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Title: The River Prophet
Author: Raymond S. Spears
Illustrator: Ralph Pallen Coleman
Release Date: May 16, 2009 [EBook #28848]
Language: English
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[Illustration: "_She snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom
and ... fired. The man stumbled back with a cry._"]
THE RIVER PROPHET
By
Raymond S. Spears
Frontispiece by
Ralph Pallen Coleman
Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1920, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
THE RIVER PROPHET
THE RIVER PROPHET
CHAPTER I
Elijah Rasba lived alone in a log cabin on Temple Run. He was a long,
lank, blue-eyed young man, with curly brown hair and a pale, almost
livid complexion. His eye-brows were heavy and dark brown, and the blue
steel of his gaze was fixed unwaveringly upon any object that it
distinguished.
Two generations before, Old Abe Rasba had built a church on a little
brook, a tributary of Jackson River, away up in the mountains. The
church was laid up of flat stones, gathered in fields, from ledges of
rock and up the wooded mountain side. It was large enough to hold all
the people for miles around, and the roof was supported by massive hewn
timbers, and some few attempts had been made to decorate the structure.
Old Abe had called his church "The Temple," had preached from a big
hollow oak stump, and laid down the Law of the Bible, which he had
memorized by heart, and expounded from experience. Elijah Rasba,
grandson of Old Abe, thus came honestly by reverence and religion, but
the strange glory which had surrounded the old Temple had departed from
the ruin, and of all the congregation, only Elijah remained.
Land-slips had ruined a score of farms cleared on too-steep hills;
lightning had destroyed the overshot grist mill, and the two big stones
had been cracked in the hot flames; a feud had opened graves before the
allotted time of the victims. It seemed to Elijah, sitting there in his
cabin, as though damnation had visited the faithful, and that death was
the reward of belief.
The ruins of the old Temple stood melancholy where the heavy stone wall,
built by a man who believed in broad, firm foundations, had split an
avalanche, but without avail, for the walls had given way and let the
roof beams drop in. No less certain had been the fate of the
congregation; they, too, were scattered or dead. There remained but one
dwelling in the little valley, with a lone occupant, who was wrestling
with his soul, trying to understand, for he knew in his heart that he
must read the truth and discover the meaning of all this trouble,
privation, disaster, and death.
He was quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little
garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle,
and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire
for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be
extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from its den.
An Almanac, a Bible, and a "Resources of Tennessee" comprised the
library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder,
about a hundred miles, perhaps--anyhow, from New York. The "Resources of
Tennessee" had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was
rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, an
inheritance.
It was a very small article, apparently, to create all the disturbances
that seemed to have followed its interpretations there on Temple Run.
Elijah would hold it out at arms length and stare at it with those sharp
eyes of his, wondering in his soul how it could be that the fate of
nations, the future of humanity, the very salvation of every soul rested
within the compass of that leather-covered, gilt-edged parcel of thin
paper which weighed rather less than half as much as a box of
cartridges.
Elijah did not spare himself in the least. He toiled at whatever task
appeared for him to do. As he required for his own wants fifty bushels
of corn for a year, he planted enough to shuck a hundred bushels. Once,
in the fervour of the hope that he was called upon to raise corn for
humanity, he raised five hundred bushels, only to give it all away to
poor white trash who had not raised enough for themselves.
Again he felt the call to preach, and he went forth with all the
eagerness of a man who had at last discovered his life's calling. He
went on foot, through storms, over mountains, and into a hundred
schoolhouses and churches, showing his little leather-skinned Bible and
warning sinners to repent, Christians to keep faith, and Baal to lower
his loathly head.
He had returned from his five months' pilgrimage with the feeling that
his utmost efforts had been futile, and that for all his good will, it
had not been vouchsafed him to leave behind one thought in fertile soil.
The matter had been brought home to him by an incident of the last
meeting he had addressed, over on Clinch.
In the Painted Church he had volunteered a sermon, and no sermons had
been preached there in years. Feuds, inextricably tangled, had involved
five different families, and members of all those families were in the
church, answering to his challenge.
They sat there with rifles or shotguns between their knees, with their
pistols on their hips, and eternal vigilance in their eyes. While
listening to his sermon they kept their gaze fastened upon one another,
lest an unwary moment bring upon them the alert shot of an enemy.
As he had stood there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the
torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as
though the final burden had been heaped upon him, and that he must
break under the weight on his mind.
"What can I say to you all?" he burst out with sudden passion. "Theh yo'
set with guns in yo' hands an' murder in yo' souls--to listen to the
word of God! How do yo' expect the Prince of Peace to come to yo' if yo'
set there thataway?"
His indignation rose as he saw them, and his scorn unbridled his tongue,
so that in a few minutes the congregation watched one another less, the
preacher more, and all settled back, to listen and blink under his
accusations and his declarations. It really seemed, for the time, as
though he had caught and engaged their attention. But when the sermon
ended and he had taken his departure, before he was a hundred yards down
the road he heard loud words, angry shouts, and then the scream of a
woman.
The next instant there came a salvo of gun and pistol shots and in all
directions up and down the cross-roads people fled on horseback. Three
men had been killed, five wounded and a dozen become fugitives from
justice at the end of the church service.
Elijah Rasba fled homeward, his will and hopes broken, and sank
dejectedly into a slough of despondency. All his good intentions, all
the inspiration of his endeavour, his very spiritual exaltation had
terminated in a tragedy, as inexplicable as it was depressing.
His conscience would neither let him rest nor work. He looked at his
Bible, inside and out, the very fibres of his brain struggling by
reason, by effort, by main strength, to discover what his duty was. No
answer soothed his waking hours or gave him rest from his dreams. On him
rested a kind of superstitious scorn and fear, and he began to believe
the whisperings of his neighbours which reached his ears. They said:
"He's possessed!"
