, and sat
+around the fire smoking and talking it over. They chattered like boys.
+They were gleeful, innocent, harmless! But only for a time. Then the
+hunted feeling returned to them. Once more they had a back track to
+watch and ambushes to be wary of. They wanted to go to Mendova, but
+again they didn't want to go there. They didn't know but what Mendova
+might be watching for them, the same as Memphis was. Certainly, they
+determined, they must go to Mendova after dark, and see a friend who
+would put them wise to actual conditions around town.
+
+They took catnaps, having had too little sleep, and yet they could not
+sleep deeply. They watched the shanty-boats which dropped down the river
+at intervals, most of them in the main current close to the far bank,
+and often hardly visible against the mottled background of caving earth,
+fallen trees, and flickering mirage. Their restlessness was silent,
+morose, and one of them was always on the lookout.
+
+Despard himself was on watch in the afternoon. He sat just inside the
+kitchen door, out of the sunshine, in a comfortable rocking chair. Two
+windows and the stern door gave him a wide view of the river, sandbars
+and eddy. It seemed but a minute, but he had fallen into a doze, when
+the splash of a shanty-boat sweeps awakened all the crew with a sudden,
+frightened start. Whispers, hardly audible, hailed in alarm. The three,
+crouching in involuntary doubt and dismay, glared at the newcomer.
+
+It was a woman drifting in. Apparently she intended to land there, and
+the three men stared at her.
+
+"His wife!" Despard said with soundless lips. The others nodded their
+recognition.
+
+Mrs. Carline had run into the great dead eddy at the foot of Yankee
+Lower Bar, turned up in the slow reverse eddy of the chute, and was
+coming by their boat at the slowest possible speed.
+
+Despard pulled his soft shirt collar, straightened his tie, hitched his
+suspenders, put on his coat, walked out on the stern deck, and, after a
+glance around, seemed suddenly to discover the stranger.
+
+"Howdy!" he nodded, touching his cap respectfully, and gazing with
+flickering eyes at the woman whose marksmanship entitled her to the
+greatest respect.
+
+"Howdy!" she nodded, scrutinizing him with level eyes. "Where am I?"
+
+"Yankee Bar. Them's Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1."
+
+"Do you know Jest Prebol?"
+
+"Yessum." Despard's head bobbed in alarmed, unwilling assent.
+
+"I thought perhaps you'd like to know that he's getting along all
+right."
+
+"I bet he learnt his lesson," Despard grimaced.
+
+"What? I don't just understand."
+
+"About bein' impudent to a lady that can shoot--straight!"
+
+A flicker moved the woman's countenance, and she smiled, oddly.
+
+"Oh, any one is likely to make mistakes!"
+
+"Darn fools is, Miss Crele. And you Old Crele's girl! He might of
+knowed!"
+
+The other two stepped out to help enjoy the conversation and the
+scenery.
+
+"You know me?" she demanded.
+
+"Yessum, we shore do. My name's Despard--Jet here and Cope."
+
+She acknowledged the introductions.
+
+"I've friends down here," she said, with a little catch of her breath.
+"I was wondering if you--any of you gentlemen had seen them?"
+
+"Your man, Gus Carline an' that writin' feller, Terabon?" Jet asked,
+without delicacy. Her cheeks flamed.
+
+"Yes!" she whispered.
+
+"Terabon took him down to Mendova or Memphis," Despard said. "Carline
+was--was on the cabin and the boat lurched when the steamboat passing
+drawed. He drapped over and hit a spark plug on the head!"
+
+"Was he badly hurt?"
+
+"Not much--kind of a lump, that's all."
+
+She looked down at Fort Pillow Bluff. The pirates awaited her pleasure,
+staring at her to their heart's content. They envied her husband and
+Terabon; they felt the strangeness of the situation. She was following
+those two men down. She was part of the river tide, drifting by; she had
+shot Prebol, their pal, and had cleverly ascertained their knowledge of
+him while insuring that they had fair warning.
+
+Her boat drifted down till it was opposite them, and then, with quick
+decision, she caught up a handy line, and said:
+
+"I'm going to tie in a little while. I've been alone clear down from
+Caruthersville; I want to talk to somebody!"
+
+She threw the rope, and they caught and made it fast. They swung her
+boat in, ran a plank from stern to bow, and Despard gave her his hand.
+She came on board, and they sat on the stern deck to talk. Only one kind
+of woman could have done that with safety, but she was that kind. She
+had shot a man down for a look.
+
+The three pirates took one of the fat young geese, plucked and dressed
+it, and baked it in a hot oven, with dressing, sweet potatoes,
+hot-bread, and a pudding which she mixed up herself.
+
+For three hours they gossiped, and before she knew it, she had told them
+about Prebol, about Parson Rasba introducing them. The pirates shouted
+when she told of Jest's apology. With river frankness, they said they
+thought a heap of Terabon, who minded his own business so cleverly.
+
+"I like him, too," she admitted. "I was afraid you boys might make
+trouble for Carline, though. He don't know much about people, treating
+them right."
+
+"He's one of those ignorant Up-the-Bankers," Despard said.
+
+"Oh, I know him." She shrugged her shoulders a little bitterly.
+
+As they ate the goose in camaraderie, the pirates took to warning and
+advising her about the Lower River; they told her who would treat her
+right, and who wouldn't. They especially warned her against stopping
+anywhere near Island 37.
+
+"They're bad there--and mean." Despard shook his head, gravely.
+
+"I won't stop in there," Nelia promised. "River folks anybody can get
+along with, but those Up-the-Bankers!"
+
+"Hit's seo," Jet cried. "They don't have no feelings for nobody."
+
+"You'll be dropping on down?" Nelia asked.
+
+"D'rectly!" Cope admitted. "We 'lowed we'd stop into Mendova. You stop
+in there an' see Palura; he'll treat you right. He was in the riveh
+hisse'f once. You talk to him----"
+
+"What did Terabon and Mr. Carline go on in? What kind of a boat?"
+
+"A gasolene cruiser."
+
+"Did he say where he'd be?"
+
+"Terabon? No. Ask into Mendova or into Memphis. They can likely tell."
+
+"Thank you, boys! I'm awful glad you've no hard feelings on account of
+my shooting your partner; I couldn't know what good fellows you are.
+We'll see you later."
+
+Her smile bewitched them; she went aboard her boat, pulled over into the
+main current, and floated away in the sunset--her favourite river hour.
+
+After hours of argument, debate, doubts, they, too, pulled out and
+floated past Fort Pillow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Parson Rasba piled the books on the crap table in his cabin and stood
+them in rows with their lettered backs up. He read their titles, which
+were fascinating: "Arabian Nights," "Representative Men," "Plutarch's
+Lives," "Modern Painters," "Romany Rye"--a name that made him shudder,
+for it meant some terrible kind of whiskey to his mind--"Lavengro," a
+foreign thing, "Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases," "The Stem
+Dictionary," "Working Principles of Rhetoric"--he wondered what rhetoric
+meant--"The Fur Buyers' Guide," "Stones of Venice," "The French
+Revolution," "Sartor Resartus," "Poe's Works," "Balzac's Tales," and
+scores of other titles.
+
+All at once the Mississippi had brought down to him these treasures and
+a fair woman with blue eyes and a smile of understanding and sympathy,
+who had handed them to him, saying:
+
+"I want to do something for your mission boat; will you let me?"
+
+No fairyland, no enchantment, no translation from poverty and sorrow to
+a realm of wealth and happiness could have caught the soul of the
+Prophet Rasba as this revelation of unimagined, undreamed-of riches as
+he plucked the fruits of learning and enjoyed their luxuries. He had
+descended in his humility to the last, least task for which he felt
+himself worthy. He had humbly been grateful for even that one thing left
+for him to do: find Jock Drones for his mother.
+
+He had found Jock, and there had been no wrestling with an obdurate
+spirit to send him back home, like a man, to face the law and accept the
+penalty. There had been nothing to it. Jock had seen the light
+instantly, and with relief. His partner had also turned back after a
+decade of doubt and misery, to live a man's part "back home." The two of
+them had handed him a floating Bethel, turning their gambling hell over
+to him as though it were a night's lodging, or a snack, or a handful of
+hickory nuts. The temple of his fathers had been no better for its
+purpose than this beautiful, floating boat.
+
+Then a woman had come floating down, a beautiful strange woman whose
+voice had clutched at his heart, whose smile had deprived him of reason,
+whose eyes had searched his soul. With tears on her lashes she had flung
+to him that treasure-store of learning, and gone on her way, leaving him
+strength and consolation.
+
+He left his treasure and went out to look at the river. Everybody leaves
+everything to look at the river! There is nothing in the world that will
+prevent it. He saw, in the bright morning, that Prebol had raised his
+curtain, and was looking at the river, too, though the effort must have
+caused excruciating pain in his wounded shoulder. Day was growing; from
+end to end of that vast, flowing sheet of water thousands upon thousands
+of old river people were taking a look at the Mississippi.
+
+Rasba carried a good broth over to Prebol for breakfast, and then
+returned to his cabin, having made Prebol comfortable and put a dozen of
+the wonderful books within his reach. Then the River Prophet sat down to
+read his treasures, any and all of them, his lap piled up, three or four
+books in one hand and trying to turn the pages of another in his other
+hand by unskilful manipulation of his thumb. He was literally starving
+for the contents of those books.
+
+He was afraid that his treasure would escape from him; he kept glancing
+from his printed page to the serried ranks on the crap table, and his
+hands unconsciously felt around to make sure that the weight on his lap
+and in his grasp was substantial and real, and not a dream or vision of
+delight.
+
+He forgot to eat; he forgot that he had not slept; he sat oblivious of
+time and river, the past or the future; he grappled with pages of print,
+with broadsides of pictures, with new and thrilling words, with
+sentences like hammer blows, with paragraphs that marched like music,
+with thoughts that had the gay abandon of a bird in song. And the things
+he learned!
+
+When night fell he was dismayed by his weariness, and could not
+understand it. For a little while he ransacked his dulled wits to find
+the explanation, and when he had fixed Prebol for the night, with
+medicine, water, and a lamp handy to matches, he told the patient:
+
+"Seems like the gimp's kind of took out of me. My eyes are sore, an' I
+doubt am I quite well."
+
+"Likely yo' didn't sleep well," Prebol suggested. "A man cayn't sleep
+days if he ain't used to hit."
+
+"Sleep days?" Rasba looked wildly about him.
+
+"Sho! When did I git to sleep, why, I ain't slept--I----Lawse!"
+
+Prebol laughed aloud.
+
+"Yo' see, Parson, yo' all cayn't set up all night with a pretty gal an'
+not sleep hit off. Yo' shore'll git tired, sportin' aroun'."
+
+"Sho!" Rasba snapped, and then a smile broke across his countenance. He
+cried out with laughter, and admitted: "Hit's seo, Prebol! I neveh set
+up with a gal befo' I come down the riveh. Lawse! I plumb forgot."
+
+"I don't wonder," Prebol replied, gravely. "She'd make any man forget.
+She sung me to sleep, an' I slept like I neveh slept befo'."
+
+Rasba went on board his boat and, after a light supper, turned in. For
+a minute he saw in retrospect the most wonderful day in his life, a day
+which a kindly Providence had drawn through thirty or forty hours of
+unforgettable exaltation. Then he settled into the blank, deep sleep of
+a soul at peace and at rest.
+
+When in the full tide of the sunshine he awakened, he went about his
+menial tasks, attending Prebol, cleaning out the boats, shaking up the
+beds, hanging the bedclothes to air in the sun, and getting breakfast.
+On Prebol's suggestion he moved the fleet of boats out into the eddy,
+for the river was falling and they might ground. He went over to
+Caruthersville and bought some supplies, brought Doctor Grell over to
+examine the patient to make sure all was well, killed several squirrels
+and three ducks back in the brakes, and, all the while, thought what
+duties he should enter upon.
