The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe River ProphetThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The River ProphetAuthor: Raymond S. SpearsIllustrator: Ralph P. ColemanRelease date: May 16, 2009 [eBook #28848]Most recently updated: January 5, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVER PROPHET ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The River ProphetAuthor: Raymond S. SpearsIllustrator: Ralph P. ColemanRelease date: May 16, 2009 [eBook #28848]Most recently updated: January 5, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Title: The River Prophet
Author: Raymond S. SpearsIllustrator: Ralph P. Coleman
Author: Raymond S. Spears
Illustrator: Ralph P. Coleman
Release date: May 16, 2009 [eBook #28848]Most recently updated: January 5, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVER PROPHET ***
“She snatched the automatic pistol from her bosomand ... fired. The man stumbled back with a cry.”
“She snatched the automatic pistol from her bosomand ... fired. The man stumbled back with a cry.”
The River Prophet
By
Raymond S. Spears
FrontispiecebyRalph Pallen Coleman
Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1920, BYDOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANYALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OFTRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
1
THE RIVER PROPHET
CHAPTER I
Elijah Rasba lived alone in a log cabin on Temple Run. He was a long, lank, blue-eyed young man, with curly brown hair and a pale, almost livid complexion. His eye-brows were heavy and dark brown, and the blue steel of his gaze was fixed unwaveringly upon any object that it distinguished.
Two generations before, Old Abe Rasba had built a church on a little brook, a tributary of Jackson River, away up in the mountains. The church was laid up of flat stones, gathered in fields, from ledges of rock and up the wooded mountain side. It was large enough to hold all the people for miles around, and the roof was supported by massive hewn timbers, and some few attempts had been made to decorate the structure.
Old Abe had called his church “The Temple,” had preached from a big hollow oak stump, and laid down the Law of the Bible, which he had memorized by heart, and expounded from experience. Elijah Rasba, grandson of Old Abe, thus came honestly by reverence and religion, but the strange glory which had surrounded the old Temple had departed from the ruin, and of all the congregation, only Elijah remained.
Land-slips had ruined a score of farms cleared on too-steep hills; lightning had destroyed the overshot grist mill, and the two big stones had been cracked in the hot flames; a feud had opened graves before the allotted time of the victims. It seemed to Elijah, sitting there in his cabin, as though damnation had visited the faithful, and that death was the reward of belief.2
The ruins of the old Temple stood melancholy where the heavy stone wall, built by a man who believed in broad, firm foundations, had split an avalanche, but without avail, for the walls had given way and let the roof beams drop in. No less certain had been the fate of the congregation; they, too, were scattered or dead. There remained but one dwelling in the little valley, with a lone occupant, who was wrestling with his soul, trying to understand, for he knew in his heart that he must read the truth and discover the meaning of all this trouble, privation, disaster, and death.
He was quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle, and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from its den.
An Almanac, a Bible, and a “Resources of Tennessee” comprised the library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder, about a hundred miles, perhaps—anyhow, from New York. The “Resources of Tennessee” had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, an inheritance.
It was a very small article, apparently, to create all the disturbances that seemed to have followed its interpretations there on Temple Run. Elijah would hold it out at arms length and stare at it with those sharp eyes of his, wondering in his soul how it could be that the fate of nations, the future of humanity, the very salvation of every soul rested within the compass of that leather-covered, gilt-edged parcel of thin paper which weighed rather less than half as much as a box of cartridges.3
Elijah did not spare himself in the least. He toiled at whatever task appeared for him to do. As he required for his own wants fifty bushels of corn for a year, he planted enough to shuck a hundred bushels. Once, in the fervour of the hope that he was called upon to raise corn for humanity, he raised five hundred bushels, only to give it all away to poor white trash who had not raised enough for themselves.
Again he felt the call to preach, and he went forth with all the eagerness of a man who had at last discovered his life’s calling. He went on foot, through storms, over mountains, and into a hundred schoolhouses and churches, showing his little leather-skinned Bible and warning sinners to repent, Christians to keep faith, and Baal to lower his loathly head.
He had returned from his five months’ pilgrimage with the feeling that his utmost efforts had been futile, and that for all his good will, it had not been vouchsafed him to leave behind one thought in fertile soil. The matter had been brought home to him by an incident of the last meeting he had addressed, over on Clinch.
