144CHAPTER XXII
Fortune, or rather the Father of Waters, had favoured Parson Elijah Rasba in the accomplishment of his errand. It might not have happened in a decade that he locate a fugitive within a hundred miles of Cairo, where the Forks of the Ohio is the jumping-off place of the stream of people from a million square miles.
Rasba knew it. The fervour of the prophets was in his heart, and the light of understanding was brightening in his mind. Something seemed to have caught the doors of his intelligence and thrown them wide open.
In the pent-up valleys of the mountains, with their little streams, their little trails, their dull and hopeless inhabitants, their wars begun in disputes over pigs and abandoned peach orchards, their moonshine and hate of government revenues, there had been no chance for Parson Rasba to get things together in his mind.
The days and nights on the rivers had opened his eyes. When he asked himself: “If this is the Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?” he found a perspective.
Sitting there beside the wounded Jest Prebol, by the light of a big table lamp, he “wrestled” with his Bible the obscurities of which had long tormented his ignorance and baffled his mental bondage.
The noises of the witches’ hours were in the air. Wavelets splashed along the side and under the bow of the Prebol shanty-boat. The mooring ropes stretched audibly, and the timber heads to which they were fastened squeaked and strained; the wind slapped and hissed and whined on all sides, crackling through the145heavy timber up the bank. The great river pouring by seemed to have a low, deep growl while the wind in the skies rumbled among the clouds.
No wonder Rasba could understand! He could imagine anything if he did not hold fast to that great Book which rested on his knees, but holding fast to it, the whisperings and chucklings and hissings which filled the river wilderness, and the deep tone of the flood, the hollow roar of the passing storm, were but signs of the necessity of faith in the presence of the mysteries.
So Rasba wrestled; so he grappled with the things he must know, in the light of the things he did know. And a kind of understanding which was also peace comforted him. He closed the Book at last, and let his mind drift whither it would.
Panoramas of the river, like pictures, unfolded before his eyes; he remembered flashes taken of men, women, and children; he dwelt for a time on the ruin of the church up there in the valley, standing vainly against a mountain slide; his face warmed, his eyes moistened. His mind seized eagerly upon a vision of the memory, the pretty woman, whose pistol had shot down the deluded and now stricken wretch there in the cabin.
The anomaly of the fact that he was caring for her victim was not lost on his shrewd understanding. He was gathering up and helping patch the wreckage she was making. It was a curious conceit, and Elijah Rasba, while he smiled at the humour of it, was at the same time conscious of its sad truth.
Her presence on the river meant no good for any one; Prebol was but one of her victims; perhaps he was the least unfortunate of them all! Others might perish through her, while it was not too much to hope that Prebol, through his sufferings, might be willing to profit by their lesson. Rasba was glad that he had not overtaken146her that night of inexplicable pursuit. Her brightness, her prettiness, her appeal had been irresistible to him, and he could but acknowledge, while he trembled at the fact, that for the time he had been possessed by her enchantment.
Thus he meditated and puzzled about the things which, in his words, had come to pass. Before he knew it, daylight had arrived, and Jock Drones came over to greet him with “Good mo’nin’, Parson!” Prebol was sleeping and there was colour in his cheeks, enough to make them look more natural. When Doctor Grell arrived, just as the three sat down to breakfast, he cheered them with the information that Prebol was coming through though the shadow had rested close to him.
None of them admitted, even to himself, the strain the wounded man had been and was on their nerves. Under his seeming indifference Buck was near the breaking point; Jock, victim of a thousand worries, was bent under his burdens. Grell, having fought the all-night fight for a human life, was still weak with weariness from the effort. Rasba, a newcomer, brought welcome reserves of endurance, assistance, and confidence.
“Yo’ men shore have done yo’ duty by a man in need,” he told them, and none of them could understand why that truthful statement should make them feel so very comfortable.
They left the sick man to go on board the gaming boat, and they sat on the stern deck, where they looked across the river and the levee to the roofs of Caruthersville. If they looked at the horizon, their attention was attracted and their gaze held by the swirling of the river current. Their eyes could not be drawn away from that tremendous motion, the rush of147a thousand acres of surface; the senses were appalled by the magnitude of its suggestion.
“Going to play to-night?” Grell asked, uneasily.
“No,” Buck replied, instantly.
“So!” the doctor exclaimed.
“Slip’s going up on the steamboat.”
“For good?”
“So’m I!” Buck continued, breathlessly; “I’m quitting the riveh, too! I’ve been down here a good many years. I’ve been thinking. I’m going back. I’m going up the bank again.”
“What’ll you do with the boat?” Grell continued.
“Slip and I’ve been talking it all over. We’re through with it. We guessed the Prophet, here, could use it. We’re going to give it to him.”
“Going to give hit to me!” Rasba started up and stared at the man.
“Yes, Parson; that poplar boat of yours isn’t what you need down here.” Buck smiled. “This big pine boat’s better; you could preach in this boat.”