+
+Doctor Grell advised that Prebol go down to Memphis, to the hospital, so
+as to have an X-ray examination, and any special treatment which might
+be necessary. The wound was healing nicely, but it would be better to
+make sure.
+
+Rasba took counsel of Prebol. The river man knew the needs of the
+occasion, and he agreed that he had better drop down to Memphis or
+Mendova, preferring the latter place, for he knew people there. He told
+Rasba to line the two small shanty-boats beside the big mission boat,
+and fend them off with wood chunks. The skiffs could float on lines
+alongside or at the stern. The power boat could tow the fleet out into
+the current, and hold it off sandbars or flank the bends.
+
+Rasba did as he was bid, and lashed the boats together with mooring
+lines, pin-head to towing bits, and side to side. Then he floated the
+boats all on one anchor line, and ran the launch up to the bow. He
+hoisted in the anchor, rowed in a skiff out to the motorboat, and swung
+wide in the eddy to run out to the river current. There was a good deal
+of work to the task, and it was afternoon before the fleet reached the
+main stream.
+
+Then Rasba cast off his tow lines, ran the launch back to the fleet, and
+made it fast to the port bow of the big boat, so that it was part of the
+fleet, with its power available to shove ahead or astern. A big oar on
+the mission boat's bow and another one out from Prebol's boat insured a
+short turn if it should be necessary to swing the boats around either
+way.
+
+Rasba carried Prebol on his cot up to the bow of the big boat, and put
+him down where he could help watch the river, and they cast off. Prebol
+knew the bends and reaches, and named most of the landings; they
+gossiped about the people and the places. Prebol told how river rats
+sometimes stole hogs or cattle for food, and Rasba learned for the first
+time of organized piracy, of river men who were banded together for
+stealing what they could, raiding river towns, attacking "sports,"
+tripping the river, and even more desperate enterprises.
+
+While he talked, Prebol slyly watched his listener and thought for a
+long time that Rasba was merely dumbfounded by the atrocities, but at
+last the Prophet grinned:
+
+"An' yo's a riveh rat. Ho law!"
+
+"Why, I didn't say----" Prebol began, but his words faltered.
+
+"Yo' know right smart about such things," Rasba reminded him. "I 'low
+hit were about time somebody shot yo' easy, so's to give yo' repentance
+a chance to catch up with yo' wickedness. Don't yo'?"
+
+Prebol glared at the accusation, but Rasba pretended not to notice.
+
+"Yo' see, Prebol, this world is jes' the hounds a-chasin' the rabbits,
+er the rabbits a-gittin' out the way. The good that's into a man keeps
+a-runnin', to git shut of the sin that's in him, an' theh's a heap of
+wrestlin' when one an' tother catches holt an' fights."
+
+"Hit's seo!" Prebol admitted, reluctantly. He didn't have much use for
+religious arguments. "I wisht yo'd read them books to me, Parson. I
+ain't neveh had much eddycation. I'll watch the riveh, an' warn ye, 'gin
+we make the crossin's."
+
+Nothing suited them better. Rasba read aloud, stabbing each word with
+his finger while he sought the range and rhythm of the sentences, and,
+as they happened to strike a book of fables, their minds could grasp the
+stories and the morals at least sufficiently to entertain and hold their
+attention.
+
+Prebol said, warningly, after a time:
+
+"Betteh hit that sweep a lick, Parson, she's a-swingin' in onto that bar
+p'int."
+
+A few leisurely strokes, the boats drifted away into deep water, and
+Rasba expressed his admiration.
+
+"Sho, Prebol! Yo' seen that bar a mile up. We'd run down onto hit."
+
+"Yas, suh," the wounded man grinned. "Three-four licks on the oars up
+theh, and down yeah yo' save pullin' yo' livin' daylights out, to keep
+from goin' onto a sandbar or into a dryin'-up chute."
+
+"How's that?" Rasba cocked his ear. "Say hit oveh--slow!"
+
+"Why, if yo's into the set of the current up theh, hit ain't strong; yo'
+jes' give two-three licks an' yo' send out clear. Down theh on the bar
+she draws yo' right into shallow water, an' yo' hang up."
+
+Rasba looked up the river; he looked down at the nearing sandbar, and as
+they passed the rippling head in safety he turned a grave face toward
+the pilot.
+
+"Up theh, theh wasn't much suck to hit, but down yeah, afteh yo've
+drawed into the current, theh's a strong drag an' bad shoals?"
+
+"Jes' so!"
+
+"Hit's easy to git shut of sin, away long in the beginnin'," Rasba bit
+his words out, "but when yo' git a long ways down into hit--Ho law!"
+
+Prebol started, caught by surprise. Then both laughed together. They
+could understand each other better and if Prebol felt himself being
+drawn in spite of his own reluctance by a new current in his life, Rasba
+did not fail to gratify the river man's pride by turning always to him
+for advice about the river, its currents and its jeopardies.
+
+"I've tripped down with all kinds," Prebol grinned as he spoke, "but
+this yeah's the firstest time I eveh did get to pilot a mission boat."
+
+"If you take it through in safety, do yo' reckon God will forget?" Rasba
+asked, and Prebol's jaw dropped. He didn't want to be reformed; he had
+no use for religion. He was very well satisfied with his own way of
+living. He objected to being prayed over and the good of his soul
+inquired into--but this Parson Rasba was making the idea interesting.
+
+They anchored for the night in the eddy at the head of Needham's Cut-Off
+Bar, and Prebol was soon asleep, but Rasba sat under the big lamp and
+read. He could read with continuity now; dread that the dream would
+vanish no longer afflicted him. He could read a book without having more
+than two or three other books in his lap.
+
+Sometimes it was almost as though Nelia were speaking the very words he
+read; sometimes he seemed to catch her frown of disapproval. The books,
+more precious than any other treasure could have been, seemed living
+things because she had owned them, because her pencil had marked them,
+and because she had given them all to his service, to fill the barren
+and hungry places in the long-empty halls of his mind.
+
+He would stop his reading to think, and thinking, he would take up a
+book to discover better how to think. He found that his reading and
+thinking worked together for his own information.
+
+He was musing, his mind enjoying the novelty of so many different images
+and ideas and facts, when something trickled among his senses and
+stirred his consciousness into alert expectancy. For a little he was
+curious, and then touched by dismay, for it was music which had roused
+him--music out of the black river night. People about to die sometimes
+hear music, and Parson Rasba unconsciously braced himself for the
+shock.
+
+It grew louder, however, more distinct, and the sound was too gay and
+lively to fit in with his dreams of a heavenly choir. He caught the
+shout of a human voice and he knew that dancers were somewhere, perhaps
+dancers damned to eternal mirth. He went out on the deck and closed the
+door on the light behind him; at first he could see nothing but black
+night. A little later he discovered boats coming down the river, eight
+or nine gleaming windows, and a swinging light hung on a flag staff or
+shanty-boat mast.
+
+As they drew nearer, someone shouted across the night:
+
+"Goo-o-o-d wa-a-a-ter thar?"
+
+"Ya-s-su-uh!" Rasba called back.
+
+"Where'll we come in?"
+
+"Anywhere's b'low me fo' a hundred yards!"
+
+"Thank-e-e!"
+
+Three or four sweeps began to beat the water, and a whole fleet of
+shanty-boats drifted in slowly. They began to turn like a wheel as part
+of them ran into the eddy while the current carried the others down, but
+old river men were at the sweeps, and one of them called the orders:
+
+"Raunch 'er, boys! Raunch 'er! Raunchin's what she needs!"
+
+They floated out of the current into the slow reverse eddy, and coming
+up close to Rasba's fleet, talked back and forth with him till a gleam
+of light through a window struck him clearly out of the dark.
+
+"Hue-e-e!" a shrill woman's voice laughed. "Hit's Rasba, the Riveh
+Prophet Rasba! Did yo' all git to catch Nelia Crele, Parson?"
+
+"Did I git to catch Missy Crele!" he repeated, dazed.
+
+"When yo' drapped out'n Wolf Island Chute, Parson, that night she pulled
+out alone?"
+
+"No'm; I lost her down by the Sucks, but she drapped in by
+Caruthersville an' give me books an' books--all fo' my mission boat!"
+
+"That big boat yourn?"
+
+"Yeh."
+
+"Where all was hit built?"
+
+"I don' remembeh, but Buck done give hit to me, him an' Jock Drones."
+
+"Hi-i-i! Yo' all found the man yo' come a-lookin' fo'. Ho law!"
+
+"Hit's the Riveh Prophet," someone replied to a hail from within, the
+dance ending.
+
+A crowd came tumbling out onto the deck of the big boat of the dance
+hall, everyone talking, laughing, catching their breaths.
+
+"Hi-i! Likely he'll preach to-morrow," a woman cried. "To-morrow's
+Sunday."
+
+"Sunday?" Rasba gasped. "Sunday--I plumb lost track of the days."
+
+"You'll preach, won't yo', Parson? I yain't hearn a sermon in a hell of
+a while," a man jeered, facetiously.
+
+"Suttingly. An' when hit's through, yo'll think of hell jes' as long,"
+Rasba retorted, with asperity, and his wit turned the laugh into a
+cheer.
+
+The fleet anchored a hundred yards up the eddy, and Rasba heard a woman
+say it was after midnight and she'd be blanked if she ever did or would
+dance on Sunday. The dance broke up, the noise of voices lessened, one
+by one the lights went out, and the eddy was still again. But the
+feeling of loneliness was changed.
+
+"Lord God, what'll I preach to them about?" Rasba whispered. "I neveh
+'lowed I'd be called to preach ag'in. Lawse! Lawse! What'll I say?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Carline ascended into the world again. It was a painful ascent, and when
+he looked around him, he recognized the interior of his motorboat cabin,
+heard and felt the throbbing of his motor, and discovered aches and
+pains that made his extremities tingle. He sat up, but the blackness
+that seemed to rise around him caused him to fall hastily back upon the
+stateroom bunk.
+
+He remembered his discovery of his own firearms on the shanty-boat, and
+fear assailed him. He remembered his folly in crying out that those were
+his guns. He might have known he had fallen among thieves. He cursed
+himself, and dread of what might yet follow his indiscretion made him
+whimper with terror. A most disgusting odour of whiskey was in his
+nostrils, and his throat was like a corrugated iron pipe partly filled
+with soot.
+
+The door of the tiny stateroom was closed, but the two ports were open
+to let the air in. It occurred to him that he might be a captive, and
+would be held for ransom. Perhaps the pirates would bleed him for
+$50,000; perhaps they would take all his fortune! He began to cry and
+sob. They might cut his throat, and not give him any chance of escape.
+He had heard of men having had their throats cut down the river.
+
+He tried to sit up again, and succeeded without undue faintness. He
+could not wait, but must know his fate immediately. He found the door
+was unlocked, and when he slipped out into the cabin, he found that
+there was only one man on board, the steersman, who was sitting in the
+engine pit, and steering with the rail wheel instead of the bow-cabin
+one.
+
+He peered out, and found that it was Terabon, who discovered him and
+hailed him, cheerily:
+
+"How are you feeling?"
+
+"Tough--my head!"
+
+"You're lucky to be alive!" Terabon said. "You got in with a crew of
+river pirates, but they let me have you. Did they leave you anything?"
+
+"Leave me anything!" Carline repeated, feeling in his pockets. "I've got
+my watch, and here's----"
+
+He opened up his change pocketbook. There were six or seven dollars in
+change and two or three wadded bills. When he looked for his main
+supply, however, there was a difference. The money was all gone. He was
+stripped to the last dollar in his money belt and of his hidden
+resources.
+
+"They did me!" he choked. "They got all I had!"
+
+"They didn't kill you," Terabon said. "You're lucky. How did they bang
+you and knock you out?"
+
+"Why, I found they had my guns on board----"
+
+"And you accused them?"
+
+"No! I just said they were mine, I was surprised!"
