"Wait'll yo've had experience," Buck retorted.

"Shucks! Ain't I had experience?"

"Eveh married?"

"No-o."

"Eveh have a lady sic' yo' onto some'n bigger'n yo' is?"

"No-o; reckon I pick my own people to scrap."

"Theh! That shows how much yo' don't know about women. Never had no woman yo' 'lowed to marry?"

"Huh! Catch me gittin' married—co'se not."

"Sonny, lemme tell yo'; hit ain't yo'll do the catchin', an' hit won't be yo' who'll be decidin' will yo' git married. An' hit won't be yo' who'll decide how long yo'll stay married, no, indeed."

"Peah's like yo' got an awful grouch ag'in women, Buck."

"Why shouldn't I have?" Buck started up from shuffling and throwing a book of cards. "Look't me. If Jest Prebol's shot most daid by a woman, look't me. Do you know me—where I come from, where the hell I'm goin'? Yo' bet you don't. I've been shanty-boatin' fifteen years, but I ain't always been a shanty-boater, no, I haven't. Talk to me about women. When I think what I've took from one woman—Sho!"

He stared at the floor, his teeth clenched and his strong face set. Slip stared. His pal had disclosed a new phase of character.

Buck turned and glared into Slip's eyes.

"I'll tell you, Slip, you're helpless when it comes to women. They've played the game for ten thousand years, practised it every day, wearing down men's minds and men never knew it. Read history, as I've done. Study psychology, as I have. Go down into the fundamentals of human experience and human activities, and learn the lesson. Fifteen years I've been up and down these rivers, from Fort Benton to the Passes, from the foothills of the Rockies to the headwaters of Clinch and Holston in the Appalachians. Why? Because one woman sang her way into my heart, and because she tied my soul to her little finger, and when she found that I could not escape—when she had—when she had—What do you know about women?"

Slip stared at him. His pal, partner in river enterprises, an old river man, who talked little and who played the slickest games in the slickest way, had suddenly emerged like a turtle's head, and spoken in terms of science, education, breeding—regular quality folks' talk—under stress of an argument about women. And they had argued the subject before with jest and humour and without personal feeling.

Buck turned away, bent and shivering.

"I 'low I'll roast up them squirrels fo' dinner?" Slip suggested.

"They'll shore go good!" Buck assented. "I'll mux around some hot-bread, an' some gravy."

"I got to make some meat soup for that feller, too."

"Huh! Jest Prebol's one of them damned fools what tried to forget a woman among women," Buck sneered.

At intervals during the day Slip went over and gave Prebol his medicine, or fed him on squirrel meat broth; toward night they floated their 35-foot shanty-boat out into the eddy, and anchored it a hundred yards from the bank, where the sheriff of Lake County, Tennessee, no longer had jurisdiction. In the late evening Slip lighted a big carbide light and turned it toward the town on the opposite bank.

Pretty soon they heard the impatient dip of skiff oars, a river fisherman came aboard, and stood for a minute over the heater stove, warming his fingers. He soon went to the long, green-topped crap table in the end of the room, and Slip stood opposite, to throw bones against him. A tiny motorboat crossed a little later; and three men, two heavy set and one a slim youth, entered, to sit down at one of the little round tables and play a game.

One by one other patrons appeared, and soon there were fourteen or fifteen. Slip and Buck glided about among them quietly, their eyes alert, their hats drawn down over their eyes, taking a hand here, throwing bones there, poking up the coal fire, putting on coffee, making sandwiches, every moment on the qui vive, communicating with each other by jerks of the hand, lifting of shoulders, or the faintest of whisperings.

A jar against the side of the boat sent one or other of the two out to look, to greet a newcomer or to fend off a drift log. A low whistle from the stern took Buck through the aisle between the staterooms to the kitchen where a rat-eyed little man waited him on the stern deck,

"Lo, Buck! I'm drappin' down in a hurry; I learn yo' was heah. Theh's a feller drapping down out the Ohio; he's lookin' fo' a feller name of Jock Drones—didn't hear what for. Yo' know 'im?"

"Nope, but I'll pass the word around."

"S'long!"

"Jock Drones—huh!" Buck repeated, turning into the lamp-lit kitchen where Slip was sniffing the coffee pot.

"Friend of mine just stopped," Buck whispered. "There's a detective coming down out of the Ohio. Told me to pass the word around. He's after somebody by the name of Drones, Dock or Jock Drones."

Slip started, turned white, and his jaws parted. Buck's eyes opened a little wider.

"S'all right, Slip! Keep your money in your belt, to be ready to run or swim. It's a long river."

Slip could not trust himself to speak. Buck, patting him on the shoulder, went on into the card room and closed the kitchen door behind him, drawing the aisle curtains shut, too, so that no one would go back until Slip had recovered his equilibrium.



CHAPTER XII

Augustus Carline instinctively slowed down his motorboat and took to looking at the wide river, its quivering, palpitating surface; its vistas at which he had to "look twice to see the end," as the river man says with whimsical accuracy.

Negligent and thoughtless, he could now feel some things which had never occurred to him before: his loneliness, his doubts, his very helplessness and indecision. His wife had been like an island around which he sailed and cruised, sure in his consciousness that he could return at any time to that safe mooring. He had returned to find the island gone, himself adrift on a boundless ocean, and he did not know which way to turn. The cays and islets, the interesting rocks and the questionable coral reefs supplied him with not the slightest semblance of shelter, support, or safety.

He did not even know which side of the river to go to, nor where to begin his search. He was wistful for human companionship, but as he looked at the distant shanty-boats, and passed a river town or two, he found himself diffident and shamed.

He saw a woman in a blue mother-hubbard dress leaning against the cabin of her low, yellow shanty-boat, a cap a-rake on her head, one elbow resting on her palm, and in the other a long-stemmed Missouri meerschaum. Her face was as hard as a man's, her eyes were as blue and level as a deputy sheriff's in the Bad Lands, and her lips were straight and thin. How could a man ask her if she had seen his wife going down that way?

He stopped his motor and let his boat drift. He wondered what he could or would say when he overtook Nelia. There struck across his imagination the figure of a man, the Unknown who had, perhaps, promised her the care he had never given her, the affection which she had almost never had from him. Having won her, this Unknown would likely defy him down there in that awful openness and carelessness of the river.

He found a feeling of insignificance making its way into his mind. He had been vain of his looks, but what did looks amount to down there? He had been proud of his money, but what privilege did money give him on that flood? He had rejoiced in his popularity and the attention women paid him, but the indifferent gaze of that smoking Amazon chilled his self-satisfaction. He cringed as he seemed to see Nelia's pretty eyes glancing at him, her puzzled face as she apparently tried to remember where she had seen him. The river wilted the crumpling flower of his pride.

As his boat turned like a compass needle in the surface eddies he saw a speck far up stream. He brought out his binoculars and looked at it, thinking that it was some toy boat, but to his astonishment it turned out to be a man in a skiff.

It occurred to Carline that he wished he could talk to someone, to any one, about anything. He had no resources of his own to draw on. He had always been obliged to be with people, talk to people, enjoy people; the silences of his wife's tongue had been more difficult for him to bear than her edged words. The skiff traveller, leisurely floating in that block of river, drew him irresistibly. He kicked over the flywheel and steered up stream, but only enough partly to overcome the speed of the current. The sensation of being carried down in spite of the motor power, complicated with the rapid approach of the stranger in his skiff, was novel and amusing. When he stopped the motor, the rowboat was within a hundred feet of him, and the two men regarded each other with interest and caution.

The traveller was unusual, in a way. On his lap was a portable typewriter, in the stern of the boat a bundle of brown canvas; a brass oil stove was on the bottom at the man's feet; behind him in the bow were a number of tins, cans, and boxes.

Neither spoke for some time, and then Carline hailed:

"Nice, pretty day on the river!"

"Fine!" the other replied. "Out the Ohio?"

"No—well, yes—I started at Evansville, where I bought this boat, but I live up the Mississippi, at Kaskaskia—Gage, they call it now."

"Yes? I stopped at Menard's on my way down from St Louis."

"When was that?"

"About ten days ago—tell you in a minute—Monday a week!" A big quarto loose-leaf notebook had revealed the day and date.

"Well, say—I——?" Carline's one question leaped to his lips but remained unasked. For the minute he could not ask it. The thing that had been his rage, and then his wonder, suddenly drew back into his heart as a secret sorrow.

"Won't you come over?" Carline asked, "it'd be company!"

"Yes, it'll be company," the other admitted, and with a pull of his oars brought the skiff alongside. He climbed aboard, painter in hand, and making the light line fast to one of the cleats, sat down on the locker across from his host.

"My name's Carline."

"Mine's Lester Terabon; a newspaper let me come down the river to write stories about it; it's the biggest thing I ever saw!"

"It's an awful size!" Carline admitted, looking around over his shoulder, and Terabon watched the face.

"Are you a river man?" the visitor asked.

"No. My father was a big farmer, and he made some money when they put a railroad through one of his places."

"Just tripping down to see the river?"

"No-o—well——" Carline hesitated, looking overside at the water.

"That must be Wolf Island over there?" the reporter suggested.

Carline looked at the island. He looked down the main river and over toward the chute toward which the Columbus bluffs had shunted them. Then he started the motor and steered into the main channel to escape the rippling shoals which flickered in the sunshine ahead of them, past an island sandbar.

"I don't know if it's Wolf Island." Carline shook his head. "I'm looking for somebody—somebody who came down this way."

The traveller waited. He looked across the current to the bluffs now passing up stream, Columbus and all.

"I don't suppose you find very much to write about, coming down?" Carline changed his mind.

For answer Terabon drew his skiff alongside and reached for his typewriter. As he began to write, he said: "I write everything down—big or little. A man can't remember everything, you know."

"Make good money writing for the newspapers?"

"Enough to live on," Terabon replied, "and, of course, it's living, coming down Old Mississip'!"