In the Painted Church he had volunteered a sermon, and no sermons had been preached there in years. Feuds, inextricably tangled, had involved five different families, and members of all those families were in the church, answering to his challenge.
They sat there with rifles or shotguns between their knees, with their pistols on their hips, and eternal vigilance in their eyes. While listening to his sermon they kept their gaze fastened upon one another, lest an unwary moment bring upon them the alert shot of an enemy.
As he had stood there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as though the final burden4had been heaped upon him, and that he must break under the weight on his mind.
“What can I say to you all?” he burst out with sudden passion. “Theh yo’ set with guns in yo’ hands an’ murder in yo’ souls—to listen to the word of God! How do yo’ expect the Prince of Peace to come to yo’ if yo’ set there thataway?”
His indignation rose as he saw them, and his scorn unbridled his tongue, so that in a few minutes the congregation watched one another less, the preacher more, and all settled back, to listen and blink under his accusations and his declarations. It really seemed, for the time, as though he had caught and engaged their attention. But when the sermon ended and he had taken his departure, before he was a hundred yards down the road he heard loud words, angry shouts, and then the scream of a woman.
The next instant there came a salvo of gun and pistol shots and in all directions up and down the cross-roads people fled on horseback. Three men had been killed, five wounded and a dozen become fugitives from justice at the end of the church service.
Elijah Rasba fled homeward, his will and hopes broken, and sank dejectedly into a slough of despondency. All his good intentions, all the inspiration of his endeavour, his very spiritual exaltation had terminated in a tragedy, as inexplicable as it was depressing.
His conscience would neither let him rest nor work. He looked at his Bible, inside and out, the very fibres of his brain struggling by reason, by effort, by main strength, to discover what his duty was. No answer soothed his waking hours or gave him rest from his dreams. On him rested a kind of superstitious scorn and fear, and he began to believe the whisperings of his neighbours which reached his ears. They said:
“He’s possessed!”5
To his own freighted mind the statement seemed to be true. He did not know what new sin he had committed, nor could he look back on long years of his youth and young manhood and discover any sin which he had not already expiated, over and over again. He had obeyed the scriptural injunctions to the best of his knowledge, and the reward was this daily and nightly torment, the scorn of his fellows, and the questioning of his own soul.
Worst of all, constructively, he had given feud fighters the chance to do murder upon one another. Under the guise of preaching for them for the good of their souls, he had enabled them to meet in antagonism, watch in wrath, and kill without mercy. Too late he realized that he should have foreseen the tragedy, and that he should have provided against it by going first to each faction, preaching to each family, and then, when he had brought them to their knees, united them in the common cause of religion.
“On me is Thy wrath!” he cried out in the anguish of his soul. “Give thy tortured slave something good to do, ere I go down!”
There was no reply, immediate or audible; he was near the limits of his endurance; he drew his arm back to throw the Bible into the flames of his fireplace, but that he could not do. He tossed it upon the shelf, drew his hat down upon his ears and at the approach of night started over the ridges to the Kalbean stillhouse.
He stalked down a ridge into that split-board shack of infamy. He found five or six men in the hot, sour-smelling place. They started to their feet when they saw the mountain preacher among them.
“Gimme some!” he told Old Kalbean. “I’m a fool! I’m damned. I’ll go with the rest of ye to Hell! Gimme some!”6
“Wha—What?” Old Kalbean choked with horror. “Yo’ gwine to drink, Parson?”
“Suttinly!” Rasba cried. “Hit ain’ no ust for me to preach! I preach, an’ the congregation murders one anotheh! Ef I don’t preach, I cayn’t live peaceable! They say hit makes a man happy—I ain’ be’n happy, not in ten, not in twenty yeahs!”
He caught up the jug that rested on the floor, threw the tin cup to one side, up-ended the receptacle, and the moonshiner and his customers stared.
“Theh!” Rasba grunted, when he had to take the jug down for breath. He reached into his pocket, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to the amazed mountain man.
“Theh!” he repeated, defiantly. “I’ve shore gone to Hell, now, an’ I don’t give a damn, nuther. S’long, boys! D’rectly, yo’l heah me jes’ a whoopin’, yas suh! Jes’ a whoopin’!”