Tears started in Rasba’s eyes and dripped through his dark whiskers. Buck and Jock had acted with the impulsiveness of gambling men. Something in the fact that Rasba had come down those strange miles had touched them, had given Drones courage to go back and face the music, and to Buck the desire to return into his old life.
“We’re going up on theKateto-morrow morning,” Buck explained. “Slip’d better show you how to run the gasolene boat if you don’t know how, Parson!”
Dazed by the access of fortune, Rasba spent the mid-afternoon learning to run the 28-foot gasolene launch which was used to tow the big houseboat which would make such a wonderful floating church. It was a big boat only a little more than two years old. Buck had148made it himself, on the Upper Mississippi, for a gambling boat. The frame was light, and the cabin was built with double boards, with building paper between, to keep out the cold wintry winds.
“Gentlemen,” Rasba choked, looking at the two donors of the gift, “I’m going to be the best kind of a man I know how––”
“It’s your job to be a parson,” Buck laughed. “If it wasn’t for men like us, that need reforming, you’d be up against it for something to look out for. You aren’t much used to the river, and I’ll suggest that when you drop down you land in eddies sheltered from the west and south winds. They sure do tear things up sometimes. I’ve had the roof tore off a boat I was in, and I saw sixty-three boats sunk at Cairo’s Kentucky shanty-boat town one morning after a big wind.”
“I’ll keep a-lookin’,” Rasba assured him, “but I’ve kind-a lost the which-way down heah. One day I had the sun ahead, behind, and both sides––”
“There’s maps in that pile of stuff in the corner,” Buck said, going to the duffle. “You’re on Sheet 4 now. Here’s Caruthersville.”
“Yas, suh. Those red lines?”
“The new survey. You see, that sandbar up in Little Prairie Bend has cut loose from Island No. 15, and moved down three miles, and we’re at the foot of this bar, here. That’s moved down, too, and that big bar down there was made between the surveys. You see, they had to move the levee back, and Caruthersville moved over the new levee––”
“Sho!” Rasba gasped. “What ails this old riveh?”
“She jes’ wriggles, same’s water into a muddy road downhill,” Kippy laughed. “Up there in Little Prairie Bend hit’s caved right through the old levee, and they had to loop around. Now they’ve reveted it.”149
“Reveted?”
“They’ve woven a willow mattress and weighted it down with broken rock from up the river—more than a mile of it, now, and they’ll have to put down another mile before they can head the river off there.”
“Put a carpet down. How wide?”
“Four hundred feet probably––”
“An’ a mile long!” Rasba whispered, awed. “Every thing’s big on the riveh!”
“Yes, sir—that’s it—big!” Buck laughed.
Thus the four gossiped, and when Doctor Grell had taken his departure the three talked together about the river and its wonders. At intervals they went over to look after Prebol whose chief requirement was quiet, meat broths, and his medicines.
As night drew down Drones turned to Buck:
“It’s goin’ to be hard leaving the riveh! I neveh will forget, Buck. If I’m sent to jail for all my life, I’ll have something to remember. If they hang me, I shore will come back to walk with those that walk in the middle of the river.”
“What’s that?” Rasba turned and demanded.
“Riveh folks believe that thousands of people who died down thisaway, sunk in snagged steamers, caught in burned-up boats, blown to kingdom come in boiler explosions, those that have been murdered, and who died along the banks, keep a-goin’ up and down.”
“Sho!” Rasba exclaimed. “Yo’ b’lieve that?”
“A man believes a heap more after he’s tripped the riveh once or twice, than he ever believed in all his borned days, eh, Buck?”
“It’s so!” Buck cried out. “Last night I was thinking that I’d wasted my life down here; years and years I’ve been a shanty-boater, drifter, fisherman, trapper, market hunter, and late years, I’ve gambled. I’ve150been getting in bad, worse all the while. The Prophet here, coming along, seemed to wake me up—the man I used to be—I mean. It wasn’t so much what you said, Parson, but your being here. Then I’ve been thinking all over again. I’ve an idea, boys, that when I go back up to-morrow I won’t be so sorry for what I’ve been, as glad that I didn’t grow worse than I did. It won’t be easy, boys—going back. I’m taking the old river with me, though. I’ve framed its bends and islands, its chutes and reaches, like pictures in my mind. Old Parson here, too, coming in on us the way he did, saying that this was hell, but he’d come here to live in it. That’s what waked me up, Parson! I could see how you felt. You’d never seen such a place before, but you said in your heart and your eyes showed it, Parson, that you would leave God’s country to help us poor devils. It’s just a point of view, though. I’m going right up to my particular hell, and I’ll look back here to this thousand miles of river as heaven. Yes, sir! But my job is up there—in that hell!”
So they talked, and always their thoughts were on the river channel, and their minds groping into the future.