"You like it travelling in that skiff? Where do you sleep?"

"I stretch that canvas between the gunwales in those staples; I put those hoops up, and draw a canvas over the whole length of the boat. I can sleep like a baby in its cradle."

"Well, that's one way," Carline replied, doubtfully. "If I owned this old river, you could buy it for two cents."

Terabon laughed, and after a minute Carline joined in, but he had told the truth. He hated the river, and he was cowed by it; yet he could not escape its clutches.

"I fancy it hasn't always treated you right," Terabon remarked.

"Treated me right!" Carline doubled his fists and stiffened where he sat. "It's!—it's——"

He could not speak for his emotion, but his little pointed chin trembled a minute later as he relaxed and looked over his shoulder again. The typewriter clicked along for minutes, Terabon's fingers dancing over the keys as he put down, word for word, and motion for motion, the man who was afraid of the river and yet was tripping down it. It seemed as though the man afraid must have some kind of courage, too, because he was going in spite of his fears.

"It's passing noon, and I think I'll get something to eat," Terabon suggested; "I'll get up my——"

"I forgot to eat!" Carline said. "I've got everything, and that knob there is a three-burner oil stove. We'll eat on board. Never mind your stuff, I've got so much it'll spoil—but I ain't much of a cook!"

"I'm the original cook the Caesars wanted to buy for gold!" Terabon boasted. "I got some squirrels, there, I killed up on Buffalo Island, and we'll fry them."

Nor did he fail to make his boast good, for he soon had hot-bread, gravy browned in the pan, boiled sweet potatoes, and canned corn ready for the table. When they sat down to eat, Carline confessed that he hadn't had a real meal for a week except one he ate in a Cairo restaurant.

"I could have got a kind of a meal," he admitted, "but you see I was worried a good deal. Did you stop at Stillhouse Island?"

"Where's that?"

"Just above Gage, kind of across from St. Genevieve."

"Let's see—oh, yes. There was an old fellow there, what's his name? He told me if I happened to see his daughter I should tell her to write him, for her mother wanted to hear."

"He said that! And you—it was Crele, Darien Crele said that?"

"That's the name—Nelia, his daughter."

"Yes, sir. I know. I guess I know! She's my wife—she was—It's her——"

"You're looking for?"

"Yes, sir; she ran away and left me. She came down here."

"Kind of a careless girl, I imagine?"

"Careless! God, no! The finest woman you ever saw. It was me—I was to blame. I never knew, I never knew!"

For a minute he held up his arms, looking tensely at the sky, struggling to overcome the emotion that long had been boiling up in his heart, rending the self-complacency of his mind. Then he broke down—broke down abjectly, and fell upon the cabin floor, crying aloud in his agony, while the newspaper man sitting there whispered to himself:

"Poor devil, here's a story! He's sure getting his. I don't want to forget this; got to put this down. Poor devil!"



CHAPTER XIII

"And he says he's a sinner himself," Nelia repeated, when she returned on board her cabin-boat in the sheltering safety of Wolf Island chute, with Mamie Caope, Parson Rasba, and the other shanty-boaters within a stone's toss of her.

Till she was among them, among friends she trusted, she had not noticed the incessant strain which she endured down those long, grim river miles. Now she could give way, in the privacy of her boat, to feminine tears and bitterness. Courage she had in plenty, but she had more sensitiveness than courage. She was not yet tuned to the river harmonies.

Something in Rasba's words, or it was in his voice, or in the quick, full-flood of his glance, touched her senses.

"You see, missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"

What had he meant? If he had meant that she, too, was a sinner, was that any of his business? Of course, being a parson—she shrugged her shoulders. Her thoughts ran swiftly back to her home that used-to-be. She laughed as she recalled the deprecatory little man who had preached in the church she had occasionally attended. She compared the trim, bird-like perspicuity and wing-flap gestures of Rev. Mr. Beeve with the slow, huge turn and stand-fast of Parson Rasba.

She was glad to escape the Mississippi down this little chute; she was glad to have a phrase to puzzle over instead of the ever-present problem of her own future and her own fate; she was glad that she had drifted in on Mrs. Mame Caope and Jim and Mr. Falteau and Mrs. Dobstan and Parson Rasba, instead of falling among those other kinds of people.

Mrs. Caope was an old acquaintance of her mother who had lived all her life on the rivers. She was a better boatman than most, and could pilot a stern-wheel whiskey boat or set hoop nets for fish.

"If I get a man, and he's mean," Mrs. Caope had said often, "I shift him. I 'low a lady needs protection up the bank er down the riveh, but I 'low if my cookin' don't pay my board, an' if fish I take out'n my nets ain't my own, and the boat I live in ain't mine—well, I've drapped two men off'n the stern of my boat to prove hit!"

Mrs. Caope had not changed at all, not in the years Nelia could recall, except to change her name. It was the custom, to ask, perfectly respectfully, what name she might be having now, and Mrs. Mame never took offence, being good natured, and understanding how hard it was to keep track of her matrimonial adventures, episodes of sentiment but without any nonsense.

"Sho!" Mrs. Caope had said once, "I disremember if I couldn't stand him er he couldn't stand me!"

Nelia, adrift in her own life, and sure now that she never had really cared very much for Gus Carline, admitted to herself that her husband had been only a step up out of the poverty and misery of her parents' shack.

"You see, missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"

Her ears had caught the depths of the pathos of his regret and sorrow, and she pitied him. At the same time her own thoughts were ominous, and her face, regular, bright, vivacious, showed a hardness which was alien to it.

Nelia went over to Mrs. Caope's for supper, and Parson Rasba was there, having brought in a wild goose which he had shot on Wolf Island while going about his meditations that afternoon. Mrs. Caope had the goose sizzling in the big oven of her coal range—coal from Pittsburgh barges wrecked along the river on bars—and the big supper was sweeter smelling than Rasba ever remembered having waited for.

Mrs. Caope told him to "ask one of them blessin's if yo' want, Parson!" and the four bowed their heads.

Jim Caope then fell upon the bird, neck, wings, and legs, and while he carved Mrs. Caope scooped out the dressing, piled up the fluffy biscuits, and handed around the soup tureen full of gravy. Then she chased the sauce with glass jars full of quivering jellies, reaching with one hand to take hot biscuits from the oven while she caught up the six-quart coffee pot with the other.

"I ain't got no patience with them women that don't feed their men!" she declared. "About all men want's a full stomach, anyhow, an' if you could only git one that wa'n't lazy, an' didn't drink, an' wasn't impedent, an' knowed anything, besides, you'd have something. Ain't that so, Nelia?"

"Oh, indeed yes," Nelia cried, from the fullness of her experience, which was far less than that of the hostess.

After they had eaten, they went from the kitchen into the sitting room, where Rasba turned to Nelia.

"You came down the river alone?" he asked.

"Yes," she admitted.

"I wonder you wouldn't be scairt up of it—nights, and those lonesome bends?"

"It's better than some other things." Nelia shook her head. "Besides, you've come alone down the Ohio yourself."

He looked at her, and Mrs. Caope chuckled.

"But—but you're a woman!" Rasba exclaimed.

"Suppose a mean man came aboard your boat, and—and tried to rob you," Nelia asked, level voiced, "what would you do?"

"Why, course, I'd—I'd likely stop him."

"You'd throw him overboard?"

"Well—if hit were clost to the bank an' he could swim, I mout."

Nelia and the Caopes laughed aloud, and Rasba joined in the merriment. When the laughter had subsided, Rasba said:

"The reason I was asking, as I came by the River Forks I found a little red boat there with a man on the cabin floor shot through——"

"Dead?" Nelia gasped.

"No, just kind of pricked up a bit, into one shoulder. He said a lady shot him because he 'lowed to land into the same eddy with her."

"But—where——?" Nelia half-whispered. "Where did he go?"

"Hit were Jest Prebol," Mrs. Caope said. "You was tellin' of him, Parson."

"Hit were Prebol," Rasba nodded, "an' he shore needed shooting!"

"Yas, suh. That kind has to be shot some to make 'em behave theirselves," Mrs Caope exclaimed, sharply. "If it wa'n't fer ladies shootin' men onct in awhile, down Old Mississip', why, ladies couldn't git to live here a-tall!"

"And women, sometimes, don't do men any good," Rasba mused, aloud, "I've wondered right smart about hit. You see, a parson circuit rides around, an' he sees a sight more'n he tells. Lawse, he shore do!"

The two women glared at him, but he was studying his huge hands, first the backs and then the calloused palms. He was really wondering, so the two women glanced at each other, laughing. The idea that probably some men needed protection from women could not help but amuse while it exasperated them.

"Prebol said," Rasba continued, "hit were a pretty woman, young an' alone. 'How'd I know?' he asked. 'How'd I know she were a spit-fire an' mean, theh all alone into a lonesome bend? How'd I know?'"

"I 'low he shore found out," Mrs. Caope spoke up, tartly, and Nelia looked at her gratefully. "Hit takes a bullet to learn fellers like Jest Prebol—an' him thinkin' he's so smart an' such a lady killer. I bet he knows theh's some ladies that's men killers, too, now. Next time he meets a lady he'll wait to be invited 'fore he lands into the same eddy with her, even if hit's a three-mile eddy."

"Theh's Mrs. Minah," Jim Caope suggested.

"Mrs. Minah!" Mrs. Caope exclaimed. "Talk about riveh ladies—theh's one. She owns Mozart Bend. Seventeen mile of Mississippi River's her'n, an' nobody but knows hit, if not to start with, then by the end. She stands theh, at the breech of her rifle, and, ho law, cayn't she shoot! She's real respectable, too, cyarful an' 'cordin' to law. She's had seven husbands, four's daid an' two's divorced, an' one she's got yet, 'cordin' to the last I hearn say about it. I tell you, if a lady's got any self-respect, she'll git a divorce, an' she'll git married ag'in. That's what I say, with divorces reasonable, like they be, an' costin' on'y $17.50 to Mendova, or Memphis, er mos' anywheres."