To his own freighted mind the statement seemed to be true. He did not
know what new sin he had committed, nor could he look back on long years
of his youth and young manhood and discover any sin which he had not
already expiated, over and over again. He had obeyed the scriptural
injunctions to the best of his knowledge, and the reward was this daily
and nightly torment, the scorn of his fellows, and the questioning of
his own soul.
Worst of all, constructively, he had given feud fighters the chance to
do murder upon one another. Under the guise of preaching for them for
the good of their souls, he had enabled them to meet in antagonism,
watch in wrath, and kill without mercy. Too late he realized that he
should have foreseen the tragedy, and that he should have provided
against it by going first to each faction, preaching to each family, and
then, when he had brought them to their knees, united them in the common
cause of religion.
"On me is Thy wrath!" he cried out in the anguish of his soul. "Give thy
tortured slave something good to do, ere I go down!"
There was no reply, immediate or audible; he was near the limits of his
endurance; he drew his arm back to throw the Bible into the flames of
his fireplace, but that he could not do. He tossed it upon the shelf,
drew his hat down upon his ears and at the approach of night started
over the ridges to the Kalbean stillhouse.
He stalked down a ridge into that split-board shack of infamy. He found
five or six men in the hot, sour-smelling place. They started to their
feet when they saw the mountain preacher among them.
"Gimme some!" he told Old Kalbean. "I'm a fool! I'm damned. I'll go with
the rest of ye to Hell! Gimme some!"
"Wha--What?" Old Kalbean choked with horror. "Yo' gwine to drink,
Parson?"
"Suttinly!" Rasba cried. "Hit ain' no ust for me to preach! I preach,
an' the congregation murders one anotheh! Ef I don't preach, I cayn't
live peaceable! They say hit makes a man happy--I ain' be'n happy, not
in ten, not in twenty yeahs!"
He caught up the jug that rested on the floor, threw the tin cup to one
side, up-ended the receptacle, and the moonshiner and his customers
stared.
"Theh!" Rasba grunted, when he had to take the jug down for breath. He
reached into his pocket, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to the
amazed mountain man.
"Theh!" he repeated, defiantly. "I've shore gone to Hell, now, an' I
don't give a damn, nuther. S'long, boys! D'rectly, yo'l heah me jes' a
whoopin', yas suh! Jes' a whoopin'!"
He left them abruptly and he went up into the darkness of the laurels.
They heard him crashing away into the night. When he was gone the men
looked at one another:
"Yo' 'low he'll bring the revenuers?" one asked, nervously.
"Bring nothin'!" another grinned. "No man eveh lived could drink fifteen
big gulps, like he done, an' git furder'n a stuck hog, no, suh!"
They listened for the promised whoops; they strained their ears for the
cries of jubilation; but none came.
"Co'rse," the stiller explained, as though an explanation were needed,
"Parson Rasba ain' used to hit; he could carry more, an' hit'll take him
longer to get lit up. But, law me, when hit begins to act! That's three
yeah old, boys, mild, but no mewl yo' eveh saw has the kick that's got,
apple an' berry cider, stilled down from the ferment!"
CHAPTER II
Virtue had not been rewarded. This much was clear and plain to the
consciousness of Nelia Carline. Looking at herself in the glass
disclosed no special reason why she should be unhappy and suffering. She
was a pretty girl; everybody said that, and envy said she was too
pretty. It seemed that poor folks had no right to be good-looking,
anyhow.
If poor folks weren't good-looking, then wealthy young men, with nothing
better to do, wouldn't go around looking among poor folks for pretty
girls. Augustus Carline had, apparently, done that. Carline had a
fortune that had been increased during three generations, and now he
didn't have to work. That was bad in Gage, Illinois. It had never done
any one any good, that kind of living. One of the fruits of the matter
was when Nelia Crele's pretty face attracted his attention. She lived in
a shack up the Bottoms near St. Genevieve, and he tried to flirt with
her, but she wouldn't flirt.
In some surprise, startled by his rebuff, he withdrew from the scene
with a memory that would not forget. The scene was a wheat field near
the Turkey bayou, where he was hunting wild ducks with a shotgun. She
had been gathering forty pounds of hickory nuts to eke out a meagre food
supply.
Poor she might be; ill clad was her strong young figure; her face showed
the strain of years of effort; her eyes had the fire of experience in
suffering; and she stood, a supple girl of heightened beauty while the
hunter, sure of his welcome, walked up to her, and, as both her hands
held the awkward bushel basket, ventured to tickle her under the chin.
She dropped the basket and before it reached the ground she caught the
rash youth broad-handed from cheek to back of the ear, and he stumbled
over a pile of wheat sheaves and fell headlong. As he had dropped his
shotgun, she picked it up and with her thumb on the safety, her finger
on the trigger, and her left hand on the breech, showed him how a $125
shotgun looks in the hands of one who could and would use it on any
further provocation.
He took his departure, and she carried the gun and hickory nuts home
with her. Thus began the inauspicious acquaintance of Nelia Crele and
Augustus Carline. The shotgun was very useful to the young woman. She
killed gray and fox squirrels, wild turkeys, geese and ducks, several
saleable fur-bearers, and other game in her neighbourhood. She told no
one how she obtained the weapon, merely saying she had found it; and
Augustus Carline did not pass any remarks on the subject.
By and by, however, when the tang of the slap and the passion of the
moment had left him, he knew that he had been foolish and cowardly. He
had some good parts, and he was sorry that he had been precipitate in
his attentions. After that encounter, he found the girls he met at
dances lacked a certain appearance, a kindling of the eye, a complexion,
and, a figure.
He ventured again into the river bottoms across from St. Genevieve and
fortune favoured him while tricking her. He apologized and gave his
name.
Nelia was poor, abjectly poor. Her father was no 'count, and her mother
was abject in suffering. One brother had gone West, a whisky criminal; a
sister had gone wrong, with the inheritance of moral obliquity. Nelia
had, somehow, become possessed with a hate and horror of wrong. She had
pictured to herself a home, happiness, and a life of plenty, but she
held herself at the highest price a woman demands.