When theKatewhistled way down at Bell’s Landing, Rasba took the two across to Caruthersville and bade them good-bye at the landing.
TheKatepulled out and Parson Rasba crossed to the three houseboats, two of them his own. He went in to see Prebol, who was lonesome and wanted to talk a little.
“What you going to do, Parson?” Prebol asked.
“I’d kind-a like to get to see shanty-boaters, and talk to them,” the man answered. “I wonder couldn’t yo’ sort of he’p me; tell me where I mout begin and where it’d he’p the most, an’ hurt people’s feelin’s the least?151I’d jes’ kind-a like to be useful. Course, I got to get you cured up an’ took cyar of first.”
“I cayn’t say much about being pious on Old Mississip’,” Prebol grinned, “but theh’s two ways of findin’ trouble. One’s to set still long enough, and then, again, you can go lookin’ fo’ hit. Course, yo’ know me! I’ve hunted trouble pretty fresh, an’ I’ve found hit, an’ I’ve lived onto hit. I cayn’t he’p much about doin’ good, an’ missionaryin’, an’ River Prophetin’.”
When Prebol’s voice showed the strain of talking Rasba bade him rest. Then he went over to the big boat, a gift that would have sold for $1,000. He looked at the crap table, the little poker tables with the brass-slot kitties; he stared at the cabinet of cards and dice.
“All mine!” he said.
He walked out on the deck where he could commune with the river, using his eyes, his ears, and the feeling that the warm afternoon gave him. The sun shone upon him, and made a narrow pathway across the rushing torrent. The sky was blue and cloudless. Of the cold, the wind, the sea of liquid mud, not one trace remained.
He looked down and up the river, and his eyes caught a flicker which became a flutter, like the agitation of a duck preening its feathers on a smooth surface.
He watched it for a long time. He did not know what it was. As a river man, his curiosity was excited, but there was something more than mere curiosity; the river instinct that the inexplicable and unknown should be watched and inquired into moved him almost unconsciously to watch that distant agitation which became a dot afloat in a mirage of light. A little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling currents at the bend.152
The sun drew nearer the tree tops. The little cabin-boat was seeking a place to land or anchor for the night. If it was an old river man, the boat would drop into some little eddy at Caruthersville or down below; but a stranger on the river would likely shoot across into the gamblers’ eddy tempted, perhaps, by the three boats already there.
The boat drew swiftly near, and as it ran down, the navigator rowed to make the shanty-boat eddy. Parson Rasba discovered that it was a woman at the sweeps, and a few strokes later he knew that it was a slim, young woman. When she coasted down outside the eddy, to swing in at the foot, and arrived opposite him, he recognized her.
“God he’p me!” he choked, “hit’s Missy Nelia. Hit’s Missy Nelia! An’ she’s a runned away married woman—an’ theh’s the man she shot!”
“Hello-o, Parson!” she hailed him, “did you see a skiff with a reporter man drop by?”
“No, missy!” he shook his head, his heart giving a painful thump
“I’m a-landing in, Parson!” she cried. “I want to talk with you!”
With that she leaned forward, drove the sweeps deep, and her boat started in like a skiff. It seemed to Parson Rasba that he had never seen a more beautiful picture in all his days.
153CHAPTER XXIII
Lester Terabon rowed down the rolling river waters in the dark night. He had, of course, looked out into the Mississippi shades from the security of landing, anchorage, and sandbar; he knew the looks of the night but not the activities of currents and bends when a gale is sweeping by and the air is, by turns, penetrated by the hissing of darting whitecaps and the roar of the blustering winds.
He would not from choice have selected a night of gale for a pull down the Mississippi, and his first sensation as he sought a storm wave stroke was one of doubt. What dangers might engulf him was not plain, not the waves, for his skiff bobbed and rocked over them; not river pirates bent on plunder, for they could not see him; perhaps a snag in the shallows of a crossing; perhaps the leap of a sawyer, a great tree trunk with branches fast in the mud and the roots bounding up and down in the current; perhaps a collision with some other craft.
He had salt-water rowlocks on his boat, open-topped “U” sockets, and the oars he used were cased with a foot of black leather and collars of leather strips; the tips were covered with copper sheets which gave them weight and balance. At first he pulled awkwardly, catching crabs in the hollows and backing into the heft of the waves, but after a time he felt the waves as they came, and the oars feathered and caught. While he watched ahead and searched the black horizon for the distant sparkle of government lights, he fell into the swing of his stroke before he knew it, and he was interested and surprised to observe that he swayed to the side-wash while he pulled to the rhythm of the waves.154
The government lights guided him. He had not paid much attention to them before; he had seen their white post standards as he dropped down, day after day, but his skiff, drawing only five inches of water, passed over the shallowest crossings and along the most gradually sloping sandbars. Now he must keep to the deep water, follow the majestic curves and sweeps of the meandering channel, lest he collide with a boiling eddy, ram the shore line of sunken trees, or climb the point of a towhead.