"How long—how long does it take?" Nelia asked, eagerly.

"Why, hardly no time at all. You jes' go theh, an' the lawyer he takes all he wants to know, an' he says come ag'in, an' next day, er the next trip, why, theh's yo' papers, an' all for $17.50. Seems like they's got special reg'lations for us shanty-boaters."

"I'm glad to know about that," Nelia said. "I thought—I never knew much about—about divorces. I thought there was a lot of—of rigmarole and testimony and court business."

"Nope! I tell yo', some of them Mendova lawyers is slick an' 'commodatin'. Why, one time I was in an awful hurry, landin' in 'long of the upper ferry, an' I went up town, an' seen the lawyer, an' told him right how I was fixed. Les' see, that wa—um-m——Oh, I 'member now, Jasper Hill. I'd married him up the line, I disremember—anyhow, 'fore I'd drapped down to Cairo, I knowed he'd neveh do, nohow, so I left him up the bank between Columbus an' Hickman—law me, how he squawked! Down by Tiptonville, where I'd landed, they was a real nice feller, Mr. Dickman. Well, we kind of co'ted along down, one place an anotheh, an' he wanted to git married. I told how hit was, that I wasn't 'vorced, an' so on, but if he meant business, we'd drap into Mendova, which we done. He wanted to pay for the divorce, but I'm independent thataway. I think a lady ought to pay for her own 'vorces, so I done hit, an' I was divorced at 3 o'clock, married right next door into the Justice's, an' we drapped out an' down the riveh onto our honeymoon. Mr. Dickman was a real gentleman, but, somehow, he couldn't stand the riveh. It sort of give him the malary, an' he got to thinking about salmon fishin' so he went to the Columbia. We parted real good friends, but the Mississippi's good 'nough for me, yes, indeed. I kind of feel zif I knowed hit, an' hit's real homelike."

"It is lovely down here," Nelia remarked. "Everything is so kind of—kind of free and easy. But wasn't it dreadful—I mean the first time—the first divorce, Mamie?"

"Course, yes, course," Mrs. Caope admitted, slowly, with a frown, "I neveh will forget mine. I'd shifted my man, an' I was right down to cornmeal an' bacon. Then a real nice feller come along, Mr. Darlet. I had to take my choice between a divorce an' a new weddin' dress, an' I tell you hit were real solemocholy fer me decidin' between an' betwixt. You know how young gals are, settin' a lot by dresses an' how they look, an' so on. Young gals ain' got much but looks, anyhow. Time a lady gits experience, she don't set so much store by looks, an' she don't have to, nohow. Well, theh I was, with a nice man, an' if I didn't divorce that first scoundrel where'd I be? So I let the dress go, an' mebby you'll b'lieve hit, an' mebby yo' won't, but I had $18.97, an' I paid my $17.50 real reg'lar, an' I had jest what was left, $1.47, an' me ready to bust out crying, feelin' so mean about marryin' into an old walking skirt.

"I was all alone, an' I had a good notion to run down the back way, an' trip off down the riveh without no man, I felt so 'shamed. An' theh, right on the sidewalk, was a wad of bills, $99 to a penny. My lan'! I wropped my hand around hit, an' yo' should of seen Mr. Darlet when he seen me come walking down, new hat, new dress, new shoes, new silk stockings—the whole business new. I wa'n't such a bad-lookin' gal, afteh all. That taught me a lesson. I've always be'n real savin' sinct then, an' I ain't be'n ketched sinct with the choice to make of a 'vorce er a weddin' dress. No, indeed, not me!"

Parson Rasba looked at her, and Nelia, her eyes twinkling, looked at the Parson. Nelia could understand the feelings in all their minds. She had her own viewpoint, too, which was exceedingly different from those of the others. The strain of weeks of questioning, weeks of mental suffering, was relieved by the river woman's serious statement and Parson Rasba's look of bewilderment at the kaleidoscopic matrimonial adventuring. At the same time, his wonder and Mrs. Caope's unconscious statement stirred up in her thoughts a new questioning.

When Nelia returned on board her boat, and sat in its cabin, a freed woman, she very calmly reckoned up the advantages of Mrs. Caope's standards. Then seeing that it was after midnight, and that only the stars shone in that narrow, wooded chute, she felt she wanted to go out into the wide river again, to go where she was not shut in. She cast off her lines and noiselessly floated out and down the slow current.

She saw Parson Rasba's boat move out into the current behind her and drift along in the soft, autumn night. Her first thought was one of indignation, but when a little later they emerged into the broad river current and she felt the solitude of the interminable surface, her mood changed.

What the big, quizzical mountain parson had in mind she did not know. It was possible that he was a very bad man, indeed. She could not help but laugh under her breath at his bewilderment regarding Mrs. Caope, which she felt was a genuine expression of his real feelings. At the same time, whatever his motive in following her, whether it was to protect her—which she could almost believe—or to court her, which was not at all unlikely, or whether he had a baser design, she did not know, but she felt neither worry nor fear.

"I don't care," she shook her head, defiantly, "I like him!"



CHAPTER XIV

Carline recovered his equilibrium after a time. His nerves, long on the ragged edge, had given way, and he was ashamed of his display of emotion.

"Seems as though some things are about all a man can stand," he said to Terabon, the newspaper man. "You know how it is!"

"Oh, yes! I've had my troubles, too," Terabon admitted.

"It isn't fair!" Carline exclaimed. "Why can't a man enjoy himself and have a good time, and not—and not——"

"Have a headache the next day?" Terabon finished the sentence with a grave face.

"That's it. I'm not what you'd call a hard drinker; I like to take a cocktail, or a whiskey, the same as any man. I like to go out around and see folks, talk to 'em, dance—you know, have a good time!"

"Everybody does," Terabon admitted.

"And my wife, she wouldn't go around and she was—she was——"

"Jealous because you wanted to use your talents to entertain?"

"That's it, that's it. You understand! I'm a good fellow; I like to joke around and have a good time. Take a man that don't go around, and he's a dead one. It ain't as though she couldn't be a good sport—Lord! Why, I'd just found out she was the best sport that ever lived. I thought everything was all right. Next day she was gone—tricky as the devil! Why, she got me to sign up a lot of papers, got all my spare cash, stocks, bonds—everything handy. Oh, she's slick! Bright, too—bright's anybody. Why, she could talk about books, or flowers, or birds—about anything. I never took much interest in them."

"And brought up in that shack on Distiller's Island?"

"Stillhouse Island, yes, sir. What do you know about that?"

"A remarkable woman!"

"Yes, sir—I—I've got some photographs," and Carline turned to a writing desk built into the motorboat. He brought out fifteen or twenty photographs. Terabon looked at them eagerly. He could not associate the girl of the pictures with the island shack, with this weakling man, nor yet with the Mississippi River—at least not at that moment.

"She's beautiful," he exclaimed, sincerely.

"Yes, sir." Carline packed the pictures away.

He started the motor, straightened the boat out and steered into mid-stream, looking uncertainly from side to side.

"There's no telling," he said, "not about anything."

"On the river no one can tell much about anything!" Terabon assented.

"You're just coming down, I suppose, looking for hist'ries to write?"

"That's about it. I just sit in the skiff, there, and I write what I see, on the machine: A big sandbar, a flock of geese, a big oak tree just on the brink of the bank half the roots exposed and going to fall in a minute or a day—everything like that!"

"I bet some of these shanty-boaters could tell you histories," Carline said. "I tell you, some of them are bad. Why, they'd murder a man for ten dollars—those river pirates would."

"No doubt about it!"

"But they wouldn't talk, 'course. It must be awful hard to make up them stories in the magazines."

"Oh, if a man gets an idea, he can work it up into a story. It takes work, of course, and time."

"I don't see how anybody can do it." Carline shook his head. "There's a man up to Gage. He wants to write a book, but he ain't never been able to find anything to write about. You see, Gage ain't much but a little landing, you might say."

"Chester, and the big penitentiary is just below there, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes!"

"I'd think there might be at least one story for him to write there."

"Oh, he don't want to write about crooks; he wants to write about nice people, society people, and that kind, and big cities. He says it's awful hard to find anybody to write about."

"You've got to look to find heroes," Terabon admitted. "I came more than a thousand miles to see a shanty-boat."

"You di-i-d? Just to see a shanty-boat!" Carline stared at Terabon in amazement.

In spite of Terabon being such a queer duck he made a good companion. He was a good cook, for one thing, and when they landed in below Hickman Bend, he went ashore and killed three squirrels and two black ducks in the woods and marsh beyond the new levee.

When he returned, he found a skiff landed near by on the sandbar. Carline was talking to the man, who had just handed over a gallon jug. The man pulled away swiftly and disappeared down the chute. Carline explained:

"He's a whiskey pedlar; a man always needs to have whiskey on board; malaria is bad down here, and a fellow might catch cold. You see how it is if a man don't have some whiskey on board."

"I understand," Terabon admitted.

After supper Carline decided that there was a lot of night air around, and that a man couldn't take too many precautions against that deadly river miasma whose insidious menace so many people have ignored to their great cost. As for himself, Carline didn't propose to be taken bad when he had so universal a specific, to take or leave alone, just as he wanted.

Terabon, having put up the hoops of his skiff and stretched the canvas over them, retired to his own boat and spent two hours writing.

In the morning, when he stirred out, he found Carline lying in the engine pit, oblivious to the night air that had fallen upon him, protected as he was by his absorption of the sure preventive of night air getting him first. The jug was on the floor, and Terabon, after a little thought, poured out about two and a half quarts which he replaced with distilled water from the motorboat's drinking bottle. Then he dropped down the chute into the main river to resume his search for really interesting "histories."

The river had never been more glorious than that morning. The sun shone from a white, misty sky. It was warm, with the slight tang of autumn, and the yellow leaves were fluttering down; squirrels were barking, and a flock of geese, so high in the air that they sparkled, in the sunshine, were gossiping, and the music of their voices rained upon the river surface as upon a sounding board.

