"Come abo'd, Parson!" someone shouted, and the boats bumped. There was a scramble to make a line fast, and then the trampling of many feet, as the Prophet was introduced to that particular river hell, amid stifled cries of expectancy and murmurs of warning. Next to being raided by the sheriff of an adjacent county, having a river prophet come on board is the greatest excitement and the smartest amusement of the bravados down the river.

"Hyar's the Prophet!" a voice shouted. "Now git ready fo' yo' eternal damnation. See 'im gather hisse'f!"

Rasba gathering himself! Jock could not help but take a peep. It was Rasba, gaunt, tall, his head up close to the shanty-boat roof and his shoulders nearly a head higher than the collars of most of those men who stood by with insolence and doubtful good humour.

"Which'd yo' rather git to play, Parson?" someone asked, slyly. "Cyards er bones er pull-sticks?"

"I've a friend down yeah, gentlemen." The Prophet ignored the insult. "His mother wants him. She's afeared likely he mout forget, since he was jes' a boy friendly and needing friends. He's no runt, no triflin' no-'count, puppy man, like this thing," in the direction whence the invitation had come, "but tall an' square, an' honourable, near six foot, an' likely 160 pounds. Not like this little runt thing yeah, but a real man!"

There was a yell of approval and delight.

"Who all mout yo' friend be?" Buck asked, respectfully, seeing that this was not a raid, but a visit.

"Jock, suh, Jock Drones, his mammy wants him, suh!"

Buck eyed the visitor keenly for a minute. Someone said they never had heard of him. Buck, who saw that the visitor was in mind to turn back, suggested:

"Won't yo' have a cup of coffee, suh? Hit's raw outside to-night, fresh and mean. Give him a chair, boys! I'm friendly with any man who takes a message from a mother to her wandering son."

A dozen chairs were snatched out to the stove, and when Parson Rasba had accepted one, Buck stepped into the kitchen. He found Slip, alias Jock Drones, standing with beads of sweat on his forehead. No need to ask the first question; Buck poured out a cup of coffee and said:

"What'll I tell him, Slip?"

"I cayn't go back, Buck!" Slip whimpered. "Hit's a hanging crime!"

"Something may have changed," Buck suggested.

"No, suh, I've heard. Hit were my bullet—I've heard. Hit's a trial, an' hit's—hit's hanging!"

"Sh-h! Not so loud!" Buck warned. "If it's lawyer money you need?"

"I got 'leven hundred, an' a trial lawyer'll cost only a thousand, Buck! Yo's a friend—Lawse! I'd shore like to talk to him. He's no detector, Parson Rasba yain't. Why, he's be'n right into a stillhouse, drunk the moonshine—an' no revenue hearn of hit, the way some feared. My sister wrote me. I want to talk to him, Buck, but—but not let them outside know."

"I'll fix it," Buck promised, carrying out steaming coffee, a plate of sandwiches, and two big oranges for the parson.

He returned, filled up the trays for the others, and took them out. Soon the crowd were sitting around, or leaning against the heavy crap table, talking and listening.

"Yo' come way down from the mountangs to find a mammy's boy?" someone asked, his tone showing better than his words how well he understood the sacrifice of that journey.

"Hit's seo," Rasba nodded. "I'm partly to blame, myse'f, for his coming down. I was a mountain preacher, exhorter, and I 'lowed I knowed hit all. One candlelight I had a congregation an' I hit 'er up loud that night, an' I 'lowed I'd done right smart with those people's souls. But—but hit were no such thing. This boy, Jock, he runned away that night, 'count of my foolishness, an' we know he's down thisaway; if I could git to find him, his mammy'd shore be comforted. She's a heap more faith in me'n I have, but I come down yeah. Likely I couldn't do much for that boy, but I kin show I'd like to."

"Trippin' a thousand miles shows some intrust!" somebody said.

"I lived all my life up theh in the mountangs, an' hit's God's country, gem'men! This yeah—" he glanced around him till his glance fell upon the card cabinet on the wall between two windows, full of decks of cards and packets of dice and shaker boxes—"this yeah, sho! Hit ain't God's country, gem'men! Hit's shore the Devil's, an' he's shore ketched a right smart haul to-night! But I live yeah now!"

Buck, who had been coming and going, had stopped at the parson's voice. He did not laugh, he did not even smile. The point was not missed, however. Far from it! He went out, bowed by the truth of it, and in the kitchen he looked at Slip, who was sitting in black and silent consideration of that cry, carried far in the echoes.

"You're one of us, Parson!" a voice exclaimed in disbelief.

"Yas, suh," Rasba smiled as he looked into the man's eyes, "I'm one of you. I 'low we uns'll git thar together, 'cordin' as we die. Look! This gem'men gives me bread an' meat; he quenches my thirst, too. An' I take hit out'n his hands. 'Peahs like he owns this boat!"

"Yas, suh," someone affirmed.

"Then I shall not shake hit's dust off my feet when I go," Rasba declared, sharply. Buck stared; Rasba did not look at even his shoes; Buck caught his breath. Whatever Rasba meant, whatever the other listeners understood, Buck felt and broke beneath those statements which brought to him things that he never had known before.

"He'll not shake the dust of this gambling dive from his feet!" Buck choked under his breath. "And this is how far down I've got!"

Rasba, conscious only of his own shortcomings, had no idea that he had fired shot after shot, let alone landed shell after shell. He knew only that the men sat in respectful, drawn-faced silence. He wondered if they were not sorry for him, a preacher, who had fallen so far from his circuit riding and feastings and meetings in churches. It did not occur to him that these men knew they were wicked, and that they were suffering from his unintentional but overwhelming rebuke.

They turned away impatiently, and went in their boats to the village landing across the river; a night's sport spoiled for them by the coming of a luck-breaking parson. Others waited to hear more of what they knew they needed, partly in amusement, partly in curiosity, and partly because they liked the whiskery fellow who was so interesting. At the same time, what he said was stinging however inoffensive.

"Game's closed for the night!" Buck announced, and the gamesters took their departure. They made no protest, for it was not feasible to continue gambling when everyone knows a parson brings bad luck to a player.

The outside lights were extinguished, and Buck brought Slip from the kitchen inside to Rasba.

"This is Slip," Buck explained, and the two shook hands, the fugitive staring anxiously at the other's face, expecting recognition.

"Don't yo' know me, Parson?" Slip exclaimed. "Jock Drones. Don't yo' know me?"

"Jock Drones?" Rasba cried, staring. "Why, Sho! Hit is! Lawse—an' I found yo' right yeah—thisaway!"

"Yassuh," Jock turned away under that bright gaze, "but I'm goin' back, Parson! I'm goin' back to stand trial, suh! I neveh knowed any man, not a blood relation would think so much of me, as to come way down yeah to tell me my mammy, my good ole mammy, wanted me to be safe——"

"An' good, Jock!" Rasba cried.

"An' good, suh," the young man added, obediently.

"I'd better go over and see our sick man," Buck turned to Slip.

"A sick man?" Rasba asked. "Where mout he be?"

"In that other shanty-boat, that little boat," Slip exclaimed. "We'll all go!"

When they entered the little boat, which sagged under their combined weights, Slip held the light so it would shine on the cot.

"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "Hyar's my friend who got shot by a lady!"

"Yes, suh, Parson!" Prebol grinned, feebly. "Seems like I cayn't get shut of yo' nohow, but I'm shore glad to see yo'. These yeah boys have took cyar of me great. Same's you done, Parson, but I wa'nt your kind, swearin' around, so I pulled out. Yo' cayn't he'p me much, but likely—likely theh's some yo' kin."

"I'd shore like to find them," Rasba declared, smoothing the man's pillow. "But there's not so many I can he'p. Yo' boys are tired; I'll give him his medicine till to'd mornin'. Yo'd jes' soon, Prebol?"

"Hit'd be friendly," Prebol admitted. "Yo' needn't to sit right yeah——"

"I 'low I shall," Rasba nodded. "I got some readin' to do. I'll git my book, an' come back an' set yeah!"

He brought his Bible, and looking up to bid the two good-night, he smiled.

"Hit's considerable wrestle, readin' this yeah Book! I neveh did git to understand hit, but likely I can git to know some more now. I've had right smart of experiences, lately, to he'p me git to know."



CHAPTER XX

Terabon possessed a newspaper man's feeling of aloofness and detachment. When he went afloat on the Mississippi at St. Louis he had no intention of becoming a part of the river phenomena, and it did not occur to his mind that his position might become that of a participator rather than an observer.

The great river was interesting. It had come to his attention several years before, when he read Parkman's "La Salle," and a little later he had read almost a column account of a flood down the Mississippi. The A. P. had collected items from St. Louis, Cincinnati, Memphis, Cairo, Natchez, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, and fired them into the aloof East. New York, Boston, Bangor, Utica, Albany, and other important centres had learned for the first time that a "levee"—whatever that might be—had suffered a cravasse; a steamboat and some towbarges had been wrecked, that Cairo was registering 63.3 on the gauge; that some Negroes had been drowned; that cattle thieves were operating in the Overflow, and so on and so forth.

The combination of La Salle's last adventure and the Mississippi flood caught the fancy of the newspaper man.

"Shall I ever get out there?" Terabon asked himself.

His dream was not of reporting wars, not of exploring Africa, not of interviewing kings and making presidents in a national convention. Far from it! His mind caught at the suggestion of singing birds in their native trees, and he could without regret think of spending days with a magnifying glass, considering the ant, or worshipping at the stalk of the flowering lily.

He was astonished, one day, to discover that he had several hundred dollars in the Chambers Street Savings Bank. It happened that the city editor called him to the desk a few minutes later and said:

"Go see about this conference."

"You go to hell!" the reporter replied, smilingly, gently replacing the slip on the greenish desk.

"T-t-t-t-t——" Mr. Dekod sputtered. There is something new under the sun!