+
+"Then?"
+
+"My light went out."
+
+"When did they get your guns?"
+
+"I woke up, up there, and you were gone. My guns and pocket money were
+gone, too. I thought----"
+
+"You thought I'd robbed you?"
+
+"Ye----Well, I didn't know!"
+
+"This is a devil of a river, old man!" said Terabon. "I guess you
+travelled with the real thing out of New Madrid----"
+
+"Doss, Renald Doss. He said he was a sportsman----"
+
+"Oh, he is, all right, he's a familiar type here on the river. He's the
+kind of a sport who hunts men, Up-the-Bankers and game of that kind.
+He's a very successful hunter, too----"
+
+"He said we'd hunt wild geese. We went up Obion River, and had lots of
+fun, and he said he'd help--he'd help----"
+
+"Find your wife?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Carline was abject. Terabon, however, was caught wordless. This man was
+the husband of the woman for whose sake he had ventured among the
+desperate river rats, and now he realized that he had succeeded in the
+task she had set him. Looking back, he was surprised at the ease of its
+accomplishment, but he was under no illusions regarding the jeopardy he
+had run. He had trusted to his aloofness, his place as a newspaper man,
+and his frankness, to rescue Carline, and he had brought him away.
+
+"You're all righ now," Terabon suggested. "I guess you've had your
+lesson."
+
+"A whole book full of them!" Carline cried. "I owe you something--an
+apology, and my thanks! Where are we going?"
+
+"I was taking you down to a Memphis hospital, or to Mendova----"
+
+"I don't need any hospital. I'm broke; I must get some money. We'll go
+to Mendova. I know some people there. I've heard it was a great old
+town, too! I always wanted to see it."
+
+Terabon looked at him; Carline had learned nothing. For a minute remorse
+and comprehension had flickered in his mind, now he looked ahead to a
+good time in Mendova, to sight-seeing, sporting around, genial friends,
+and all the rest. Argument would do no good, and Terabon retreated from
+his position as friend and helper to that of an observer and a recorder
+of facts. Whatever pity he might feel, he could not help but perceive
+that there was no use trying to help fools.
+
+It was just dusk when they ran into Mendova. The city lights sparkled as
+they turned in the eddy and ran up to the shanty-boat town. They dropped
+an anchor into the deep water and held the boat off the bank by the
+stern while they ran a line up to a six-inch willow to keep the bow to
+the bank. The springy, ten-foot gangplank bridged the gap to the shore.
+
+More than thirty shanty-boats and gasolene cruisers were moored along
+that bank, and from nearly every one peered sharp eyes, taking a look at
+the newcomers.
+
+"Hello, Terabon!" someone hailed, and the newspaper man turned,
+surprised. One never does get over that feeling of astonishment when,
+fifteen hundred miles or so from home, a familiar voice calls one's name
+in greeting.
+
+"Hello!" Terabon replied, heartily, and then shook hands with a market
+hunter he had met for an hour's gossip in the eddy at St. Louis. "Any
+luck, Bill? How's Frank?"
+
+"Averaging fine," was the answer. "Frank's up town. Going clear down
+after all, eh?"
+
+"Probably."
+
+"Any birds on Yankee Bar?"
+
+"I saw some geese there--hunters stopped in, too. How is the flight?"
+
+"We're near the tail of it; mostly they've all gone down. We're going to
+drive for it, and put out our decoys down around Big Island and below."
+
+"Then I'll likely see you down there."
+
+"Sure thing; here's Frank."
+
+Terabon shook hands with the two, introduced Carline, and then the
+hunters cast off and steered away down the stream. They had come more
+than a thousand miles with the migrating ducks and geese, intercepting
+them at resting or feeding places. That touch and go impressed Terabon
+as much as anything he had ever experienced.
+
+He went up town with Carline, who found a cotton broker, a timber
+merchant, and others who knew him. It was easy to draw a check, have it
+cashed, and Carline once more had ready money. Nothing would do but they
+must go around to Palura's to see Mendova's great attraction for
+travellers.
+
+Palura supplied entertainment and excitement for the whole community,
+and this happened to be one of his nights of special effort. Personally,
+Palura was in a temper. Captain Dalkard, of the Mendova Police, had been
+caught between the Citizens' Committee and Palura's frequenters. There
+were 100 citizens in the committee, and Palura's frequenters were
+unnamed, but familiar enough in local affairs.
+
+The cotton broker thought it was a good joke, and he explained the whole
+situation to Terabon and Carline for their entertainment.
+
+"Dalkard called in Policeman Laddam and told him to stand in front of
+Palura's, and tell people to watch out. You see, there's been a lot of
+complaints about people being short changed, having their pockets
+picked, and getting doped there, and some people think it doesn't do the
+town any good. Some think we got to have Palura's for the sake of the
+town's business. I'm neutral, but I like to watch the fun. We'll go down
+there and look in to-night."
+
+They had dinner, and about 9 o'clock they went around to Palura's. It
+was an old market building made over into a pleasure resort, and it
+filled 300 feet front on Jimpson Street and 160 feet on the flanking
+side streets. A bright electric sign covered the front with a flare of
+yellow lights and there was one entrance, under the sign.
+
+As Terabon, Carline, and the cotton broker came along, they saw a tall,
+broad-shouldered, smooth-shaven policeman in uniform standing where the
+lights showed him up.
+
+"Watch your pocketbooks!" the policeman called softly to the patrons.
+"Watch your change; pickpockets, short-changers, and card-stackers work
+the unwary here! Keep sober--look out for knock-out drops!"
+
+He said it over and over again, in a purring, jeering tone, and Terabon
+noticed that he was poised and tense. In the shadows on both sides of
+the policeman Terabon detected figures lurking and he was thrilled by
+the evident fact that one brave policeman had been sent alone into that
+deadly peril to confront a desperate gang of crooks, and that the lone
+policeman gloried to be there.
+
+The cotton broker, neutral that he was, whispered as they disregarded
+the warnings: "Laddam cleaned up Front Street in six months; the mob has
+all come up here, and this is their last stand. It'll hurt business if
+they close this joint up, because the town'll be dead, but I wish
+Palura'd kind of ease down a bit. He's getting rough."
+
+Little hallways and corridors led into dark recesses on either side of
+the building, and faint lights of different colours showed the way to
+certain things. Terabon saw a wonderfully beautiful woman, in furs, with
+sparkling diamonds, and of inimitable grace waiting in a little
+half-curtained cubby hole; he heard a man ask for "Pete," and caught the
+word "game" twice. The sounds were muffled, and a sense of repression
+and expectancy permeated the whole establishment.
+
+They entered a reception room, with little tables around the sides,
+music blaring and blatant, a wide dancing floor, and a scurrying throng.
+All kinds were there: spectators who were sight-seeing; participants who
+were sporting around; men, women, and scoundrels; thugs and their
+prospective victims; people of supposed allurement; and sports of
+insipid, silly pose and tricked-up conspicuousness.
+
+Terabon's gaze swept the throng. Noise and merriment were increasing.
+Liquor was working on the patrons. The life of Mendova was stirring to
+blaring music. The big hall was bare, rough, and gaunt. Dusty flags and
+cobwebs dangled from the rafters and hog-chain braces. A few hard, white
+lights cast a blinding glare straight down on the heads of the dancers
+and drinkers and onlookers.
+
+Business was brisk, and shouts of "Want the waiter!" indicated the
+insistence with which trade was encouraged and even insisted upon. No
+sooner had Terabon and his companions seated themselves than a burly
+flat-face with a stained white apron came and inflicted his determined
+gaze upon them. He sniffed when Terabon ordered plain soda.
+
+"We got a man's drink."
+
+"I'm on the water wagon for awhile," Terabon smiled, and the waiter
+nodded, sympathetically. A tip of a quarter mollified his air of surly
+expectancy completely, and as he put the glasses down he said:
+
+"The Boss is sick the way he's bein' treated. They ain't goin' to git
+away wit' stickin' a bull in front of his door like he was a crook."
+
+Terabon heard a woman at a near-by table making her protest against the
+policeman out in front. No other topic was more than mentioned, and the
+buzz and burr of voices vied with the sound of the band till it ended.
+Then there was a hush.
+
+"Palura!" a whisper rippled in all directions.
+
+Terabon saw a man about 5 feet 10 inches tall, compactly built, square
+shouldered, and just a trifle pursy at the waist line, approaching along
+the dancing floor. He was light on his small feet, his shoulders worked
+with feline grace, but his face was a face as hard as limestone and of
+about the same colour--bluish gray. His eyes were the colour of ice,
+with a greenish tinge. Smooth-shaven cheeks, close-cropped hair,
+wing-like ears, and a little round head were details of a figure that
+might have been heroic--for his jaw was square, his nose large, and his
+forehead straight and broad.
+
+Everyone knew he was going out to throw the policeman, Laddam, into the
+street. The policeman had not hurt business a pennyworth as yet, but
+Palura felt the insult. Palura knew the consequences of failing to meet
+the challenge.
+
+"Give 'im hell!" someone called.
+
+Palura turned and nodded, and a little yelping cheer went up, which
+ceased instantly. Terabon, observing details, saw that Palura's coat
+sagged on the near side--in the shape of an automatic pistol. He saw,
+too, that the man's left sleeve sagged round and hard--a slingshot or
+black-jack.
+
+There was no delay; Palura went straight through to his purpose. He
+disappeared in the dark and narrow entrance way and not a sound was
+audible except the scuffling of feet.
+
+"Palura's killed four men," the cotton broker whispered to Terabon,
+under his breath.
+
+What seemed an age passed. The lights flickered. Terabon looked about in
+alarm lest that gang----
+
+A crash outside brought all to their feet, and the whole crowd fell back
+against the walls. Out of the corridor surged a mass of men, and among
+them stalked a stalwart giant of a man draped with the remnants of a
+policeman's uniform. He had in his right hand a club which he was
+swinging about him, and every six feet a man dropped upon the floor.
+
+Terabon saw Palura writhing, twisting, and working his way among the
+fighting mass. He heard a sharp bark:
+
+"Back, boys!"
+
+Four or five men stumbled back and two rolled out of the way of the feet
+of the policeman. It flashed to Terabon what had been done. They had
+succeeded in getting the policeman into the huge den of vice, where he
+could not legally be without a warrant, where Palura could kill him and
+escape once more on the specious plea of self-defence. Terabon saw the
+grin of perfect hate on Palura's face as both his hands came up with
+automatics in them--a two-handed gunman with his prey.
+
+This would teach the policemen of Mendova to mind their own business!
+Suddenly Policeman Laddam threw his night stick backhanded at the
+infamous scoundrel, and Palura dodged, but not quite quickly nor quite
+far enough. The club whacked noisily against his right elbow and Palura
+uttered a cry of pain as one pistol fell to the floor.
+
+Then Laddam snatched out his own automatic, a 45-calibre gun, three
+pounds or more in weight, and began to shoot, calmly, deliberately, and
+with the artistic appreciation of doing a good job thoroughly.
+
+His first bullet drove Palura straight up, erect; his next carried the
+bully back three steps; his next whirled him around in a sagging spiral,
+and the fourth dropped the dive keeper like a bag of loose potatoes.
+
+Laddam looked around curiously. He had never been there before. Lined up
+on all sides of him were the waiters, bouncers, men of prey, their
+faces ghastly, and three or four of them sick. The silent throng around
+the walls stared at the scene from the partial shadows; no one seemed
+even to be breathing. Then Palura made a horrible gulping sound, and
+writhed as he gave up his last gasp of life.
+
+"Now then!" Laddam looked about him, and his voice was the low roar of a
+man at his kill. "You men pick them up, pack them outside there, and up
+to headquarters. March!"