Terabon was approaching Donaldson's Point, Winchester Chute, Island No. 10, and New Madrid. An asterisk on his map showed that Slough Neck was interesting, and sure enough, he found a 60-foot boat just above Upper Slough Landing, anchored off the sandbar. This was a notorious whiskey boat, and just below it was a flight of steps up the steep bank. No plantation darky ever used those steps. He would rather scramble in the loose silt and risk his neck than climb that easy stairway—yes, indeed!

Terabon, drifting by, close at hand, gazed at the scene. From that craft Negroes had gone forth to commit crime; white men had gone out to do murder, and one of them had rolled down those steps, shot dead. On the other side of Slough Neck, just outside of Tiptonville, there was a tree on which seven men had been lynched.

He pulled across to the foot of Island No. 10 sandbar, to walk up over that historic ground, and to visit the remnants of Winchester Chute where General Grant had moored barges carrying huge mortars with which to drop shells into the Confederate works on Island No. 10.

He hailed a shanty-boat just below where he landed, and as the window opened and he saw someone within, he asked:

"Will you kindly watch my skiff? I'm going up over the island."

"Yes, glad to!"

"Thank you." He bowed, and went upon his exploration.

It was hard to believe that this sandbar, grown to switch willows which increased to poles six or seven inches in diameter, had once been a big island covered with stalwart trees, with earthworks, cannon, and desperate soldiers. Its serene quiet, undulating sands and casual weed-trees, showing the stain of floods that had filled the bark with sediment, proved the indifference of the river to fleeting human affairs—the trifling work of human hands had been washed away in a spring tide or two, and Island No. 10 was half way to the Gulf by this time.

Terabon returned to his skiff three or four hours later, and taking up his typewriter, began to write down what he had seen, elaborating the pencil notes which he had made. As he wrote he became conscious of an observer, and of the approach of someone who was diffident and curious—a familiar enough sensation of late.

He looked up, started, and reached for his hat. It was a woman, a young woman, with bright eyes, grace, dignity—and much curiosity.

"I didn't mean to disturb you," she apologized. "I was just wondering what on earth you could be doing!"

"Oh, I'm writing—making notes——"

"Yes. But—here!"

"I'm a newspaper writer," he made his familiar statement. "My name is Lester Terabon. I'm from New York. I came down here from St. Louis to see the Mississippi."

"You write for newspapers?" she repeated.

She came and sat down on the bow deck of his skiff, frankly curious and interested.

"My name's Nelia Crele," she smiled. "I'm a shanty-boater. That's my boat."

"I'm sure I'm glad to meet you," he bowed, "Mrs. Crele."

"You find lots to write about?"

"I can't write fast enough," he replied, enthusiastically, "I've been coming six weeks—from St. Louis. I've made more than 60,000 words in notes already, and the more I make the more I despair of getting it all down. Why, right here—New Madrid, Island 10, and—and——"

"And me?" she asked. "Did you stop at Gage?"

"At Stillhouse Island," he admitted, circumspectly. "Mr. Crele there said I should be sure and tell his daughter, if I happened to meet her, that her mother wanted her to be sure and write and let her know how she is getting along."

"Oh, I'll do that," she assured him. "I was just writing home when you landed in. Isn't it strange how everybody knows everybody down here, and how you keep meeting people you know—that you've heard about? You knew me when you saw me!"

"Yes—I'd seen your pictures."

"Mammy hadn't but one picture of me!" She stared at him.

"That's so," he thought, unused to such quick thought.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she asked him, looking around her. "Do you try to write all that, too—I mean this sandbar, and those willows, and that woods down there, and—the caving bank?"

"Everything," he admitted. "See?"

He handed her the page which he had just written. Holding it in one hand—there was hardly a breath of air stirring—she read it word for word.

"Yes, that's it!" She nodded her head. "How do you do it? I've just been reading—let me see, '... the best romance becomes dangerous if by its excitement it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and—and——' I've forgotten the rest of it. Could anything make this life down here—anything written, I mean—seem uninteresting?"

He looked at her without answering. What was this she was saying? What was this shanty-boat woman, this runaway wife, talking about? He was dazed at being transported so suddenly from his observations to such reflections.

"That's right," he replied, inanely. "I remember reading that—somewhere!"

"You've read Ruskin?" she cried. "Really, have you?"

"Sesame and Lilies—there's where it was!"

"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed, looking at him. He caught the full flash of her delight, as well as surprise, at finding someone who had read what she quoted, and could place the phrase.

"The sun's bright," she continued. "Won't you come down on my boat in the shade? I've lots of books, and I'm hungry—I'm starving to talk to somebody about them!"

It was a pretty little boat, sweet and clean; the sitting room was draped with curtains along the walls, and there was a bookcase against the partition. She drew a rocking chair up for him, drew her own little sewing chair up before the shelves, and began to take out books.

He had but to sit there and show his sympathy with her excitement over those books. He could not help but remember where he had first heard her name, seen the depressed woman who was her mother. And the bent old hunter who was her father. It was useless for him to try to explain her.

Just that morning, too, he had left Nelia Crele's husband in an alcoholic stupor—a man almost incredibly stupid!

"I know you don't mind listening to me prattle!" she laughed, archly. "You're used to it. You're amused, too, and you're thinking what a story I will make, aren't you, now?"

"If—if a man could only write you!" he said, with such sincerity that she laughed aloud with glee.

"Oh, I've read books!" she declared. "I know—I've been miserable, and I've been unhappy, but I've turned to the books, and they've told me. They kept me alive—they kept me above those horrid little things which a woman—which I have. You've never been in jail, I suppose?"

"What—in jail? I've been there, but not a prisoner. To see prisoners."

"You couldn't know, then, the way prisoners feel. I know. I reckon most women know. But now I'm out of jail. I'm free."

He could not answer; her eyes flashed as they narrowed, and she fairly glared at him in the intensity of her declaration.

"Oh, you couldn't know," she laughed, "but that's the way I feel. I'm free! Isn't the river beautiful to-day? I'm like the river——"

"Which is kept between two banks?" he suggested.

"I was wrong," she shook her head. "I'm a bird——"

"I can well admit that," he laughed.

"Oh," she cried, in mock rebuke, "the idea!"

"It's your own—and a very brilliant one," he retorted, and they laughed together.

There was no resisting the gale of Nelia Crete's effervescent spirits. It was clear that she had burst through bonds of restraint that had imprisoned her soul for years. Terabon was too acute an observer to frighten the sensitive exhilaration. It would pass—he was only too sure of that. What would follow?

The sandbar was miles long, miles wide; six or seven miles of caving bend was visible below them, part of it over another sandbar that extended out into the river. There was not a boat, house, human being, or even fence in sight in any direction. Across the river there was a cotton field, but so far away it was that the stalks were but a purple haze under the afternoon sun.

"You think I'm queer?" she suddenly demanded.

"No, but I would be if——"

"If what?"

"If I didn't think you were the dandiest river tripper in the world," he exclaimed.

"You're a dear boy," she laughed. "You don't know how much good you've done me already. Now we'll get supper."

"I've two black ducks," he said. "I'll bet they'll make a good——"

"Roast," she took his word. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook, too!"



CHAPTER XV

The Mississippi River brings people from the most distant places to close proximity; Pittsburg and even Salamanca meet Fort Benton and St. Paul at the Forks of the Ohio. On the other hand, with uncanny certainty, those most eager to meet are kept apart and thrown to the ends of the world.

Parson Rasba saw Nelia Crele's boat drift out into the current and drop down the Chute of Wolf Island, and impelled by solitude and imagination he followed her. She had awakened sensations in his heart which he had never before known, so he acted with primitive directness and moved out into the Mississippi.

The river carried him swiftly toward a town whose electric lights sparkled on a high bluff, Hickman, and he saw the cabin-boat of the young and venturesome woman clearly outlined between him and the town. For nearly an hour he was conscious of the assistance of the river in carrying him along at an even pace, permitting him to remain as guardian of the woman. He felt that she needed him, that he must help her, and there grew in his heart an emotion which strangely made him desire to sing and to shout.

He watched the cabin-boat drift down right into the pathway of reflections that fell from the lights on Hickman bluffs. His eyes were apparently fixed upon the boat, and he could not lose sight of it. The river carried him right into the same glare, and for a few minutes he looked up at the arcs, and shaded his eyes to get some view of the town whose sounds consisted of the mournful howling of a dog.

Rasba looked back at the town, and felt the awe which a sleeping village inspires in the thoughts of a passer-by. He thought perhaps he would never again see that town. He wondered if there was a lost soul there whose slumberings he could disturb and bring it to salvation. He looked down the river, and the next instant his boat was seized as by a strong hand and whirled around and around, and flung far from its course. He remembered the phenomenon at the Forks of the Ohio, and again at Columbus bluff's. With difficulty he found his bearings.

He looked around and saw to his surprise that he was drifting up stream. He looked about him in amazement. He searched the blackness of the river, and stared at the blinding lights of the town. He began to row with his sweeps, and look down stream whither had disappeared the cabin-boat whose occupant he had felt called upon to guard and protect.

That boat was gone. In the few minutes it had disappeared from his view. He surmised, at last, that he had been thrust into an eddy, for the current was carrying him up stream, and he rowed against it in vain. Only when he had floated hundreds of yards in the leisurely reverse current below the great bar of Island No. 6 and had drifted out into the main current again, almost under the Hickman lights once more, was he able in his ignorance to escape from the time-trap into which he had fallen.

Standing at his oars, and rowing down stream, he tried to overtake the young woman whose good looks, bright eyes, sympathetic understanding, and need of his spiritual tutoring had caught his mind and made it captive.

