172CHAPTER XXV
Renn Doss, the false friend, saw the danger of the recognition of the firearms by Carline. The savage swing of a half pound of fine shot braided up in a rawhide bag, and a good aim, reduced Carline to an inert figure of a man. “Renn Doss” was Hilt Despard, pirate captain, whose instantaneous action always had served him well in moments of peril.
The three men carried Carline to a bunk and dropped him on it. They covered him up and emptied a cupful of whiskey on his pillow and clothes. They even poured a few spoonfuls down his throat. They thus changed him to what might be called a “natural condition.”
Then, sitting around the stove, they whispered among themselves, discussing what they had better do. Half a hundred possibilities occurred to their fertile fancies and replete memories. Men and women who have always led sheltered lives can little understand or know what a pirate must understand and know even to live let alone be successful.
“What’s Terabon up to?” Despard demanded. “Here he is, drappin’ down by Fort Pillow Landing, running around. Where’s that girl he had up above New Madrid? What’s his game? Coming up here and talking to us? Asking us all about the river and things—writin’ it for the newspapers?”
“That woman’s this Carline’s wife!” Jet sneered.
“Sure! An’ here’s Terabon an’ here’s Carline. Terabon don’t talk none about that woman—nor about Carline,” Dock grumbled.
“I bet Terabon would be sorry none if Carline hyar dropped out. Y’ know she’s Old Crele’s gal,” Jet173said. “Crele’s a good feller. Sent word down to have us take cyar of her, an’ Prebol, the fool, didn’t know ’er, hadn’t heard. Look what she give him, bang in the shoulder! That old Prophet’ll take cyar of him, course. See how hit works out. She shined up to Terabon, all right.”
“I ’low I better talk to him,” Despard suggested. “Terabon’s a good sport. He said, you’ know, that graftin’ and whiskey boatin’, an’ robbin’ the bank wa’n’t none of his business. He said, course, he could write it down in his notes, but without names, ’count of somebody might read somethin’ in them an’ get some good friend of his in Dutch. He said it wouldn’t be right for him to know about somebody robbin’ a commissary, or a bank, or killin’ somebody, because if somebody like a sheriff or detective got onto it, they might blame him, or somethin’.”
“I like that Terabon!” Jet declared. “Y’see how he is. He says he’s satisfied, makin’ a fair living, gettin’ notes so’s he can write them magazine stories, an’ if he was to try to rob the banks, he’d have to learn how, same’s writin’ for newspapers. An’ probably he wouldn’t have the nerve to do it really, ’count of his maw and paw bein’ the kind they was. He told me hisself that they made him go to Sunday school when he was a kid, an’ things like that spoil a man for graftin’. Stands to reason, all right, the way he talks. I like him; he knows enough to mind his own business.”
“He’s comin’ up to-night to go after geese on the bar. We’ll talk to him. He’ll look that business over, level-headed. That motorboat any good?”
“Nothin’ extra. He’s got ready money, though, I forgot that,” Despard grinned, walking over to the hapless victim of his black-jack skill.
The three divided nearly thirteen hundred dollars174among them. The money made them good humoured and they had some compassion for their prisoner. One of them noticed that a skiff was coming up from Fort Pillow Landing, and fifteen minutes later Terabon was talking to Despard on the snag to one prong of which was fastened the line of Carline’s motorboat.
“I was wondering where I’d see you again,” Terabon said. “Didn’t have a chance at New Madrid, saw you was in business, so I didn’t follow up none.”
“I was wondering if you had a line on that,” Despard said, doubtfully. “Y’know that woman you was staying with up on Island Ten Bar? Well, we got her man in here full’s a fish. Lookin’ for his woman, an’ he’s no good. Fell off the cabin, hit a spark in the back of the head when the water sucked when that steamboat went by this morning. He’d ought to go down to Memphis hospital, but—Well, we can’t take ’im. You know how that is.”
“Be glad to help you boys out any way I can,” Terabon said. “I’ll run him down.”
“Say, would you? We don’t want him on our hands,” the pirate explained. “We’d get to see you down b’low some’rs.”
“Sure, I would,” Terabon exclaimed. “Fact is, the woman said it’d be a favour to her, too, if I’d get him home. She’ll be dropping down likely. Darn nice girl, but quick tempered.”