He left them abruptly and he went up into the darkness of the laurels. They heard him crashing away into the night. When he was gone the men looked at one another:
“Yo’ ’low he’ll bring the revenuers?” one asked, nervously.
“Bring nothin’!” another grinned. “No man eveh lived could drink fifteen big gulps, like he done, an’ git furder’n a stuck hog, no, suh!”
They listened for the promised whoops; they strained their ears for the cries of jubilation; but none came.
“Co’rse,” the stiller explained, as though an explanation were needed, “Parson Rasba ain’ used to hit; he could carry more, an’ hit’ll take him longer to get lit up. But, law me, when hit begins to act! That’s three yeah old, boys, mild, but no mewl yo’ eveh saw has the kick that’s got, apple an’ berry cider, stilled down from the ferment!”
7CHAPTER II
Virtue had not been rewarded. This much was clear and plain to the consciousness of Nelia Carline. Looking at herself in the glass disclosed no special reason why she should be unhappy and suffering. She was a pretty girl; everybody said that, and envy said she was too pretty. It seemed that poor folks had no right to be good-looking, anyhow.
If poor folks weren’t good-looking, then wealthy young men, with nothing better to do, wouldn’t go around looking among poor folks for pretty girls. Augustus Carline had, apparently, done that. Carline had a fortune that had been increased during three generations, and now he didn’t have to work. That was bad in Gage, Illinois. It had never done any one any good, that kind of living. One of the fruits of the matter was when Nelia Crele’s pretty face attracted his attention. She lived in a shack up the Bottoms near St. Genevieve, and he tried to flirt with her, but she wouldn’t flirt.
In some surprise, startled by his rebuff, he withdrew from the scene with a memory that would not forget. The scene was a wheat field near the Turkey bayou, where he was hunting wild ducks with a shotgun. She had been gathering forty pounds of hickory nuts to eke out a meagre food supply.
Poor she might be; ill clad was her strong young figure; her face showed the strain of years of effort; her eyes had the fire of experience in suffering; and she stood, a supple girl of heightened beauty while the hunter, sure of his welcome, walked up to her, and, as both her hands held the awkward bushel basket, ventured to tickle her under the chin.8
She dropped the basket and before it reached the ground she caught the rash youth broad-handed from cheek to back of the ear, and he stumbled over a pile of wheat sheaves and fell headlong. As he had dropped his shotgun, she picked it up and with her thumb on the safety, her finger on the trigger, and her left hand on the breech, showed him how a $125 shotgun looks in the hands of one who could and would use it on any further provocation.
He took his departure, and she carried the gun and hickory nuts home with her. Thus began the inauspicious acquaintance of Nelia Crele and Augustus Carline. The shotgun was very useful to the young woman. She killed gray and fox squirrels, wild turkeys, geese and ducks, several saleable fur-bearers, and other game in her neighbourhood. She told no one how she obtained the weapon, merely saying she had found it; and Augustus Carline did not pass any remarks on the subject.
By and by, however, when the tang of the slap and the passion of the moment had left him, he knew that he had been foolish and cowardly. He had some good parts, and he was sorry that he had been precipitate in his attentions. After that encounter, he found the girls he met at dances lacked a certain appearance, a kindling of the eye, a complexion, and, a figure.
He ventured again into the river bottoms across from St. Genevieve and fortune favoured him while tricking her. He apologized and gave his name.
Nelia was poor, abjectly poor. Her father was no ’count, and her mother was abject in suffering. One brother had gone West, a whisky criminal; a sister had gone wrong, with the inheritance of moral obliquity. Nelia had, somehow, become possessed with a hate and horror of wrong. She had pictured to herself a home,9happiness, and a life of plenty, but she held herself at the highest price a woman demands.
That price Augustus Carline was only too willing to pay. He had found a girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days mansion in Gage.
There he installed her with everything he thought she needed, and—pursued his usual futile life. Too late she learned that he was weak, insignificant, and, like her own father, no ’count. Augustus Carline was a brute, a creature of appetites and desires, who by no chance rose to the heights of his wife’s mental demands.
Nelia Carline regarded the tragedy of her life with impatience. She studied the looking glass to see wherein she had failed to measure up to her duty; she ransacked her mind, and compared it with all the women she met by virtue of her place as Gus Carline’s wife. Those women had not proved to be what she had expected grand dames of society to be.