Lester Terabon strolled forth with easy nonchalance, and three days later he was in the office of the secretary of the Mississippi River Commission, at St. Louis, calmly inquiring into the duties and performance thereof, involving the efforts of 100,000 Negroes, 40,000 mules, 500 contractors, 10,000 government officials, a few hundred pieces of floating plant, and sundry other things which Terabon had conceived were of importance.

He had approached the Mississippi River from the human angle. He knew of no other way of approach. His first view of the river, as he crossed the Merchants Bridge, had not disturbed his equilibrium in the least, and he had floated out of an eddy in a 16-foot skiff still with the human-viewpoint approach.

Then had begun a combat in his mind between all his preconceived ideas and information and the river realities. Faithfully, in the notebooks which he carried, he put down the details of his mental disturbances.

By the time he reached Island No. 10 sandbar he had about resigned himself to the whimsicalities of river living. He had, however, preserved his attitude of aloofness and extraneousness. He regarded himself as a visiting observer who would record the events in which others had a part. It still pleased his fancy to say that he was interviewing the Mississippi River as he might interview the President of the United States.

But as Lester Terabon rowed his skiff back up the eddy above New Madrid, and breasted the current in the sweep of the reach to that little cabin-boat half a mile above the Island No. 10 light, his attitude was undergoing a conscious change. While he had been reporting the Mississippi River in its varying moods something had encircled him and grasped him, and was holding him.

For some time he had felt the change in his position; glimmerings of its importance had appeared in his notes; his mind had fought against it as a corruption, lest it ruin the career which he had mapped out for himself.

When the New Madrid fish-dock man told him to carry the warning that a "detector" was hunting for a certain woman, and that the detective had gone on down with some river fellows, his place as a river man was assured. River folks trusted and used him as they used themselves. Moreover, he was possessed of a vital river secret.

Nelia Crele, alias Nelia Carline, was the woman, and they were both stopping over at the Island No. 10 sandbar. He knew, what the fish-dock man probably did not know, that the pursuer was the woman's husband.

"What'll I tell her?" Terabon asked himself.

With that question he uncovered an unsuspected depth to his feelings. It was a dark, dull day. The waves rolled and fell back, sometimes the wind seeming the stronger and then the current asserting its weight. With the wind's help over the stern, Terabon swiftly passed the caving bend and landed in the lee above the young woman's boat.

He carried some things he had bought for her into the kitchen and they sat in the cabin to read newspapers and magazines which he had obtained.

"I heard some news, too," he told her.

"Yes? What news?"

"The fish-dock man at New Madrid told me to tell the people along that a detective has gone on down, looking for a woman."

"A detective looking for a woman?" she repeated.

"A man the name of Carline——"

"Oh!" she shrugged her shoulders. "Why didn't you tell me!"

He flushed. Almost an hour had elapsed since he had returned. He had found it difficult to mention the subject.

"I did not tell you either," he apologized, "that I happened to meet Mr. Carline up at Island No. 8, when I had no idea the good fortune would come to me of meeting you, whose—whose pictures he showed me. I could not—I saw——There was——"

"And you didn't tell me," she accused him.

"It seemed to me none of my affair. I'm a newspaper man—I——"

"And did that excuse you from letting me know of his—of that pursuit of me?"

His newspaper impartiality had failed him, and he hung his head in doubt and shame. She claimed, and she deserved, his friendship; the last vestige of his pretence of mere observation was torn from him. He was a human among humans—and he had a fervid if unexpected thought about the influence and exasperation of the river out yonder.

"I could not tell you!" he cried. "I didn't think—it seemed——"

"You know, then, you saw why I had left him?"

"Liquor!" he grasped at the excuse. "Oh, that was plain enough."

"Perhaps a woman could forgive liquor," she suggested, thoughtfully, "but not—not stupidity and indifference. He never disturbed the dust on any of the books of his library. Oh, what they meant my books mean to me!"

She turned and stared at her book shelves.

"Suppose you hadn't found books?" he asked, glad of the opportunity for a diversion.

"I'd be dead, I think," she surmised, "and one day, I did deliberately choose."

"How was that?"

"Get your notebook!" she jeered. "I thought if he was going to rely on the specious joys of liquor I would, and tried it. It was a blizzard day last winter. He had gone over to see the widow, and there was a bottle of rum in the cupboard. I took some hot milk, nutmeg, sugar, and rum. I've never felt so happy in my life, except——"

"With what exception?" he asked.

"Yesterday," she answered, laughing, "and last night and to-day! You see, I'm free now. I say and do what I please. I don't care any more. I'm perfectly brazen. I don't love you, but I like you very much. You're good company. I hope I am, too——"

"You are—splendid!" he cried, almost involuntarily, and she shivered.

"Let's go walking again, will you?" she said. "I want to get out in the wind; I want to have the sky overhead, a sandbar under my feet, and all outdoors at my command. You don't mind, you'd like to go?"

"To the earth's end!" he replied, recklessly, and her gay laugh showed how well he had pleased her mood.

They kept close up to the north side of the bar because down the wind the sand was lifting and rolling up in yellow clouds. They went to Winchester Chute, and followed its winding course through the wood patch. There was a slough of green water, with a flock of ducks which left precipitately on their approach. They returned down to the sandbar, and pressed their way through the thick clump of small willows into the switch willows and along the edge of the unbroken desert of sand. They could see the very surface of the bar rolling along before the wind, and as they walked along they found their feet submerged in the blast.

But when they arrived at the boat night was near at hand, and the enveloping cold became more biting and the gloom more depressing.

Just when they had eaten their supper together, and had seated themselves before the fire, and when the whirl and whistle of the wind was heard in the mad music of a river storm, a motorboat with its cut-out open ploughed up the river through the dead eddy and stopped to hail.

Jim Talum, a fisherman whose line of hoop nets filled the reach of Island No. 9 for eight or ten miles, was on his way to his tent which he had pitched at the head of Winchester Chute.

He tramped aboard, and welcomed a seat by the fire.

"'Lowed I'd drap in a minute," he declared. "Powerful lonesome up on the chute where I got my tent. Be'n runnin' my traps down the bank, yeah, an' along of the chute, gettin' rats. Yo' trappin'?"

"No, just tripping," Terabon replied. "I was down to New Madrid this morning."

"I'm just up from there. Ho law! Theh's one man I'd hate to be down below. I expect yo've hearn tell of them Despard riveh pirates? No! Well, they've come drappin' down ag'in, an' they landed into New Madrid yestehd'y evenin'. Likely they 'lowed to raid some commissary down b'low—cayn't tell what they did 'low to do. But they picked good pickin's down theh! Feller come down lookin' fo' a woman, hisn's I expect. Anyhow, he's a strangeh on the riveh. He's got a nice power boat, an' likely he's got money. If he has, good-bye! Them Despards'd kill a man for $10. One of 'em, Hilt Despard's onto the bo't with him, pretendin' to be a sport, an' they've drapped out. The rest the gang's jes' waitin' fo' the wind to lay, down b'low, an' down by Plum P'int, some'rs, Mr. Man'll sudden come daid."

The fisherman had been alone so much that the pent-up conversation of weeks flowed uninterruptedly. He told details; he described the motorboat; he laughed at the astonishment the man would feel when the pirates disclosed their intentions with a bullet or knife; and he expected, by and by, to hear the story of the tragedy through the medium of some whiskey boater, some river gossip coming up in a power boat.

For an hour he babbled and then, as precipitately as he had arrived, he took his departure. When he was gone, Nelia Crele turned to Terabon with helpless dismay. Augustus Carline was worthless; he had been faithless to her; he had inflicted sufferings beyond her power of punishment or forgiveness.

"But he's looking for me!" she recapitulated, "and he doesn't know. He's a fool, and they'll kill him like a rat! What can I do?"

Obviously there was nothing that she could do, but Lester Terabon rose instantly.

"I'd better drop down and see if I can't help him—do something. I know that crew."

"You'll do that for me!" her voice lifted in a cry of thankfulness. "Oh, if you would, if you would. I couldn't think of his being—his being killed, trying to find me. Get him; send him home!"

"I'd better start right down," Terabon said, "it's sixty or seventy miles, anyhow. They'll not hurry. They can't, for the gang's in a shanty-boat."

She walked up to him with her arms raised.

"How can I thank you?" she demanded. "You do this for me—a stranger!"

"Why not, if I can help?" he asked.

"Where shall I see you again?"

He brought in his book of river maps, and together they looked down the tortuous stream; he rested the tip of his pencil on Yankee Bar below Plum Point.

"It's a famous pirate resort, this twenty miles of river!" he said. "I'll wait at Fort Pillow Landing. Or if you are ahead?"

"We'll meet there!" she cried. "I'll surely find you there. Or at Mendova—surely at Mendova."

She followed him out on the bow deck.

"Just a minute," she whispered, "while I get used to the thought of being alone again. I did not know there were men like you who would rather do a favour than ask for kisses."

"It isn't that we don't like them!" he blurted out. "It's—it's just that we'd rather deserve them and not have them than have them and not deserve them!"

She laughed. "Good-bye—and don't forget, Fort Pillow!"

"Does a man forget his meals?" he demanded, lightly, and with his duffle packed low in his skiff he rowed out into the gray river and the black night.

Having found a lee along the caving bank above New Madrid he gain-speeded down the current behind the sandbar, but when he turned the New Madrid bend he pulled out into mid-river and with current and wind both behind him, followed the government lights that showed the channel.

He had expected to linger long down this historic stretch of river with its Sunk Lands of the New Madrid earthquakes, with its first glimpse of the cotton country, and with its countless river phenomena.

"But Old Mississip' has other ideas," he said to himself, and miles below he was wondering if and when he would meet the girl of Island No. 10 again.