That price Augustus Carline was only too willing to pay. He had found a
girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness
of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of
everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days
mansion in Gage.
There he installed her with everything he thought she needed,
and--pursued his usual futile life. Too late she learned that he was
weak, insignificant, and, like her own father, no 'count. Augustus
Carline was a brute, a creature of appetites and desires, who by no
chance rose to the heights of his wife's mental demands.
Nelia Carline regarded the tragedy of her life with impatience. She
studied the looking glass to see wherein she had failed to measure up to
her duty; she ransacked her mind, and compared it with all the women she
met by virtue of her place as Gus Carline's wife. Those women had not
proved to be what she had expected grand dames of society to be.
"I want to talk learning," she told herself, "and they talk hairpins and
dirty dishes and Bill-don't-behave!"
Now one of those women, a kind of a grass widow, Mrs. Plosell, had
attracted Gus Carline, and when he came home from her house, he was
always drunk. When Nelia remonstrated, he was ugly. He had thrown her
down and gone back to the grass widow's the night before. Nelia
considered that grim fact, and, having made up her mind, acted.
In her years of poverty she had learned many things, and now she put
into service certain practical ideas. She had certain rights, under the
law, since she had taken the name of Augustus Carline. There were, too,
moral rights, and she preferred to exercise her moral rights.
Part of the Carline fortune was in unregistered stocks and bonds, and
when Gus Carline returned from the widow's one day he found that Nelia
was in great good humour, more attractive than he had ever known her,
and so very pleasant during the two days of his headache that he was
willing to do anything she asked.
She asked him to have a good time with her, and put down on the table
before him a filled punch bowl and two glasses. He had never known the
refinements of intoxicating liquors. Now he found them in his own home,
and for a while forgot all else.
He sang, danced, laughed and, in due course, signed a number of papers,
receipts, bills and checks to settle up some accounts. These were sort
of hit-or-miss, between-the-acts affairs, to which he paid little
attention.
To Nelia, however, they represented a rite as valid as any solemn court
procedure could be, for to her river-trained instinct there was no moral
question as to the justice of her claim upon a part of Carline's
fortune. Her later experience, her reading, had taught her that society
and the law also held with the principle, if not the manner of her
primitive method, for obtaining her rights to separate support.
When Carline awakened, Nelia was gone. Nelia had departed that morning,
one of the servants said. The girl did not know where she had gone. She
had taken a box of books, two trunks, two suitcases and was dressed up,
departing in the automobile, which she drove herself.
He had a feeling of alarm, which he banished as unworthy. Finally toward
night he went down to the post office where he found several letters.
One seared his consciousness;
Gus:
Don't bother to look for me. I'm gone, and I'm going to stay gone.
You have shown yourself to be a mere soak, a creature of appetite
and vice, and with no redeeming mental traits whatever. I hate you,
and worse yet, I despise you. Get a divorce get another woman--the
widow is about your calibre. But, I give you fair warning, leave me
alone. I'm sick of men.
Nelia.
CHAPTER III
Elijah Rasba stalked homeward from the still in the dark, grimly and
expectantly erect. Now he was going to have that period of happiness
which he knew was the chief reason for people drinking moonshine
whiskey. He looked forward to the sensation of exuberant joy very much
as a man would look forward to five hours of happiness, to be followed
by hanging by the neck, till dead.
The stars were shining, and the over-ridge trail which he followed was
familiar enough under his feet, once he had struck into it from the
immediate vicinity of the lawbreakers. He saw the bare-limbed oak trees
against the sky, and he heard rabbits and other night runners scurrying
away in the dead leaves. The stars fluttering in the sky were stern eyes
whose gaze he avoided with determined wickedness and unrepentance.
Arriving at his own cabin, he stirred up the big pine-root log, and drew
his most comfortable rocking chair up before the leaping flames. He sat
there, and waited for the happiness of mind which was the characteristic
of his idea of intoxication.
He waited for it, all ready to welcome it. If it had come into his
cabin, all dressed up like some image of temptation or allurement, he
would not have been in the least surprised. He rather expected a real
and tangible manifestation, a vision of delight, clothed in some fair
figure. He sat there, rigidly, watching for the least symptom of unholy
pleasure. He had no clock by which to tell the time, and his watch was
thoroughly unreliable.
Again and again he poked up the fire. He was surprised, at last, to
hear a far-away gobble, the welcome of a wild turkey for the first false
dawn. By and by he became conscious of the light which was crowding the
fire flare into a subordinate place.
Day had arrived, and as yet, the delight which everybody said was in
moonshine whiskey had failed to touch him. However, he knew that he was
not properly in a receptive mood for happiness. His soul was still
stubborn against the allurements of sin. He stirred from his chair,
fried a rabbit in a pan, and baked a batch of hot-bread in a dutch oven,
brewing strong coffee and bringing out the jug of sorghum molasses.
He ate breakfast. He was conscious of a certain rigidity of action, a
certain precision of motion, ascribing them to the stern determination
which he had that when he should at last discover the whiskey-happiness
in his soul, he would let go with a whoop.
"Some hit makes happy, and some hit makes fightin' mad!" Rasba suddenly
thought, with much concern, "S'posen hit'd make me fightin' mad?"
A fluttering trepidation clutched his heart. The bells ringing in his
ears fairly clanged the alarm. He hadn't looked for anything else but
joy from being drunk, and now suppose he should be stricken with a mad
desire to fight--to kill someone!
No deadlier fear ever clutched a man's heart than the one that seized
Elijah Rasba. Suppose that when the deferred hilarity arrived, he was
made fighting drunk instead of joyous? The thought seized his soul and
he looked about himself wondering how he could chain his hands and save
his soul from murder, violence, fighting, and similar crimes! No
feasible way appeared to his frightened mind.
He dropped on his knees and began to pray for happiness, instead of for
violence, when the drink that he had had should seize him in its
embrace. He prayed with a voice that roared like thunder and which made
the charcoal fall from the log in the fireplace, and which alarmed the
jays and inquisitive mockingbirds about the little clearing.