+
+As one man, the men who had been Palura's marched. They gathered up the
+remains of Palura and the men with broken skulls, and carried them out
+into the street. The crowd followed, men and women both. But outside,
+the hundreds scurried away in all directions, men afraid and women
+choking with horror. Terabon's friend the cotton broker fled with the
+rest, Carline disappeared, but Terabon went to headquarters, writing in
+his pocket notebook the details of this rare and wonderful tragedy.
+
+Policeman Laddam had single-handed charged and captured the last citadel
+of Mendova vice, and the other policemen, when they looked at him, wore
+expressions of wonder and bewilderment. They knew the Committee of 100
+would make him their next chief and a man under whom it would be a
+credit to be a cop.
+
+Terabon, just before dawn, returned toward Mousa Slough. As he did so,
+from a dull corner a whisper greeted him:
+
+"Say, Terabon, is it straight, Palura killed up?"
+
+"Sure thing!"
+
+"Then Mendova's sure gone to hell!" Hilt Despard the river pirate cried.
+"Say, Terabon, there's a lady down by the slough wants to get to talk to
+you."
+
+"Who----?"
+
+"She just dropped in to-night, Nelia Crele! She's into her boat down at
+the head of the sandbar, facing the switch willows. There's a little
+gasolene sternwheeler next below her boat."
+
+"She's dropped in? All right, boys, much obliged!"
+
+They separated.
+
+But when Terabon searched along the slough for Nelia's boat he did not
+find it, and to his amazed anger he found that the gasolene boat in
+which he had arrived was also gone, as well as his own skiff and all his
+outfit.
+
+"Darn this river!" he choked. "But that's a great story I sent of the
+killing of Palura!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+Nelia Crele had laughed in her heart at Elijah Rasba as he sat there
+listening to her reading. She knew what she was doing to the mountain
+parson! She played with his feelings, touched strings of his heart that
+had never been touched before, teased his eyes with a picture of
+feminine grace, stirred his mind with the sense of a woman who was
+bright and who knew so much that he had never known. At the same time,
+there was no malice in it--just the delight in making a strong man
+discover a strength beyond his own, and in humbling a masculine pride by
+the sheer superiority of a woman who had neglected no opportunity to
+satisfy a hunger to know.
+
+She knew the power of a single impression and a clear, quick getaway.
+She left him dazed by the fortune which heaped upon him literary
+classics in a dozen forms--fiction, essays, history, poetry, short
+stories, criticism, fable, and the like; she laughed at her own quick
+liking for the serious-minded, self-deprecatory, old-young man whose big
+innocent eyes displayed a soul enamoured by the spirited intelligence of
+an experienced and rather disillusioned young woman who had fled from
+him partly because she did know what a sting it would give him.
+
+So with light heart and singing tongue she floated away on the river,
+not without a qualm at leaving those books with Rasba; she loved them
+too much, but the sacrifice was so necessary--for his work! The river
+needed him as a missionary. He could help ease the way of the old
+sinners, and perhaps by and by he would reform her, and paint her again
+with goodness where she was weather-beaten.
+
+It is easy to go wrong on the Mississippi--just as easy, or easier, than
+elsewhere in the world. The student of astronomy, gazing into the vast
+spaces of the skies, feels his own insignificance increasing, while the
+magnitude of the constellations grows upon him. What can it matter what
+such a trifling thing, such a mere atom, as himself does when he is to
+the worlds of less size than the smallest of living organisms in a drop
+of water?
+
+Nelia Crele looked around as she left the eddy and saw that her
+houseboat was but a trifle upon a surface containing hundreds of square
+miles. A human being opposite her on the bank was less in proportion
+than a fly on the cabin window pane. Then what could it matter what she
+did? Why shouldn't she be reckless, abandoned, and live in the gaiety of
+ages?
+
+She had read thousands of pages of all kinds with no guide posts or
+moral landmarks. A picture of dangerous delights had come into her
+imagination. Having read and understood so much, she had not failed to
+discover the inevitable Nemesis on the trail of wrongdoing, as well as
+the inevitableness of reward for steadfastness in virtues--but she
+wondered doubtfully what virtue really was, whether she was not absolved
+from many rigid commandments by the failure of the world to keep faith
+with her and reward her for her own patience and atone for her own
+sufferings.
+
+It was easy, only too easy, on the surface to feel that if she wanted to
+be gay and wanton, living for the hour, it was no one's affair but her
+own. She fought the question out in her mind. She fixed her
+determination on the young and, in one sense, inexperienced newspaper
+man whose ambitions pleased her fancy and whose innocence delighted her
+own mood.
+
+He was down the river somewhere, and when she landed in at Mendova in
+the late twilight she saw his skiff swinging from the stern of a
+motorboat. Having made fast near it, she quickly learned that he had
+gone up town, and that someone had heard him say that he was going to
+Palura's.
+
+Palura's! Nelia had heard the fascination of that den's ill-fame. She
+laughed to herself when she thought that Terabon would excuse his going
+there on the ground of its being right in his line of work, that he must
+see that place because otherwise he would not know how to describe it.
+
+"If I can catch him there!" she thought to herself.
+
+She went to Palura's, and Old Mississippi seemed to favour her. She
+found another woman who knew the ropes there and who was glad to help
+her play the game. From a distance Nelia Crele discovered that Terabon
+was with Carline, her own husband. She dismissed him with a shrug of her
+shoulders, and told her companion to take care of him.
+
+Nelia, having plagued the soul of the River Prophet, Rasba, now with
+equal zest turned to seize Terabon, careless of where the game ended if
+only she could begin it and carry it on to her own music and in her own
+measure.
+
+They had it all determined: Carline was to be wedged away with his
+friend, a cotton broker that Daisy--Nelia's newfound accomplice--knew,
+and Terabon was to be tempted to "do the Palace," and he was to be
+caught unaware, by Nelia, who wanted to dance with him, dine with him
+under bright lights, and drink dangerous drinks with him. She knew him
+sober and industrious, good and faithful, a decent, reputable working
+man--she wanted to see him waked up and boisterous, careless for her
+sake and because of her desires.
+
+She just felt wicked, wanted to be wicked, and didn't care how wicked
+she might be. She counted, however, without the bonds which the
+Mississippi River seems at times to cast around its favourites--the
+Spirit of the river which looks after his own.
+
+She had not even seen Policeman Laddam standing at the main entrance of
+the notorious resort, for Daisy had taken her through another door. She
+went to the exclusive "Third," and from there emerged onto the dancing
+floor just as Palura ostentatiously went forth to drive Laddam away, or
+to kill him.
+
+Daisy checked her, for the minute or two of suspense, and then the whole
+scene, the tragedy, was enacted before her gaze. She was not frightened;
+she was not even excited; the thing was so astonishing that she did not
+quite grasp its full import till she saw Palura stumbling back, shot
+again and again. Daisy caught her arm and clutched it in dumb panic, and
+when the policeman calmly bent the cohorts of the dead man to his will
+and carried away his victims, Daisy dragged Nelia away.
+
+Then Daisy disappeared and Nelia was left to her own devices.
+
+She was vexed and disappointed. She knew nothing of the war in Mendova.
+Politics had never engaged her attention, and the significance of the
+artistic killing of Palura did not appear to her mind. She was simply
+possessed by an indignant feminine impatience to think that Terabon had
+escaped, and she was angry when she had only that glimpse of him, as
+with his notebook in hand he raced his pencil across the blank pages,
+jotting down the details and the hasty, essential impressions as he
+caught them.
+
+She heard the exodus. She heard women sobbing and men gasping as they
+swore and fled. She gathered up her own cloak and left with reluctant
+footsteps.
+
+She realized that she had arrived there just one day too late to "do"
+Palura's. The fugitives, as they scurried by, reminded her of some
+description which she had read of the Sack of Rome; or was it the Fall
+of Babylon? Their sins were being visited upon the wicked, and Nelia
+Crele, since she had not sinned, could not thrill with quite the same
+terror and despair of the wretches who had sinned in spite of their
+consciences, instead of through ignorance or wantonness. She took her
+departure not quite able to understand why there had been so much furore
+because one man had been killed.
+
+She was among the last to leave the accursed place, and she saw the
+flight of the ones who had delayed, perhaps to loot, perhaps having just
+awakened to the fact of the tragedy. She turned toward Mousa Slough, and
+her little shanty-boat seemed very cool and bare that late evening. The
+bookshelves were all empty, and she was just a little too tired to
+sleep, just a little too stung by reaction to be happy, and rather too
+much out of temper to be able to think straight and clearly on the
+disappointment.
+
+Mendova had been familiar in her ears since childhood; she had heard
+stories of its wildness, its gayeties, its recklessness. Impression had
+been made upon impression, so that when she had found herself nearing
+the place of her dreams, she was in the mood to enter into its wildest
+and gayest activities; she had expected to, and she had known in her own
+mind that when she met Terabon she would be irresistible.
+
+At last she shuddered. She seemed to hear a voice, the river's voice,
+declare that this thing had happened to prevent her seeking to betray
+herself and Terabon, not to mention that other matter which did not
+affect her thought in the least, her husband's honour.
+
+The idea of her husband's honour made the thing absurd to her. There was
+no such thing as that honour. She had plotted to get Carline out of the
+way now that she heard he was clear of the pirates. On second thought,
+she was sorry that she had been so hasty in returning to the boat,
+wishing that she had followed up Terabon.
+
+She walked out onto the bow deck, and standing in the dark, with her
+door closed, looked up and down the slough. A dozen boats were in sight.
+She heard a number of men and women talking in near-by boats, and the
+few words she heard indicated that the river people had a pretty morsel
+of gossip in the killing of Palura.
+
+She heard men rustling through the weeds and switch willows of the
+boatmen's pathway, and she hailed; she was now a true river woman,
+though she did not know it.
+
+"Say, boys, do you know if Terabon and Carline landed here to-night?"
+
+"We just landed in," one answered. "I don't know."
+
+"Going up town?"
+
+"Yes----"
+
+"I want to know about them----"
+
+"Hit's Nelia Crele!" one exclaimed.
+
+"That's right. Hello, boys--Despard--Jet--Cope!"
+
+"Sure! When'd you land?"
+
+"Late this evening; I was up to Palura's when----"
+
+"That ain't no place fo' a lady."
+
+She laughed aloud, as she added, "I was there when Palura was killed by
+the policeman."
+
+"Palura killed a policeman!" Despard said. "He's killed----"
+
+"No, Palura was killed by a policeman. Shot him dead right on the
+dance-hall floor."
+
+The pirates choked. The thing was unbelievable. They came down to the
+boat and she described the affair briefly, and they demanded details.
+
+They felt that it would vitally affect Mendova. They whispered among
+themselves as to what it meant. They learned that a policeman had been
+stationed in front of the notorious resort and that that policeman had
+done the shooting during a fight with waiters and bouncers and with
+Palura himself.
+
+"We hadn't better get to go up town," Jet whimpered. "Hit don't sound
+right!"
+
+They argued and debated, and finally went on their way, having promised
+Nelia that they would see and tell Terabon, on the quiet, that she had
+come into the slough, and that she wanted to see him.
+
+She waited for some time, hoping that Terabon would come, but finally
+went to sleep. She was tired, and excitement had deserted her. She slept
+more soundly than in some time.
+
+Once she partly awakened, and thought that some drift log had bumped
+into her boat; then she felt a gentle undulation, as of the waves of a
+passing steamer, but she was too sleepy to contemplate that phenomenon
+in a rather narrow water channel around a bend from the main current.
+
+It was not till she had slept long and well that she began to dream
+vividly. She was impatient with dreams; they were always full of
+disappointment.
+
+Daylight came, and sunshine penetrated the window under which she slept.
+The bright rays fell upon her closed eyes and stung her cheeks. She
+awakened with difficulty, and looked around wonderingly. She saw the
+sunlight move along the wall and then drift back again. She felt the
+boat teetering and swaggering. She looked out of the window and saw a
+distant wood across the familiar, glassy yellow surface of the
+Mississippi. With a low whisper of dismay she started out to look
+around, and found that she was really adrift in mid-river.
