CHAPTER IX

45CHAPTER 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 flight46with 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.47She 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. Having48stocked 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 fire49of 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.

50CHAPTER 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, carried51along 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.52

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?”53

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 knowed54he 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.”55

“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.56

“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.57Falteau, 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.

58CHAPTER 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 few59minutes 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.60I ’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 women61the 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 his62strong 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.63

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 thequi 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?”64

“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.

65CHAPTER 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 overtook66Nelia. 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 rowboat67was 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!”68

“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 those69staples; I put those hoops up, and draw a canvas over the whole length of the boat. I can sleep like a baby in its cradle.”

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

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

“I fancy it hasn’t always treated you right,” Terabon remarked.

“Treated me right!” Carline doubled his fists and stiffened where he sat. “It’s!—it’s––”

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

“It’s passing noon, and I think I’ll get something to eat,” Terabon suggested; “I’ll get up my––”

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

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

Nor did he fail to make his boast good, for he soon had hot-bread, gravy browned in the pan, boiled sweet potatoes, and canned corn ready for the table. When they sat down to eat, Carline confessed that he hadn’t70had 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!”

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