“I want to talk learning,” she told herself, “and they talk hairpins and dirty dishes and Bill-don’t-behave!”
Now one of those women, a kind of a grass widow, Mrs. Plosell, had attracted Gus Carline, and when he came home from her house, he was always drunk. When Nelia remonstrated, he was ugly. He had thrown her down and gone back to the grass widow’s the night before. Nelia considered that grim fact, and, having made up her mind, acted.
In her years of poverty she had learned many things, and now she put into service certain practical ideas. She had certain rights, under the law, since she had taken the name of Augustus Carline. There were, too,10moral rights, and she preferred to exercise her moral rights.
Part of the Carline fortune was in unregistered stocks and bonds, and when Gus Carline returned from the widow’s one day he found that Nelia was in great good humour, more attractive than he had ever known her, and so very pleasant during the two days of his headache that he was willing to do anything she asked.
She asked him to have a good time with her, and put down on the table before him a filled punch bowl and two glasses. He had never known the refinements of intoxicating liquors. Now he found them in his own home, and for a while forgot all else.
He sang, danced, laughed and, in due course, signed a number of papers, receipts, bills and checks to settle up some accounts. These were sort of hit-or-miss, between-the-acts affairs, to which he paid little attention.
To Nelia, however, they represented a rite as valid as any solemn court procedure could be, for to her river-trained instinct there was no moral question as to the justice of her claim upon a part of Carline’s fortune. Her later experience, her reading, had taught her that society and the law also held with the principle, if not the manner of her primitive method, for obtaining her rights to separate support.
When Carline awakened, Nelia was gone. Nelia had departed that morning, one of the servants said. The girl did not know where she had gone. She had taken a box of books, two trunks, two suitcases and was dressed up, departing in the automobile, which she drove herself.
He had a feeling of alarm, which he banished as unworthy. Finally toward night he went down to the post office where he found several letters. One seared his consciousness;11
Gus:
Don’t bother to look for me. I’m gone, and I’m going to stay gone. You have shown yourself to be a mere soak, a creature of appetite and vice, and with no redeeming mental traits whatever. I hate you, and worse yet, I despise you. Get a divorce get another woman—the widow is about your calibre. But, I give you fair warning, leave me alone. I’m sick of men.
Nelia.
12CHAPTER III
Elijah Rasba stalked homeward from the still in the dark, grimly and expectantly erect. Now he was going to have that period of happiness which he knew was the chief reason for people drinking moonshine whiskey. He looked forward to the sensation of exuberant joy very much as a man would look forward to five hours of happiness, to be followed by hanging by the neck, till dead.
The stars were shining, and the over-ridge trail which he followed was familiar enough under his feet, once he had struck into it from the immediate vicinity of the lawbreakers. He saw the bare-limbed oak trees against the sky, and he heard rabbits and other night runners scurrying away in the dead leaves. The stars fluttering in the sky were stern eyes whose gaze he avoided with determined wickedness and unrepentance.
Arriving at his own cabin, he stirred up the big pine-root log, and drew his most comfortable rocking chair up before the leaping flames. He sat there, and waited for the happiness of mind which was the characteristic of his idea of intoxication.
He waited for it, all ready to welcome it. If it had come into his cabin, all dressed up like some image of temptation or allurement, he would not have been in the least surprised. He rather expected a real and tangible manifestation, a vision of delight, clothed in some fair figure. He sat there, rigidly, watching for the least symptom of unholy pleasure. He had no clock by which to tell the time, and his watch was thoroughly unreliable.
Again and again he poked up the fire. He was surprised,13at last, to hear a far-away gobble, the welcome of a wild turkey for the first false dawn. By and by he became conscious of the light which was crowding the fire flare into a subordinate place.
Day had arrived, and as yet, the delight which everybody said was in moonshine whiskey had failed to touch him. However, he knew that he was not properly in a receptive mood for happiness. His soul was still stubborn against the allurements of sin. He stirred from his chair, fried a rabbit in a pan, and baked a batch of hot-bread in a dutch oven, brewing strong coffee and bringing out the jug of sorghum molasses.
He ate breakfast. He was conscious of a certain rigidity of action, a certain precision of motion, ascribing them to the stern determination which he had that when he should at last discover the whiskey-happiness in his soul, he would let go with a whoop.