He prayed while his voice grew huskier and huskier, and his head bowed
lower and lower as he wrestled with this peril which he had not
foreseen. All he asked was that when the moonshine began to operate, it
make him laugh instead of mad, but terrible doubts smote him. A glance
at his rifle on the wall made him fairly grovel on the floor, and he
knew that in his hands the andirons, the axe, the very hot-bread rolling
pin would be deadly weapons.
He hoped that he would not be able to shoot straight, but this hope was
instantly blasted, for a flock of wild turkeys came down into the
cornfield about ninety yards from his cabin, and although he seldom shot
anything in his own clearing, he now tried a shot at the turkey gobbler
and shot it dead where it strutted. If he should be stricken with anger
instead of with joy, no worse man could possibly live! There was no
telling what he would do if the liquor would work "wrong" on him. He
could kill men at two hundred yards!
He determined that he would see no human beings that day. Few people
ever visited him in his cabin, but he took no chances. He crept up the
mountain and skulking through the woods found an immense patch of
laurels. He crawled into it, and sat down there for hours and hours, so
that no one should have an opportunity to speak to him and stir the
latent devil of violence.
He returned to his cabin long after dark, and raking some hot coals out
of the ashes, whittled splinters and started a blaze. He was assailed
by hunger, and he baked corn pones and dry-salted pork, then added a
great flapjack of delicious sage sausage to the meal. He brought out
cans of fruit, whose juice assuaged his increasing thirst. Having eaten
heartily he resumed his vigil before the fireplace, and then he noticed
that some one had tied something on the stock of his rifle.
It was a letter which a passer-by had brought up from the Ford Post
Office, and when he opened it and looked at the writing, remorse
assailed him:
Dear Parsun:
Ever senct you preched here I ben sufrin count of my boy JocK. You
know Him for he set right thar, frade of no man, not the Tobblys,
nor the Crents. When tha drawed DOWN to shoot, he stud right thar an
shot back shoot fer shoot, an now he has goned awa down the Rivehs
an I am worited abot his soul because he is a gud boy an neveh was
no whars in all his borned days an an i hear now he is gettin bad
down thataway on Misipy riveh where thas all Bad Peple an i wisht
yud prey fer him so's he wont get bad. Mrs. drones panted church on
Clinch.
Rasba read the letter for the words at first. Then he went back after
the meaning, and the meaning struck him like a blow in the heart.
"Me pray fo' any man again," he gasped. "Lawse! Lawse!"
He didn't feel fit to pray for himself, let alone for any other sinner,
but there came to his memory a picture of Mrs. Drones, a motherly little
woman who had taken him home to a dinner at which seven kinds of
preserved fruit were on the table, and where the family laughed around
the fireplace--only to see Jock a fugitive the next night, and the
terrors of a feud war upon them.
"And Jock's getting bad down the Mississippi River!" Rasba repeated to
himself, striving to grapple with that fact. He could not think clearly
or coherently. The widow's voice, however, was as clearly speaking in
his thoughts as though she stood there, instead of merely having written
to him. He took to walking up and down the floor, back and forth, on one
plank.
He had forgotten that there was such a thing for humans as sleep. The
incongruity of his having been wide awake for two days and two nights
did not occur to him till suddenly his eyes turned to the bed in the
corner of the room and its purpose was recalled to his mind. He blinked
at it. His eyes opened with difficulty. He threw chunks on the fire and
went toward the bed, but as he stood by it the world grew black before
his eyes and clutching about him, he sank to the floor.
CHAPTER IV
Nelia Carline would not return to that miserable little river-bottom
cabin where she had grown up in unhappy privation. She had other plans.
She drove the little automobile down to Chester, put it in the Star
Garage, then walked to the river bank and gave the eddy a critical
inspection.
For years she had lived between the floods of the river and the poverty
of the uplands. Her life had often crossed that of river people, and
although she had never been on the river, she had frequently gone
visiting shanty-boaters who had landed in for a night or a week at the
bank opposite her own shack home. She knew river men, and she had no
illusions about river women. Best of all now, in her great emergency,
she knew shanty-boats, and as she gazed at the eddy and saw the fleet of
houseboats there her heart leaped exultantly.
No less than a score of boats were landed along the eddy bank, and
instantly her eyes fell upon first one and then another that would serve
her purpose. She walked down to the uppermost of the boats, and hailed
from the bank:
"U-whoo!"
A lank, stoop-shouldered woman emerged from the craft and fixed the
well-favoured young woman with keen, bright eyes.
"You-all know if there's a shanty-boat here for sale--cheap?" Nelia
asked, without eagerness.
The woman looked at the bank, reflectively.
"I expect," she admitted at last. "This un yaint, but theh's two spo'ts
down b'low, that's quittin' the riveh, that blue boat theh, but theh's
spo'ts."
"I 'lowed they mout be," Nelia dropped into her childhood vernacular as
she looked down the bank, "Likely yo' mout he'p me bargain, er
somebody?"
"I 'low I could!" the river woman replied. "Me an' my ole man he'ped a
feller up to St. Louis, awhile back, who was green on the river, but he
let us kind of p'int out what he'd need fo' a skift trip down this away.
Real friendly feller, kind of city-like, an' sort of out'n the country,
too. 'Lowed he was a writin' feller, fer magazines an' books an'
histries an' them kind of things. Lawsy! He could ask questions, four
hundred kinds of questions, an' writin' hit all down into a writin'
machine onto paper. We shore told him a heap an' a passel, an' he writes
mornin' an' nights. Lots of curius fellers on Ole Mississip'. We'll sort
of look aroun'. Co'se, yo' got a man to go 'long?"
"No."
"Wha-a-t! Yo' ain' goin' to trip down alone?"
"I might's well."
"But, goodness, gracious sake, you're pretty, pretty as a picture! I
'lowed yo' had a man scoutin' aroun'. Why somethin' mout happen to a
lady, if she didn't have a man or know how to take cyar of herse'f."