Dawn, following false dawn, saw him passing New Madrid, still rowing impatiently, his eyes staring down the wild current, past a graveyard poised ready to plunge on the left bank, and then down the baffling crossing at Point Pleasant and through the sunny breadths up to Tiptonville, half sunk in the river, only to fall away toward Little Cypress—and still no sight of the lost cabin-boat.

In mid-afternoon, weary and worn by sleeplessness and expectancy, he pulled his boat into the deadwater at the foot of an eddy and having thrown over his stone anchor, sadly entered his cabin and, without prayer, subsided into sleep.

If he dreamed he was not awakened to consciousness by his visions. He slept on in the deep weariness which followed the wakefulness that had continued through a night of undiminished anxiety into a day of doubt and increasing despair. It had not occurred to him, in his simplicity, that the young woman would escape from him. The shadow and the gloom next to the bank on either side had not suggested his passing by the object of his intention. His thought was that she must have gone right on down stream, though he might have divined from his own condition that she, too, long since must have been weary.

He awakened some time in the morning, after twelve hours or so of uninterrupted slumber. He turned out into the fascinating darkness of early morning on the Mississippi. A gust of chill wind swept down out of the sky, rippling the surface and roaring through the woods up the bank. The gust was followed by a raw calm and further blanketing of the few stars that penetrated the veil of mist.

He had in mind the further pursuit of Nelia, and hauling in his anchor he pulled out into mid-current and then by lamp-light prepared his breakfast. While he worked, he discovered that dawn was near, and at lengthening intervals he went out to look ahead, hoping to see the object of his pursuit. Perhaps he would have gone on down to New Orleans, only it is not written in Mississippi weather prophecies that the tenor of one's way shall be even.

He heard wind blowing, and felt his boat bobbing about inexplicably. He went out to look about him, and in the morning twilight he discovered that the whole aspect of the Mississippi had changed. With the invisible sunrise had come an awe-inspiring spectacle which excited in his mind forebodings and dismay.

First, there was the cold wind which penetrated his clothes and shrivelled the very meat of his bones. The river's surface, which he had come to regard as a shimmering, polished floor, was now rumpled and broken into lumpy waves, like mud on a road, and the waves broke into dull yellow foam caps. There was not a light gleam on the whole surface, and dark shadows seemed to crawl and twist about in the very substance of the heavy and turgid waters.

Rasba stared. Born and trained in mountains, where he remembered clear streams of pale, beautiful green, catching reflections of white clouds and clean foliage, with only occasional patches of sullen clay-bank wash, he refused to acknowledge the great tawny Mississippi at its best, as a relation of the streams he knew. Certainly this menacing dawn reminded him of nothing he had ever witnessed. Waves slapped against his boat, waves which did not conceal, but rather accentuated, the sullen and relentless rush of the vast body of the water. While the surface leaped and struggled, wind-racked, the deeps moved steadily on. Elijah saw that his boat was being driven into a river chute, and seizing his sweeps, he began to row toward a sandbar which promised shoal water and a landing.

He managed to strike the foot of the bar, and threw out his anchor rock. He let go enough line to let the boat swing, and went in to breakfast. While he was eating, he noticed that the table turned gray and that a yellowish tinge settled upon everything. When he went out to look around, he found that the air was full of a cloud that filled his eyes with dust, and that a little drift of sand had already formed on the deck of his boat, gritting under his feet. The cloud was so thick that he could hardly see the river shores; a gale was blowing, and a whole sandbar, miles long, was coming down upon him from the air. The sandbar, when he looked at it, seemed fairly to be running, like water.

Parson Rasba remembered the storms of biblical times, and better understood the wrath that was visited upon the Children of Israel.

He dwelt in that storm all that day. He shut the door to keep the sand out, but it spurted through the cracks. He could see the puffing gusts as they burst through the keyhole, and he could hear the heavier grains rattling upon the thin, painted boards of his roof. His clothes grayed, his hands gritted, his teeth crunched fine stone; he pondered upon the question of what sin he had committed to bring on him this ancient punishment.

For a long time his finite mind was without inspiration, without understanding, and then he choked with terror and regret. He had beguiled himself into believing that it was his duty to take care of Nelia Crele, the fair woman of the river. He had believed only too readily that his duty lay where his heart's desire had been most eager. He sat there in dumb horror at the sin which had blinded him.

"I come down yeah to find Jock Drones for his mother!" He reminded himself by speaking his mission aloud, adding, "And hyar I've be'n floating down looking for a woman, looking for a pretty woman!"

And because he could remember her shoes, the smooth leather over those exquisite ankles, Parson Rasba knew that his sin was mortal, and that no other son of man had ever strayed so far as he.

No wonder he was caught in a desert blizzard where no one had ever said there was a desert!

"Lord God," he cried out, "he'p this yeah po'r sinner! He'p! He'p!"



CHAPTER XVI

Jock, alias "Slip," Drones, was discovering how small the world really is. Like many another man, he had figured that no one would know him, no one could possibly find him, down the Mississippi River, more than a thousand miles from home. Having killed, or at least fought his man in a deadly feud war, he had escaped into the far places. His many months of isolation had given him confidence and taken the natural uneasiness of flight from his mind.

Now someone was coming down the Mississippi inquiring for Jock Drones! A detective, as relentless, as sure as a bullet in the heart, was coming. He might even then be lurking in the brush up the bank, waiting to get a sure drop. He might be dropping down that very night. He might step in among the players, unnoticed, unseen, and wait there for the moment of surprise and action.

Slip's mind ransacked the far places of which he had heard: Oklahoma, the Missouri River, California, the Mexican border, Texas. Far havens seemed safest, but against their lure he felt the balance of Buck's comradeship.

Caruthersville had a sporting crowd with money, lots of money. The people there were liberal spenders, and they liked a square game better than any other sport in the world. The boat was making good money, big money. The two partners had only to break even in their own play to make a big living out of the kitty in the poker tables, and there was always a big percentage in favour of the boat, because Buck and Slip understood each other so well. Slip's share often amounted to more in a week than he had earned in two years up there in the mountains felling trees, rafting them in eddies, and tripping them down painfully to the sawmills. These never did pay the price they were advertised to pay for timber, and one had to watch the sealers to see that they didn't short the measure in the under water and goose-egg good logs.

He remembered Jest Prebol, who was lying shot through in the boat alongside, and he went over to the boat, lighted the lamp, and sat down by the wounded man. Prebol was a little delirious, and Slip went over on his own boat, and called Buck out.

"We got a sick man on our hands," he whispered. "Ain't Doc Grell come oveh yet?"

"Come the last boat," Buck said, and called the doctor out.

"Say, Doc, that sick feller out here, will you look't him?"

Doctor Grell went over to the boat. He looked at the wounded man, and frowned as he took the limp wrist. He tried the temperature, too, and then shook his head.

"He's a sick man, Slip," he said. "Thought he was coming all right last night. Now——"

He looked at the wound, and gazed at the great, blue plate around the bullet hole.

"He's bad?" Slip said, in alarm. "Poison's workin', Doc?"

"Mighty bad!"

There was nothing for it. Doctor Grell's night of pleasure had turned into one of life-saving and effort. He sent Slip over to drag away one of the young men from his game, and they rigged up two square trunks and a waterproof tarpaulin into an operating table. Then, as Slip was faint and sick, the two drove him back to the gambling boat, while they, the graduate and the student, entered upon a gamble with a human life the stake.

Of that night's efforts, fighting the "poison" with the few sharp weapons at their command—later reinforced by a hasty trip across the river to get others—the two need never tell. While they worked, they could hear at intervals the shout of a winner in the other boat. In moments of perfect quiet they heard the quick rustling of shuffled cards; they heard the rattling of dice in hard, muffled boxes; they heard, at intervals, the rattling of stove lids and smelt the soft-coal smoke which blew down on them from the kitchen chimney. Slip, not forgetful of them, brought over pots of black coffee and inquired after the patient. He found the two men paler on each visit, and stripped down more and more, till they were merely in their sweaty undershirts.

Toward morning the wind began to blow; it began to grow cold. The noises on the neighbouring boat grew fainter in the low rumble of a stormy wind out of the northwest, and the shanty-boat lifted at intervals on a wave that rolled out of the main current and across the eddy, making their operating room even more unstable.

Under their onslaught the death which was taking hold of Jest Prebol was checked, and the river rat whose life had been forfeited for his sly crimes became the object of a doctor's sentiment and belief in his own training.

Long after midnight, when some few of the patrons of the games had already taken their departure, the doors opened oftener and oftener, letting the geometrical shaft of the yellow light flare out across the waters, and the grotesque shadows of those who departed stood out against the night and waters as the men shivered in the wind and bent to feel their way into the boats.

After dawn Doctor Grell and his assistant, peaked and white, limp with their tremendous effort, and shivering with exhaustion of mind and body, walked out of the little shanty-boat, up to the big one, sat down with Buck and Slip to breakfast, and then took their own course across the ruffled and tumble-surfaced river.

"I 'low he'll pull through," Doctor Grell admitted, almost reluctantly. "He's in bad shape, though, with the things the bullet carried into him, but we sure swabbed him out. How'd the game go to-night, boys?"

"Purty good." Buck shook his head. "Tammer sure had luck his way—won a seventy-dollar pot onct."

"I sure wanted to play," Grell shook his head, "but in my profession you aren't your own, and you cayn't quit."

"We owe you for it," Buck said. "He's our friend——"

"And he's ourn, too," Grell declared, "so we'll split the difference. I expect it was worth a hundred dollars what we two did to-night. That'll be fifty, boys, if it's all right."

"Yes, suh," Slip said, handing over five ten-dollar bills, and Grell handed two of them to his companion, who shook his head, saying:

"Nope, Doc! Ten only to-night. My first fee!"

"And you'll never have a more interesting case," Grell declared. "No, indeed! You'll see cases, come you go to college, but none more interesting, and if we've pulled him through, you'll never have better reason for satisfaction."