“That’s right; quick ain’t no name for it. She plugged a friend of mine up by Buffalo Island––”
“Prebol? I heard about him. She was scairt.”
“She needn’t be, never again!” Despard grinned. “When a lady can handle a river Law like she does, us bad uns are real nice!”
Terabon laughed, and the two went into the cabin-boat where Carline lay on the bunk. Terabon ran his175hand around the man’s head and neck, found the lump near the base of the skull, found that the neck wasn’t broken, and made sure that the heart was beating—things a reporter naturally learns to do in police-station and hospital experience.
Jet brought the motorboat down to the stern of the cabin-boat, and the four carried Carline on board. They put him in his bunk, and Terabon, his skiff towing astern, steered out into the main current and soon faded down by Craighead Point Bar.
“I knowed he’d be all right,” Despard declared. “He’ll take him down to Memphis, and out of our way. I’d ’a’ hated to kill him; it ain’t no use killin’ a man less’n it’s necessary. We got what we was after. Course, if we’d rewarded him, likely we’d got a lot, but it ain’t safe, holdin’ a man for rewards ain’t.”
“That boat’d been a good one to travel in,” Jet suggested.
“Everybody’d knowed it was Carline’s, an’ it wa’n’t worth fixing over. Hull not much good, and the motor’s been abused some. We’ll do better’n that.”
They had rid themselves of an incumbrance. They had made an acquaintance who was making himself useful. They were considerably richer than they had been for some time.
“I’d like to drap into Mendova,” Jet mused. “We ain’t had what you’d call a time––”
“Let’s kill some birds first,” Gaspard suggested. “I got a hunch that Yankee Bar’s a good bet for us for a little while. We dassn’t look into Memphis, ’count of last trip down. Mendova’s all right, but wait’ll we’ve hunted Yankee Bar.”
The money burned in their pockets, but as they stood looking out at the long, beautiful Yankee Bar its appeal went home. For more than a hundred years176generations of pirates had used there, and no one knows how many tragedies have left their stain in the great band around from Gold Dust Landing to Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1.
After dark they rowed over to the point and put out their decoys, dug their pits, screened them, and brushed over their tracks in the sand. Then they played cards till midnight, turned in for a little sleep, and turned out again in the black morning to go to their places with repeating shotguns and cripple-killer rifles in their hands.
When they were in their places, and the river silence prevailed, they saw the stars overhead, the reflections on sand and water around them, and the quivering change as air currents moved in the dark—the things that walk in the night. They heard, at intervals, many voices. Some they knew as the fluent music of migrant geese flying over on long laps of their fall flight, but some they did not know, except that they were river voices.
Ducks flew by no higher than the tops of the willow trees up the bar, their wings whistling and their voices eager in the dark. The lurkers saw these birds darting by like black streaks, tempting vain shots, but they were old hunters, and knew they wanted at least a little light. Over on the mainland they heard the noises of wilderness animals, and away off yonder a mule’s “he-haw” reverberated through the bottoms and over bars and river.
For these things, if the pirates had only known it, they found the world endurable. Each in his own pit, given over to his own thoughts, they thrilled to the joy of living. All they wanted, really, was this kind of thing; hunting in fall and winter, fishing in the summer, and occasional visits to town for another kind of thrill,177another sort of excitement. But their boyhood had been passed in privation, their youth amid temptations of appetite and vice, and now they were hopelessly mixed as to what they liked, what they didn’t like, what the world would do for them, and what they would do to the world. Weaklings, uneducated, without balance; habit-ridden, yet with all that miserable inheritance from the world, they waited there rigid, motionless, their hearts thrilling to the increasing music of the march of dawn across the bottoms of the Mississippi.
False dawn flushed and faded almost like a deliberate lightning flash. Then dawn appeared, marking down the gray lines of the wilderness trees with one stroke, sweeping out all the stars with another brush, revealing the flocks of birds glistening against the sky while yet the earth was in shade. The watchers spied a score of birds, great geese far to the northward, coming right in line with them. They waited for a few seconds—ages long. Then one of the men cried:
“They’re stoopin’, boys! They’re comin’!”
The wild geese, coming down a magnificent slant from a mile height, headed straight for Yankee Bar. Will birds never learn? They ploughed down with their wings folding, and poised. Their voices grew louder and louder as they approached.