Nelia shrugged her shoulders. Mrs. Tons, the river woman, gazed for a
minute at the pretty, partly averted face. It was almost desperate,
quite reckless, and by the expression, the river woman understood. She
thought in silence, for a minute, and then looked down the eddy at a
boat some distance away.
"Theh's a boat. Like the looks of it?"
"It's a fine boat, I 'low," Nelia said. "Fresh painted."
"Hit's new," the woman said.
"Is it for sale?"
"We'll jes walk down thataway," the river woman suggested. "Two ladies
is mostly safe down thisaway."
"My name's Nelia Crele. We used to live up by Gage, on the Bottoms----"
"Sho! Co'se I know Ole Jim Crele, an' his woman. My name's Mrs. Tons. We
stopped in thah 'bout six weeks ago. I hearn say yo'd--yo'd married
right well!"
"Umph!" Nelia shrugged her shoulders, "Liquor spoils many a home!"
"Yo' maw said he was a drinkin' man, an' I said to myse'f, from my own
'sperience.... Yo' set inside yeah, Nelia. I'll go down theh an' talk
myse'f. We come near buyin' that bo't yistehd'y. Leave hit to me!"
Nelia sat down in the shanty-boat, and waited. She had not long to wait.
A tall, rather burly man returned with the woman, who introduced the
two;
"Mis' Crele, this is Frank Commer. His bo't's fo' sale, an' he'll take
$75 cash, for everything, ropes, anchor, stoves, a brass bedstead, an'
everything and I said hit's reasonable. Hit's a pine boat, built last
fall, and the hull's sound, with oak framing. Co'se, hit's small, 22
foot long an' 7 foot wide, but hit's cheap."
"I'll take it, then," Nelia nodded.
"You can come look it over," the man declared. "Tight hull and tight
roof. We built it ourselves. But we're sick of the river, and we'll sell
cheap, right here."
The three went down to the boat, and Nelia handed him seventy-five
dollars in bills. He and his partner, who came down from the town a few
minutes later, packed up their personal property in two trunks. They
left the dishes and other outfit, including several blankets.
The four talked as the two packed up. One of them suddenly looked
sharply at Nelia:
"You dropping down alone?"
She hesitated, and then laughed:
"Yes."
"It's none of my business," the man said, doubtfully, "but it's a mean
old river, some ways. A lady alone might get into trouble. River
pirates, you know."
It was a challenge. He was a clear-eyed, honest man, hardly twenty-five
years of age, and not an evil type at all. What he had to suggest he did
boldly, sure of his right at such a time, under such circumstances, to
do. He was entirely likeable. In spite of herself, Nelia wavered for a
moment. She knew river people; the woman by her side would have said she
would be safer with him than without his protection. There was only one
reason why Nelia could not accept that protection.
"I'll have to take care of myself," she shook her head, without rebuke
to the youth. "You see, I'm running away from a mean scoundrel."
"Hit's so," the river woman approved, and the men took their departure
without further comment.
The two women, disapproving the men's housekeeping, scrubbed the boat
and washed all the bedding. Nelia brought down her automobile and the
two carried her own outfit on board. Then Nelia took the car back to the
garage, and said that she would call for it in the morning.
"All right, Mrs. Carline," the garage man replied, without suspicion.
Back at the landing, Nelia bade the river woman good-bye.
"I got to be going," she said, "likely there'll be a whole pack after me
directly----"
"Got a gun?" the woman asked.
"Two," Nelia smiled. "Bill gave me a goose rifle and Frank let me have
this--he said it's the Law down Old Mississip'!"
"The Law" was a 32-calibre automatic pistol in perfect condition.
"Them boys thought a heap of yo', gal!" The river woman shook her head.
"Frank'd sure made you a good man!"
"Oh, I know it," replied Nelia, "but I'm sick of men--I hate men! I'm
going to go droppin' along, same's the rest."
"Don't let go of that pistol. Theh's mean, bad men down thisaway,
Nelia!"
Nelia laughed, but harshly. "I don't give a damn for anything now; I
tell you that!"
"Don't forget it. Shoot any man that comes."
Nelia, who could row a skiff with any one, set her shanty-boat sweeps on
their pins, coiled up the two bow lines by which the boat was moored to
the bank, and which the river woman untied, then rowed out of the eddy
and into the main current.
"It's good floating right down," Mrs. Tons called after her, "till yo'
git to Grand Tower Rock--thirty mile!"
The river rapidly widened below Chester, and the little houseboat swung
out into mid-stream. Nelia knew the river a little from having been down
on a steamer, and the misery she left behind was in contrast to the
sense of freedom and independence which she now had.
Stillness, peace, the sense of vast motion in the river torrent
comforted her. The moment of embarking alone on the river had been full
of nervous tenseness and anxiety, but now those feelings were left
behind and she could breathe deeply and confront the future with a calm
spirit. The veil that the blue mist of distance left behind her was
penetrable by memory, but the future was hidden from her gaze, as it was
hidden from her imagination.
The determination to dwell in the immediate present caught up her soul
with its grim, cold bonds, and as the sun was setting against the sky
beyond the long, sky-line of limestone ledges, she entered the cabin,
and looked about her with a feeling of home such as she had never had
before.
"I'll stand at the breech of my rifle, to defend it," she whispered to
herself. "Men are mean! I hate men!"
She found a flat book on a shelf which held a half hundred magazines.
The book was bound in blue boards, and backed with yellow leather. When
she opened it, out of curiosity, she discovered that it was full of
maps.
"Those dear boys!" she whispered, almost regretfully. "They left this
map book for me, because they knew I'd need it; knew everybody down
thisaway needs a map!"
They had done more than that; they had left the equally indispensable
"List of Post Lights," and when dusk fell and she saw a pale yellow
light revealed against a bank the little book named it "Wilkinson
Island." She pulled toward the east bank into the deadwater below
Lacours Island, cast over her anchor, and came to rest in the dark of a
starless night.