CHAPTER XXI

Pirates have infested the Mississippi from the earliest days. The stranger on the river cannot possibly know a pirate when he sees one, and even shanty-boaters of long experience and sharp eyes penetrate their disguises with difficulty. How could Gus Carline suspect the loquacious, ingratiating, and helpful Renald Doss?

Lonely; pursued by doubts, ignorance, and a lurking timidity, Carline was only too glad to take on a companion who discoursed about all the river towns, called river commissioners by their first names, knew all the makes of motors, and called the depth of the water in Point Pleasant crossing by reading the New Madrid gauge.

He relinquished the wheel of his boat to the dapper little man, and fed the motor more gas, or slowed down to half speed, while he listened to volumes of river lore.

"You've been landing along down?" Doss asked.

"All along," Carline replied, "everywhere."

"Seen anybody?"

"I should say so; there was a fellow come down pretending to be a reporter. He stopped over with me, got me full's a tick, and then robbed me."

"Eh—he robbed you?"

"Yes, sir! He got me to drinking heavy. I like my stew a little, but he fixed me. Then he just went through me, but he didn't get all I had, you bet!"

This was rich!

"Lucky he didn't hit you on the head, and take the boat, too!" Doss grinned.

"I suppose so."

"Yes, sir! Lots of mean men on this river, they play any old game. They say they're preachers, or umbrella menders, or anything. Every once in a while some feller comes down, saying he's off'n some magazine. They come down in skiffs, mostly. It's a great game they play. Everybody tells 'em everything. If I was going to be a crook, I bet I'd say I was a hist'ry writer. I'd snoop around, and then I'd land—same's that feller landed on you. Get much?"

"Two—three hundred dollars!"

The little man laughed in his throat. He handled the boat like a river pilot. His eyes turned to the banks, swept the sandbars, gazed into the coiling waters alongside, and he whispered names of places as he passed them—landings, bars, crossings, bends, and even the plantations and log cuttings. He named the three cotton gins in Tiptonville, and stared at the ferry below town with a sidelong leer.

Carline would have been the most astonished man on the Mississippi had he known that nearly all his money was in the pockets of his guest. He babbled on, and before he knew it, he was telling all about his wife running away down the Mississippi.

"What kind of a boat's she in?" Doss asked.

"I don't know."

"How do you expect to find her if you don't know the boat?"

"Why—why, somebody might know her; a woman alone!"

"She's alone?"

"Why—yes, sir. I heard so."

"Good looker?"

Without a word Carline handed the fellow a photograph. Doss made no sign. For two minutes he stared at that fine face.

"I bet she's got an awful temper," he half whispered.

"She's quick," Carline admitted, fervently.

"She'd just soon shoot a man as look at him," Doss added, with a touch of asperity.

"Why—she——" Carline hesitated. He recalled a day in his own experience when she took his own shot gun from him, and stood a fury, flaming with anger.

"Yes, sir, she would," Doss declared, with finality.

Doss had seen her. By that time a thousand shanty-boaters had heard about that girl's one shot of deadly accuracy. The woman folks on a thousand miles of reach and bend had had a bad example set before them. Doss himself felt an anger which was impotent against the woman who had shot Jest Prebold down. Probably other women would take to shooting, right off the bat, the same way. He despised that idea.

Carline, doubtful as to whether his wife was being insulted, congratulated, or described, gazed at the photograph. The more he looked, the more exasperated he felt. She was a woman—what right had she to run away and leave him with his honour impugned? He felt as though he hadn't taught her her place. At the same time, when he looked at the picture, he discovered a remembrance of his feeling that she was a very difficult person to teach anything to. Her learning always had insulted his own meagreness of information and aptness in repartee. Next to not finding her, his big worry had become finding her.

They steered down the river without great haste. Doss studied the shanty-boats which he saw moored in the various eddies, large and small. Some he spoke of casually, as store-boats, fishermen, market hunters, or, as they passed between Caruthersville and the opposite shore, a gambling boat. Even the river pirate, gloating over his prey, and puzzled only as to the method of making the most of his victim, could not penetrate the veil which it happened the Mississippi River interposed between them and the river gambling den—for the moment. There is no use seeking the method of the river, nor endeavouring to discover the processes by which the lives of thousands who go afloat down the Mississippi are woven as woof and warp in the fabric of river life and river mysteries. The more faithful an effort to select one of the commonest and simplest of river complications, the more improbable and fanciful it must seem.

Doss, in intervals when he was not consciously registering the smile of good humour, the generosity of an experienced man toward the chance visitor, and the willingness to defer to the gentleman from Up the Bank, brought his expression unconsciously to the cold, rough woodenness of blank insensitiveness—the malignance of a snapping turtle, to mention a medium reptilian face. A whim, and the necessity of delay, led Doss to suggest that they take a look up the Obion River as a likely hiding place. Of course, Doss knew best, and they quit the tumbling Mississippi for the quiet wooded aisle of the little river.

When they emerged, two days later, Augustus Carline could well thank his stars, though he did not know it, that he was still on the boat. All unconscious of the real nature and habits of river rats he had given the little wretch a thousand opportunities to commit one of the many crimes he had in mind. But he developed a reluctance to choose the easiest one, when from hint after hint he understood that a mere river piracy and murder would be folly in view of the opportunity for a more profitable stake which a man of means offered.

As he steered by the government boat which was surveying Plum Point bars, Doss showed his teeth like an indignant cat. Five or six miles below he offered the supine and helpless Carline the information:

"There's Yankee Bar. We'll swing wide and land in below, so's not to scare up any geese or ducks that may be roosting there."

Eagerly Doss searched through the switch willows for a glimpse of the setback of the water beyond the bar. Away down in the old eddy he discovered a shanty-boat, and to cover his involuntary exclamation of satisfaction he said:

"Shucks! There's somebody theh. I hoped we'd have it to ourselves but they may be sports, too. If they are, we'll sure have a good time. Some of these shanty-boaters are great sports. We'll soon find out!"

He steered into the eddy and the two men stepped out on the flat boat's deck to greet them.

"Seems like I've seen them before," Doss said in a low voice; "I believe they're old timers. Hello, boys! Hunting?"

"Yes, suh! Lots of game. Sho, ain' yo' Doss, Ren Doss?"

"You bet. I knew you! I told Mr. Carline, here, that I knew you, that I'd seen you before! I'm glad to see you boys again. Catch a line there."

No doubt about it, they were old friends. In a minute they were shaking hands all around, then went into the shanty-boat, and they sat down in assorted chairs, and Doss, Jet, and Cope exchanged the gossip of a river year.

Carline's eyes searched about him with interest, and the three men watched him more and more openly. When he walked toward the bow of the boat, where the slope of the yellow sand led up to the woods of Flower Island, one of them casually left his seat and followed.

Carline looked at the stand of guns in the cabin corner and started with surprise. He reached and picked up one of them to look at it.

"Why," he shouted, "this is my shot gu——"

No more. His light went out on the instant and he felt that he was suspended in mid-air, poised between the abyss and the heavens.



CHAPTER XXII

Fortune, or rather the Father of Waters, had favoured Parson Elijah Rasba in the accomplishment of his errand. It might not have happened in a decade that he locate a fugitive within a hundred miles of Cairo, where the Forks of the Ohio is the jumping-off place of the stream of people from a million square miles.

Rasba knew it. The fervour of the prophets was in his heart, and the light of understanding was brightening in his mind. Something seemed to have caught the doors of his intelligence and thrown them wide open.

In the pent-up valleys of the mountains, with their little streams, their little trails, their dull and hopeless inhabitants, their wars begun in disputes over pigs and abandoned peach orchards, their moonshine and hate of government revenues, there had been no chance for Parson Rasba to get things together in his mind.

The days and nights on the rivers had opened his eyes. When he asked himself: "If this is the Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?" he found a perspective.

Sitting there beside the wounded Jest Prebol, by the light of a big table lamp, he "wrestled" with his Bible the obscurities of which had long tormented his ignorance and baffled his mental bondage.

The noises of the witches' hours were in the air. Wavelets splashed along the side and under the bow of the Prebol shanty-boat. The mooring ropes stretched audibly, and the timber heads to which they were fastened squeaked and strained; the wind slapped and hissed and whined on all sides, crackling through the heavy timber up the bank. The great river pouring by seemed to have a low, deep growl while the wind in the skies rumbled among the clouds.

No wonder Rasba could understand! He could imagine anything if he did not hold fast to that great Book which rested on his knees, but holding fast to it, the whisperings and chucklings and hissings which filled the river wilderness, and the deep tone of the flood, the hollow roar of the passing storm, were but signs of the necessity of faith in the presence of the mysteries.

So Rasba wrestled; so he grappled with the things he must know, in the light of the things he did know. And a kind of understanding which was also peace comforted him. He closed the Book at last, and let his mind drift whither it would.

Panoramas of the river, like pictures, unfolded before his eyes; he remembered flashes taken of men, women, and children; he dwelt for a time on the ruin of the church up there in the valley, standing vainly against a mountain slide; his face warmed, his eyes moistened. His mind seized eagerly upon a vision of the memory, the pretty woman, whose pistol had shot down the deluded and now stricken wretch there in the cabin.

The anomaly of the fact that he was caring for her victim was not lost on his shrewd understanding. He was gathering up and helping patch the wreckage she was making. It was a curious conceit, and Elijah Rasba, while he smiled at the humour of it, was at the same time conscious of its sad truth.

Her presence on the river meant no good for any one; Prebol was but one of her victims; perhaps he was the least unfortunate of them all! Others might perish through her, while it was not too much to hope that Prebol, through his sufferings, might be willing to profit by their lesson. Rasba was glad that he had not overtaken her that night of inexplicable pursuit. Her brightness, her prettiness, her appeal had been irresistible to him, and he could but acknowledge, while he trembled at the fact, that for the time he had been possessed by her enchantment.