With a hissing roar of their wings they pounded down out of the great, safe heights and circled around and inward. With a shout the three men started up through their masks and with levelled guns opened fire.
Too late the old gander at the point of the “V” began to climb; too late the older birds in the point screamed and gathered their strength. The river men turned their black muzzles against the necks of the young tail birds of the feathered procession and brought them tumbling down out of the line to the ground,178where on the hard sand two of them split their breasts and exposed thick layers of fat dripping with oil.
The cries of the fleeing birds, the echoes of the barking guns, died away. The men shouted their joy in their success, gathered up their victims, scurried pack to cover, brushing over their tracks, and crouched down again, to await another flock.
Hunger drove them to their cabin-boat within an hour. They had thought they wanted to get some more birds, but in fact they knew they had enough. They went over to their boat, cooked up a big breakfast, and sat around the fire smoking and talking it over. They chattered like boys. They were gleeful, innocent, harmless! But only for a time. Then the hunted feeling returned to them. Once more they had a back track to watch and ambushes to be wary of. They wanted to go to Mendova, but again they didn’t want to go there. They didn’t know but what Mendova might be watching for them, the same as Memphis was. Certainly, they determined, they must go to Mendova after dark, and see a friend who would put them wise to actual conditions around town.
They took catnaps, having had too little sleep, and yet they could not sleep deeply. They watched the shanty-boats which dropped down the river at intervals, most of them in the main current close to the far bank, and often hardly visible against the mottled background of caving earth, fallen trees, and flickering mirage. Their restlessness was silent, morose, and one of them was always on the lookout.
Despard himself was on watch in the afternoon. He sat just inside the kitchen door, out of the sunshine, in a comfortable rocking chair. Two windows and the stern door gave him a wide view of the river, sandbars and eddy. It seemed but a minute, but he had fallen179into a doze, when the splash of a shanty-boat sweeps awakened all the crew with a sudden, frightened start. Whispers, hardly audible, hailed in alarm. The three, crouching in involuntary doubt and dismay, glared at the newcomer.
It was a woman drifting in. Apparently she intended to land there, and the three men stared at her.
“His wife!” Despard said with soundless lips. The others nodded their recognition.
Mrs. Carline had run into the great dead eddy at the foot of Yankee Lower Bar, turned up in the slow reverse eddy of the chute, and was coming by their boat at the slowest possible speed.
Despard pulled his soft shirt collar, straightened his tie, hitched his suspenders, put on his coat, walked out on the stern deck, and, after a glance around, seemed suddenly to discover the stranger.
“Howdy!” he nodded, touching his cap respectfully, and gazing with flickering eyes at the woman whose marksmanship entitled her to the greatest respect.
“Howdy!” she nodded, scrutinizing him with level eyes. “Where am I?”
“Yankee Bar. Them’s Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1.”
“Do you know Jest Prebol?”
“Yessum.” Despard’s head bobbed in alarmed, unwilling assent.
“I thought perhaps you’d like to know that he’s getting along all right.”
“I bet he learnt his lesson,” Despard grimaced.
“What? I don’t just understand.”
“About bein’ impudent to a lady that can shoot—straight!”
A flicker moved the woman’s countenance, and she smiled, oddly.
“Oh, any one is likely to make mistakes!”180
“Darn fools is, Miss Crele. And you Old Crele’s girl! He might of knowed!”
The other two stepped out to help enjoy the conversation and the scenery.
“You know me?” she demanded.
“Yessum, we shore do. My name’s Despard—Jet here and Cope.”
She acknowledged the introductions.
“I’ve friends down here,” she said, with a little catch of her breath. “I was wondering if you—any of you gentlemen had seen them?”
“Your man, Gus Carline an’ that writin’ feller, Terabon?” Jet asked, without delicacy. Her cheeks flamed.
“Yes!” she whispered.
“Terabon took him down to Mendova or Memphis,” Despard said. “Carline was—was on the cabin and the boat lurched when the steamboat passing drawed. He drapped over and hit a spark plug on the head!”
“Was he badly hurt?”
“Not much—kind of a lump, that’s all.”