+
+On the opposite side of the boat she saw the blank side of a boat
+against her cabin window. As she stood there, she heard or felt a motion
+on the boat alongside. Someone stepped, or rather jumped heavily, onto
+the bow deck of her boat and flung the cabin door open.
+
+She sprang to get her pistol, and stood ready, as the figure of a man
+stumbled drunkenly into her presence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+Parson Elijah Rasba, the River Prophet, could not think what he would
+say to these river people who had determined to have a sermon for their
+Sabbath entertainment. Neither his Bible nor his hurried glances from
+book to book which Nelia Crele had given him brought any suggestion
+which seemed feasible. His father had always declared that a sermon, to
+be effective, "must have one bullet fired straight."
+
+What bullet would reach the souls of these river people who sang ribald
+songs, danced to lively music, and lived clear of all laws except the
+one they called "The Law," a deadly, large-calibre revolver or automatic
+pistol?
+
+"I 'low I just got to talk to them like folks," he decided at last, and
+with that comforting decision went to sleep.
+
+The first thing, after dawn, when he looked out upon the river in all
+the glory of sunshine and soft atmosphere and young birds, he heard a
+hail:
+
+"Eh, Prophet! What time yo' all goin' to hold the meeting?"
+
+"Round 10 or 11 o'clock," he replied.
+
+Rasba went to one of the boats for breakfast, and he was surprised when
+Mamie Caope asked him to invoke a blessing on their humble meal of
+hot-bread, sorghum, fried pork chops, oatmeal, fried spuds, percolator
+coffee, condensed cream, nine-inch perch caught that morning, and some
+odds and ends of what she called "leavings."
+
+Then the women all went over on his big mission boat and cleaned things
+up, declaring that men folks didn't know how to keep their own faces
+clean, let alone houseboats. They scrubbed and mopped and re-arranged,
+and every time Rasba appeared they splashed so much that he was obliged
+to escape.
+
+When at last he was allowed to return he found the boat all cleaned up
+like a honey-comb. He found that the gambling apparatus had been taken
+away, except the heavy crap table, which was made over into a pulpit,
+and that chairs and benches had been arranged into seats for a
+congregation. A store-boat man climbed to the boat's roof at 10:30, with
+a Texas steer's horn nearly three feet long, and began to blow.
+
+The blast reverberated across the river, and echoed back from the shore
+opposite; it rolled through the woods and along the sandbars; and the
+Prophet, listening, recalled the tales of trumpets which he had read in
+the Bible. At intervals of ten minutes old Jodun filled his great lungs,
+pursed his lips, and swelled his cheeks to wind his great horn, and the
+summons carried for miles. People appeared up the bank, swamp angels
+from the timber brakes who strolled over to see what the river people
+were up to, and skiffs sculled over to bring them to the river meeting.
+The long bend opposite, and up and down stream, where no sign of life
+had been, suddenly disgorged skiffs and little motorboats of people
+whose floating homes were hidden in tiny bays, or covered by neutral
+colours against their backgrounds.
+
+The women hid Rasba away, like a bridegroom, to wait the moment of his
+appearance, and when at last he was permitted to walk out into the
+pulpit he nearly broke down with emotion. There were more than a hundred
+men and women, with a few children, waiting eagerly for him. He was a
+good old fellow; he meant all right; he'd taken care of Jest Prebol, who
+had deserved to be shot; he was pretty ignorant of river ways, but he
+wanted to learn about them; he hadn't hurt their feelings, for he minded
+his own business, saying not a word about their good times, even if he
+wouldn't dance himself. They could do no better than let him know that
+they hadn't any hard feelings against him, even if he was a parson, for
+he didn't let on that they were sinners. Anyway, they wanted to hear him
+hit it up!
+
+"I came down here to find a son whose mother was worrited about him,"
+Rasba began at the beginning. "I 'lowed likely if I could find Jock it'd
+please his mammy, an' perhaps make her a little happier. And Jock 'lowed
+he'd better go back, and stand trial, even if it was a hanging matter.
+
+"You see, I didn't expect you'd get to learn very much from me, and I
+haven't been disappointed. I'm the one that's learning, and when I think
+what you've done for me, and when I see what Old Mississip' does,
+friendlying for all of us, tripping us along----"
+
+They understood. He looked at the boat, at them, and through the
+wide-open windows at the sun-rippled water.
+
+"Now for religion. Seems like I'm impudent, telling you kindly souls
+about being good to one another, having no hard, mean feelings against
+anybody, and living like you ought to live. We're all sinners! Time and
+again hit's ag'in the grain to do what's right, and if we taste a taste
+of white liquor, or if hit's stained with burnt sugar to make hit red,
+why----"
+
+"Sho!" someone grinned. "Parson Rasba knows!"
+
+The preacher joined the laughter.
+
+"Yas, suh!" he admitted, more gravely, "I know. I 'lowed, one time, that
+I'd git to know this yeah happiness that comes of liquor, an' I shore
+took one awful gulp. Three nights an' three days I neveh slept a wink,
+an' me settin' theh by the fireplace, waitin' to be lit up an'
+jubulutin', but hit didn't come. I've be'n happier, jes' a-settin' an'
+lookin' at that old riveh, hearin' the wild geese flocking by!
+
+"That old riveh--Lawse! If the Mississippi brings you fish and game; if
+it gives you sheltered eddies to anchor in, and good banks or sandbars
+to tie against; if this great river out here does all that for you, what
+do you reckon the Father of that river, of all the world, of all the
+skies would do, He being so much friendlier and powerfuller?
+
+"Hit's easy to forget the good that's done to you. Lots an' lots of
+times, I bet you've not even thought of the good you've had from the
+river, from the sunshine, from the winds, plenty to eat and warm of
+nights on your boats and in your cabins. It's easy to remember the
+little evil things, the punishments that are visited upon us for our
+sins or because we're ignorant and don't know; but reckon up the
+happiness you have, the times you are blessed with riches of comfort and
+pleasure, and you'll find yourself so much happier than you are sad that
+you'll know how well you are cared for.
+
+"I cayn't preach no reg'lar sermon, with text-tes and singing and all
+that. Seems like I jes' want to talk along rambling like, and tell you
+how happy you are all, for I don't reckon you're much wickeder than you
+are friendly on the average. I keep a-hearing about murdering and
+stealing and whiskey boating and such things. They're signs of the
+world's sinfulness. We talk a heap about such things; they're real, of
+course, and we cayn't escape them. At the same time, look at me!
+
+"I came down here, sorry with myse'f, and you make me glad, not asking
+if I'd done meanness or if I'd betrayed my friends. You 'lowed I was
+jes' a man, same's you. I couldn't tell you how to be good, because I
+wasn't no great shakes myse'f, and the worse I was the better you got.
+Buck an' Jock gives me this boat for a mission boat; I'm ignorant, an' a
+woman gives me----"
+
+He choked up. What the woman had given him was too immeasurable and too
+wonderful for mere words to express his gratitude.
+
+"I'm just one of those shoutin', ignorant mountain parsons. I could
+out-whoop most of them up yonder. But down yeah, Old Mississip' don't
+let a man shout out. When yo' play dance music, hit's softer and sweeter
+than some of those awful mountain hymns in which we condemn lost souls
+to the fire. Course, the wicked goes to hell, but somehow I cayn't git
+up much enthusiasm about that down yeah. What makes my heart rejoice is
+that there's so much goodness around that I bet 'most anybody's got a
+right smart chanct to get shut of slippin' down the claybanks into
+hell."
+
+"Jest Prebol?" someone asked, seeing Prebol's face in the window of the
+little red shanty-boat moored close by, where he, too, could listen.
+
+"Jest Prebol's been my guide down the riveh," the Prophet retorted. "I
+can say that I only wish I could be as good a pilot for poor souls and
+sinners toward heaven as Jest is a river pilot for a wandering old
+mountain parson on the Mississippi----"
+
+"Hi-i-i!" a score of voices laughed, and someone shouted, "So row me
+down the Jordan!"
+
+They all knew the old religious song which fitted so nicely into the
+conditions on the Mississippi. Somebody called to someone else, and the
+musicians in the congregation slipped away to return with their
+violins, banjos, accordions, guitars, and other familiar instruments.
+Before the preacher knew it, he had more music in the church than he had
+ever heard in a church before--and they knew what to play and what to
+sing.
+
+The sermon became a jubilee, and he would talk along awhile till
+something he said struck a tuneful suggestion, and the singing would
+begin again; and when at last he brought the service to an end, he was
+astonished to find that he had preached and they had sung for more than
+two hours.
+
+Then there was scurrying about, and from all sides the calm airs of the
+sunny Sabbath were permeated with the odours of roasts and fried things,
+coffee and sauces. A score wanted Rasba to dine out, but Mrs. Caope
+claimed first and personal acquaintance, and her claim was acknowledged.
+The people from far boats and tents returned to their own homes. Two or
+three boats of the fleet, in a hurry to make some place down stream,
+dropped out in mid-afternoon, and the little shanty-boat town was
+already breaking up, having lasted but a day, but one which would long
+be remembered and talked about. It was more interesting than murder, for
+murders were common, and the circumstances and place were so remarkable
+that even a burning steamboat would have had less attention and
+discussion.
+
+The following morning Mrs. Caope offered Rasba $55 for his old poplar
+boat, and he accepted it gladly. She said she had a speculation in mind,
+and before nightfall she had sold it for $75 to two men who were going
+pearling up the St. Francis, and who thought that a boat a parson had
+tripped down in would bring them good luck.
+
+The dancers of Saturday night, the congregation of Sunday, on Monday
+afternoon were scattered. Mrs. Caope's and another boat dropped off the
+river to visit friends, and mid-afternoon found Parson Rasba and Prebol
+alone again, drawing down toward Mendova.
+
+Prebol knew that town, and he told Rasba about it. He promised that they
+would see something of it, but they could not make it that evening, so
+they landed in Sandbar Reach for the night. Just after dawn, while the
+rising sun was flashing through the tree tops from east to west, a
+motorboat driving up stream hailed as it passed.
+
+"Ai-i-i, Prebol! Palura's killed up!"
+
+Prebol shouted out for details, and the passer-by, slowing down, gave a
+few more:
+
+"Had trouble with the police, an' they shot him daid into his own dance
+floor--and Mendova's no good no more!"
+
+"Now what the boys goin' to do when they make a haul?" Prebol demanded
+in great disgust of Parson Rasba. "Fust the planters shot up whiskey
+boats; then the towns went dry, an' now they closed up Palura's an' shot
+him daid. Wouldn't hit make yo' sick, Parson! They ain't no fun left
+nowheres for good sports."
+
+Rasba could not make any comment. He was far from sure of his
+understanding. He felt as though his own life had been sheltered, remote
+from these wild doings of murders and shanty-boat-fleet dances and a
+congregation assembling in a gambling boat handed to him for a mission!
+He could not quite get his bearings, but the books blessed him with
+their viewpoints, as numerous as the points of the compass. He could not
+turn a page or a chapter without finding something that gave him a
+different outlook or a novel idea.
+
+They landed in late on Monday at Mendova bar, just above the wharf. Up
+the slough were many shanty-boats, and gaunt dogs and floppy buzzards
+fed along the bar and down the wharf.
+
+Groups of men and women were scattered along both the slough and the
+river banks, talking earnestly and seriously. Rasba, bound up town to
+buy supplies, heard the name of Palura on many lips; the policemen on
+their beats waltzed their heavy sticks about in debonair skilfulness;
+and stooped, rat-like men passing by, touched their hats nervously to
+the august bluecoats.
+
+When Rasba returned to the boat, he found a man waiting for him.
+
+"My name is Lester Terabon," the man said. "I landed in Saturday, and
+went up town. When I returned, my skiff and outfit were all
+gone--somebody stole them."
+
+"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "I've heard of you. You write for newspapers?"