Thus he meditated and puzzled about the things which, in his words, had come to pass. Before he knew it, daylight had arrived, and Jock Drones came over to greet him with "Good mo'nin', Parson!" Prebol was sleeping and there was colour in his cheeks, enough to make them look more natural. When Doctor Grell arrived, just as the three sat down to breakfast, he cheered them with the information that Prebol was coming through though the shadow had rested close to him.

None of them admitted, even to himself, the strain the wounded man had been and was on their nerves. Under his seeming indifference Buck was near the breaking point; Jock, victim of a thousand worries, was bent under his burdens. Grell, having fought the all-night fight for a human life, was still weak with weariness from the effort. Rasba, a newcomer, brought welcome reserves of endurance, assistance, and confidence.

"Yo' men shore have done yo' duty by a man in need," he told them, and none of them could understand why that truthful statement should make them feel so very comfortable.

They left the sick man to go on board the gaming boat, and they sat on the stern deck, where they looked across the river and the levee to the roofs of Caruthersville. If they looked at the horizon, their attention was attracted and their gaze held by the swirling of the river current. Their eyes could not be drawn away from that tremendous motion, the rush of a thousand acres of surface; the senses were appalled by the magnitude of its suggestion.

"Going to play to-night?" Grell asked, uneasily.

"No," Buck replied, instantly.

"So!" the doctor exclaimed.

"Slip's going up on the steamboat."

"For good?"

"So'm I!" Buck continued, breathlessly; "I'm quitting the riveh, too! I've been down here a good many years. I've been thinking. I'm going back. I'm going up the bank again."

"What'll you do with the boat?" Grell continued.

"Slip and I've been talking it all over. We're through with it. We guessed the Prophet, here, could use it. We're going to give it to him."

"Going to give hit to me!" Rasba started up and stared at the man.

"Yes, Parson; that poplar boat of yours isn't what you need down here." Buck smiled. "This big pine boat's better; you could preach in this boat."

Tears started in Rasba's eyes and dripped through his dark whiskers. Buck and Jock had acted with the impulsiveness of gambling men. Something in the fact that Rasba had come down those strange miles had touched them, had given Drones courage to go back and face the music, and to Buck the desire to return into his old life.

"We're going up on the Kate to-morrow morning," Buck explained. "Slip'd better show you how to run the gasolene boat if you don't know how, Parson!"

Dazed by the access of fortune, Rasba spent the mid-afternoon learning to run the 28-foot gasolene launch which was used to tow the big houseboat which would make such a wonderful floating church. It was a big boat only a little more than two years old. Buck had made it himself, on the Upper Mississippi, for a gambling boat. The frame was light, and the cabin was built with double boards, with building paper between, to keep out the cold wintry winds.

"Gentlemen," Rasba choked, looking at the two donors of the gift, "I'm going to be the best kind of a man I know how——"

"It's your job to be a parson," Buck laughed. "If it wasn't for men like us, that need reforming, you'd be up against it for something to look out for. You aren't much used to the river, and I'll suggest that when you drop down you land in eddies sheltered from the west and south winds. They sure do tear things up sometimes. I've had the roof tore off a boat I was in, and I saw sixty-three boats sunk at Cairo's Kentucky shanty-boat town one morning after a big wind."

"I'll keep a-lookin'," Rasba assured him, "but I've kind-a lost the which-way down heah. One day I had the sun ahead, behind, and both sides——"

"There's maps in that pile of stuff in the corner," Buck said, going to the duffle. "You're on Sheet 4 now. Here's Caruthersville."

"Yas, suh. Those red lines?"

"The new survey. You see, that sandbar up in Little Prairie Bend has cut loose from Island No. 15, and moved down three miles, and we're at the foot of this bar, here. That's moved down, too, and that big bar down there was made between the surveys. You see, they had to move the levee back, and Caruthersville moved over the new levee——"

"Sho!" Rasba gasped. "What ails this old riveh?"

"She jes' wriggles, same's water into a muddy road downhill," Kippy laughed. "Up there in Little Prairie Bend hit's caved right through the old levee, and they had to loop around. Now they've reveted it."

"Reveted?"

"They've woven a willow mattress and weighted it down with broken rock from up the river—more than a mile of it, now, and they'll have to put down another mile before they can head the river off there."

"Put a carpet down. How wide?"

"Four hundred feet probably——"

"An' a mile long!" Rasba whispered, awed. "Every thing's big on the riveh!"

"Yes, sir—that's it—big!" Buck laughed.

Thus the four gossiped, and when Doctor Grell had taken his departure the three talked together about the river and its wonders. At intervals they went over to look after Prebol whose chief requirement was quiet, meat broths, and his medicines.

As night drew down Drones turned to Buck:

"It's goin' to be hard leaving the riveh! I neveh will forget, Buck. If I'm sent to jail for all my life, I'll have something to remember. If they hang me, I shore will come back to walk with those that walk in the middle of the river."

"What's that?" Rasba turned and demanded.

"Riveh folks believe that thousands of people who died down thisaway, sunk in snagged steamers, caught in burned-up boats, blown to kingdom come in boiler explosions, those that have been murdered, and who died along the banks, keep a-goin' up and down."

"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "Yo' b'lieve that?"

"A man believes a heap more after he's tripped the riveh once or twice, than he ever believed in all his borned days, eh, Buck?"

"It's so!" Buck cried out. "Last night I was thinking that I'd wasted my life down here; years and years I've been a shanty-boater, drifter, fisherman, trapper, market hunter, and late years, I've gambled. I've been getting in bad, worse all the while. The Prophet here, coming along, seemed to wake me up—the man I used to be—I mean. It wasn't so much what you said, Parson, but your being here. Then I've been thinking all over again. I've an idea, boys, that when I go back up to-morrow I won't be so sorry for what I've been, as glad that I didn't grow worse than I did. It won't be easy, boys—going back. I'm taking the old river with me, though. I've framed its bends and islands, its chutes and reaches, like pictures in my mind. Old Parson here, too, coming in on us the way he did, saying that this was hell, but he'd come here to live in it. That's what waked me up, Parson! I could see how you felt. You'd never seen such a place before, but you said in your heart and your eyes showed it, Parson, that you would leave God's country to help us poor devils. It's just a point of view, though. I'm going right up to my particular hell, and I'll look back here to this thousand miles of river as heaven. Yes, sir! But my job is up there—in that hell!"

So they talked, and always their thoughts were on the river channel, and their minds groping into the future.

When the Kate whistled way down at Bell's Landing, Rasba took the two across to Caruthersville and bade them good-bye at the landing.

The Kate pulled out and Parson Rasba crossed to the three houseboats, two of them his own. He went in to see Prebol, who was lonesome and wanted to talk a little.

"What you going to do, Parson?" Prebol asked.

"I'd kind-a like to get to see shanty-boaters, and talk to them," the man answered. "I wonder couldn't yo' sort of he'p me; tell me where I mout begin and where it'd he'p the most, an' hurt people's feelin's the least? I'd jes' kind-a like to be useful. Course, I got to get you cured up an' took cyar of first."

"I cayn't say much about being pious on Old Mississip'," Prebol grinned, "but theh's two ways of findin' trouble. One's to set still long enough, and then, again, you can go lookin' fo' hit. Course, yo' know me! I've hunted trouble pretty fresh, an' I've found hit, an' I've lived onto hit. I cayn't he'p much about doin' good, an' missionaryin', an' River Prophetin'."

When Prebol's voice showed the strain of talking Rasba bade him rest. Then he went over to the big boat, a gift that would have sold for $1,000. He looked at the crap table, the little poker tables with the brass-slot kitties; he stared at the cabinet of cards and dice.

"All mine!" he said.

He walked out on the deck where he could commune with the river, using his eyes, his ears, and the feeling that the warm afternoon gave him. The sun shone upon him, and made a narrow pathway across the rushing torrent. The sky was blue and cloudless. Of the cold, the wind, the sea of liquid mud, not one trace remained.

He looked down and up the river, and his eyes caught a flicker which became a flutter, like the agitation of a duck preening its feathers on a smooth surface.

He watched it for a long time. He did not know what it was. As a river man, his curiosity was excited, but there was something more than mere curiosity; the river instinct that the inexplicable and unknown should be watched and inquired into moved him almost unconsciously to watch that distant agitation which became a dot afloat in a mirage of light. A little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling currents at the bend.

The sun drew nearer the tree tops. The little cabin-boat was seeking a place to land or anchor for the night. If it was an old river man, the boat would drop into some little eddy at Caruthersville or down below; but a stranger on the river would likely shoot across into the gamblers' eddy tempted, perhaps, by the three boats already there.

The boat drew swiftly near, and as it ran down, the navigator rowed to make the shanty-boat eddy. Parson Rasba discovered that it was a woman at the sweeps, and a few strokes later he knew that it was a slim, young woman. When she coasted down outside the eddy, to swing in at the foot, and arrived opposite him, he recognized her.

"God he'p me!" he choked, "hit's Missy Nelia. Hit's Missy Nelia! An' she's a runned away married woman—an' theh's the man she shot!"

"Hello-o, Parson!" she hailed him, "did you see a skiff with a reporter man drop by?"

"No, missy!" he shook his head, his heart giving a painful thump

"I'm a-landing in, Parson!" she cried. "I want to talk with you!"

With that she leaned forward, drove the sweeps deep, and her boat started in like a skiff. It seemed to Parson Rasba that he had never seen a more beautiful picture in all his days.



CHAPTER XXIII

Lester Terabon rowed down the rolling river waters in the dark night. He had, of course, looked out into the Mississippi shades from the security of landing, anchorage, and sandbar; he knew the looks of the night but not the activities of currents and bends when a gale is sweeping by and the air is, by turns, penetrated by the hissing of darting whitecaps and the roar of the blustering winds.