“Some hit makes happy, and some hit makes fightin’ mad!” Rasba suddenly thought, with much concern, “S’posen hit’d make me fightin’ mad?”
A fluttering trepidation clutched his heart. The bells ringing in his ears fairly clanged the alarm. He hadn’t looked for anything else but joy from being drunk, and now suppose he should be stricken with a mad desire to fight—to kill someone!
No deadlier fear ever clutched a man’s heart than the one that seized Elijah Rasba. Suppose that when the deferred hilarity arrived, he was made fighting drunk instead of joyous? The thought seized his soul and he looked about himself wondering how he could chain his hands and save his soul from murder, violence, fighting, and similar crimes! No feasible way appeared to his frightened mind.
He dropped on his knees and began to pray for happiness, instead of for violence, when the drink that he14had had should seize him in its embrace. He prayed with a voice that roared like thunder and which made the charcoal fall from the log in the fireplace, and which alarmed the jays and inquisitive mockingbirds about the little clearing.
He prayed while his voice grew huskier and huskier, and his head bowed lower and lower as he wrestled with this peril which he had not foreseen. All he asked was that when the moonshine began to operate, it make him laugh instead of mad, but terrible doubts smote him. A glance at his rifle on the wall made him fairly grovel on the floor, and he knew that in his hands the andirons, the axe, the very hot-bread rolling pin would be deadly weapons.
He hoped that he would not be able to shoot straight, but this hope was instantly blasted, for a flock of wild turkeys came down into the cornfield about ninety yards from his cabin, and although he seldom shot anything in his own clearing, he now tried a shot at the turkey gobbler and shot it dead where it strutted. If he should be stricken with anger instead of with joy, no worse man could possibly live! There was no telling what he would do if the liquor would work “wrong” on him. He could kill men at two hundred yards!
He determined that he would see no human beings that day. Few people ever visited him in his cabin, but he took no chances. He crept up the mountain and skulking through the woods found an immense patch of laurels. He crawled into it, and sat down there for hours and hours, so that no one should have an opportunity to speak to him and stir the latent devil of violence.
He returned to his cabin long after dark, and raking some hot coals out of the ashes, whittled splinters and started a blaze.15He was assailed by hunger, and he baked corn pones and dry-salted pork, then added a great flapjack of delicious sage sausage to the meal. He brought out cans of fruit, whose juice assuaged his increasing thirst. Having eaten heartily he resumed his vigil before the fireplace, and then he noticed that some one had tied something on the stock of his rifle.
It was a letter which a passer-by had brought up from the Ford Post Office, and when he opened it and looked at the writing, remorse assailed him:
Dear Parsun:
Ever senct you preched here I ben sufrin count of my boy JocK. You know Him for he set right thar, frade of no man, not the Tobblys, nor the Crents. When tha drawed DOWN to shoot, he stud right thar an shot back shoot fer shoot, an now he has goned awa down the Rivehs an I am worited abot his soul because he is a gud boy an neveh was no whars in all his borned days an an i hear now he is gettin bad down thataway on Misipy riveh where thas all Bad Peple an i wisht yud prey fer him so’s he wont get bad. Mrs. drones panted church on Clinch.
Rasba read the letter for the words at first. Then he went back after the meaning, and the meaning struck him like a blow in the heart.
“Me pray fo’ any man again,” he gasped. “Lawse! Lawse!”
He didn’t feel fit to pray for himself, let alone for any other sinner, but there came to his memory a picture of Mrs. Drones, a motherly little woman who had taken him home to a dinner at which seven kinds of preserved fruit were on the table, and where the family laughed around the fireplace—only to see Jock a fugitive the next night, and the terrors of a feud war upon them.
“And Jock’s getting bad down the Mississippi River!” Rasba repeated to himself, striving to grapple with that fact. He could not think clearly or coherently.16The widow’s voice, however, was as clearly speaking in his thoughts as though she stood there, instead of merely having written to him. He took to walking up and down the floor, back and forth, on one plank.
He had forgotten that there was such a thing for humans as sleep. The incongruity of his having been wide awake for two days and two nights did not occur to him till suddenly his eyes turned to the bed in the corner of the room and its purpose was recalled to his mind. He blinked at it. His eyes opened with difficulty. He threw chunks on the fire and went toward the bed, but as he stood by it the world grew black before his eyes and clutching about him, he sank to the floor.