CHAPTER V
In mid-afternoon, the man who had so desperately and as a last resource
tested the efficiency of moonshine whiskey as a palliative for mental
misery awaked gradually, in confusion of mind and aching of body. Noises
filled his ears, and streaking lights blurred the keenness of his eyes.
Reason had but little to do with his first thoughts, and feelings had
nearly everything. There did not seem to be any possible atonement for
him to make. Too late, as it seemed, he realized the enormity of his
offence and the bitterness of inevitable punishment.
There remained but one thing for him to do, and that was go away down
the rivers and find the fugitive Jock Drones, whose mother feared for
him. No other usefulness of purpose remained in his reach. If he stood
up, now, before any congregation, the imps of Satan, the patrons of
moonshiners, would leer up at him in his pulpit, reminding him that he,
too, was one of them.
He went over to the corner of his cabin, raised some planks there and
dug down into the earth till he found a jug. He dragged the jug into the
cabin and out of it poured the Rasba patrimony, a hidden treasure of
gold, which he put into a leather money belt and strapped on. There was
not much in the cabin worth taking away, but he packed that little up
and made ready for his departure.
It was but a few miles over to Tug River, and he readily engaged a wagon
to carry him that far. On the wooded river bank he built a flatboat with
his own hands, and covered one end of it with a poplar-wood cabin,
purchased at a near-by sawmill. He floated out of the eddy in his
shack-boat and began his journey down the rivers to the Mississippi,
where he would perform the one task that remained for him to do in the
service of God. He would find Jock, give him his mother's message, and
after that expiate his own sins in the deserved misery of an exiled
penitent.
Tug River was in flood, a heavy storm having cast nearly two inches of
rainfall upon part of the watershed. On the crest of the flood it was
fast running and there was no delay, no stopping between dawn and dusk.
Standing all day at the sweeps Rasba cleared the shore in sharp bends,
avoided the obstacles in mid stream, and outran the wave crests and the
racing drift, entering the Big Sandy and emerging into the unimaginable
breadths of the Ohio.
He had no time to waste on the Ohio. The object of his search was on the
Mississippi, hundreds of miles farther down, and he could not go fast
enough to suit him. But at that, pulling nervously at his sweeps and
riding down the channel line, he "gain-speeded," till his eyes were
smarting with the fury of the changing shores, and his arms were aching
with the pulling and pushing of his great oars, and he neither
recognized the miles that he floated nor the repeated days that ensued.
Long since he had escaped from his own mountain environment. The trees
no longer overhung his course; railroad trains screamed along endless
shores, bridges overhung his path like menacing deadfalls, and the
rolling thunder of summer storms was mingled with the black smoke of ten
thousand undreamed-of industries. The simplicity of the mountain
cornfields of his youth had become a mystery of production, of activity,
of passing phenomena which he neither knew nor understood. In his
thoughts there was but one beacon.
His purpose was to reach the Mississippi, take the young man in hand,
and redeem him from the evils into which he had fallen. His object was
no more than that, nor any less. From the confusion of his experiences,
efforts, and humiliations, he held fast to one fact: the necessity of
finding Jock Drones. All things else had melted into that.
The river banks fell apart along his course; the river ridges withdrew
to wide distances, even blue at times; mere V-gullies or U-gorges,
widened into vast corn fields. A post-office store-house at a rippling
ford gave way to smoking cities, rumbling bridges, paved streets, and
hurrying throngs. The lone fisherman in an 18-foot dugout had changed
insensibly to darting motorboats and to huge, red-wheeled, white-castled
monsters, whose passage in the midst of vast waters was attended by the
sighs of toiling engines and the tossing of troubled seas.
Except for that one sure demand upon him, Elijah Rasba long since would
have been lost in the confusion and doubts of his transition from narrow
wooded ridges and trembling streamlets to this succession of visions.
But his soul retained its composure, his eyes their quickness to seize
the essential detail, and he rode the Tug River freshet into the Ohio
flood tide bent upon his mission of redeeming one mountain youth who had
strayed down into this far land, of which the shores were washed by the
unimaginable sea of a river.
When at the end of a day he arrived in a way-side eddy and moored his
poplar-bottom craft against a steep bank and the last twilight had faded
from his vision, he would eat some simple thing for supper, and then, by
lamp-light, try to read his exotic life into the Bible which accompanied
him on his travels. He knew the Book by heart, almost; he knew all the
rivers told about in it; he knew the storms of the various biblical
seas; he knew the Jordan, in imagination, and the Nile, the Euphrates,
the Jabbok, and the Brook of Egypt, but they did not conform in his
imagination with this living tide which was carrying him down its
course, over shoal, around bend and from vale to vale of a size and
grandeur beyond expression.
Elijah was speechless with amazement; the spies who had gone into
Canaan, holding their tongues, and befriended by women whose character
Elijah Rasba could not identify, were less surprised by the riches which
they discovered than Rasba by the panorama which he saw rolled out for
his inspection day by day.
Other shanty-boaters were dropping down before the approach of winter.
Sometimes one or another would drift near to Rasba's boat and there
would be an exchange of commonplaces.
"How fur mout hit be, strangeh?" he would ask each man. "'Low hit's a
hundred mile yet to the Mississippi?"
A hundred miles! They could not understand that this term in the
mountain man's mind meant "a long ways," if need be a thousand or ten
thousand miles. When one answered that the Mississippi was 670 miles,
and another said it was a "month's floating," their replies were equally
without meaning to his mind. Rasba could not understand them when they
talked of reaches, crossings, wing dams, government works, and chutes
and islands, but he would not offend any of them by showing that he did
not in the least understand what they were talking about. He must never
again hurt the feelings of any man or woman, and he must perform the one
service which the Deity had left for him to perform.
Little by little he began to understand that he was approaching the
Mississippi River. He saw the Cumberland one day, and two hours later,
he was witness to the Tennessee, and that long, wonderful bridge which a
railroad has flung from shore to shore of the great river. The current
carried him down to it, and his face turned up and up till he was swept
beneath that monument to man's inspiration and the industry of countless
hands.