He would not from choice have selected a night of gale for a pull down the Mississippi, and his first sensation as he sought a storm wave stroke was one of doubt. What dangers might engulf him was not plain, not the waves, for his skiff bobbed and rocked over them; not river pirates bent on plunder, for they could not see him; perhaps a snag in the shallows of a crossing; perhaps the leap of a sawyer, a great tree trunk with branches fast in the mud and the roots bounding up and down in the current; perhaps a collision with some other craft.

He had salt-water rowlocks on his boat, open-topped "U" sockets, and the oars he used were cased with a foot of black leather and collars of leather strips; the tips were covered with copper sheets which gave them weight and balance. At first he pulled awkwardly, catching crabs in the hollows and backing into the heft of the waves, but after a time he felt the waves as they came, and the oars feathered and caught. While he watched ahead and searched the black horizon for the distant sparkle of government lights, he fell into the swing of his stroke before he knew it, and he was interested and surprised to observe that he swayed to the side-wash while he pulled to the rhythm of the waves.

The government lights guided him. He had not paid much attention to them before; he had seen their white post standards as he dropped down, day after day, but his skiff, drawing only five inches of water, passed over the shallowest crossings and along the most gradually sloping sandbars. Now he must keep to the deep water, follow the majestic curves and sweeps of the meandering channel, lest he collide with a boiling eddy, ram the shore line of sunken trees, or climb the point of a towhead.

It was all a new experience, and its novelty compelled him at times to pause in his efforts to jot down a few hasty words by light of a little electric flash to preserve in his memory the sequence of the constantly varying features of the night, beginning with the curtain of the shanty-boat which flicked its good luck after him, passing the bright, clear lights of New Madrid. After leaving far behind their glow against the thin haze in the night he "made" the scattered shoals of Point Pleasant, and hugged down vanishing Ruddles Point, taking a glimpse of Tiptonville—which withdraws year by year from the fatal caving brink of its site—wishing as he passed that he might return to that strange place and visit Reelfoot Lake three or four miles beyond, where the New Madrid earthquakes drowned a forest whose dead stubs rise as monuments to the tragedy.

In Little Cypress Bend, twenty-five miles below where he had left the young woman, he heard the splash and thud of a caving bank, and felt the big rollers from the falling earth twisting and tumbling him about for a third of a mile.

It was after 1 o'clock when he looked at his watch. He was beginning to feel the pull on his shoulders, and the crick which constantly looking over his shoulder to see the lights ahead caused him. The dulness of his vision, due to inevitable fatigue, compelled him constantly to sit more alert and dash away the fine spray which whipped up from the waves. A feeling of listlessness overpowered him. He could not row on forever, without resting at all. Taking advantage of a moment of calm in the wind, he pulled the bow around and drifted down stern first.

He had lost track of his position; he had not counted the lights, and now for many miles there was no town distinguishable. He had felt the loneliness of a mile-breadth; now he wondered whether he was in Missouri or Arkansas, whether he had come forty miles or eighty, and after a little he began to worry for fear he might have gone more than a hundred.

With the wind astern or nearly astern, he knew that he had pulled four or five miles an hour, and he did not know how fast the current of the river ran; it might be four miles or eight miles. In ten hours he might leave more than a hundred miles of river bank behind him.

A new sensation began to possess him: the feeling that he was not alone. He looked around, while he rested trying to find what proximity thus affected him. The wind? Those dull banks, seemingly so distant? Perhaps some fellow traveller? It was none of those things.

It was the river! The "feel" of the flood was that of a person. He could not shake off the sensation, which seemed absurd. He shook his head resolutely and then searched through the gloom to discover what eyes might be shining in it. He saw the inevitable government lights between which was deep water and a safe channel. He had but to keep on the line between the lights, cutting across when he spied another one far ahead. The lights but accentuated the certainty that on all sides, but a little way from him, a host of invisible beings speculated on his presence and influenced his course.

A newspaper man of much experience could not help but protest in his practical mind against such a determination of the invisible and the unknown to give him such nonsensical ideas. He had in play, in intellectual persiflage, and with some show of traditional reasonableness, called Nelia Crele "a river goddess." She was very well placed in his mind—a reckless woman, pretty, with a fine character for a masterpiece of fiction (should he ever get to the story-writing stage) and a delight to think about; commanding, too, mysterious and exacting; and now he thought it might be the laughter of her voice that carried in the wind, not a mocking laugh, nor a jeering one, but one of sweet encouragement which neither distance nor circumstances could dismiss from a distressed and reluctant heart, let alone a heart so willing to receive as his.

Lester Terabon accepted the possibility of river lore and proclaimed beliefs. Fishermen, store-boaters, trippers, pirates, and all sorts of the shanty-boaters whom he had interviewed on his way down had solemnly assured him that there were spirits who promenaded down mid-stream, and who sometimes could be seen.

Terabon was sorry when his cool, calculating mind refused to believe his eyes, which saw shapes; his flesh, which felt creeps; his ears, which heard voices; and his nostrils, which caught a whiff of a faint, sweet perfume more exquisite than any which he remembered. He knew that when he had kissed the river goddess whose eyes were blue, whose flesh was fair, whose grace was lovely, he had tasted that nectar and sniffed that ambrosia. He wondered if she were near him, watching to see whether he performed well the task which she had set for him, the rescue of the husband who had forfeited her love, and yet who still was under her protection since in his indignant sorrow he had supposed himself capable of finding and retaining her.

Terabon would have liked nothing better than to believe what the Grecians used to believe, that goddesses and gods do come down to the earth to mingle among mankind. He fought the impossibility with his reason, and night winds laughed at him, while the voices of the waves chuckled at his predicament. They assailed him with their presence like living things, and then roared away to give room to new voices and new presences.

"Anyhow," Terabon laughed, in spite of himself, "you're good company, Old Mississip'!"

Yet he felt the chilling and depressing possibility that he might never again see that woman who would remain as a "river goddess" in his imagination. He had been heart-free, a bystander in the world's affairs. Now he knew what it was to see the memory of a woman rise unbidden to disturb his calculations; more than that, too, he was a part of the affairs of the River People.

As a reporter "back home" he had never been able quite to reconcile himself to his constant position as a spectator, a neutral observer, obliged to write news without feeling and impartially. A politician could look him in the eye and tell him any smooth lie, and he could not, with white heat, deny the statement. He could not rise with his own strength to champion the cause of what he knew to be right against wrong; he could not elaborate on the details of things that he felt most interested in, but must consult the fancies of a not-particularly discriminating public, whose average intelligence, according to some learned students, must be placed at seventeen-years plus. As he was twenty-four plus, Terabon was immensely discouraged with the public when he had set forth down the Mississippi.

Now he was on the way from a river goddess to interfere with the infamous plans of river pirates, through a dry gale out of the north, on the winding course of the Mississippi, a transition which troubled the self-possession while it awakened the spirit of the young man.

Dawn broke on the troubled river, and the prospect was enchanting to the heroic in the mind of the skiff-tripper. He could not be sure which was east or west, for the gray light appeared on all sides, in spots and patches of varying size. No gleam reflected from the yellow clay of the tumbling and tortured waters. As far as he could see there was light, but not a bright light. Dull purples, muddy waters, gray tree trunks, black limbs against dark clouds; Terabon felt the weariness of a desert, the melancholy of a wet, dripping-tree wilderness, and of a tumbling waste of waters; and yet never had the solid body of the stream been so awe-inspiring as in that hour of creeping and insinuating dawn.

He ran out into the main river again, and a wonderful prospect opened before his eyes. Sandbars spread out for miles across the river and lengthwise of the river; the bulk of the stream seemed broken up into channels and chutes and wandering waterways. He saw column after column of lines of spiles, like black teeth, through which the water broke with protesting foam.

When he thought to reckon up, as he passed Osceola Bar, he found that he had come ninety-five miles. Yankee Bar was only five or six miles below him, and he eagerly pulled down to inspect the long beaches, the chutes and channels, which the river pirates had used for not less than 150 years; where they still had their rendezvous.

Wild ducks and geese were there in many flocks. There were waters sheltered from the wind by willow patches. The woods of Plum Point Peninsula were heavy and dark. The river main current slashed down the miles upon miles of Craighead Point, and shot across to impinge upon Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1, where a made dirt bank was silhouetted against the sky.

Not until his binoculars rested upon the bar at the foot of Fort Pillow Bluff did Terabon's eyes discover any human beings, and then he saw a white houseboat with a red hull. He headed toward it to ask the familiar river question.

"No, suh!" the lank, sharp-eyed fisherman shook his head. "Theh's no motorboat landed up theh, not this week. Who all mout you be?"

"Lester Terabon; I'm a newspaper writer; I live in New York; I came down the Mississippi looking for things to tell about in the newspapers. You see, lots of people hardly know there's a Mississippi River, and it's the most interesting place I ever heard of."

"Terabon? I expect you all's the feller Whiskey Williams was tellin' about; yo'n a feller name of Carline was up by No. 8. He said yo' had one of them writin' machines right into a skift. Sho! An' yo' have! The woman an' me'd jes' love to see yo' all use hit."

"You'll see me," Terabon laughed, "if you'll let me sit by your stove. I've some writing I could do. Here's a goose for dinner, too."

"Sho! The woman shore will love to cook that goose! I'm a fisherman but no hunter. 'Tain't of'en we git a roast bird!"

So Terabon sat by the stove, writing. He wrote for more than an hour—everything he could remember, with the aid of his pencilled midnight notes, about that long run down. With his maps before him he recognized the bends and reaches, the sandbars and islands which had loomed up in the dark. Of all the parts of the river, the hundred miles from Island No. 10 down to Fort Pillow became the most familiar to his thoughts, black though the night had been. Even each government light began to have characteristics, and the sky-line of levee, wilderness, sandbar, and caving bank grew more and more defined.