The two got into a little motorboat and went bounding and rocking in the wind and waves toward the town behind the levee on the far bank. The two gamblers watched the little boat rocking along till it was but a black fleck in the midst of the weltering brown waters.

"I don't reckon any one'll drap down to-day," Slip muttered, looking up the river.

"We'll keep our eyes open," Buck replied. "You needn't to worry, you're plumb worn out, Slip. Git to bed, now, an' I'll slick up around."

It was a cold, dry gale. From sharp gusts with near calms between the wind grew till it was a steady, driving storm that flattened against the shanty-boat sides, and whistled and roared through the trees up the bank. And instead of dying down at dusk, it increased so much that the big acetylene light was not hung out, and if any one came down to the opposite shore he saw that there would be no game that night.

Buck went in and sat down by the wounded man's bed, giving him the medicines Doctor Grell had left. For the attentions Prebol, in lucid intervals, showed wondering looks of gratitude, like an ugly dog which has been trapped and then set free. What he had suffered during the night even he could hardly recall in the enfeebled condition of his mind, but the spoonfuls of broth, the medicine that thrilled his body, the man's very companionship, lending strength, took away the feeling of despair which a man in the extremities of anguish and alone in the world finds hardest to resist.

Buck, sitting there, gazed at the wan countenance, studying it. Prebol had forgotten, but when Buck first arrived on the river, the pirate, a much younger man then, had carelessly and perhaps for display told the stranger and softpaw many things about the river which were useful. It occurred to Buck that he was now paying back a debt of gratitude.

Something boiled up in his thoughts, and he swore to himself that he owed nothing, that the world owed him, and he bridged the years of his disappointment and desolation back to the hour when he had stormed out of the life he had known, to come down the Mississippi to be a gambler. Prebol, in his lapses into delirium, called a woman's name, Sadie—always Sadie! And if he would have cursed that name in his consciousness, out of the depths of his soul it came with softness and gentleness of affection.

Buck wondered what Jest Prebol had done to Sadie that she had driven him down there, and he cursed with his own lips, while he stifled in the depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of memories and reflections. He wondered what had become of the woman for love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this heartless occupation of common gambler?

True to Slip, he had watched the river for the stranger whose inquiries had been carried down in fair warning to all the river people—and Buck, suddenly conscious of his own part in that river system, laughed in surprise.

"Why," he said to himself, "humans are faithful to one another! It's what they live for, to be faithful to one another!"

It was an incredible, but undeniable theory. In spite of his own wilful disbelief in the faith of mankind, here he was sitting by one poor devil's bed while he kept his weather eye out upon the rough river in the interests of another—a murderer! He pondered on the question of whether any one kept faith with him. His mind cried out angrily, "No!" but on second thought, in spite of himself, he realized distinctly that he had let one person's faithlessness overcome his trust of all others.

No day on the Mississippi is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an early spring. Steamboats are driven into the refuge of landing or eddy, and if the power craft cannot stand the buffetings, much less are the exposed little houseboats, toys of current and breeze, able to escape the resistless blasts. So the wind possesses itself of the whole river breadth and living creatures are driven to shelter.

Prebol, shot through and conscious of the reward of his manner of living; Slip, a fugitive under the menace of a murderer's fate; and Buck, given over to melancholy, were but types on the lengths and tributaries of the indifferent flood.

Nothing happened, nothing could happen. The arrival of Slip from his restless bunk relieved Buck of his vigil, and he went to bed and slept into the dawn of another day—a day like the previous one, and fit to drive him up the bank, into the woods, and among the fallen branches of rotten trees seeking in physical activity to check the mourning and tauntings of a mind over which he found, as often before, that he had no control.

And yet, when the storm suddenly blew itself out with a light puff and a sudden flood of sunshine, just as the sun went down, Prebol's condition took a sudden turn for the better, Slip forgot his fears, and Buck burst into a gay little whistled tune, which he could never whistle except when he was absurdly and inexplicably merry.



CHAPTER XVII

Terabon's notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long, lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood itself.

His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump under the term of "histories," but now, after his hundreds of miles of association with the river, his thought took but brief note of those trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as "river towns." He had passed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!—bound but wearing away its bonds.

Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed, in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the Mississippi River "spirit"—as he always quoted it in his calm and dispassionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions—had encompassed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been called a "compromising position."

That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a drunken stupor, and now in the late evening the fugitive wife was taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat—and he had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home—he thought the phrase with difficulty—and he remembered the word "chaperon" as from a foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.

His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the occasion. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook," she had said, and while he followed her on board the boat, with the two big black ducks to help prepare, he wondered and remembered and, in spite of his life-long avoidance of all appearance of evil, submitted to this irresistible circumstance, wherever it might lead.

So he built the fire in her kitchen stove. She mixed up dressing and seasoned the birds, made biscuit batter for hot-bread, brought out stacks and stores of things to eat, or to eat with, and they set the table, ground the coffee, and got the oven hot for the roasting and baking.

One thing took the curse off their position: They had to have all the windows and doors wide open so that they seemed fairly to be cooking on an open sandbar at the edge of the river. Terabon took an inward satisfaction in that fact. It is not possible to feel exceedingly wicked or depraved when there is a mile-wide Mississippi on the one hand and a mile-wide sandbar on the other side, and the sun is shining calmly upon the bright and innocent waters.

As the ducks were young and tender, their cooking took but an hour, or a little more, and the interim was occupied in the countless things that must be done to prepare even a shanty-boat feast. He stirred some cranberry sauce, and she had to baste the ducks, get the flour stirred with water, and condensed cream for gravy, besides setting the table and raising the biscuits, to have them ready for the ducks. She must needs wonder if she'd forgotten the salt, and for ten minutes she was almost in a panic at the thought, while he watched her in breathless wonderment, and took covert glances up the Mississippi River, fearful of, and yet almost wishing to see, that pursuing motorboat come into view.

When at last the smoking viands were on the ample table and they sat with their knees under it, and he began to carve the ducks and dish out the unblessed meal, he glanced up stream through the cabin window on his right. He caught a glimpse of a window pane flashing miles distant in the light of the setting sun—the whiskey boat without doubt. He saw a flock of ducks coming like a great serpent just above the river surface, then a shadow lifted as out of the river, swept up the trees in the lost section of Kentucky opposite, and from spattering gold the scene turned to blue which rapidly became purple, darkening visibly.

Through the open doors and windows swept the chill of twilight, and while she lighted the big lamp he did her bidding and closed the doors and windows. Those shelves of books, classics and famous, time-tried fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of titles, the blues and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all those master minds warn the young against evil?

But they talked over the ducks of what a pity it was that all towns could not engage themselves in thought the way Athens used to do, and they wondered to each other when the hurrying passion of greed and its varying phenomena would become reconciled to a modest competence and the simplicity which they, for example, were enjoying down the Mississippi.

When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful, though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden, risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position.

Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty.

"I think I'd better put up my canvas top," he blurted out, and she assented.

"And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of dishes," she added.

"Oh, of course!" he exclaimed.

"I'll help with the canvas," she said, and he dared not look at her.

By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the bar, and the river in the dark, running by.

They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power, its resistlessness.

"It's overwhelming," he whispered. "When you can't see it you hear it, or you feel it!"

"And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so perfectly negligible," she added, consciously, and then with vivacity: "I'll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me for a walk up this sandbar!"

"Gladly," he laughed, "but I'll help with the dishes as well!"

She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber, not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different, wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle—they remembered Thoreau's "Cape Cod" and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had accumulated a vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the simple superstitions with which the river people beguile themselves and add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.

"An old river man can look at the river and tell when a headrise is coming," he told her. "He knows by the looks of the water when the river is due to fall again. When he dreams, he says he knows what is going to happen, and where to find buried treasure, and if there is going to be an earthquake or a bad storm."

"They get queer living alone!" she said, thoughtfully. "Lots of them used to stop in at our slough on Kaw River. I was afraid of them!"

"You afraid of anything!" he exclaimed. "Of any one!"

"Oh, that was a long time ago—ages ago!" She laughed, and then gave voice to that most tragic riverside thought. "But now—nothing at all matters now!"

She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing, that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin's most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring tears.

He knew in that very moment, as by revelation, that he had caught from her lips one of the bitterest phrases which the human mind is capable of forming. He was glad of the favour which fate had bestowed upon him, and he thrilled, while he regretted, that in that hour he could not forget that he was a seeker of facts, a gatherer of information.

To match her mood was beyond his own power. By a simple statement of fact she had given herself a place in his thought comparable to—he went at making ideas again, despite himself—comparable to one of those wonderful widows which are the delight, while they rend to tatters the ambitions of delvers into the mysteries of Olympian lore. This bright, pretty, vivacious young woman had suffered till she had arrived at a Helen's recklessness—nothing mattered!

There was a pause.

"I think you are in a fair way to become unforgetable in connection with the Mississippi River," he suggested, with even voice.

"What do you mean?" she demanded, quickly.

"Well, I'll tell you," with the semblance of perfect frankness. "I've been wondering which one of the Grecian goddesses you would have been if you had lived, say, in Homer's time."

"Which one of them I resemble?" she asked, amused.

"Exactly that," he declared.

"Oh, that's such a pretty compliment," she cried. "It fits so well into the things I've been thinking. The river grows and grows on me, and I feel as though I grew with it! You don't know—you could never know—you're a man—masculine! For the first time in my life I'm free—and—and I don't—I don't care a damn!"

"But the future!" he protested, feebly.

"That's it!" she retorted. "For a river goddess there is no future. It's all in the present for her, because she is eternal."

They had walked clear up to the southernmost tip of the sandbar point. They could hear someone, perhaps a chorus of voices, singing on the whiskey boat at the Upper Landing. They could see the light of the boat's windows. There they turned and started back down the sandbar, reaching the two boats moored side by side in the deadwater.

"Shall I help with those dishes to-night?" he asked.

"No, we'll do them in the morning," she replied without emphasis and as a matter of course, which left him unassisted in his obvious predicament.