Rasba had seen cities and railroads and steamboats, but all in a kind of
confusion and tumult. They had meant but incidents down the river; this
bridge, however, a structure of huge proportions, was clearly one piece,
one great idea fixed in steel and stone.
"How big was the man who built that bridge?" he asked himself.
While yet the question echoed in his expanding soul he hailed a passing
skiff:
"Strangeh! How fur now is it to the Mississippi River?"
"Theh 'tis!" the man cried, pointing down the current. "Down by that air
willer point!"
CHAPTER VI
Those first free days on the Mississippi River revealed to Nelia Crele a
woman she had never known before. Daring, fearless, making no reckoning,
she despised the past and tripped eagerly into the future. It was no
business of any one what she did. She had married a man who had turned
out to be a scoundrel, and when fate treated her so, she owed nothing to
any one or to anything. Even the fortune which she had easily seized
through the alcoholic imbecility of her semblance of a man brought no
gratitude to her. The money simply insured her against poverty and her
first concern was to put that money where it would be safe from raiders
and sure to bring her an income. This, watchfulness and alertness of
mind had informed her, was the function of money.
She dropped into Cape Girardeau, and sought a man whom she had met at
her husband's house. This was Duneau Menard, who had little interest in
the Carlines, but who would be a safe counsellor for Nelia Crele. He
greeted her with astonishment, and smiles, and told her what she needed
to know.
"I was just thinking of you, Nelia," he said, "Carline's sure raising a
ruction trying to find you. He 'lows you are with some man who needs
slow killing. He telephoned to me, and he's notified a hundred sheriffs,
but, shucks! he's a mean scoundrel, and I'm glad to see yo'."
"I want to have you help me invest some money," she said. "It's mine,
and he signed every paper, for me. Here's one of them."
He took the sheet and read:
I want my wife to share up with me all my fortune, and I hereby
convey to her stocks, bonds, and cash, according to enclosed signed
certificates, etc.
Augustus Carline.
"How come hit?" the man asked.
"He was right friendly, then," she replied, grimly. "For what you-all
said about the daughter of my mother I come here to claim your help. You
know about money, about interest and dividends. I want it so I can have
money, regular, like Gus did----"
"I shall be glad to fix that," he said, wiping his glasses. "What you
wish is a diversified set of investments. How much is there?"
She stacked up before him wads, rolls, briquettes, and bundles. He
counted it, slip by slip and when he had completed the tally and
reckoned some figures on the back of an envelope, he nodded his
approval.
"I expect that this will bring you around twelve or fifteen hundred
dollars a year, safe, and a leetle besides, on speculation."
"That'll do," she said, approvingly.
No one in town connected her with the sensation up around Gage. She was
just one of those shanty-boat girls who come down the Mississippi every
once in a while, especially below St. Louis. In a hundred cities and
towns people were looking for Mrs. Augustus Carline, supposed to be
cutting a dashing figure, and probably in company with a certain Dick
Asunder, who had been seen in Chester, with his big black automobile on
the same day that Mrs. Carline abandoned her husband's automobile
there.
Of course, the shanty-boaters did not tell, if they knew; the River
tells no tales. Certainly, of all the women in the world this casual
visitor at Attorney Menard's need not attract attention. Menard always
did have strange clients, and it was nothing new to see a shanty-boat
land in and some man or woman walk up to his corner office and sit down
to tell him in legal confidences things more interesting to know than
any one not of his curiosity and sympathy would ever dream.
Attorney Menard kept faith with river wastrels, floating nomads who are
akin to gypsies, but who are of all bloods--tramps of the running
floods. He listened to narratives stranger than any other attorney; in
his safe he had documents of interest to sweethearts and wives, to
husbands and sons, to fugitives and hunters. Letters came to him from
all parts of the great basin, giving him directions, or notifying him of
the termination of lives whose passing had a significance or a meaning.
Nelia's mother knew him, and Nelia herself recalled his good-humoured
smile, his weathered face, his appeal to a girl for her confidence, and
the certainty that her confidence would be respected. She had gone to
him as naturally as she would have gone to a decent father or a wise
mother. She took from him his neatly written receipt, but with the
feeling that it was superfluous. In a little while she returned to the
shanty-boat and dropped out of the eddy on her way down the river. She
floated under the big Thebes Bridge, and landed against the west bank
before dark, there to have the luck to shoot a wild goose. The maps
showed that she was approaching the Lower Mississippi.
When she had left Cape Girardeau, she had noticed a little brick-red
shanty-boat which landed in just below her own. Without looking up, she
discovered that a man leaned against the roof of his low cabin whose
eyes did not cease to watch her every motion while she cast off, coiled
her ropes, and leaned to the light sweeps.
When she was a safe distance down the river, she ventured to look up
stream, and saw that the little red shanty-boat had left its mooring,
and that the man was coming down the current astern of her. It was a
free river; any one could go whither he pleased, but the certainty that
she had attracted the man's attention revealed to her the necessity of
considering her position there alone and dependent on her own
resources.
She remembered the two market hunters, and their warnings. The man
astern was a patient, lurking, menacing brute, who might suspect her of
having property enough to make a river piracy worth while; or he might
have other designs, since she was unfortunately good-looking and
attractive. Night would surely be his opportunity and the test of her
soul.
She could have landed at Commerce, where there were several shanty-boats
and temporary safety; she could have floated on down at night and
slipped into the shore in the dark, her lights out; she could have tried
flight down the river hoping to lose the brick-red boat; she decided
against all these.
Boldly she pulled into an eddy just before sunset, and had made fast to
a snag and a live root when the little boat came dropping down in the
edge of the current hardly forty feet distant, with the man leaning on
his sweeps, watching her every motion, especially fastening his gaze
upon her trim figure.
As he came opposite she turned and faced him; her jaws set.
"Hello, girlie!" he called, leaning upon his sweeps to carry his
skiff-like boat into the same eddy.