Having written his notes, and Jeff Slamey having fingered the nine loose-leaf sheets with exclamatory interest and delight, Terabon said he must go rest awhile.

"Yas, suh," the fisherman cried, "when a man's pulled a hundred mile he shore needs sleep. When the woman's got that goose cooked, I bet yo'll be ready to eat, too."

So Terabon turned in to sleep. He was awakened at last by the sizzling of a goose getting its final basting. He started up, and Slamey said:

"Hit's ready. I bet yo' feel betteh, now; six hours asleep!"

It didn't seem like six minutes of dreamless recreation.

With night the wind fell. The flood of sunset brilliance spread down the radiant sandbars and the bright waterways. The trees were plated with silver and gold, and the sweep of the caving bend was a dark shadow against which the river current swept with ceaseless attack.

For hours that night Terabon amused his host with his adventures, except that he made but most casual mention of the woman whom Carline was seeking. He was cautious, too, about the motorboat and the companion who had taken Carline down the river, till Slamey burst out:

"I know that feller. He's a bad man; he's a river rat. If he don't kill Gus Carline, I don't know these yeah riveh fellers. They use down thisaway every winter. I know; I know them all. I leave them alone, an' they leave me alone. I knew they was comin'. They got three four boats now. One feller, name of Prebol—he's bad, too—was shot by a lady above Cairo. He's with a coupla gamblers to Caruthersville now. Everybody stops yeah; I know everybody; everybody knows me."

The next day was calm all day long, and Terabon went up the bank to shoot squirrels or other woods game; he went almost up to the Plum Point, killed several head of game, and rejoiced in the bayous and sloughs and chutes of a changing land.

The following morning he was hailed by Slamey:

"Hi—i, Terabon! Theh's a shanty-boat up the head of Flower Island Bar jes' drappin' in. They've floated down all night!"

Through his glasses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.

They were too far away for him to distinguish their personalities, but one was a tall, active man, the other obviously chunky, and when they ran their lines out and made fast to half-buried snags, it was with the quick decision of men used to work against currents and to unison of effort. There was something suggestive in their bearing, their scrutiny up and down the river, their standing close to each other as they talked. If Terabon had not suspected them of being pirates, their attitude and actions would have betrayed them.

Terabon, after a little while, pulled up the eddy toward them; he was willing to take a long chance. Few men resent a newspaper man's presence. The worst of them like to put themselves, their ideas, right with the world. Terabon risked their knavery to win their approbation. Come what might, he would seek to save Augustus Carline from the consequences of his ignorance, money, folly, and remorse.



CHAPTER XXIV

The flow of the Mississippi River is down stream—a perfectly absurd and trite statement at first thought. On second thought, one reverts to the people who are always trying to fight their way up that adverse current, with the thrust of two miles perpendicular descent and the body of a thousand storms in its rush.

There are steamers which endeavour to stem the current, but they make scant headway; sometimes a fugitive afraid of the rails will pull up stream; the birds do fly with the spring winds against the retreat of winter; but all these things are trifles, and merely accentuate the fact that everything goes down.

The sandbars are not fixed, they are literally rivers of sand flowing down, tormenting the current, and keeping human beings speculating on their probable course and the effect, when after a few years on a point, they disappear under the water. Later they will lunge up and out into the wind again, gallumphing along, some coarse gravel bars, some yellow sand, some white sand, some fine quicksand, some gritty mud, and others of mud almost fit to use in polishing silver.

Thousands of people in shanty-boats, skiff's, fancy little yachts, and jon-boats, rag-shacks on rafts, and serviceable cruisers drift down with the flood, and are a part of it.

Autumn was passing; most of the birds had speeded south when the wild geese brought the alarm that a cold norther was coming. When the storm had gone by, shanty-boaters, having shivered with the cold, determined not to be caught again. The sunshine of the evening, when the wind died, saw boats drifting out for the all-night run. Dawn, calm and serene, found boats moving out into mid-channel more or less in haste.

So they floated down, sometimes within a few hundred feet of other boats, sometimes in merry fleets tied together by ropes and common joyousness, sometimes alone in the midst of the vacant waters. The migration of the shanty-boaters was watched with mingled hate, envy, and admiration by Up-the-Bank folks, who pretend to despise those who live as they please.

And Nelia Carline pulled out into the current and followed her river friend, Lester Terabon, who had gone on ahead to save her husband from the river pirates. She despised her husband more as she let her mind dwell on the man who had shown no common frailties while he did enjoy a comradeship which included the charm of a pretty woman, recognizing her equality, and not permitting her to forget for a moment that he knew she was lovely, as well as intelligent.

She had not noticed that fact so much at the time, as afterward, when she subjected him to the merciless scrutiny of a woman who has heretofore discovered in men only depravity, ignorance, selfishness, or brutality. Her first thought had been to use Terabon, play with him, and, if she could, hurt him. She knew that there were men who go about plaguing women, and as she subjected herself to grim analysis, she realized that in her disappointment and humiliation she would have hurt, while she hated, men.

The long hours down the river, in pleasant sunshine, with only an occasional stroke of the oar to set the boat around broadside to the current, enabled her to sit on the bow of her boat and have it out with herself. She had never had time to think. Things crowded her Up-the-Bank. Now she had all the time in the world, and she used that time. She brought out her familiar books and compared the masters with her own mind. She could do it—there.

"Ruskin, Carlyle, Old Mississip', Plato, Plutarch, Thoreau, the Bible, Shelley, Byron, and I, all together, dropping down," she chuckled, catching her breath. "I'm tripping down in that company. And there's Terabon. He's a good sport, too, and he'll be better when I've—when I've caught him."

Terabon was just a raw young man as regards women. He might flatter himself that he knew her sex, and that he could maintain a pose of writing her into his notebooks, but she knew. She had seen stunned and helpless youth as she brought into play those subtle arts which had wrenched from his reluctant and fearful soul the kiss which he thought he had asked for, and the phrase of the river goddess, which he thought he had invented. She laughed, for she had realized, as she acted, that he would put into words the subtle name for which she had played.

It all seemed so easy now that she considered the sequence of her inspired moves. Drifting near another shanty-boat, she passed the time of day with a runaway couple who had come down the Ohio. They had dinner together on their boat. A solitaire and an unscarred wedding ring attested to the respectability of the association.

"Larry's a river drifter," the girl explained, "and Daddy's one of those set old fellows who hate the river. But Mamma knew it was all right. Larry's saved $7,000 in three years. He'd never tell me that till I married him, but I knew. We're going clear down to N'Orleans. Are you?"

"Probably."

"And all alone—aren't you afraid?"

"Oh, I'll be all right, won't I?" She looked at the stern-featured youth.

"If you can shoot and don't care," Larry replied without a smile.

"I can shoot," Nelia said, showing her pistol.

"That's river Law!" Larry cried, smiling. "That's Law. You came out the Upper River?"

"Yes," she nodded.

"Then I bet——" the girl-wife started to speak, but stopped, blushing.

"Yes," Nelia smiled a hard smile. "I'm the woman who shot Prebol above Buffalo Island—I had to."

"You did right; men always respect a lady if she don't care who she shoots," Larry cried, enthusiastically. "Wish you'd get my wife to learn how to shoot. She's gun shy!"

So Nelia coaxed the little wife to shoot, first the 22-calibre repeating rifle and then the pistol. When Nelia had to go down they parted good friends and Larry thanked her, saying that probably they would meet down below somewhere.

"You'll make Caruthersville," Larry told her. "There's a good eddy on the east side across from the town. There's likely some boats in there. They'll know, perhaps, if the folks you are looking for are around. There's an old river man there now, name of Buck. He's a gambler, but he's all right, and he'll treat you all right. He's from up in our country, on the Ohio. Hardly anybody knows about him. He was always a dandy fellow, but he married a woman that wasn't fit to drink his coffee. She bothered the life out of him, and—well, he squared up. He gave her to the other fellow with a double-barrelled shotgun."

When Nelia ran down to the gambling boat and found Parson Rasba there, she enjoyed the idea. Certainly the River Prophet and the river gambler were an interesting combination. She was not prepared to find that Buck had taken his departure and that Parson Rasba was converting the gambling hell into a mission boat. Least of all was she prepared when Parson Rasba said with an unsteady voice:

"Theh's a man sick in that other boat, and likely he'd like to see somebody."

"Oh, if there's anything I can do!" she exclaimed, as a woman does.

He led the way to the brick-red little boat, the like of which could be found in a thousand river eddies. She followed him on board and over to the bed. There she looked into the wan countenance and startled eyes of Jest Prebol.

"Hit's Mister Prebol," Rasba said. "I know you have no hard feelings against him, and I know he has none against you, Missy Carline!"

An introduction to a contrite river pirate, whom she had shot, for the moment rendered the young woman speechless. Prebol was less at loss for words.

"I'm glad to git to see yo'," he said, feebly. "If I'd knowed yo', I shore would have minded my own business. I'm bad, Missy Carline, but I ain' mean—not much. Leastwise, not about women. I reckon the boys shore will let yo' be now. I made a mistake, an' I 'low to 'pologise to yo'."

"I was—I was scairt to death," she cried, sitting in a chair. "I was all alone. I was afraid—the river was so big that night. I was so far away. I should have given you fair warning. I'm sorry, too, Jest."

"Lawse!" Prebol choked. "Say hit thataway ag'in——"

"I'm sorry, too, Jest!"

"I cayn't thank yo' all enough," the man-whispered. "I've got friends along down the riveh. I'll send word along to them, they'll shore treat yo' nice. Treat friends of yourn nice, too. Huh! 'Pologizin' to me afteh what I 'lowed to do!"

"We'll be good friends, Jest. The Prophet here and I are good friends, too. Aren't we, Parson?"

"I hearn say, Missy," the Prophet said, slowly, picking his words, "I hearn say you've a power and a heap of book learning! Books on yo' boat, all kinds. What favoured yo' thataway?"