+
+"Yes, sir, and I'm some chump, being caught that way."
+
+"They meant to rob you?" Rasba asked.
+
+"Why, of----I don't know!" Terabon saw a new outlook on the question.
+
+"Did they go down?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I heard so. I don't care about my boat, typewriter, and
+duffle; what bothers me is my notebooks. Months of work are in them. If
+I could get them back!"
+
+"What can I do for you?"
+
+"I don't know--I'm going down stream; it's down below, somewhere."
+
+"I need someone to help me," Rasba said. "I've a wounded man here who
+has a doctor with him. If he goes up to the hospital or stays with us,
+I'll be glad to have you for your help and company."
+
+"I'm in luck." Terabon laughed with relief.
+
+Just that way the Mississippi River's narrow channel brought the River
+Prophet and the river reporter together. Terabon went up town and bought
+some clothes, some writing paper, a big blank notebook, and a bottle of
+fountain-pen ink. With that outfit he returned on board, and a delivery
+car brought down his share of things to eat.
+
+The doctor said Prebol ought to go into the hospital for at least a
+week, and Terabon found Prebol's pirate friends, hidden up the slough on
+their boat, not venturing to go out except at night. They took the
+little red shanty-boat up the slough, and Prebol went to the hospital.
+
+Rasba, frankly curious about the man who wrote for newspapers for a
+living, listened to accounts of an odd and entertaining occupation. He
+asked about the Palura shooting which everyone was talking about, and
+when Terabon described it as he had witnessed it, Rasba shook his head.
+
+"Now they'll close up that big market of sin?" he asked. "They've all
+scattered around."
+
+"Yes, and they scattered with my skiff, too, and probably robbed Carline
+of his boat----"
+
+"Carline! You know him?"
+
+"I came down with him from Yankee Bar, and we went up to Palura's
+together. I lost him in the shuffle, when the big cop killed Palura."
+
+"And Mrs. Carline, Nelia Crele?" Rasba demanded.
+
+"Why--I--they said she'd landed in. She's gone, too----"
+
+"You know her?"
+
+"Why, yes--I----"
+
+"So do I. Those books," he waved his hand toward the loaded shelves,
+"she gave them all to me for my mission boat!"
+
+Terabon stared. He went to the shelves and looked at the volumes. In
+each one he found the little bookmark which she had used in cataloguing
+them:
+
+                             Nelia Carline,
+                             A Loved Book.
+                                 No. 87
+
+A jealous pang seized him, in spite of his reportorial knowledge that
+jealousy is vanity for a literary person.
+
+"I 'low we mout 's well drop out," Rasba suggested. "Missy Crele's down
+below some'rs. Her boat floated out to'd mornin', one of the boys
+said."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+Carline had discovered his wife in the excitement at Palura's, and with
+the cunning of a drunken man had shadowed her. He followed her down to
+Mousa Bayou, and saw her go on board her cabin-boat. He watched, with
+more cunning, to see for whom she was waiting. He had in his pocket a
+heavy automatic pistol with which to do murder.
+
+He had seen killing done, and the thing was fascinating; some
+consciousness that the policeman had done the right thing seemed now to
+justify his own intention of killing a man, or somebody.
+
+Disappointment lingered in his mind when the lights went out on board
+Nelia's boat, and for a long time he meditated as to what he should do.
+He saw skiffs, motorboats, shanty-boats pulling hastily down the slough
+into the Mississippi. It was the Exodus of Sin. Mendova's rectitude had
+asserted its strength and power, and now the exits of the city were
+flickering with the shadows of departing hordes of the night and of the
+dark, all of whom had two fears: one of daylight, the other of sudden
+death.
+
+Their departure before his eyes, with darkened boats, gave Carline
+an idea at last. He wanted to get away off somewhere, where he could
+be alone, without any interruption. Bitter anger surged in his
+breast because his wife had shamed him, left him, led him this
+any-thing-but-merry chase down the Mississippi. A proud Carline had
+no call to be treated thataway by any woman, especially by the
+daughter of an old ne'er-do-well whom he had condescended to marry.
+
+He had always been a hunter and outdoor man, and it was no particular
+trick for him to cast off the lines of Nelia's boat and push it out
+into the sluggish current, and it was as easy for him to take his own
+boat and drop down into the river. He brought the two boats quietly
+together and lashed them fast with rope fenders to prevent rubbing and
+bumping--did it with surprising skill.
+
+The Mississippi carried them down the reach into the crossing, and
+around a bend out of sight of even the glow of the Mendova lights. Here
+was one of those lonesome stretches of the winding Mississippi, with
+wooded bank, sandbar, sky-high and river-deep loneliness.
+
+Carline, with alcoholic persistency, held to his scheme. He drank the
+liquor which he had salvaged in the riotous night. He thought he knew
+how to bring people to time, especially women. He had seen a big
+policeman set the pace, and the sound of the club breaking skull bones
+was still a shock in his brain, oft repeated.
+
+The sudden dawn caught him by surprise, and he stared rather nonplussed
+by the sunrise, but when he looked around and saw that he was in
+mid-stream and miles from anywhere and from any one, he knew that there
+was no better place in the world for taming one's wife, and extorting
+from her the apologies which seemed to Carline appropriate, all things
+considered, for the occasion.
+
+The time had arrived for action. He rose with dignity and buttoned up
+his waistcoat; he pulled down his coat and gave his cravat a hitch; he
+rubbed a tentative hand on the lump where the pirates had bumped him; he
+scrambled over the side onto the cabin-boat deck, and entered upon the
+scene of his conquest.
+
+He found himself confronted by Nelia in a white-faced, low-voiced fury
+instead of in the mood he had expected. She wasn't sorry; she wasn't
+apologetic; she wasn't even amiable or conciliatory.
+
+"Gus Carline! Drunk, as usual. What do you mean by this?"
+
+"S'all right!" he assured her, flapping his hands. "Y're m'wife; I'm
+your husban'! S'all right!"
+
+She drew her pistol and fired a bullet past him.
+
+"Go!" she cried.
+
+Before he knew what had happened he had backed out upon the bow deck,
+and she bundled him up onto his own craft. She cast off the bow line and
+ran to the stern to cast off the line there. As she did so, she
+discovered Terabon's skiff around at the far side where Carline could
+not see it.
+
+Her husband was still shaking his fist in her direction, but the two
+boats were well apart as she rowed away with her sweeps. He stood there,
+undecided. He had not expected the sudden and effective resistance.
+Before he knew it, she was lost in a whole fleet of little houseboats
+which were, to his eyes, both in the sky, underwater, and scattered all
+over the tip-tilting surfaces.
+
+The current, under the impulse of her rowing, carried Nelia into an eddy
+and she saw the cruiser rocking down a crossing into the mirage of the
+distance. She sat on the bow deck while her boat made a long swing in
+the eddy. Things did not happen down the river as she planned or
+expected. She regarded the previous night's entertainment with less
+indifference now; something about the calm of that broad river affected
+her. She realized that watching the killing of Palura had given her a
+shock so deep that now she was trembling with the weakness of horror.
+
+She had seen Gus Carline stumble into her cabin, and with angry defiance
+she had acted with the intention of doing to him what she had done to
+Prebol--but she had missed deliberately when she shot. When she recalled
+the matter, she saw that for weeks she had been living in a false frame
+of mind; that she was desperate, and not contented; that she was
+afraid--and that she hated fear.
+
+Her pistol was sign of her bravado, and her shots were the indication of
+her desperation. The memory of the wan face of Prebol brought down by
+her bullet was now an accusation, not a pride.
+
+Old Mississip' had received her gently in her most furious mood, but now
+that immense, active calm of vast power was working on the untamed soul
+which she owned. The river swept along, and its majesty no longer gave
+her the feeling that nothing mattered. Far from it! Though she rebelled
+against the idea, her mind knew that she was in rebellion, that she was
+going against the current. And the river's mood was dangerous, now, to
+the wanton feelings to which she had desperately yielded but
+unsuccessfully.
+
+The old, familiar, sharp division between right and wrong was presented
+to her gaze as if the river itself were calling her attention to it. She
+could not escape the necessity of a choice, with evil so persuasive and
+delightful and virtue so depressing and necessary.
+
+She investigated Terabon's outfit with curiosity and questioning. His
+typewriter, his maps, his few books, his stack of notes neatly compiled
+in loose-leaf files, were the materials which caught and held her fancy.
+She took them on board her shanty-boat and read the record which he had
+made, from day to day, from his inspection of Commission records at St.
+Louis to the purchase of his boat in shanty-boat town, and his departure
+down the river.
+
+His words were intimate and revealing:
+
+  Oct. 5; In mid-stream among a lot of islands; rafts of ducks; a
+  dull, blue day, still those great limestone hills, with hollows
+  through which the wind comes when opposite--coolies?----; in the far
+  distance a rowboat. On the Missouri side, the hills; on the other
+  the flats, with landing sheds. Ducks in great flocks--look like sea
+  serpents when flying close to the water; like islands on it--wary
+  birds.
+
+That was above the part of the river which she knew; she turned to
+Kaskaskia, and read facts familiar to her:
+
+  I met Crele, an old hunter-trapper, in a slough below St. Genevieve.
+  He was talkative, and said he had the prettiest girl on a hundred
+  miles of river. She had married a man of the name of Carline, real
+  rich and a big bug. "But my gal's got the looks, yes, indeed!" If I
+  find her, I must be sure and tell her to write to her folks--river
+  romance!
+
+Nelia's face warmed as she read those phrases as well it might. She
+wondered what other things he had written in his book of notes, and her
+eye caught a page:
+
+  House boatmen are a bad lot. Once a young man came to work for a
+  farmer back on the hills. He'd been there a month, when one night he
+  disappeared; a set of double harness went with him. Another man hung
+  around a week, and raided a grocery store, filling washtubs with
+  groceries, cloth, and shoes--went away in a skiff.
+
+She turned to where he travelled down the Mississippi with her husband
+and read the description of Gus Carline's whiskey skiff man, his
+purchase of a gallon of whiskey; the result, which her imagination
+needed but few words to visualize; then Terabon's drifting away down
+stream, leaving the sot to his own insensibilities.
+
+Breathlessly she read his snatching sentences from bend to shoal, from
+reach to reach, until he described her red-hull, white cabin-boat,
+described the "young river woman" who occupied it; and then, page after
+page of memoranda, telling almost her own words, and his own words, as
+he had remembered them. What he wrote here had not been intended for her
+eyes.
+
+  She's dropping down this river all alone; pirates nor scoundrels nor
+  river storms nor jeopardies seem to disturb her in the least. She
+  even welcomes me, as an interesting sort of intellectual specimen,
+  who can talk about books and birds and a multitude of things. She
+  may well rest assured that none of us river rats have any designs,
+  whatever, on a lady who shoots quick, shoots straight, and dropped
+  Prebol at thirty yards off-hand with an automatic!
+
+She read the paragraph with interest and then with care; she did not
+know whether to be pleased or not by that brutally frank statement that
+he was afraid of her--suppose he hadn't been afraid? Then, of what was
+he really afraid--not of her pistol! She read on through the pages of
+notes. The description of the walk with her up the sandbar and back,
+there at Island No. 10, thrilled her, for it told the apparently
+trifling details--the different kinds of sands, the sounds, the night
+gloom, the quick sense of the river presence, the glow of distant New
+Madrid. He had lived it, and he wrote it in terms that she realized were
+the words she might have used to describe her own observations and
+sensations.
+
+She searched through his notes in vain for any suggestion of the
+emotions which she had felt. She shrugged her shoulders, because he had
+not written anything to indicate that he had discovered her allurement.
+He had written in bald words the fact of her sending him on the errand
+of rescue, to save her husband--and she was obliged to digest in her
+mind the bare but significant phrase:
+
+  And, because she has sent me, I am glad to go!