It was all a new experience, and its novelty compelled him at times to pause in his efforts to jot down a few hasty words by light of a little electric flash to preserve in his memory the sequence of the constantly varying features of the night, beginning with the curtain of the shanty-boat which flicked its good luck after him, passing the bright, clear lights of New Madrid. After leaving far behind their glow against the thin haze in the night he “made” the scattered shoals of Point Pleasant, and hugged down vanishing Ruddles Point, taking a glimpse of Tiptonville—which withdraws year by year from the fatal caving brink of its site—wishing as he passed that he might return to that strange place and visit Reelfoot Lake three or four miles beyond, where the New Madrid earthquakes drowned a forest whose dead stubs rise as monuments to the tragedy.
In Little Cypress Bend, twenty-five miles below where he had left the young woman, he heard the splash and thud of a caving bank, and felt the big rollers from the falling earth twisting and tumbling him about for a third of a mile.
It was after 1 o’clock when he looked at his watch. He was beginning to feel the pull on his shoulders, and the crick which constantly looking over his shoulder155to see the lights ahead caused him. The dulness of his vision, due to inevitable fatigue, compelled him constantly to sit more alert and dash away the fine spray which whipped up from the waves. A feeling of listlessness overpowered him. He could not row on forever, without resting at all. Taking advantage of a moment of calm in the wind, he pulled the bow around and drifted down stern first.
He had lost track of his position; he had not counted the lights, and now for many miles there was no town distinguishable. He had felt the loneliness of a mile-breadth; now he wondered whether he was in Missouri or Arkansas, whether he had come forty miles or eighty, and after a little he began to worry for fear he might have gone more than a hundred.
With the wind astern or nearly astern, he knew that he had pulled four or five miles an hour, and he did not know how fast the current of the river ran; it might be four miles or eight miles. In ten hours he might leave more than a hundred miles of river bank behind him.
A new sensation began to possess him: the feeling that he was not alone. He looked around, while he rested trying to find what proximity thus affected him. The wind? Those dull banks, seemingly so distant? Perhaps some fellow traveller? It was none of those things.
It was the river! The “feel” of the flood was that of a person. He could not shake off the sensation, which seemed absurd. He shook his head resolutely and then searched through the gloom to discover what eyes might be shining in it. He saw the inevitable government lights between which was deep water and a safe channel. He had but to keep on the line between the lights, cutting across when he spied another156one far ahead. The lights but accentuated the certainty that on all sides, but a little way from him, a host of invisible beings speculated on his presence and influenced his course.
A newspaper man of much experience could not help but protest in his practical mind against such a determination of the invisible and the unknown to give him such nonsensical ideas. He had in play, in intellectual persiflage, and with some show of traditional reasonableness, called Nelia Crele “a river goddess.” She was very well placed in his mind—a reckless woman, pretty, with a fine character for a masterpiece of fiction (should he ever get to the story-writing stage) and a delight to think about; commanding, too, mysterious and exacting; and now he thought it might be the laughter of her voice that carried in the wind, not a mocking laugh, nor a jeering one, but one of sweet encouragement which neither distance nor circumstances could dismiss from a distressed and reluctant heart, let alone a heart so willing to receive as his.
Lester Terabon accepted the possibility of river lore and proclaimed beliefs. Fishermen, store-boaters, trippers, pirates, and all sorts of the shanty-boaters whom he had interviewed on his way down had solemnly assured him that there were spirits who promenaded down mid-stream, and who sometimes could be seen.
Terabon was sorry when his cool, calculating mind refused to believe his eyes, which saw shapes; his flesh, which felt creeps; his ears, which heard voices; and his nostrils, which caught a whiff of a faint, sweet perfume more exquisite than any which he remembered. He knew that when he had kissed the river goddess whose eyes were blue, whose flesh was fair, whose grace was lovely, he had tasted that nectar and sniffed that ambrosia. He wondered if she were near him, watching157to see whether he performed well the task which she had set for him, the rescue of the husband who had forfeited her love, and yet who still was under her protection since in his indignant sorrow he had supposed himself capable of finding and retaining her.
Terabon would have liked nothing better than to believe what the Grecians used to believe, that goddesses and gods do come down to the earth to mingle among mankind. He fought the impossibility with his reason, and night winds laughed at him, while the voices of the waves chuckled at his predicament. They assailed him with their presence like living things, and then roared away to give room to new voices and new presences.
“Anyhow,” Terabon laughed, in spite of himself, “you’re good company, Old Mississip’!”
Yet he felt the chilling and depressing possibility that he might never again see that woman who would remain as a “river goddess” in his imagination. He had been heart-free, a bystander in the world’s affairs. Now he knew what it was to see the memory of a woman rise unbidden to disturb his calculations; more than that, too, he was a part of the affairs of the River People.
