23CHAPTER 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 out24of 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.25
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 told26about 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 was27approaching 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!”
28CHAPTER 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.
29
“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 know30than 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 the31certainty 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.
32CHAPTER 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 dangerous33shoulder 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!”34
“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.35I 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 moutyo’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 sandbar36reef 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!”
37CHAPTER 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 shooting38of 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 to39count 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; Dogtooth40Island 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-boat41home. 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 midnight42and 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 Carline43left 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.44
“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.