"Oh, I read lots!" she exclaimed, surprised by the sudden shift of thought. "Somehow, I've read lots!"

"In my house I had a Bible, an almanac, and the 'Resources of Tennessee,' Yo' have that many books?"

"Why, I've a hundred—more than a hundred books!" she answered.

"A Bible?"

"Yes."

"Would you mind, Missy, comin' on board this boat to-night, an' tellin' us about these books you have? I'm not educated; my daddy an' I read the Bible, an' tried to understand hit. Seems like we neveh did git to know the biggest and bestest of the words."

"You had a dictionary?"

"A which?"

"A dictionary, a book that explains the meaning of all the words!"

"Ho law! A book that tells what words mean, Missy. Where all kin a man git to find one of them books?"

"Why, I've got——I'm hungry, Mr. Rasba, I must get something to eat. After supper we'll bring some books over here and talk about them!"

"My supper is all ready, keeping warm in the oven," Rasba said. "I always cook enough for one more than there is. Yo' know, a vacant chair at the table for the Stranger."

"And I came?" she laughed.

"An' yo' came, Missy!" he replied.

"Parson," Prebol pleaded, "I'm alone mos' the time. Mout yo' two eat hyar on my bo't? The table—hit'd be comp'ny."

"Certainly we'll come," Nelia promised, "if he'd just soon."

"I'd rather," Rasba assented, and at his tone Nelia felt a curious sensation of pity and mischievousness. At the same time, she recovered her self-possession. She demanded that Rasba let her help him bring over the supper, add a feminine relish, and set the table with a daintiness which was an addition to the fascination of her presence. Gaily she fed Prebol the delicate things which he was permitted to eat, then sat down with Rasba, her face to the light, and Prebol could watch her bantering, teasing, teaching Parson Rasba things he had never known he lacked.

After supper she brought over a basket full of books, twenty volumes. She dumped them onto the table, leather, cloth, and board covers, of red, blue, gray, brown, and other gay colours. Parson Rasba had seen government documents and even some magazines with picture covers, but in the mountains where he had ridden his Big Circuit with such a disastrous end he had never seen such books. He hesitated to touch one; he cried out when three or four slipped off the pile onto the floor.

"Missy, won't they git muddied up!"

"They're to read!" she told him. "Listen," and she began to read—poetry, prose at random.

The Prophet did not know, he had never been trained to know—as few men ever are trained—how to combat feminine malice and spoiled power. He listened, but not with averted eyes. Prebol, himself a spectator at a scene different from any he had ever witnessed, was still enough more sophisticated to know what she was doing, and he was delighted.

By and by the injured man drifted into slumber, but Rasba gave no sign of flagging interest, no traces of a mind astray from the subject at hand. He felt that he must make the most of this revelation, which came after the countless revelations which he had had since arriving down the river. There was a fear clutching at his heart that it might end; that in a moment this woman might depart and leave him unenlightened, and unable ever to find for himself the unimaginable world of words which she plucked out of those books and pinned into the great vacant spaces of his mind which he had kept empty all these years—not knowing that he was waiting for this night, when he should have the Mississippi bring into his eddy, alongside his own mission boat, what he most needed.

He sat there, a great, pathetic figure, shaggy, his heart thumping, taking from this trim, neat, beautiful woman the riches which she so casually, almost wantonly, threw to him in passing.

The corridors of his mind echoed to the tread of hosts; he heard the rumblings of history, the songs of poets whose words are pitched to the music of the skies, and he hung word pictures which Ruskin had painted in his imagination.

Fate had waited long to give him this night. It had waited till the man was ready, then with a lavish hand the storehouses of the master intellects of the world were opened to him, for him to help himself. Nelia suddenly started up from her chair and looked around, herself the victim of her own raillery, which had grown to be an understanding of the pathetic hunger of the man for these things.

It was daylight, and the flood of the sunrise was at hand.

"Parson," she said, "do you like these things—these books?"

"Missy," he whispered, "I could near repeat, word for word, all those things you've said and read to me to-night."

"There are lots more," she laughed. "I want to do something for your mission boat, will you let me?"

"Lawse! Yo've he'ped me now more'n yo' know!"

She smiled the smile that women have had from all the ages, for she knew a thousand times more than even the Prophet.

"I'll give you a set of all these books!" she said; "all the books that I have. Not these, my old pals—yes, these books, Mr. Rasba. If you'll take them? I'll get another lot down below."

"Lawd God! Give me yo' books!"

"Oh, they're not expensive—they're——"

"They're yours. Cayn't yo' see? It's your own books, an' hit's fo' my work. I neveh knowed how good men could be, an' they give me that boat fo' a mission boat. Now—now—missy—I cayn't tell yo'—I've no words——"

And with gratitude, with the simplicity of a mountain parson, he dropped on his knees and thanked God. As he told his humility, Prebol wakened from a deep and restful sleep to listen in amazement.

When at last Rasba looked up Nelia was gone. The books were on the table and he found another stack heaped up on the deck of the mission boat. But the woman was gone, and when he looked down the river he saw something flicker and vanish in the distance.

He stared, hurt; he choked, for a minute, in protest, then carried that immeasurable treasure into his cabin.



CHAPTER XXV

Renn Doss, the false friend, saw the danger of the recognition of the firearms by Carline. The savage swing of a half pound of fine shot braided up in a rawhide bag, and a good aim, reduced Carline to an inert figure of a man. "Renn Doss" was Hilt Despard, pirate captain, whose instantaneous action always had served him well in moments of peril.

The three men carried Carline to a bunk and dropped him on it. They covered him up and emptied a cupful of whiskey on his pillow and clothes. They even poured a few spoonfuls down his throat. They thus changed him to what might be called a "natural condition."

Then, sitting around the stove, they whispered among themselves, discussing what they had better do. Half a hundred possibilities occurred to their fertile fancies and replete memories. Men and women who have always led sheltered lives can little understand or know what a pirate must understand and know even to live let alone be successful.

"What's Terabon up to?" Despard demanded. "Here he is, drappin' down by Fort Pillow Landing, running around. Where's that girl he had up above New Madrid? What's his game? Coming up here and talking to us? Asking us all about the river and things—writin' it for the newspapers?"

"That woman's this Carline's wife!" Jet sneered.

"Sure! An' here's Terabon an' here's Carline. Terabon don't talk none about that woman—nor about Carline," Dock grumbled.

"I bet Terabon would be sorry none if Carline hyar dropped out. Y' know she's Old Crele's gal," Jet said. "Crele's a good feller. Sent word down to have us take cyar of her, an' Prebol, the fool, didn't know 'er, hadn't heard. Look what she give him, bang in the shoulder! That old Prophet'll take cyar of him, course. See how hit works out. She shined up to Terabon, all right."

"I 'low I better talk to him," Despard suggested. "Terabon's a good sport. He said, you' know, that graftin' and whiskey boatin', an' robbin' the bank wa'n't none of his business. He said, course, he could write it down in his notes, but without names, 'count of somebody might read somethin' in them an' get some good friend of his in Dutch. He said it wouldn't be right for him to know about somebody robbin' a commissary, or a bank, or killin' somebody, because if somebody like a sheriff or detective got onto it, they might blame him, or somethin'."

"I like that Terabon!" Jet declared. "Y'see how he is. He says he's satisfied, makin' a fair living, gettin' notes so's he can write them magazine stories, an' if he was to try to rob the banks, he'd have to learn how, same's writin' for newspapers. An' probably he wouldn't have the nerve to do it really, 'count of his maw and paw bein' the kind they was. He told me hisself that they made him go to Sunday school when he was a kid, an' things like that spoil a man for graftin'. Stands to reason, all right, the way he talks. I like him; he knows enough to mind his own business."

"He's comin' up to-night to go after geese on the bar. We'll talk to him. He'll look that business over, level-headed. That motorboat any good?"

"Nothin' extra. He's got ready money, though, I forgot that," Despard grinned, walking over to the hapless victim of his black-jack skill.

The three divided nearly thirteen hundred dollars among them. The money made them good humoured and they had some compassion for their prisoner. One of them noticed that a skiff was coming up from Fort Pillow Landing, and fifteen minutes later Terabon was talking to Despard on the snag to one prong of which was fastened the line of Carline's motorboat.

"I was wondering where I'd see you again," Terabon said. "Didn't have a chance at New Madrid, saw you was in business, so I didn't follow up none."

"I was wondering if you had a line on that," Despard said, doubtfully. "Y'know that woman you was staying with up on Island Ten Bar? Well, we got her man in here full's a fish. Lookin' for his woman, an' he's no good. Fell off the cabin, hit a spark in the back of the head when the water sucked when that steamboat went by this morning. He'd ought to go down to Memphis hospital, but—Well, we can't take 'im. You know how that is."

"Be glad to help you boys out any way I can," Terabon said. "I'll run him down."

"Say, would you? We don't want him on our hands," the pirate explained. "We'd get to see you down b'low some'rs."

"Sure, I would," Terabon exclaimed. "Fact is, the woman said it'd be a favour to her, too, if I'd get him home. She'll be dropping down likely. Darn nice girl, but quick tempered."

"That's right; quick ain't no name for it. She plugged a friend of mine up by Buffalo Island——"

"Prebol? I heard about him. She was scairt."

"She needn't be, never again!" Despard grinned. "When a lady can handle a river Law like she does, us bad uns are real nice!"

Terabon laughed, and the two went into the cabin-boat where Carline lay on the bunk. Terabon ran his hand around the man's head and neck, found the lump near the base of the skull, found that the neck wasn't broken, and made sure that the heart was beating—things a reporter naturally learns to do in police-station and hospital experience.

Jet brought the motorboat down to the stern of the cabin-boat, and the four carried Carline on board. They put him in his bunk, and Terabon, his skiff towing astern, steered out into the main current and soon faded down by Craighead Point Bar.