As a reporter “back home” he had never been able quite to reconcile himself to his constant position as a spectator, a neutral observer, obliged to write news without feeling and impartially. A politician could look him in the eye and tell him any smooth lie, and he could not, with white heat, deny the statement. He could not rise with his own strength to champion the cause of what he knew to be right against wrong; he could not elaborate on the details of things that he felt most interested in, but must consult the fancies of a not-particularly discriminating public, whose average158intelligence, according to some learned students, must be placed at seventeen-years plus. As he was twenty-four plus, Terabon was immensely discouraged with the public when he had set forth down the Mississippi.
Now he was on the way from a river goddess to interfere with the infamous plans of river pirates, through a dry gale out of the north, on the winding course of the Mississippi, a transition which troubled the self-possession while it awakened the spirit of the young man.
Dawn broke on the troubled river, and the prospect was enchanting to the heroic in the mind of the skiff-tripper. He could not be sure which was east or west, for the gray light appeared on all sides, in spots and patches of varying size. No gleam reflected from the yellow clay of the tumbling and tortured waters. As far as he could see there was light, but not a bright light. Dull purples, muddy waters, gray tree trunks, black limbs against dark clouds; Terabon felt the weariness of a desert, the melancholy of a wet, dripping-tree wilderness, and of a tumbling waste of waters; and yet never had the solid body of the stream been so awe-inspiring as in that hour of creeping and insinuating dawn.
He ran out into the main river again, and a wonderful prospect opened before his eyes. Sandbars spread out for miles across the river and lengthwise of the river; the bulk of the stream seemed broken up into channels and chutes and wandering waterways. He saw column after column of lines of spiles, like black teeth, through which the water broke with protesting foam.
When he thought to reckon up, as he passed Osceola Bar, he found that he had come ninety-five miles. Yankee Bar was only five or six miles below him, and he eagerly pulled down to inspect the long beaches, the159chutes and channels, which the river pirates had used for not less than 150 years; where they still had their rendezvous.
Wild ducks and geese were there in many flocks. There were waters sheltered from the wind by willow patches. The woods of Plum Point Peninsula were heavy and dark. The river main current slashed down the miles upon miles of Craighead Point, and shot across to impinge upon Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1, where a made dirt bank was silhouetted against the sky.
Not until his binoculars rested upon the bar at the foot of Fort Pillow Bluff did Terabon’s eyes discover any human beings, and then he saw a white houseboat with a red hull. He headed toward it to ask the familiar river question.
“No, suh!” the lank, sharp-eyed fisherman shook his head. “Theh’s no motorboat landed up theh, not this week. Who all mout you be?”
“Lester Terabon; I’m a newspaper writer; I live in New York; I came down the Mississippi looking for things to tell about in the newspapers. You see, lots of people hardly know there’s a Mississippi River, and it’s the most interesting place I ever heard of.”
“Terabon? I expect you all’s the feller Whiskey Williams was tellin’ about; yo’n a feller name of Carline was up by No. 8. He said yo’ had one of them writin’ machines right into a skift. Sho! An’ yo’ have! The woman an’ me’d jes’ love to see yo’ all use hit.”
“You’ll see me,” Terabon laughed, “if you’ll let me sit by your stove. I’ve some writing I could do. Here’s a goose for dinner, too.”
“Sho! The woman shore will love to cook that goose! I’m a fisherman but no hunter. ’Tain’t of’en we git a roast bird!”160
So Terabon sat by the stove, writing. He wrote for more than an hour—everything he could remember, with the aid of his pencilled midnight notes, about that long run down. With his maps before him he recognized the bends and reaches, the sandbars and islands which had loomed up in the dark. Of all the parts of the river, the hundred miles from Island No. 10 down to Fort Pillow became the most familiar to his thoughts, black though the night had been. Even each government light began to have characteristics, and the sky-line of levee, wilderness, sandbar, and caving bank grew more and more defined.
Having written his notes, and Jeff Slamey having fingered the nine loose-leaf sheets with exclamatory interest and delight, Terabon said he must go rest awhile.
“Yas, suh,” the fisherman cried, “when a man’s pulled a hundred mile he shore needs sleep. When the woman’s got that goose cooked, I bet yo’ll be ready to eat, too.”
So Terabon turned in to sleep. He was awakened at last by the sizzling of a goose getting its final basting. He started up, and Slamey said:
“Hit’s ready. I bet yo’ feel betteh, now; six hours asleep!”
It didn’t seem like six minutes of dreamless recreation.
With night the wind fell. The flood of sunset brilliance spread down the radiant sandbars and the bright waterways. The trees were plated with silver and gold, and the sweep of the caving bend was a dark shadow against which the river current swept with ceaseless attack.