17CHAPTER IV
Nelia Carline would not return to that miserable little river-bottom cabin where she had grown up in unhappy privation. She had other plans. She drove the little automobile down to Chester, put it in the Star Garage, then walked to the river bank and gave the eddy a critical inspection.
For years she had lived between the floods of the river and the poverty of the uplands. Her life had often crossed that of river people, and although she had never been on the river, she had frequently gone visiting shanty-boaters who had landed in for a night or a week at the bank opposite her own shack home. She knew river men, and she had no illusions about river women. Best of all now, in her great emergency, she knew shanty-boats, and as she gazed at the eddy and saw the fleet of houseboats there her heart leaped exultantly.
No less than a score of boats were landed along the eddy bank, and instantly her eyes fell upon first one and then another that would serve her purpose. She walked down to the uppermost of the boats, and hailed from the bank:
“U-whoo!”
A lank, stoop-shouldered woman emerged from the craft and fixed the well-favoured young woman with keen, bright eyes.
“You-all know if there’s a shanty-boat here for sale—cheap?” Nelia asked, without eagerness.
The woman looked at the bank, reflectively.
“I expect,” she admitted at last. “This un yaint, but theh’s two spo’ts down b’low, that’s quittin’ the riveh, that blue boat theh, but theh’s spo’ts.”18
“I ’lowed they mout be,” Nelia dropped into her childhood vernacular as she looked down the bank, “Likely yo’ mout he’p me bargain, er somebody?”
“I ’low I could!” the river woman replied. “Me an’ my ole man he’ped a feller up to St. Louis, awhile back, who was green on the river, but he let us kind of p’int out what he’d need fo’ a skift trip down this away. Real friendly feller, kind of city-like, an’ sort of out’n the country, too. ’Lowed he was a writin’ feller, fer magazines an’ books an’ histries an’ them kind of things. Lawsy! He could ask questions, four hundred kinds of questions, an’ writin’ hit all down into a writin’ machine onto paper. We shore told him a heap an’ a passel, an’ he writes mornin’ an’ nights. Lots of curius fellers on Ole Mississip’. We’ll sort of look aroun’. Co’se, yo’ got a man to go ’long?”
“No.”
“Wha-a-t! Yo’ ain’ goin’ to trip down alone?”
“I might’s well.”
“But, goodness, gracious sake, you’re pretty, pretty as a picture! I ’lowed yo’ had a man scoutin’ aroun’. Why somethin’ mout happen to a lady, if she didn’t have a man or know how to take cyar of herse’f.”
Nelia shrugged her shoulders. Mrs. Tons, the river woman, gazed for a minute at the pretty, partly averted face. It was almost desperate, quite reckless, and by the expression, the river woman understood. She thought in silence, for a minute, and then looked down the eddy at a boat some distance away.
“Theh’s a boat. Like the looks of it?”
“It’s a fine boat, I ’low,” Nelia said. “Fresh painted.”
“Hit’s new,” the woman said.
“Is it for sale?”
“We’ll jes walk down thataway,” the river woman suggested. “Two ladies is mostly safe down thisaway.”19
“My name’s Nelia Crele. We used to live up by Gage, on the Bottoms––”
“Sho! Co’se I know Ole Jim Crele, an’ his woman. My name’s Mrs. Tons. We stopped in thah ’bout six weeks ago. I hearn say yo’d—yo’d married right well!”
“Umph!” Nelia shrugged her shoulders, “Liquor spoils many a home!”
“Yo’ maw said he was a drinkin’ man, an’ I said to myse’f, from my own ’sperience.... Yo’ set inside yeah, Nelia. I’ll go down theh an’ talk myse’f. We come near buyin’ that bo’t yistehd’y. Leave hit to me!”
Nelia sat down in the shanty-boat, and waited. She had not long to wait. A tall, rather burly man returned with the woman, who introduced the two;
“Mis’ Crele, this is Frank Commer. His bo’t’s fo’ sale, an’ he’ll take $75 cash, for everything, ropes, anchor, stoves, a brass bedstead, an’ everything and I said hit’s reasonable. Hit’s a pine boat, built last fall, and the hull’s sound, with oak framing. Co’se, hit’s small, 22 foot long an’ 7 foot wide, but hit’s cheap.”