"I knowed he'd be all right," Despard declared. "He'll take him down to Memphis, and out of our way. I'd 'a' hated to kill him; it ain't no use killin' a man less'n it's necessary. We got what we was after. Course, if we'd rewarded him, likely we'd got a lot, but it ain't safe, holdin' a man for rewards ain't."

"That boat'd been a good one to travel in," Jet suggested.

"Everybody'd knowed it was Carline's, an' it wa'n't worth fixing over. Hull not much good, and the motor's been abused some. We'll do better'n that."

They had rid themselves of an incumbrance. They had made an acquaintance who was making himself useful. They were considerably richer than they had been for some time.

"I'd like to drap into Mendova," Jet mused. "We ain't had what you'd call a time——"

"Let's kill some birds first," Gaspard suggested. "I got a hunch that Yankee Bar's a good bet for us for a little while. We dassn't look into Memphis, 'count of last trip down. Mendova's all right, but wait'll we've hunted Yankee Bar."

The money burned in their pockets, but as they stood looking out at the long, beautiful Yankee Bar its appeal went home. For more than a hundred years generations of pirates had used there, and no one knows how many tragedies have left their stain in the great band around from Gold Dust Landing to Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1.

After dark they rowed over to the point and put out their decoys, dug their pits, screened them, and brushed over their tracks in the sand. Then they played cards till midnight, turned in for a little sleep, and turned out again in the black morning to go to their places with repeating shotguns and cripple-killer rifles in their hands.

When they were in their places, and the river silence prevailed, they saw the stars overhead, the reflections on sand and water around them, and the quivering change as air currents moved in the dark—the things that walk in the night. They heard, at intervals, many voices. Some they knew as the fluent music of migrant geese flying over on long laps of their fall flight, but some they did not know, except that they were river voices.

Ducks flew by no higher than the tops of the willow trees up the bar, their wings whistling and their voices eager in the dark. The lurkers saw these birds darting by like black streaks, tempting vain shots, but they were old hunters, and knew they wanted at least a little light. Over on the mainland they heard the noises of wilderness animals, and away off yonder a mule's "he-haw" reverberated through the bottoms and over bars and river.

For these things, if the pirates had only known it, they found the world endurable. Each in his own pit, given over to his own thoughts, they thrilled to the joy of living. All they wanted, really, was this kind of thing; hunting in fall and winter, fishing in the summer, and occasional visits to town for another kind of thrill, another sort of excitement. But their boyhood had been passed in privation, their youth amid temptations of appetite and vice, and now they were hopelessly mixed as to what they liked, what they didn't like, what the world would do for them, and what they would do to the world. Weaklings, uneducated, without balance; habit-ridden, yet with all that miserable inheritance from the world, they waited there rigid, motionless, their hearts thrilling to the increasing music of the march of dawn across the bottoms of the Mississippi.

False dawn flushed and faded almost like a deliberate lightning flash. Then dawn appeared, marking down the gray lines of the wilderness trees with one stroke, sweeping out all the stars with another brush, revealing the flocks of birds glistening against the sky while yet the earth was in shade. The watchers spied a score of birds, great geese far to the northward, coming right in line with them. They waited for a few seconds—ages long. Then one of the men cried:

"They're stoopin', boys! They're comin'!"

The wild geese, coming down a magnificent slant from a mile height, headed straight for Yankee Bar. Will birds never learn? They ploughed down with their wings folding, and poised. Their voices grew louder and louder as they approached.

With a hissing roar of their wings they pounded down out of the great, safe heights and circled around and inward. With a shout the three men started up through their masks and with levelled guns opened fire.

Too late the old gander at the point of the "V" began to climb; too late the older birds in the point screamed and gathered their strength. The river men turned their black muzzles against the necks of the young tail birds of the feathered procession and brought them tumbling down out of the line to the ground, where on the hard sand two of them split their breasts and exposed thick layers of fat dripping with oil.

The cries of the fleeing birds, the echoes of the barking guns, died away. The men shouted their joy in their success, gathered up their victims, scurried pack to cover, brushing over their tracks, and crouched down again, to await another flock.

Hunger drove them to their cabin-boat within an hour. They had thought they wanted to get some more birds, but in fact they knew they had enough. They went over to their boat, cooked up a big breakfast, and sat around the fire smoking and talking it over. They chattered like boys. They were gleeful, innocent, harmless! But only for a time. Then the hunted feeling returned to them. Once more they had a back track to watch and ambushes to be wary of. They wanted to go to Mendova, but again they didn't want to go there. They didn't know but what Mendova might be watching for them, the same as Memphis was. Certainly, they determined, they must go to Mendova after dark, and see a friend who would put them wise to actual conditions around town.

They took catnaps, having had too little sleep, and yet they could not sleep deeply. They watched the shanty-boats which dropped down the river at intervals, most of them in the main current close to the far bank, and often hardly visible against the mottled background of caving earth, fallen trees, and flickering mirage. Their restlessness was silent, morose, and one of them was always on the lookout.

Despard himself was on watch in the afternoon. He sat just inside the kitchen door, out of the sunshine, in a comfortable rocking chair. Two windows and the stern door gave him a wide view of the river, sandbars and eddy. It seemed but a minute, but he had fallen into a doze, when the splash of a shanty-boat sweeps awakened all the crew with a sudden, frightened start. Whispers, hardly audible, hailed in alarm. The three, crouching in involuntary doubt and dismay, glared at the newcomer.

It was a woman drifting in. Apparently she intended to land there, and the three men stared at her.

"His wife!" Despard said with soundless lips. The others nodded their recognition.

Mrs. Carline had run into the great dead eddy at the foot of Yankee Lower Bar, turned up in the slow reverse eddy of the chute, and was coming by their boat at the slowest possible speed.

Despard pulled his soft shirt collar, straightened his tie, hitched his suspenders, put on his coat, walked out on the stern deck, and, after a glance around, seemed suddenly to discover the stranger.

"Howdy!" he nodded, touching his cap respectfully, and gazing with flickering eyes at the woman whose marksmanship entitled her to the greatest respect.

"Howdy!" she nodded, scrutinizing him with level eyes. "Where am I?"

"Yankee Bar. Them's Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1."

"Do you know Jest Prebol?"

"Yessum." Despard's head bobbed in alarmed, unwilling assent.

"I thought perhaps you'd like to know that he's getting along all right."

"I bet he learnt his lesson," Despard grimaced.

"What? I don't just understand."

"About bein' impudent to a lady that can shoot—straight!"

A flicker moved the woman's countenance, and she smiled, oddly.

"Oh, any one is likely to make mistakes!"

"Darn fools is, Miss Crele. And you Old Crele's girl! He might of knowed!"

The other two stepped out to help enjoy the conversation and the scenery.

"You know me?" she demanded.

"Yessum, we shore do. My name's Despard—Jet here and Cope."

She acknowledged the introductions.

"I've friends down here," she said, with a little catch of her breath. "I was wondering if you—any of you gentlemen had seen them?"

"Your man, Gus Carline an' that writin' feller, Terabon?" Jet asked, without delicacy. Her cheeks flamed.

"Yes!" she whispered.

"Terabon took him down to Mendova or Memphis," Despard said. "Carline was—was on the cabin and the boat lurched when the steamboat passing drawed. He drapped over and hit a spark plug on the head!"

"Was he badly hurt?"

"Not much—kind of a lump, that's all."

She looked down at Fort Pillow Bluff. The pirates awaited her pleasure, staring at her to their heart's content. They envied her husband and Terabon; they felt the strangeness of the situation. She was following those two men down. She was part of the river tide, drifting by; she had shot Prebol, their pal, and had cleverly ascertained their knowledge of him while insuring that they had fair warning.

Her boat drifted down till it was opposite them, and then, with quick decision, she caught up a handy line, and said:

"I'm going to tie in a little while. I've been alone clear down from Caruthersville; I want to talk to somebody!"

She threw the rope, and they caught and made it fast. They swung her boat in, ran a plank from stern to bow, and Despard gave her his hand. She came on board, and they sat on the stern deck to talk. Only one kind of woman could have done that with safety, but she was that kind. She had shot a man down for a look.

The three pirates took one of the fat young geese, plucked and dressed it, and baked it in a hot oven, with dressing, sweet potatoes, hot-bread, and a pudding which she mixed up herself.

For three hours they gossiped, and before she knew it, she had told them about Prebol, about Parson Rasba introducing them. The pirates shouted when she told of Jest's apology. With river frankness, they said they thought a heap of Terabon, who minded his own business so cleverly.

"I like him, too," she admitted. "I was afraid you boys might make trouble for Carline, though. He don't know much about people, treating them right."

"He's one of those ignorant Up-the-Bankers," Despard said.

"Oh, I know him." She shrugged her shoulders a little bitterly.

As they ate the goose in camaraderie, the pirates took to warning and advising her about the Lower River; they told her who would treat her right, and who wouldn't. They especially warned her against stopping anywhere near Island 37.

"They're bad there—and mean." Despard shook his head, gravely.

"I won't stop in there," Nelia promised. "River folks anybody can get along with, but those Up-the-Bankers!"

"Hit's seo," Jet cried. "They don't have no feelings for nobody."

"You'll be dropping on down?" Nelia asked.

"D'rectly!" Cope admitted. "We 'lowed we'd stop into Mendova. You stop in there an' see Palura; he'll treat you right. He was in the riveh hisse'f once. You talk to him——"

"What did Terabon and Mr. Carline go on in? What kind of a boat?"

"A gasolene cruiser."

"Did he say where he'd be?"

"Terabon? No. Ask into Mendova or into Memphis. They can likely tell."

"Thank you, boys! I'm awful glad you've no hard feelings on account of my shooting your partner; I couldn't know what good fellows you are. We'll see you later."