For hours that night Terabon amused his host with his adventures, except that he made but most casual mention of the woman whom Carline was seeking.161He was cautious, too, about the motorboat and the companion who had taken Carline down the river, till Slamey burst out:
“I know that feller. He’s a bad man; he’s a river rat. If he don’t kill Gus Carline, I don’t know these yeah riveh fellers. They use down thisaway every winter. I know; I know them all. I leave them alone, an’ they leave me alone. I knew they was comin’. They got three four boats now. One feller, name of Prebol—he’s bad, too—was shot by a lady above Cairo. He’s with a coupla gamblers to Caruthersville now. Everybody stops yeah; I know everybody; everybody knows me.”
The next day was calm all day long, and Terabon went up the bank to shoot squirrels or other woods game; he went almost up to the Plum Point, killed several head of game, and rejoiced in the bayous and sloughs and chutes of a changing land.
The following morning he was hailed by Slamey:
“Hi—i, Terabon! Theh’s a shanty-boat up the head of Flower Island Bar jes’ drappin’ in. They’ve floated down all night!”
Through his glasses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.
They were too far away for him to distinguish their personalities, but one was a tall, active man, the other obviously chunky, and when they ran their lines out and made fast to half-buried snags, it was with the quick decision of men used to work against currents and to unison of effort. There was something suggestive in their bearing, their scrutiny up and down the river, their standing close to each other as they talked. If Terabon had not suspected them of being pirates, their attitude and actions would have betrayed them.162
Terabon, after a little while, pulled up the eddy toward them; he was willing to take a long chance. Few men resent a newspaper man’s presence. The worst of them like to put themselves, their ideas, right with the world. Terabon risked their knavery to win their approbation. Come what might, he would seek to save Augustus Carline from the consequences of his ignorance, money, folly, and remorse.
163CHAPTER XXIV
The flow of the Mississippi River is down stream—a perfectly absurd and trite statement at first thought. On second thought, one reverts to the people who are always trying to fight their way up that adverse current, with the thrust of two miles perpendicular descent and the body of a thousand storms in its rush.
There are steamers which endeavour to stem the current, but they make scant headway; sometimes a fugitive afraid of the rails will pull up stream; the birds do fly with the spring winds against the retreat of winter; but all these things are trifles, and merely accentuate the fact that everything goes down.
The sandbars are not fixed, they are literally rivers of sand flowing down, tormenting the current, and keeping human beings speculating on their probable course and the effect, when after a few years on a point, they disappear under the water. Later they will lunge up and out into the wind again, gallumphing along, some coarse gravel bars, some yellow sand, some white sand, some fine quicksand, some gritty mud, and others of mud almost fit to use in polishing silver.
Thousands of people in shanty-boats, skiff’s, fancy little yachts, and jon-boats, rag-shacks on rafts, and serviceable cruisers drift down with the flood, and are a part of it.
Autumn was passing; most of the birds had speeded south when the wild geese brought the alarm that a cold norther was coming. When the storm had gone by, shanty-boaters, having shivered with the cold, determined not to be caught again. The sunshine of the evening, when the wind died, saw boats drifting out for164the all-night run. Dawn, calm and serene, found boats moving out into mid-channel more or less in haste.
So they floated down, sometimes within a few hundred feet of other boats, sometimes in merry fleets tied together by ropes and common joyousness, sometimes alone in the midst of the vacant waters. The migration of the shanty-boaters was watched with mingled hate, envy, and admiration by Up-the-Bank folks, who pretend to despise those who live as they please.
And Nelia Carline pulled out into the current and followed her river friend, Lester Terabon, who had gone on ahead to save her husband from the river pirates. She despised her husband more as she let her mind dwell on the man who had shown no common frailties while he did enjoy a comradeship which included the charm of a pretty woman, recognizing her equality, and not permitting her to forget for a moment that he knew she was lovely, as well as intelligent.
She had not noticed that fact so much at the time, as afterward, when she subjected him to the merciless scrutiny of a woman who has heretofore discovered in men only depravity, ignorance, selfishness, or brutality. Her first thought had been to use Terabon, play with him, and, if she could, hurt him. She knew that there were men who go about plaguing women, and as she subjected herself to grim analysis, she realized that in her disappointment and humiliation she would have hurt, while she hated, men.
The long hours down the river, in pleasant sunshine, with only an occasional stroke of the oar to set the boat around broadside to the current, enabled her to sit on the bow of her boat and have it out with herself. She had never had time to think. Things crowded her Up-the-Bank. Now she had all the time in the world,165and she used that time. She brought out her familiar books and compared the masters with her own mind. She could do it—there.
“Ruskin, Carlyle, Old Mississip’, Plato, Plutarch, Thoreau, the Bible, Shelley, Byron, and I, all together, dropping down,” she chuckled, catching her breath. “I’m tripping down in that company. And there’s Terabon. He’s a good sport, too, and he’ll be better when I’ve—when I’ve caught him.”
