95CHAPTER 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 often96amounted 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 back97to 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 stood98out 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 town99behind 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 swore100to 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 that101he 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.
102CHAPTER 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 evening103the 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 to104prepare 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 thought105the 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!”106
“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!”107
“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 the108Grecian 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!”109
“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.
110CHAPTER 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 him111beyond 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 into112a 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 drop113of 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 own114home, 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.115
“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.116
“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.