She looked down at Fort Pillow Bluff. The pirates awaited her pleasure, staring at her to their heart’s content. They envied her husband and Terabon; they felt the strangeness of the situation. She was following those two men down. She was part of the river tide, drifting by; she had shot Prebol, their pal, and had cleverly ascertained their knowledge of him while insuring that they had fair warning.
Her boat drifted down till it was opposite them, and then, with quick decision, she caught up a handy line, and said:
“I’m going to tie in a little while. I’ve been alone clear down from Caruthersville; I want to talk to somebody!”181
She threw the rope, and they caught and made it fast. They swung her boat in, ran a plank from stern to bow, and Despard gave her his hand. She came on board, and they sat on the stern deck to talk. Only one kind of woman could have done that with safety, but she was that kind. She had shot a man down for a look.
The three pirates took one of the fat young geese, plucked and dressed it, and baked it in a hot oven, with dressing, sweet potatoes, hot-bread, and a pudding which she mixed up herself.
For three hours they gossiped, and before she knew it, she had told them about Prebol, about Parson Rasba introducing them. The pirates shouted when she told of Jest’s apology. With river frankness, they said they thought a heap of Terabon, who minded his own business so cleverly.
“I like him, too,” she admitted. “I was afraid you boys might make trouble for Carline, though. He don’t know much about people, treating them right.”
“He’s one of those ignorant Up-the-Bankers,” Despard said.
“Oh, I know him.” She shrugged her shoulders a little bitterly.
As they ate the goose in camaraderie, the pirates took to warning and advising her about the Lower River; they told her who would treat her right, and who wouldn’t. They especially warned her against stopping anywhere near Island 37.
“They’re bad there—and mean.” Despard shook his head, gravely.
“I won’t stop in there,” Nelia promised. “River folks anybody can get along with, but those Up-the-Bankers!”
“Hit’s seo,” Jet cried. “They don’t have no feelings for nobody.”182
“You’ll be dropping on down?” Nelia asked.
“D’rectly!” Cope admitted. “We ’lowed we’d stop into Mendova. You stop in there an’ see Palura; he’ll treat you right. He was in the riveh hisse’f once. You talk to him––”
“What did Terabon and Mr. Carline go on in? What kind of a boat?”
“A gasolene cruiser.”
“Did he say where he’d be?”
“Terabon? No. Ask into Mendova or into Memphis. They can likely tell.”
“Thank you, boys! I’m awful glad you’ve no hard feelings on account of my shooting your partner; I couldn’t know what good fellows you are. We’ll see you later.”
Her smile bewitched them; she went aboard her boat, pulled over into the main current, and floated away in the sunset—her favourite river hour.
After hours of argument, debate, doubts, they, too, pulled out and floated past Fort Pillow.
183CHAPTER XXVI
Parson Rasba piled the books on the crap table in his cabin and stood them in rows with their lettered backs up. He read their titles, which were fascinating: “Arabian Nights,” “Representative Men,” “Plutarch’s Lives,” “Modern Painters,” “Romany Rye”—a name that made him shudder, for it meant some terrible kind of whiskey to his mind—“Lavengro,” a foreign thing, “Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases,” “The Stem Dictionary,” “Working Principles of Rhetoric”—he wondered what rhetoric meant—“The Fur Buyers’ Guide,” “Stones of Venice,” “The French Revolution,” “Sartor Resartus,” “Poe’s Works,” “Balzac’s Tales,” and scores of other titles.
All at once the Mississippi had brought down to him these treasures and a fair woman with blue eyes and a smile of understanding and sympathy, who had handed them to him, saying:
“I want to do something for your mission boat; will you let me?”
No fairyland, no enchantment, no translation from poverty and sorrow to a realm of wealth and happiness could have caught the soul of the Prophet Rasba as this revelation of unimagined, undreamed-of riches as he plucked the fruits of learning and enjoyed their luxuries. He had descended in his humility to the last, least task for which he felt himself worthy. He had humbly been grateful for even that one thing left for him to do: find Jock Drones for his mother.
He had found Jock, and there had been no wrestling with an obdurate spirit to send him back home, like a man, to face the law and accept the penalty.184There had been nothing to it. Jock had seen the light instantly, and with relief. His partner had also turned back after a decade of doubt and misery, to live a man’s part “back home.” The two of them had handed him a floating Bethel, turning their gambling hell over to him as though it were a night’s lodging, or a snack, or a handful of hickory nuts. The temple of his fathers had been no better for its purpose than this beautiful, floating boat.