Terabon was just a raw young man as regards women. He might flatter himself that he knew her sex, and that he could maintain a pose of writing her into his notebooks, but she knew. She had seen stunned and helpless youth as she brought into play those subtle arts which had wrenched from his reluctant and fearful soul the kiss which he thought he had asked for, and the phrase of the river goddess, which he thought he had invented. She laughed, for she had realized, as she acted, that he would put into words the subtle name for which she had played.
It all seemed so easy now that she considered the sequence of her inspired moves. Drifting near another shanty-boat, she passed the time of day with a runaway couple who had come down the Ohio. They had dinner together on their boat. A solitaire and an unscarred wedding ring attested to the respectability of the association.
“Larry’s a river drifter,” the girl explained, “and Daddy’s one of those set old fellows who hate the river. But Mamma knew it was all right. Larry’s saved $7,000 in three years. He’d never tell me that till I married him, but I knew. We’re going clear down to N’Orleans. Are you?”
“Probably.”
“And all alone—aren’t you afraid?”166
“Oh, I’ll be all right, won’t I?” She looked at the stern-featured youth.
“If you can shoot and don’t care,” Larry replied without a smile.
“I can shoot,” Nelia said, showing her pistol.
“That’s river Law!” Larry cried, smiling. “That’s Law. You came out the Upper River?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“Then I bet––” the girl-wife started to speak, but stopped, blushing.
“Yes,” Nelia smiled a hard smile. “I’m the woman who shot Prebol above Buffalo Island—I had to.”
“You did right; men always respect a lady if she don’t care who she shoots,” Larry cried, enthusiastically. “Wish you’d get my wife to learn how to shoot. She’s gun shy!”
So Nelia coaxed the little wife to shoot, first the 22-calibre repeating rifle and then the pistol. When Nelia had to go down they parted good friends and Larry thanked her, saying that probably they would meet down below somewhere.
“You’ll make Caruthersville,” Larry told her. “There’s a good eddy on the east side across from the town. There’s likely some boats in there. They’ll know, perhaps, if the folks you are looking for are around. There’s an old river man there now, name of Buck. He’s a gambler, but he’s all right, and he’ll treat you all right. He’s from up in our country, on the Ohio. Hardly anybody knows about him. He was always a dandy fellow, but he married a woman that wasn’t fit to drink his coffee. She bothered the life out of him, and—well, he squared up. He gave her to the other fellow with a double-barrelled shotgun.”
When Nelia ran down to the gambling boat and found Parson Rasba there, she enjoyed the idea. Certainly167the River Prophet and the river gambler were an interesting combination. She was not prepared to find that Buck had taken his departure and that Parson Rasba was converting the gambling hell into a mission boat. Least of all was she prepared when Parson Rasba said with an unsteady voice:
“Theh’s a man sick in that other boat, and likely he’d like to see somebody.”
“Oh, if there’s anything I can do!” she exclaimed, as a woman does.
He led the way to the brick-red little boat, the like of which could be found in a thousand river eddies. She followed him on board and over to the bed. There she looked into the wan countenance and startled eyes of Jest Prebol.
“Hit’s Mister Prebol,” Rasba said. “I know you have no hard feelings against him, and I know he has none against you, Missy Carline!”
An introduction to a contrite river pirate, whom she had shot, for the moment rendered the young woman speechless. Prebol was less at loss for words.
“I’m glad to git to see yo’,” he said, feebly. “If I’d knowed yo’, I shore would have minded my own business. I’m bad, Missy Carline, but I ain’ mean—not much. Leastwise, not about women. I reckon the boys shore will let yo’ be now. I made a mistake, an’ I ’low to ’pologise to yo’.”
“I was—I was scairt to death,” she cried, sitting in a chair. “I was all alone. I was afraid—the river was so big that night. I was so far away. I should have given you fair warning. I’m sorry, too, Jest.”
“Lawse!” Prebol choked. “Say hit thataway ag’in––”
“I’m sorry, too, Jest!”168
“I cayn’t thank yo’ all enough,” the man-whispered. “I’ve got friends along down the riveh. I’ll send word along to them, they’ll shore treat yo’ nice. Treat friends of yourn nice, too. Huh! ’Pologizin’ to me afteh what I ’lowed to do!”
“We’ll be good friends, Jest. The Prophet here and I are good friends, too. Aren’t we, Parson?”
“I hearn say, Missy,” the Prophet said, slowly, picking his words, “I hearn say you’ve a power and a heap of book learning! Books on yo’ boat, all kinds. What favoured yo’ thataway?”
“Oh, I read lots!” she exclaimed, surprised by the sudden shift of thought. “Somehow, I’ve read lots!”
“In my house I had a Bible, an almanac, and the ‘Resources of Tennessee,’ Yo’ have that many books?”
“Why, I’ve a hundred—more than a hundred books!” she answered.
“A Bible?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind, Missy, comin’ on board this boat to-night, an’ tellin’ us about these books you have? I’m not educated; my daddy an’ I read the Bible, an’ tried to understand hit. Seems like we neveh did git to know the biggest and bestest of the words.”