"Well," he drawled, after a time, "it's about midnight. I must say a river goddess is—is beyond my most vivid dreams. I wonder——"

"What do you wonder?"

"If you'll let me kiss you good-night now?"

"Yes," she answered.

The stars twinkled as he put his arm around her and took the kiss which her lips gave—smiling.

"I'll help with those dishes in the morning," he said, helping her up the gang plank of her boat. "Good-night!"

"Good-night," she answered, and entered the cabin, the dim light of her turned-down lamp flashing across the sandbar and revealing his face for a moment. Then the door closed between them.

He went to his skiff, raised the cover, and crawled into his canvas hammock which was swung from both sides of his boat. Before going to sleep he looked under the canvas at the river, at the stars, at the dark cabin-boat forty feet distant in the eddy.

At the same moment he saw a face against a window pane in the cabin.

"What does it mean?" he asked himself, but there was no answer. The river, when asked, seldom answers. Just as he was about to go to sleep, he started up, wide awake.

For the first time on the river, he had forgotten to post up his notes. He felt that he had come that day, as never before, to the forks in the road—when he must choose between the present and the future. He lighted his lantern, sat up in his cot, and reached for his typewriter.

He wrote steadily, at full speed, for an hour. When he had those wonderful and fleeting thoughts and observations nailed down and safe, he again put out his lantern, and turned in once more.

Then he heard a light, gay laugh, clear and distinct-a river voice beyond question—full of raillery, and yet beneath the mocking note was something else which he could neither identify nor analyze, which he hoped was not scorn or mere derision, which he wished might be understanding and sympathy—till he thought of his making those notes.

Then he despised himself, which was really good for his soul. His conscience, instead of rejoicing, rebuked him as a cad. He swore under his breath.



CHAPTER XVIII

Augustus Carline was a long time recovering even his consciousness. A thousand dreams, a thousand nightmares tormented his thoughts while the mangling grip of unnumbered vises and ropes sank deep into his flesh; ploughs and harrows dragged through his twisted muscles.

Yet he did rise at last out of his pit and, leaning against the cabin of his boat, look about him to see what hell he had escaped into. The sun was shining somewhere, blinding his eyes, which were already seared. A river coiled by, every ripple a blistering white flame. He heard birds and other music which sounded like an anvil chorus performing in the narrow confines of a head as large as a cabin.

He remembered something. It was even worse than what he was undergoing, but he could not quite call the horror to the surface of the weltering sea of his feelings; he did not even know his name, nor his place, nor any detail except the present pain—and he didn't want to know. He fought against knowing, till the thing pressed exuberantly forward, and then he knew that the beautiful girl, the woman he loved and to whom he was married, had left him. That was the exquisite calamity of his soul, and he flinched from the fact as from a blow. He was always flinching, he remembered. He was always turning from the uncomfortable and the bothering to seek what was easy and unengaging. Now, for the moment, he could not undertake any relief from his present misery.

Acres and lakes of water were flowing by, but his thirst was worse than oceans could quench. He wanted to drink, but the thought of drinking disgusted him beyond measure. It seemed to him that a drop of water would flame up in his throat like gasolene on a bed of coals, and at that moment his eyes fell upon the jug which stood by the misty engine against the intangible locker. The jug was a monument of comfort and substantiality.

At the odour which filled the air when he had taken out the cork his very soul was filled with horror.

"But I got to drink it!" he whimpered. "It's the only thing that'll cure me, the only thing I can stand. If I don't I'll die!"

Not to drink was suicide, and to drink was living death! He could not choose between the suggestions; he never had been trained to face fate manfully. His years' long dissipation had unfitted him for every squarely made decision, and now with horror on one side and terror on the other, he could not procrastinate and wonder what folly had brought him to this state.

"Why couldn't it smell good!" he choked. "The taste'll kill me!"

Taste he must, or perish! The taste was all that he had anticipated, and melted iron could hardly have been more painful than that first torture of cold, fusil acid. Gulping it down, he was willing to congratulate himself on his endurance and wisdom, his very heroism in undertaking that deadly specific.

After it was over with, however, the raw chill, which the heat of the sun did not help, began to yield to a glow of warmth. He straightened his twisted muscles and after a hasty look around retreated into his cabin and flung himself on his bunk.

What length of time he spent in his recovery from the attacks of his enemy, or rather enemies of a misspent youth, he could not surmise. He did at last stir from his place and look with subdued melancholy into a world of woe. He recalled the visitor, the man who wrote for newspapers, and in a panic he searched for his money.

The money was gone; $250, at least, had disappeared from his pockets. An empty wallet on the cabin floor showed with what contemptuous calm the funds had been abstracted from his pockets. He turned, however, to a cunning little hiding place, and found there his main supply of currency—a thousand dollars or more.

No man likes to be robbed, and Carline, fixing upon his visitor Terabon as his assailant, worked himself into a fine frenzy of indignation. The fellow had purposely encouraged him to drink immoderately—Carline's memory was clear and unmistaken on that point—and then, taking advantage of his unconsciousness, the pseudo writer had committed piracy.

"I'd ought to be glad he didn't kill me!" Carline sneered to himself, looking around to conjure up the things that might have been.

The prospect was far from pleasing. The sky was dark, although it was clearly sometime near the middle of a day—what day, he could but guess. The wind was raw and penetrating, howling through the trees, and skipping down the chute with a quick rustling of low, breaking waves. The birds and animals which he had heard were gone with the sunshine.

When Carline took another look over his boat, he found that it had been looted of many things, including a good blanket, his shot gun and rifle, ammunition, and most of his food supply—though he could not recall that he had had much food on board.

He lighted the coal-oil heater to warm the cabin, for he was chilled to the bone. He threw the jug overboard, bound now never again to touch another drop of liquor as long as he lived—that is, unless he happened to want a drink.

Wearily he set about cleaning up his boat. He was naturally rather inclined to neatness and orderliness. He picked up, folded, swept out, and put into shape. He appeased his delicate appetite with odds and ends of things from a locker full of canned goods which had escaped the looter.

As long as he could, Carline had not engaged his thoughts with the subject of his runaway wife. Now, his mind clearing and his body numb, his soul took up the burden again, and he felt his helplessness thrice confounded. He did not mind anything now compared to the one fact that he had lost and deserved to lose the respect of the pretty girl who had become his wife. He took out the photographs which he had of her, and looked at them, one by one. What a fool he had been, and what a scoundrel he was!

He could not give over the pursuit, however; he felt that he must save her from herself; he must seek and rescue her. He hoisted in his anchor and starting the motor, turned into the chute and ran down before the wind into the river. Never had he seen the Mississippi in such a dark and repellent mood.

When he had cleared the partial shelter of Island No. 8, he felt the wind and current at the stern of his boat, driving it first one way then the other. Steering was difficult, and fear began to clutch at his heart. He felt his helplessness and the hopelessness of his search down that wide river with its hundred thousand hiding places. He knew nothing of the gossiping river people except that he despised them. He could not dream that his ignorance of things five or ten miles from his home was not typical of the shanty-boaters; he could not know that where he was a stranger in the next township to his own home, a shanty-boater would know the landing place of his friends a thousand miles or so down stream.

Without maps, without knowledge, without instinct, he might almost as well have been blind. His careless, ignorant glance swept the eight or nine miles of shoreline of sandbar from above Island No. 10 clear down to the fresh sloughing above Hotchkiss's Landing, opposite the dry Winchester Chute—in which deep-draft gun-barges had been moored fifty years or so before. He did not even know it was Island No. 10, Donaldson's Point; he didn't know that he was leaving Kentucky to skirt Tennessee; much less did he dream that he was passing Kentucky again. He looked at a shanty-boat moored at the foot of a mile-long sandbar; saw, without observing, a skiff against the bar just above the cabined scow. His gaze discovered smoke, houses, signs of settlement miles below, and he quickened the beat of his motor to get down there.

He longed for people, for humanity, for towns and cities; and that was a big sawmill and cotton-gin town ahead of him, silhouetted along the top of a high bank. He headed straight for it, and found his boat inexplicably slowed up and rebuffed. Strangers on the river always do find themselves baffled by the big New Madrid eddy, which even power boats engage with difficulty of management. He landed at last against a floating dock, and found that it was a fish market.

Having made fast, he went up town and spent hours, till long after dark, buying supplies, talking to people, getting the lonesomeness out of his system, and making veiled inquiries to learn if anything had been heard about a woman coming down the Mississippi. He succeeded in giving the impression that he was a detective. In the restaurant he talked with a cocky little bald-headed man all spruced up and dandyish.

"I'm from Pittsburgh," the man said. "My name's Doss, Ronald Doss; I'm a sportsman, but every winter I drop down here, hunting and fishing; sometimes on the river, sometimes back in the bottoms. I suppose, Mr. Carline, that you're a stranger on the river?"

"Why, yes-s, down this way; I live near it, up at Gage."

"I see, your first trip down. Got a nice gasolene boat, though!"

"Oh, yes! You're stopping here?"

"Just arrived this morning; trying to make up my mind whether I'll go over on St. Francis, turkey-and deer-hunting, or get a boat and drop down the Mississippi. Been wondering about that."

"Well, say, now—why can't you drop down with me?"

"Oh, I'd be in the way——"

"Not a bit——"

"Costs a lot to run a motorboat, and I'd have to——"

"No, you wouldn't! Not a cent! Your experience and my boat——"

"Well, of course, if you put it that way. If it'd be any accommodation to you to have an old river man—I mean I've always tripped the river, off and on, for sport."

"It'd be an education for me, a great help!"

"Yes, I expect it would be an education, if you don't know the river." Doss smiled.

They walked over to the river bank. An arc light cast its rays upon the end of the street, down the sloping bank, and in a light circle upon the rocking, muddy waters where the fish dock and several shanty-boats rested against the bank.

Doss whistled a little tune as he rested on his cane.