“I’ll take it, then,” Nelia nodded.
“You can come look it over,” the man declared. “Tight hull and tight roof. We built it ourselves. But we’re sick of the river, and we’ll sell cheap, right here.”
The three went down to the boat, and Nelia handed him seventy-five dollars in bills. He and his partner, who came down from the town a few minutes later, packed up their personal property in two trunks. They left the dishes and other outfit, including several blankets.
The four talked as the two packed up. One of them suddenly looked sharply at Nelia:
“You dropping down alone?”20
She hesitated, and then laughed:
“Yes.”
“It’s none of my business,” the man said, doubtfully, “but it’s a mean old river, some ways. A lady alone might get into trouble. River pirates, you know.”
It was a challenge. He was a clear-eyed, honest man, hardly twenty-five years of age, and not an evil type at all. What he had to suggest he did boldly, sure of his right at such a time, under such circumstances, to do. He was entirely likeable. In spite of herself, Nelia wavered for a moment. She knew river people; the woman by her side would have said she would be safer with him than without his protection. There was only one reason why Nelia could not accept that protection.
“I’ll have to take care of myself,” she shook her head, without rebuke to the youth. “You see, I’m running away from a mean scoundrel.”
“Hit’s so,” the river woman approved, and the men took their departure without further comment.
The two women, disapproving the men’s housekeeping, scrubbed the boat and washed all the bedding. Nelia brought down her automobile and the two carried her own outfit on board. Then Nelia took the car back to the garage, and said that she would call for it in the morning.
“All right, Mrs. Carline,” the garage man replied, without suspicion.
Back at the landing, Nelia bade the river woman good-bye.
“I got to be going,” she said, “likely there’ll be a whole pack after me directly––”
“Got a gun?” the woman asked.
“Two,” Nelia smiled. “Bill gave me a goose rifle and Frank let me have this—he said it’s the Law down Old Mississip’!”21
“The Law” was a 32-calibre automatic pistol in perfect condition.
“Them boys thought a heap of yo’, gal!” The river woman shook her head. “Frank’d sure made you a good man!”
“Oh, I know it,” replied Nelia, “but I’m sick of men—I hate men! I’m going to go droppin’ along, same’s the rest.”
“Don’t let go of that pistol. Theh’s mean, bad men down thisaway, Nelia!”
Nelia laughed, but harshly. “I don’t give a damn for anything now; I tell you that!”
“Don’t forget it. Shoot any man that comes.”
Nelia, who could row a skiff with any one, set her shanty-boat sweeps on their pins, coiled up the two bow lines by which the boat was moored to the bank, and which the river woman untied, then rowed out of the eddy and into the main current.
“It’s good floating right down,” Mrs. Tons called after her, “till yo’ git to Grand Tower Rock—thirty mile!”
The river rapidly widened below Chester, and the little houseboat swung out into mid-stream. Nelia knew the river a little from having been down on a steamer, and the misery she left behind was in contrast to the sense of freedom and independence which she now had.
Stillness, peace, the sense of vast motion in the river torrent comforted her. The moment of embarking alone on the river had been full of nervous tenseness and anxiety, but now those feelings were left behind and she could breathe deeply and confront the future with a calm spirit. The veil that the blue mist of distance left behind her was penetrable by memory, but the future was hidden from her gaze, as it was hidden from her imagination.22
The determination to dwell in the immediate present caught up her soul with its grim, cold bonds, and as the sun was setting against the sky beyond the long, sky-line of limestone ledges, she entered the cabin, and looked about her with a feeling of home such as she had never had before.
“I’ll stand at the breech of my rifle, to defend it,” she whispered to herself. “Men are mean! I hate men!”
She found a flat book on a shelf which held a half hundred magazines. The book was bound in blue boards, and backed with yellow leather. When she opened it, out of curiosity, she discovered that it was full of maps.
“Those dear boys!” she whispered, almost regretfully. “They left this map book for me, because they knew I’d need it; knew everybody down thisaway needs a map!”
They had done more than that; they had left the equally indispensable “List of Post Lights,” and when dusk fell and she saw a pale yellow light revealed against a bank the little book named it “Wilkinson Island.” She pulled toward the east bank into the deadwater below Lacours Island, cast over her anchor, and came to rest in the dark of a starless night.