“You had a dictionary?”
“A which?”
“A dictionary, a book that explains the meaning of all the words!”
“Ho law! A book that tells what words mean, Missy. Where all kin a man git to find one of them books?”
“Why, I’ve got––I’m hungry, Mr. Rasba, I must get something to eat. After supper we’ll bring some books over here and talk about them!”
“My supper is all ready, keeping warm in the oven,”169Rasba said. “I always cook enough for one more than there is. Yo’ know, a vacant chair at the table for the Stranger.”
“And I came?” she laughed.
“An’ yo’ came, Missy!” he replied.
“Parson,” Prebol pleaded, “I’m alone mos’ the time. Mout yo’ two eat hyar on my bo’t? The table—hit’d be comp’ny.”
“Certainly we’ll come,” Nelia promised, “if he’d just soon.”
“I’d rather,” Rasba assented, and at his tone Nelia felt a curious sensation of pity and mischievousness. At the same time, she recovered her self-possession. She demanded that Rasba let her help him bring over the supper, add a feminine relish, and set the table with a daintiness which was an addition to the fascination of her presence. Gaily she fed Prebol the delicate things which he was permitted to eat, then sat down with Rasba, her face to the light, and Prebol could watch her bantering, teasing, teaching Parson Rasba things he had never known he lacked.
After supper she brought over a basket full of books, twenty volumes. She dumped them onto the table, leather, cloth, and board covers, of red, blue, gray, brown, and other gay colours. Parson Rasba had seen government documents and even some magazines with picture covers, but in the mountains where he had ridden his Big Circuit with such a disastrous end he had never seen such books. He hesitated to touch one; he cried out when three or four slipped off the pile onto the floor.
“Missy, won’t they git muddied up!”
“They’re to read!” she told him. “Listen,” and she began to read—poetry, prose at random.
The Prophet did not know, he had never been trained to know—as few men ever are trained—how to combat170feminine malice and spoiled power. He listened, but not with averted eyes. Prebol, himself a spectator at a scene different from any he had ever witnessed, was still enough more sophisticated to know what she was doing, and he was delighted.
By and by the injured man drifted into slumber, but Rasba gave no sign of flagging interest, no traces of a mind astray from the subject at hand. He felt that he must make the most of this revelation, which came after the countless revelations which he had had since arriving down the river. There was a fear clutching at his heart that it might end; that in a moment this woman might depart and leave him unenlightened, and unable ever to find for himself the unimaginable world of words which she plucked out of those books and pinned into the great vacant spaces of his mind which he had kept empty all these years—not knowing that he was waiting for this night, when he should have the Mississippi bring into his eddy, alongside his own mission boat, what he most needed.
He sat there, a great, pathetic figure, shaggy, his heart thumping, taking from this trim, neat, beautiful woman the riches which she so casually, almost wantonly, threw to him in passing.
The corridors of his mind echoed to the tread of hosts; he heard the rumblings of history, the songs of poets whose words are pitched to the music of the skies, and he hung word pictures which Ruskin had painted in his imagination.
Fate had waited long to give him this night. It had waited till the man was ready, then with a lavish hand the storehouses of the master intellects of the world were opened to him, for him to help himself. Nelia suddenly started up from her chair and looked around, herself the victim of her own raillery, which had grown171to be an understanding of the pathetic hunger of the man for these things.
It was daylight, and the flood of the sunrise was at hand.
“Parson,” she said, “do you like these things—these books?”
“Missy,” he whispered, “I could near repeat, word for word, all those things you’ve said and read to me to-night.”
“There are lots more,” she laughed. “I want to do something for your mission boat, will you let me?”
“Lawse! Yo’ve he’ped me now more’n yo’ know!”
She smiled the smile that women have had from all the ages, for she knew a thousand times more than even the Prophet.
“I’ll give you a set of all these books!” she said; “all the books that I have. Not these, my old pals—yes, these books, Mr. Rasba. If you’ll take them? I’ll get another lot down below.”
“Lawd God! Give me yo’ books!”
“Oh, they’re not expensive—they’re––”
“They’re yours. Cayn’t yo’ see? It’s your own books, an’ hit’s fo’ my work. I neveh knowed how good men could be, an’ they give me that boat fo’ a mission boat. Now—now—missy—I cayn’t tell yo’—I’ve no words––”
And with gratitude, with the simplicity of a mountain parson, he dropped on his knees and thanked God. As he told his humility, Prebol wakened from a deep and restful sleep to listen in amazement.
When at last Rasba looked up Nelia was gone. The books were on the table and he found another stack heaped up on the deck of the mission boat. But the woman was gone, and when he looked down the river he saw something flicker and vanish in the distance.
He stared, hurt; he choked, for a minute, in protest, then carried that immeasurable treasure into his cabin.