Then a woman had come floating down, a beautiful strange woman whose voice had clutched at his heart, whose smile had deprived him of reason, whose eyes had searched his soul. With tears on her lashes she had flung to him that treasure-store of learning, and gone on her way, leaving him strength and consolation.
He left his treasure and went out to look at the river. Everybody leaves everything to look at the river! There is nothing in the world that will prevent it. He saw, in the bright morning, that Prebol had raised his curtain, and was looking at the river, too, though the effort must have caused excruciating pain in his wounded shoulder. Day was growing; from end to end of that vast, flowing sheet of water thousands upon thousands of old river people were taking a look at the Mississippi.
Rasba carried a good broth over to Prebol for breakfast, and then returned to his cabin, having made Prebol comfortable and put a dozen of the wonderful books within his reach. Then the River Prophet sat down to read his treasures, any and all of them, his lap piled up, three or four books in one hand and trying to turn the pages of another in his other hand by unskilful manipulation of his thumb. He was literally starving for the contents of those books.
He was afraid that his treasure would escape from him; he kept glancing from his printed page to the serried185ranks on the crap table, and his hands unconsciously felt around to make sure that the weight on his lap and in his grasp was substantial and real, and not a dream or vision of delight.
He forgot to eat; he forgot that he had not slept; he sat oblivious of time and river, the past or the future; he grappled with pages of print, with broadsides of pictures, with new and thrilling words, with sentences like hammer blows, with paragraphs that marched like music, with thoughts that had the gay abandon of a bird in song. And the things he learned!
When night fell he was dismayed by his weariness, and could not understand it. For a little while he ransacked his dulled wits to find the explanation, and when he had fixed Prebol for the night, with medicine, water, and a lamp handy to matches, he told the patient:
“Seems like the gimp’s kind of took out of me. My eyes are sore, an’ I doubt am I quite well.”
“Likely yo’ didn’t sleep well,” Prebol suggested. “A man cayn’t sleep days if he ain’t used to hit.”
“Sleep days?” Rasba looked wildly about him.
“Sho! When did I git to sleep, why, I ain’t slept—I––Lawse!”
Prebol laughed aloud.
“Yo’ see, Parson, yo’ all cayn’t set up all night with a pretty gal an’ not sleep hit off. Yo’ shore’ll git tired, sportin’ aroun’.”
“Sho!” Rasba snapped, and then a smile broke across his countenance. He cried out with laughter, and admitted: “Hit’s seo, Prebol! I neveh set up with a gal befo’ I come down the riveh. Lawse! I plumb forgot.”
“I don’t wonder,” Prebol replied, gravely. “She’d make any man forget. She sung me to sleep, an’ I slept like I neveh slept befo’.”
Rasba went on board his boat and, after a light supper,186turned in. For a minute he saw in retrospect the most wonderful day in his life, a day which a kindly Providence had drawn through thirty or forty hours of unforgettable exaltation. Then he settled into the blank, deep sleep of a soul at peace and at rest.
When in the full tide of the sunshine he awakened, he went about his menial tasks, attending Prebol, cleaning out the boats, shaking up the beds, hanging the bedclothes to air in the sun, and getting breakfast. On Prebol’s suggestion he moved the fleet of boats out into the eddy, for the river was falling and they might ground. He went over to Caruthersville and bought some supplies, brought Doctor Grell over to examine the patient to make sure all was well, killed several squirrels and three ducks back in the brakes, and, all the while, thought what duties he should enter upon.
Doctor Grell advised that Prebol go down to Memphis, to the hospital, so as to have an X-ray examination, and any special treatment which might be necessary. The wound was healing nicely, but it would be better to make sure.
Rasba took counsel of Prebol. The river man knew the needs of the occasion, and he agreed that he had better drop down to Memphis or Mendova, preferring the latter place, for he knew people there. He told Rasba to line the two small shanty-boats beside the big mission boat, and fend them off with wood chunks. The skiffs could float on lines alongside or at the stern. The power boat could tow the fleet out into the current, and hold it off sandbars or flank the bends.