The front door of the third houseboat up the eddy opened and closed. A man climbed the bank and passed the two with a basket on his arm.

"Come on down," Carline urged.

"Not to-night," Doss said. "I've got my room up at the hotel, and I'll have to get my stuff out of the railroad baggage room. But I'll come down about 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning. Then we'll fit up and drop down the river. Good-night!"

Doss watched Carline go down to the dock and on to his boat. Then he went up the street and held earnest confab with a man who had a basket on his arm. They whispered ten minutes or so, then the man with the basket returned to his shanty-boat, and within half an hour was back up town, carrying two suitcases, a gun case, and a duffle bag.

Doss went to the smaller hotel with these things and registered. He walked down to the river in the morning and noticed that the third shanty-boat had dropped out into the river during the night, in spite of the storm that was blowing up. He went down and ate breakfast with Carline, and the two went up and got Doss's outfit at the hotel. They returned to the motorboat, and, having laid in a supply of groceries, cast off their lines and steered away down the river.

"Yes, sir, we'll find that girl if it takes all winter!" the fish-market man heard Doss tell Carline in a loud voice.

That afternoon a man in a skiff came down the river and turned into the dock. As he landed, the fish-market man said to him:

Yes.

"If you see any lady coming down, tell her a detector is below, lookin' fo' her. He's a cheap skate, into a motorboat—but I don't expect he'll be into hit long, 'count of some river fellers bein' with him. But he mout be bad, that detector. If you should see a nice lady, tell her."

"You bet!" the skiff man, who was Lester Terabon, exclaimed.



CHAPTER XIX

For long hours Parson Rasba endured the drifting sand and the biting wind which penetrated the weather-cracks in his poplar shanty-boat. It was not until near nightfall that it dawned on him that he need not remain there, that it was the simplest thing in the world to let go his hold and blow before the wind till he was clear of the sandblast.

He did haul in his anchor and float away. As he rode the waves and danced before the wind the clouds of sand were flung swiftly down upon the water, where the surface was covered with a film and a sheet of dust.

Standing at his sweeps, he saw that he was approaching the head of another sandbar, and as he felt the water shoaling under the boat he cast over the anchor and rode in clear air again. He was not quite without a sense of humour.

Shaking the dust out of his long hair and combing it out of his whiskers, he laughed at his ignorance and lack of resource. He swept the decks and floor of his cabin, and scooped the sand up with an ash shovel to throw overboard. A lesson learned on the Mississippi is part of the education of the future—if there is anything in the pupil's head to hold a memory of a fact or experience.

Even though he knew it was his own ignorance that had kept him a prisoner in that storm, Parson Rasba did not fail to realize that his ignorance had been sin, and that his punishment was due to his absorption in the fate of a pretty woman.

Certainly after such a sharp rebuke he could not fail to return to his original task, imposed upon him because of his fault in bringing the feud fighters of his home mountains together, untrained and unrepentant, to hear the voice of his pride declare the Word for the edification of sinners. Parson Rasba did not mince his words as he contemplated the joy he had felt in being eloquent and a "power" of a speaker from the pulpits of the mountain churches. The murdering by the feud fighters had taught him what he would never forget, and his frank acknowledgment of each rebuke gave him greater understanding.

While the gale lasted he watched the river and the sky. The wild fowl flying low, and dropping into woods behind him led to forays seeking game, and in a bayou a mile distant he drew down with deadly aim on one of a flock of geese. He killed that bird, and then as its startled and lumbering mates sought flight, he got two more of them, missing another shot or two in the excitement.

The three great birds made a load for him, and he returned to his boat with a heart lighter than he had known in many a day because it seemed to him a "sign" that he need not hate himself overmuch. The river consoled him, and its constancy and integrity were an example which he could not help but take to heart.

Gales might blow, fair weather might tempt, islands might interpose themselves in its way, banks and sandbars might stand against the flood, but come what might, the river poured on through its destined course like a human life.

He entertained the whimsical fancy, as his smallest goose was roasting, that perhaps the Mississippi might sin. In so many ways the river reminded him of humankind. He had stood beside a branch of the Mississippi which was so small and narrow that he could dam it with his ample foot, or scoop it up with a bucket—and yet here it was a mile wide! In its youth it was subject to the control of trifling things, a stone or a log, or the careless handiwork of a man. Down here all the little threads of its being had united in a full tide of life still subject to the influences of its normal course, but wearing and tearing along beyond any power to stop till its appointed course was run.

Insensibly Parson Rasba felt the resources of his own mind flocking to help him. Just being there beside that mighty torrent helped him to get a perspective on things. Tiny things seemed so useless in the front of that overwhelming power. What were the big things of his own life? What were the important affairs of his existence?

He could not tell. He had always meant to do the right thing. He could see now, looking back on his life, that his good intentions had not prevented his ignorance from precipitating a feud fight.

"I should have taken them, family by family, and brought them to their own knees fustest," he thought, grimly. "Then I could have helt 'em all together in mutual repentance!"

Having arrived at that idea, he shrugged his shoulders almost self-contemptuously. "I'm a learnin'. That's one consolation, I'm a learnin'!"

And then Rasba heard the Call!

It was Old Mississip's voice; the river was heaping duties upon him more and more. So far, he had been rather looking out for himself, now he recalled the houseboats which he had seen moored down the reaches and in the bends. Those river people, dropping down incessantly with the river current, must sometimes need help, comfort, and perhaps advice. His humility would not permit him to think that he could preach to them or exhort them.

"Man to man, likely I could he'p some po'r sinner see as much as I can see. If I could kind of get 'em to see what this big, old riveh is like! Hit's carryin' a leaf er a duck, an' steamboats an' shanty-bo'ts; hit carries the livin' an' hit carries the daid; hit begrudges no man it's he'p if he comes to it to float down a log raft er a million bushels of coal. If Ole Mississip'll do that fo' anybody, suttin'ly hit's clear an' plain that God won't deny a sinner His he'p! Yas, suh! Now I've shore found a handle to keep hold of my religion!"

Peace of mind had come to him, but not the peace of indolence and neglect. Far from that! He saw years of endless endeavour opening before him, but not with multitudes looking up to him as he stood, grand and noble, in the bright light of a thousand pulpits, circuit riding the earth. Instead, he would go to a sinning man here, a sorrowing woman there, and perhaps sit down with a little child, to give it comfort and instruction.

People were too scattered down the Mississippi to think of congregations. All days were Sunday, and for him there could be no day of rest. If he could not do big work, at least he could meet men and women, and he could get to know little children, to understand their needs. He knew it was a good thought, and when he looked across the Mississippi, he saw night coming on, but between him and the dark was sunset.

The cold white glare changed to brilliant colours; clouds whose gray-blue had oppressed the soul of the mountain man flashed red and purple, growing thinner and thinner, and when he had gazed for a minute at the glow of a fixed government light he was astonished by the darkness of night—only the night was filled with stars.

Thus the river, the weather, the climate, the sky, the sandbars, and the wooded banks revealed themselves in changing moods and varying lights to the mountain man whose life had always been pent in and narrowed, without viewpoint or a sense of the future. The monster size of the river dwarfed the little affairs of his own life and humbled the pride which had so often been humbled before. At last he began to look down on himself, seeing something of the true relation of his importance to the immeasurable efforts of thousands and millions of men.

The sand clouds carried by the north wind must ever remain an epoch in his experience. Definitely he was rid of a great deal of nonsense, ignorance, and pride; at the same time it seemed, somehow, to have grounded him on something much firmer and broader than the vanities of his youth.

His eyes searched the river in the dark for some place to begin his work, and as they did so, he discovered a bright, glaring light a few miles below him across the sandbar at the head of which he had anchored. He saw other lights down that way, a regular settlement of lights across the river, and several darting firefly gleams in the middle of the stream which he recognized were boats, probably small gasolene craft.

In forty minutes he was dipping his sweep blades to work his way into the eddy where several small passenger craft were on line-ends from a large, substantial craft which was brightly lighted by lanterns and a big carbide light. Its windows were aglow with cheeriness, and the occupants engaged in strange pastimes.

"Come, now, come on, now!" someone was crying in a sing-song. "Come along like I said! Come along, now—Seven—Seven—Seven!"

Parson Rasba's oar pins needed wetting, for the strain he put on the sweeps made them squeak. The splash of oars down the current was heard by people on board and several walked out on the deck.

"Whoe-e-e!" one hailed. "Who all mout yo' be?"

"Rasba!" the newcomer replied. "Parson Elijah Rasba, suh. Out of the Ohio!"

"Hi-i-i!" a listener cried out, gleefully, "hyar comes the Riveh Prophet after yo sinners. Hi-i-i!"

There was a laugh through the crowd. Others strolled out to see the phenomenon. A man who had been playing with fortune at one of the poker tables swore aloud.

"I cayn't neveh git started, I don't shift down on my luck!" he whined. "Las' time, jes' when I was coming home, I see a piebald mewl, an' now hyar comes a parson. Dad drat this yeah ole riveh! I'm goin' to quit. I'm gwine to go to Hot Springs!"

These casual asides were as nothing, however, to the tumult that stirred in the soul of Jock Drones, who had been cutting bread to make boiled-ham sandwiches for their patrons that night. His acute hearing had picked up the sound of the coming shanty-boat, and he had felt the menace of a stranger dropping in after dark. Few men not on mischief bent, or determined to run all night, run into shanty-boat eddies.

He even turned down the light a little, and looked toward the door to see if the way was clear. The hail relieved the tension of his mind strain, but only for a minute. Then he heard that answer.

"Rasba!" he heard. "Parson Elijah Rasba, suh. Out of the Ohio!"

In a flash he knew the truth! Old Rasba, whose preaching he had listened to that bloody night away up in the mountains, had come down the rivers. A parson, none else, was camping on the mountain fugitive's trail. That meant tribulation, that meant the inescapableness of sin's punishment—not in jails, not in trial courts, not on the gallows, but worse than that!