+
+His notes made her understand him better, but they did not reveal all
+his own feelings. He wrote her down as an object of curiosity, as he
+spoke of the sour face and similitude of good humour in the whiskey
+boater's expression. In the same painstaking way he described her own
+friendliness for a passing skiff boater. The impersonality of his
+remarks about himself surprised while it perplexed her.
+
+The mass of material which he had gathered for making articles and
+stories amazed her. The stack of pages, closely typewritten, was more
+than two inches thick. A few pages disclosed consecutive paragraphs with
+subjects, predicates, and complete sense, but other pages showed only
+disjointed phrases, words, and flashes of ideas.
+
+The changing notes, the questioning, the observations, the minute
+recording were fascinating to her. It revealed a phase of writers' lives
+of which she had known nothing--the gathering of myriads of details, in
+order to free the mind for accurate rendering of pictures and
+conditions. She wished she could see some of the finished product of
+Terabon's use of these notes, and the wish revealed a chasm, an abyss
+that confronted her. She felt deserted, as though she had need of
+Terabon to give her a view of his own life, that she might be diverted
+into something not sordid, and decidedly not according to Augustus
+Carline's ideals!
+
+After a time, seeing that Carline's boat had disappeared down river, she
+threw over her anchor, and rested in the eddy. It was on the west side,
+with a chute entrance through a sandbar and willow-grown island points
+opposite. She brought out her map book to see if she could learn where
+she was anchored, but the printed map, with the bright red lines of
+recent surveys, helped her not at all. She turned from sheet to sheet
+down to Memphis, without finding what she wanted to know.
+
+She saw some shanty-boats down the river; she saw some up the river; but
+there was none near her till just before dark a motor skiff came down in
+the day's gray gloom, and passed within a few yards of her. When she
+looked at the two men in the boats she learned to know what fear
+is--river terror--horror of mankind in its last extremities of depravity
+and heartlessness.
+
+She saw men stooped and slinking, whose glance was sidelong and whose
+expression was venomous, casting covert looks toward her as they passed
+by into the gray mist of falling night. They entered a narrow waterway
+among the sandbars, and left behind the feeling that along that waterway
+was the abiding place of lost souls. She wanted to take up the anchor
+and flee out onto the river, but when she looked into the darkening
+breadths, she felt the menace of the miles, of the mists, of the wooded
+shores. Foreboding was in her tired soul.
+
+She examined her pistol, to make sure that it was ready to use; she
+locked the stern door, and drew the curtains; she went to the bow and
+looked carefully at the anchor-line fastenings. With no light on board
+to blind her gaze, she scrutinized all the surroundings, to make sure of
+her locality. In that blank gloom she was dubious but brave. Not a thing
+visible, not a sound audible, nothing but her remote and little
+understood sensation of premonitory dread explained her perturbation.
+She entered the cabin, locked the door, set the window catches and
+sticks, lighted the lamp, and sat down to--think. Her bookshelves were
+empty, and she was glad that she had emptied them in a good cause. It
+occurred to her that she ought to make up another list for her own
+service, and with pencil and paper she began that most fascinating
+work, the compilation of one's own library. As she made her selections,
+she forgot the menace which she had observed.
+
+In the stillness she thought her own ears were ringing and paid no
+attention to the humming that increased in volume moment by moment. It
+was a flash of lightning without thunder that stirred her senses. She
+looked up from her absorption.
+
+She heard a distant rumble, a near-by stirring. The wavelets along the
+side of the boat were noisy; they rattled like paper. Something fell
+clattering on the roof of the cabin, and a tearing, ripping, crashing
+struck the boat and fairly tossed it skipping along the surface of the
+water. The lamp blew out as a window pane broke, and the woman was
+thrown to the floor in a confusion of chairs, table, and other loose
+objects. Happily, the stove was screwed fast to the floor. The anchor
+line broke with a loud twang, and the black confusion was lighted with
+flares and flashes of gray-blue glaring.
+
+The river had made Nelia Crele believe that she was in jeopardy from
+man; but it was a little hurricane, or, as the river people call them,
+cyclones, that menaced. Dire as was the confusion and imminent as was
+the peril, Nelia felt a sense of relief from what would have been harder
+to bear--an attack by men. She had searched the map for information, but
+it was the river which inspired her to understand that the hurricane was
+her deliverance rather than her assailant.
+
+She did not know whether she would live or die during those seconds when
+the gale crashed like maul blows and wind and rain poured and whistled
+in at the broken window pane. She laughed at her predicament, tumbling
+in dishevelment around the bouncing cabin floor, and when the suck and
+send of the storm crater passed by, leaving a driving wind, she stepped
+out on the bows, and caught up her sweeps to ride the waves and face the
+gale that set steadily in from the north.
+
+It was gray, impenetrable black--that night. She could see nothing,
+neither the waves nor the sky nor the river banks; but singing aloud,
+she steadied the boat, bow to the wind, holding it to the gale by
+dipping the sweeps deep and strong.
+
+Beaten steadily back, unable to know how far or in what direction, she
+found her soul, serenely above the mere physical danger, loving that
+vast torrent more than ever.
+
+The Mississippi trains its own to be brave.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+Parson Rasba and Terabon floated out into the main river current and ran
+with the stream. They were passing through the famous, changeable
+channels among the great sandbars from Island No. 34 down to Hopefield
+Bend. They rounded Dean Island Bend in the darkness, for they had
+floated all day and far into the night, driven by an anxiety which was
+inexplicable.
+
+They wanted to be going; they felt an urge which they commented upon; it
+was a voice in their hearts, and not audible in their ears. Yet when
+they stood nervously at the great sweeps of the mission boat, to pull
+the occasional strokes necessary to clear a bar or flank a bend, they
+could almost declare that the river was talking.
+
+They strained their ears in vain, trying to distinguish the meanings of
+the distant murmurings. Terabon, now well familiar with the river, could
+easily believe that he was listening to the River Spirit, and his
+feelings were melancholy.
+
+For months he had strained every power of his mind to record the exact
+facts about the Mississippi, and he put down tens of thousands of words
+describing and stating what he saw, heard, and knew. With one stroke he
+had been separated from his work, and he feared that he had lost his
+precious notes for all time.
+
+Either Carline or river pirates had carried them away. He hoped, he
+believed, that he would find them, but there was an uncertainty. He
+shivered apprehensively when he recalled with what frankness he had put
+down details, names, acts, rumours, reports--all the countless things
+which go to make up the "histories" of a voyage down from St. Louis in
+skiff, shanty-boat, and launch. What would they say if they read his
+notes?
+
+He had notepaper, blank books, and ink, and he set about the weary task
+of keeping up his records, and putting down all that he could recall of
+the contents of his lost loose-leaf system. It was a staggering task.
+
+In one record he wrote the habitual hour-to-hour description, comment,
+talk, and fact; in his "memory journal" he put down all the things he
+could recall about the contents of his lost record. He had written the
+things down to save him the difficulty of trying to remember, but now he
+discovered that he had remembered. A thousand times faster than he could
+write the countless scenes and things he had witnessed flocked back into
+the consciousness of his mind, pressing for recognition and another
+chance to go down in black and white.
+
+As he wrote, Parson Rasba, in the intervals of navigating the big
+mission boat, would stand by gazing at the furious energy of his
+companion. Rasba had seized upon a few great facts of life, and dwelt in
+silent contemplation of them, until a young woman with a library
+disturbed the echoing halls of his mind, and brought into them the
+bric-a-brac of the thought of the ages. Now, from that brief experience,
+he could gaze with nearer understanding at this young man who regarded
+the pathway of the moon reflecting in a narrow line across a sandbar and
+in a wide dancing of cold blue flames upon the waters, as an important
+thing to remember; who recorded the wavering flight of the nigger geese,
+or cormorants, as compared to the magnificent V-figure, straight drive
+of the Canadians and the other huge water fowl; who paused to seize such
+simple terms as "jump line," "dough-bait," "snag line," "reef line," as
+though his life might depend on his verbal accuracy.
+
+The Prophet pondered. The Mississippi had taught him many lessons. He
+was beginning to look for the lesson in casual phenomena, and when he
+said so to Terabon, the writer stared at him with open mouth.
+
+"Why--that explains!" Terabon gasped.
+
+"Explains what?"
+
+"The heathen who was awed by the myriad impressions of Nature, and who
+learned, by hard experience, that he must not neglect even the
+apparently trivial things lest he suffer disaster."
+
+Then Terabon fell to writing even more furiously in his day-by-day
+journal, for that was something of this moment, although he has just
+jotted down the renewed impression of coming into the bottoms at Cape
+Girardeau. Rasba took up the pages of the notes which Terabon was
+rewriting. Happily, Terabon's writing was like copper-plate script,
+however fast he wrote, and the mountain man read:
+
+  Big hickory tree grove--Columbus Hickories--Largest cane in some
+  bend down below Helena--Spanish Moss bend--famous river
+  bend--Fisherman at Brickey's Mill told of hoop nets, trammels,
+  seines (stillwater bayous), jump, hand, snag, reef, lines----Jugging
+  for catfish down the crossings, half pound pork, or meat, for bait,
+  also called "blocking" for catfish.
+
+"What will you do with all this?" Rasba asked.
+
+"Why, I'll----" Terabon hesitated, and then continued: "It's like
+building a house. I gather all this material: lumber, stone, logs,
+cement, shingles, lathes, quick-lime, bricks, and everything. I store it
+all up in this notebook; that's my lumber yard. Then when I dig the
+foundation, I'll come in here and I'll find the things I need to build
+my house, or mansion. Of course, to start with, I'll just build little
+shacks and cabins. See what I mean? I am going to write articles first
+and they're kind of like barns and shacks, and even mere fences. But by
+and by I'll write fiction stories, and they will be like the mansions,
+and the material will all fit in: all about a fisherman, all about a
+market hunter, all about a drifter, all about a river----"
+
+"All about a river woman?" Rasba asked, as he hesitated.
+
+"I wasn't thinking that." Terabon shook his head, his colour coming a
+little. "I had in mind, all about a River Prophet!"
+
+"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "What could you all find to write about a Riveh
+Prophet?"
+
+Terabon looked at the stern, kindly, friendly, picturesque mountaineer
+who had come so far to find one man, for that man's mother, and he
+rejoiced in his heart to think that the parson did not know, could never
+know, because of the honest simplicity of his heart, how extraordinarily
+interesting he was.
+
+So they drifted with the current, absorbed in their immediate present.
+It seemed as though they found their comprehension expanding and
+widening till it encompassed the answers to a thousand questions. Rasba,
+dazed by his own accretion of new interests, discovery of undreamed-of
+powers, seizure of opportunities never known before, could but gaze with
+awe and thankfulness at the evidences of his great good fortune, the
+blessings that were his in spite of his wondering why one of so little
+desert had received such bountiful favour. Terabon, remembering what he
+feared was irrevocably lost, knew that he had escaped disaster, and that
+the pile of notes which he had made only to be deprived of them were
+after all of less importance than that he should have suffered the deep
+emotion of seeing so much of his toil and time vanish.
+
+Here it was again--Rasba might well wonder at that gathering and
+hoarding of trifles. They were not the important things, those minute
+words and facts and points; no, indeed.
+
+At last Terabon knew that most important fact of all that it was the
+emotions that counted. As a mere spectator, he could never hope to know
+the Mississippi, to describe and write it truly; the river had forced
+him into the activities of the river life, and had done him by that act
+its finest service.
+
+He was in the fervour of his most recent discovery when Rasba went out
+on the bow deck and looked into the night. He called Terabon a minute
+later, and the two looked at a phenomenon. The west was aglow, like a
+sunset, but with flarings and flashings instead of slowly changing
+lights and hues. The light under the clouds at the horizon extended
+through 90 degrees of the compass, and in the centre of the bright
+greenish flare there was a compact, black, apparently solid mass from
+which streaks of lightning constantly exuded on all sides.