Rasba did as he was bid, and lashed the boats together with mooring lines, pin-head to towing bits, and side to side. Then he floated the boats all on one anchor line, and ran the launch up to the bow. He hoisted in the anchor, rowed in a skiff out to the motorboat,187and swung wide in the eddy to run out to the river current. There was a good deal of work to the task, and it was afternoon before the fleet reached the main stream.
Then Rasba cast off his tow lines, ran the launch back to the fleet, and made it fast to the port bow of the big boat, so that it was part of the fleet, with its power available to shove ahead or astern. A big oar on the mission boat’s bow and another one out from Prebol’s boat insured a short turn if it should be necessary to swing the boats around either way.
Rasba carried Prebol on his cot up to the bow of the big boat, and put him down where he could help watch the river, and they cast off. Prebol knew the bends and reaches, and named most of the landings; they gossiped about the people and the places. Prebol told how river rats sometimes stole hogs or cattle for food, and Rasba learned for the first time of organized piracy, of river men who were banded together for stealing what they could, raiding river towns, attacking “sports,” tripping the river, and even more desperate enterprises.
While he talked, Prebol slyly watched his listener and thought for a long time that Rasba was merely dumbfounded by the atrocities, but at last the Prophet grinned:
“An’ yo’s a riveh rat. Ho law!”
“Why, I didn’t say––” Prebol began, but his words faltered.
“Yo’ know right smart about such things,” Rasba reminded him. “I ’low hit were about time somebody shot yo’ easy, so’s to give yo’ repentance a chance to catch up with yo’ wickedness. Don’t yo’?”
Prebol glared at the accusation, but Rasba pretended not to notice.
“Yo’ see, Prebol, this world is jes’ the hounds188a-chasin’ the rabbits, er the rabbits a-gittin’ out the way. The good that’s into a man keeps a-runnin’, to git shut of the sin that’s in him, an’ theh’s a heap of wrestlin’ when one an’ tother catches holt an’ fights.”
“Hit’s seo!” Prebol admitted, reluctantly. He didn’t have much use for religious arguments. “I wisht yo’d read them books to me, Parson. I ain’t neveh had much eddycation. I’ll watch the riveh, an’ warn ye, ’gin we make the crossin’s.”
Nothing suited them better. Rasba read aloud, stabbing each word with his finger while he sought the range and rhythm of the sentences, and, as they happened to strike a book of fables, their minds could grasp the stories and the morals at least sufficiently to entertain and hold their attention.
Prebol said, warningly, after a time:
“Betteh hit that sweep a lick, Parson, she’s a-swingin’ in onto that bar p’int.”
A few leisurely strokes, the boats drifted away into deep water, and Rasba expressed his admiration.
“Sho, Prebol! Yo’ seen that bar a mile up. We’d run down onto hit.”
“Yas, suh,” the wounded man grinned. “Three-four licks on the oars up theh, and down yeah yo’ save pullin’ yo’ livin’ daylights out, to keep from goin’ onto a sandbar or into a dryin’-up chute.”
“How’s that?” Rasba cocked his ear. “Say hit oveh—slow!”
“Why, if yo’s into the set of the current up theh, hit ain’t strong; yo’ jes’ give two-three licks an’ yo’ send out clear. Down theh on the bar she draws yo’ right into shallow water, an’ yo’ hang up.”
Rasba looked up the river; he looked down at the nearing sandbar, and as they passed the rippling head in safety he turned a grave face toward the pilot.189
“Up theh, theh wasn’t much suck to hit, but down yeah, afteh yo’ve drawed into the current, theh’s a strong drag an’ bad shoals?”
“Jes’ so!”
“Hit’s easy to git shut of sin, away long in the beginnin’,” Rasba bit his words out, “but when yo’ git a long ways down into hit—Ho law!”
Prebol started, caught by surprise. Then both laughed together. They could understand each other better and if Prebol felt himself being drawn in spite of his own reluctance by a new current in his life, Rasba did not fail to gratify the river man’s pride by turning always to him for advice about the river, its currents and its jeopardies.
“I’ve tripped down with all kinds,” Prebol grinned as he spoke, “but this yeah’s the firstest time I eveh did get to pilot a mission boat.”
“If you take it through in safety, do yo’ reckon God will forget?” Rasba asked, and Prebol’s jaw dropped. He didn’t want to be reformed; he had no use for religion. He was very well satisfied with his own way of living. He objected to being prayed over and the good of his soul inquired into—but this Parson Rasba was making the idea interesting.
They anchored for the night in the eddy at the head of Needham’s Cut-Off Bar, and Prebol was soon asleep, but Rasba sat under the big lamp and read. He could read with continuity now; dread that the dream would vanish no longer afflicted him. He could read a book without having more than two or three other books in his lap.
Sometimes it was almost as though Nelia were speaking the very words he read; sometimes he seemed to catch her frown of disapproval. The books, more precious than any other treasure could have been,190seemed living things because she had owned them, because her pencil had marked them, and because she had given them all to his service, to fill the barren and hungry places in the long-empty halls of his mind.
He would stop his reading to think, and thinking, he would take up a book to discover better how to think. He found that his reading and thinking worked together for his own information.
He was musing, his mind enjoying the novelty of so many different images and ideas and facts, when something trickled among his senses and stirred his consciousness into alert expectancy. For a little he was curious, and then touched by dismay, for it was music which had roused him—music out of the black river night. People about to die sometimes hear music, and Parson Rasba unconsciously braced himself for the shock.
It grew louder, however, more distinct, and the sound was too gay and lively to fit in with his dreams of a heavenly choir. He caught the shout of a human voice and he knew that dancers were somewhere, perhaps dancers damned to eternal mirth. He went out on the deck and closed the door on the light behind him; at first he could see nothing but black night. A little later he discovered boats coming down the river, eight or nine gleaming windows, and a swinging light hung on a flag staff or shanty-boat mast.
As they drew nearer, someone shouted across the night:
“Goo-o-o-d wa-a-a-ter thar?”
“Ya-s-su-uh!” Rasba called back.
“Where’ll we come in?”
“Anywhere’s b’low me fo’ a hundred yards!”
“Thank-e-e!”
Three or four sweeps began to beat the water, and a191whole fleet of shanty-boats drifted in slowly. They began to turn like a wheel as part of them ran into the eddy while the current carried the others down, but old river men were at the sweeps, and one of them called the orders:
“Raunch ’er, boys! Raunch ’er! Raunchin’s what she needs!”
They floated out of the current into the slow reverse eddy, and coming up close to Rasba’s fleet, talked back and forth with him till a gleam of light through a window struck him clearly out of the dark.
“Hue-e-e!” a shrill woman’s voice laughed. “Hit’s Rasba, the Riveh Prophet Rasba! Did yo’ all git to catch Nelia Crele, Parson?”
“Did I git to catch Missy Crele!” he repeated, dazed.
“When yo’ drapped out’n Wolf Island Chute, Parson, that night she pulled out alone?”
“No’m; I lost her down by the Sucks, but she drapped in by Caruthersville an’ give me books an’ books—all fo’ my mission boat!”
“That big boat yourn?”
“Yeh.”
“Where all was hit built?”
“I don’ remembeh, but Buck done give hit to me, him an’ Jock Drones.”
“Hi-i-i! Yo’ all found the man yo’ come a-lookin’ fo’. Ho law!”
“Hit’s the Riveh Prophet,” someone replied to a hail from within, the dance ending.
A crowd came tumbling out onto the deck of the big boat of the dance hall, everyone talking, laughing, catching their breaths.
“Hi-i! Likely he’ll preach to-morrow,” a woman cried. “To-morrow’s Sunday.”192
“Sunday?” Rasba gasped. “Sunday—I plumb lost track of the days.”
“You’ll preach, won’t yo’, Parson? I yain’t hearn a sermon in a hell of a while,” a man jeered, facetiously.
“Suttingly. An’ when hit’s through, yo’ll think of hell jes’ as long,” Rasba retorted, with asperity, and his wit turned the laugh into a cheer.
The fleet anchored a hundred yards up the eddy, and Rasba heard a woman say it was after midnight and she’d be blanked if she ever did or would dance on Sunday. The dance broke up, the noise of voices lessened, one by one the lights went out, and the eddy was still again. But the feeling of loneliness was changed.
“Lord God, what’ll I preach to them about?” Rasba whispered. “I neveh ’lowed I’d be called to preach ag’in. Lawse! Lawse! What’ll I say?”