+
+For a minute Terabon stared, cold chills goose-pimpling his flesh. Then
+he cried:
+
+"Cyclone, Parson! Get ready!"
+
+They were opposite the head of a long bend near the end of a big
+sandbar, and skirting the edge of an eddy, near its foot. Terabon sprang
+into the gasolene launch, started the motor, and steered for the shelter
+of the west bank. In the quiet he and Rasba told each other what to do.
+
+Rasba ran out two big anchors with big mooring lines tied to them. He
+closed the bow door but opened all the windows and other doors. Then, as
+they heard the storm coming, they covered the launch with the heavy
+canvas, heaved over the anchors into a fathom of water, let out long
+lines, and played the launch out over the stern on a heavy line fast to
+towing bits.
+
+A sweep of hail and rain was followed by a moment of calm. Then a blast
+of wind, which scraped over the cabin roof, was succeeded by the suck of
+the tornado, which swept, a waterspout, across the river a quarter of a
+mile down stream, struck a sandbar, and carried up a golden yellow cloud
+of dust, which disappeared in the gray blackness of a terrific downpour
+of rain.
+
+They stretched out on their anchor lines till the whole fabric of the
+cabin hummed and crackled with the strain, but the lines held, and the
+windows being open, prevented the semi-vacuum created by the storm's
+passing from "exploding" the boat, and tearing off the cabin, or the
+roof.
+
+After the varying gusts and blasts the wind settled down, colder by
+forty degrees, and with the steady white of a norther. It meant days and
+nights of waiting while the storm blew itself out. And when the danger
+had passed and the boats were safe against the lines, the two men turned
+in to sleep, more tired after their adventures than they remembered ever
+being before.
+
+In the morning rain was falling intermittently with some sleet, but
+toward afternoon there was just a cold wind. They built hot fires in
+their heater, burning coal with which the gamblers had filled bow and
+stern bins from coal barges somewhere up the river. Having plenty to eat
+on board, there was nothing to worry them.
+
+Terabon, his fountain pen racing, wrote for his own distant Sunday
+Editor a narrative which excited the compiler of the Magazine Supplement
+to deep oaths of admiration for the fertile, prolific imagination of
+the wandering writer--for who would believe in a romance ready made?
+
+The night of the big wind was followed by a day and a night of gusts of
+wind and sleety rain; then followed a day and a night of rising clouds,
+then a day when the clouds were scattered and the sun was cold. That day
+the sunset was grim, white, and freezing cold.
+
+In the morning there was a bright, warm sunrise, a breath of sweet, soft
+air, and unimaginable brightness and buoyancy, birds singing, squirrels
+barking, and all the dismal pangs banished.
+
+Shanty-boats shot out into the gay river and dotted the wide surface up
+and down the current for miles. The ears of the parson and the writer,
+keener with the acuteness of distant sounds, could hear music from a
+boat so far away that they could not see it, a wonderfully enchanting
+experience.
+
+They, too, ran out into the flood of sunshine to float down with the
+rest.
+
+At the foot of Brandywine Bar a little cabin-boat suddenly rowed out
+into the current and signalled them; somebody recognized and wanted to
+speak to the mission boat. They were rapidly sucking down the swift
+chute current, but Terabon turned over the motor, and flanked the big
+houseboat across the current so that the hail could be answered.
+
+The little cabin-boat, almost lost to view astern, rapidly gained, and
+as they ran down Beef Island chute, where the current is slow, they were
+overtaken.
+
+"Sho!" Parson Rasba cried aloud, "hit's Missy Carline, Missy Nelia,
+shore as I'm borned!"
+
+Terabon had known it for half an hour. He had been noticing river
+details, and he could not fail to recognize that little boat. His hands
+trembled as he steered the launch to take advantage of slack current and
+dead water, and his throat choked with an emotion which he controlled
+with difficulty. He looked fearfully at the gaunt River Prophet whose
+own cheeks were staining with warm blood, and whose eyes gazed so keenly
+at the young woman who was coming, leaning to her sweeps with Viking
+grace and abandon.
+
+She was coming to _them_, with the fatalistic certainty that is so
+astonishing to the student observer. Carried away by her sottish
+husband; threatened by the tornado; rescued, perhaps, by the storm from
+worse jeopardy, caught in safety under an island sandbar; her eyes,
+sweeping the lonesome breadths of the flowing river-sea, had seen and
+recognized her friend's boat, the floating mission, and pulled to join
+safe company.
+
+She rowed up, with her eyes on the Prophet. He stood there in his
+majesty while Terabon stooped unnoticed in the engine pit of the
+motorboat. Not till she had run down near enough to throw a line did she
+take her eyes off the mountain parson, and then she turned and looked
+into the eyes, dumb with misery, of the other man, Terabon.
+
+Her cheeks, red with her exertions, turned white. Three days she had
+read that heap of notes in loose-leaf file which Terabon had written.
+She had read the lines and between the lines, facts and ideas,
+descriptions and reminiscence, dialogue and history, statistics and
+appreciation of a thousand river things, all viewpoints, including her
+own.
+
+She knew, now, how wicked she was. She knew, now, the wilfulness of her
+sins, and the merciful interposition of the river's inviolable strength.
+Her sight of the mission boat had awakened in her soul the knowledge
+that she must go out and talk to the good man on board, confess her
+naughtiness, and beg the Prophet for instruction. Woman-like, she knew
+what the outcome would be.
+
+He would take her, protect her, and there would be some way out of the
+predicament in which they both found themselves. But again she reckoned
+without the river. How could she know that Terabon and he had come down
+the Mississippi together?
+
+But there he was, chauffeuring for the Prophet!
+
+She threw the line, Rasba caught it, drew the two boats together and
+made them fast. He welcomed her as a father might have welcomed a
+favourite child. He threw over the anchor, and Terabon dropped the
+launch back to the stern, and hung it there on a light line.
+
+When he entered the big cabin Nelia was sitting beside a table, and
+Rasba was leaning against the shelves which he had put up for the books.
+Nelia, dumbfounded, had said little or nothing. When she glanced up at
+Terabon, she looked away again, quickly, flushing.
+
+She was lost now. That was her feeling. Her defiance and her courage
+seemed to have utterly left her, and in those bitter days of cold wind
+and clammy rain, sleet and discomfort had changed the outlook of
+everything.
+
+Married, without a husband; capable of great love, and yet sure that she
+must never love; two lovers and an unhappy marriage between her and
+happiness; a mind made up to sin, wantonly, and a soul that taunted her
+with a life-time of struggle against sordidness. The two men saw her
+burst into tears and cry out in an agony of spirit.
+
+Dumbly they stood there, man-like, not knowing what to do, or what
+thought was in the woman's mind. The Prophet Rasba, his face full of
+compassion, turned from her and went aft through the alley into the
+kitchen, closing the doors behind him. He knew, and with knowledge he
+accepted the river fate.
+
+Terabon went to her, and gave her comfort. He talked to her as a lover
+should when his sweetheart is in misery, her heart breaking. And she
+accepted his gentleness, and sobbed out the impossibility of everything,
+while she clung to him.
+
+Within the hour they had plighted troth, regardless. She confessed to
+her lover, instead of to the Prophet. He said he didn't care, and she
+said she didn't care, either--which was mutually satisfactory.
+
+When they went out to Parson Rasba, they found him calmly reading one of
+the books which she had given him. He looked up at their red faces and
+smiled with indulgence. They would never know what went on inside his
+heart, what was in his mind behind that kindly smile. That he knew and
+understood everything was clear to them, but they did not and would not
+have believed that he had, for a minute, hated Terabon as standing
+between him and happiness.
+
+"What are we going to do?" Terabon cried, when he had told the Parson
+that they loved each other, that they would complete the voyage down the
+river together, that her husband still lived, and that they could get a
+$17.50 divorce at Memphis.
+
+"Hit wouldn't be no 'count, that divorce." The Prophet shrugged his
+shoulders, and the two hung their heads. They knew it, and yet they had
+been willing to plead ignorance as an excuse for sin.
+
+He seemed to close the incident by suggesting that it was time to eat
+something, and the three turned to getting a square meal. They cooked a
+bountiful dinner, and sat down to it, the Prophet asking a blessing that
+seared the hearts of the two because of its fervour.
+
+Rasba asked her to read to them after they had cleared up the dishes,
+and she took down the familiar volumes and read. Rasba sat with his eyes
+closed, listening. Terabon watched her face. She seemed to choose the
+pages at random, and read haphazardly, but it was all delight and all
+poetry.
+
+She was reading, which was strange, the Humphrey-Abbott book about the
+Mississippi River levees, the classic report on river facts, all
+fascinating to the mind that grasps with pleasure any river fact. When
+Rasba looked up and smiled, the two were absorbed in their occupations,
+one reading, the other watching her read. She stopped in conscious
+confusion.
+
+"Yas, suh!" he smiled aloud. "I 'low we uns can leave hit to Old
+Mississip', these yeah things that trouble us: I, my triflin' doubts,
+and you children yo' own don't-know-yets."
+
+What made him say that, if he wasn't a River Prophet? Who told him, what
+voice informed him, at that moment? Who can say?
+
+The following morning the big mission boat and Missy Nelia's boat landed
+in at Memphis wharf, and the three went up town to buy groceries,
+newspapers and magazines to read, and to help Nelia choose another set
+of books from the shelves of local book stores. Old Rasba had never been
+in a book store before, and he stared at the hundreds of feet of
+shelves, with books of all sizes, kinds, and makes.
+
+"Sho!" he cried aloud, and then, again, "Sho! Sho!"
+
+It was fairyland for him, a land of enchantment, of impossible
+satisfaction and glory-be! Terabon and Nelia saw that they had given him
+another pleasure, and Rasba was happy to know that he would always be
+able to visit such places, and add to his own store of literature, when
+he had read the books which he had, as he would do, page by page, and
+word by word, his dictionary at hand.
+
+Magazines and newspapers had little interest for him. Nelia and Terabon
+could not help but wish to keep closer in touch with the world. They
+picked up a copy of the _Trade-Appealer_, and then a copy of the
+_Evening Battle Ax_, just out.
+
+They read one headline:
+
+                       UNKNOWN DROWNS IN CRUISER
+
+It was a brutally frank description of a motorboat cruiser which had
+floated down Hopefield Bend, awash and waterlogged, but held afloat by
+air-tight tanks:
+
+  In the cabin was the body of a man, apparently about 30 years of
+  age, with a whiskey jug clasped in one hand by the handle. He was
+  face downward, and had been dead two or three days. It is supposed
+  he was caught in the heavy wind-storm of Wednesday night and
+  drowned.
+
+The river had planned again. The river had acted again. They went to
+look at the boat, which was pumped out and in Ash Slough. It was
+Carline's cruiser. Then they went to the morgue, and it was Carline's
+body.
+
+Nelia broke down and cried. After all, one's husband is one's husband.
+She did the right thing. She owned him, now, and she carried his remains
+back home to Gage, and there she buried him, and wept on his grave.
+
+She put on widow's weeds for him, and though she might have claimed his
+property, she ignored the will which left her all of it, and gave to his
+relatives and to her own poor people what was theirs. She gave Parson
+Rasba, whom she had brought home with her to bury her husband, $5,000
+for his services.
+
+Then, after the estate was all settled up, she returned to Memphis, and
+Terabon met her at the Union Station, dutifully, as she had told him to
+do. Together they went to the City Clerk's and obtained a marriage
+license, and the River Prophet, Rasba, with firm voice and unflinching
+gaze, united them in wedlock.
+
+They went aboard their own little shanty-boat, and while the rice and
+old shoes of a host of river people rattled and clattered on their
+cabin, they drifted out into the current and rapidly slipped away toward
+President's Island. Parson Rasba, as they drifted clear, said to them:
+
+"I 'lowed we uns could leave hit to Old Mississip'!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
+GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The River Prophet, by Raymond S. Spears
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