On the instant she snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom and,
dropping the muzzle, fired. The man stumbled back with a cry. He stood
grabbing at his shoulder, his florid face turning white, his eyes
starting with terror and pain. She saw him reel and fall through the
open hatch of his cabin and his boat go drifting on into the crossing
below. It occurred to her numbed brain that she was delivered from that
peril, but as dusk fell she hated the misery of her loneliness.
CHAPTER VII
The Ohio had the Mississippi eddied. The rains that had fallen over the
valleys of Kentucky and southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had brought
a tide down the big branch and as there was not much water running out
of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi, the flood had backed up the
Mississippi for a little while, stopping the current almost dead.
Elijah Rasba, running full tilt in the mid Ohio current, looked ahead
that afternoon, and he had a full view of the thing to which he had
come, seeking the wandering son of Mrs. Drones.
He arrived at the moment when the Mississippi, having been banked up
long enough, began to feel the restraint of the Ohio and resent it. The
gathered waters moved down against the Ohio flood and pressed them back
against the Kentucky side. Once more the Mississippi River resumed its
sway. On the loosed waters was a little cigar-box of a shanty-boat, and
Rasba rowed toward it across the saucer-like sucks and depressions where
the two currents of different speeds dragged by each other.
He pulled alongside, hailed, and, for answer, heard a groan, a weak
cry:
"Help!"
He carried a line across to the stranger's deck and made it fast. Then
he saw, stretched upon the floor, a stricken man, from whose side a pool
of blood had run. Working rapidly, Elijah discovered the wound and as
gunshot injuries were only too familiar in his mountain experience he
well knew what he should do. Examination showed that it was a painful
and dangerous shoulder shot. He cleared away the stains, washed the
hole, plucked the threads of cloth out of it, turned the man on his face
and, with two quick slashes of a razor, cut out the missile which had
done the injury.
Healing liniment, the inevitable concoction of a mountaineer's cabin,
soothed while it dressed the wound. Pads of cotton, and a bandage
supplied the final need, and Rasba stretched his patient upon the
cabin-boat bunk, then looked out upon the world to which he had
drifted.
It was still a vast river, coming from the unknown and departing into
the unknown. He knew it must be the Mississippi, but he acknowledged it
with difficulty.
He did not ask the man about the bullet. Born and bred in the mountains,
he knew that that would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette. But the
wounded man was uneasy, and when he was eased of his pain, he began to
talk:
"I wa'nt doin' nothing!" he explained, "I were jes' drappin' down, up
above Buffalo Island, an' b'low Commerce, an' a lady shot me--bang! Ho
law! She jes' shot me thataway. No 'count for hit at all."
"A lady you knowed?" Rasba asked.
"No suh! But she's onto the riveh, into a shanty-boat, purty, too, an'
jes' drappin' down, like she wa'nt goin' no wheres, an' like she mout of
be'n jes' moseyin'. I jes 'lowed I'd drap in, an' say howdy like, an'
she drawed down an' shot--bang!"
"Was she frightened?"
"Hit were a lonesome reach, along of Powerses Island," the man admitted,
whining and reluctant. "She didn't own that there riveh. Hain't a man no
right to land in anywheres? She shot me jes' like I was a dawg, an' she
hadn't no feelin's nohow. Jes' like a dawg!"
"Did you know her?"
"No, suh. We'd be'n drappin' down, an' drappin' down--come down below
Chester, an' sometimes she'd be ahead, an' sometimes me, an' how'd I
know she wouldn't be friendly? Ain't riveh women always friendly? An'
theh she ups an' shoots me like a dawg. She's mean, that woman, mean an'
pretty, too, like some women is!"
Rasba wondered. He had been long enough on the Ohio to get the feeling
of a great river. He saw the specious pleading of the wounded wretch,
and his quick imagination pictured the woman alone in a vast, wild wood,
at the edge of that running mile-wide flood.
"Of co'rse!" he said, half aloud, "of co'rse!"
"Co'rse what?" the man demanded, querulously.
"Co'rse she shot," Rasba answered, tartly. "Sometimes a lady jes'
naturaly has to shoot, fearin' of men."
Rasba landed the two boats in at the foot of a sandbar, and made them
fast to old stakes driven into the top of the low reef. He brought his
patient some hot soup, and after they had eaten supper, he sat down to
talk to him, keeping the man company in his pain, and leading him on to
talk about the river, and the river people.
In that first adventure at the Ohio's forks Rasba had discovered his own
misconceptions, and the truth of the Mississippi had been partly
revealed to him. What the Tug was to the Big Sandy, what the Big Sandy
was to the Ohio, the Ohio was to the Mississippi. What he had looked to
as the end was but the beginning, and Rasba was lost in the immensity of
the river that was a mile wide, thousands of miles long, and unlike
anything the mountain preacher had ever dreamed of. If this was the
Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?
"My name's Prebol," the man said, "Jest Prebol. I live on Old
Mississip'! I live anywhere, down by N'Orleans, Vicksburg--everywhere!
I'm a grafter, I am--"
"A grafter?" Rasba repeated the strange word.
"Yas, suh, cyards, an' tradin' slum, barberin' mebby, an' mebby some
otheh things. I can sell patent medicine to a doctor, I can! I clean
cisterns, an' anything."
"You gamble?" Rasba demanded, grasping one fact.
"Sho!" Prebol grinned. "Who all mout _yo'_ be?"
"Elijah Rasba," was the reply. "I am seeking a soul lost from the
sheepfold of God. I ask but the strength to find him."
"A parson?" Prebol asked, doubtfully, his eyes resting a little in their
uneasy flickerings. "One of them missionaries?"
"No, suh." Rasba shook his head, humbly. "Jes' a mountang parson,
lookin' for one po'r man, low enough fo' me to he'p, maybe."
Prebol made no reply or comment. His mind was grappling with a fact and
a condition. He could not tell what he thought. He remembered with some
worriment, that he had cursed under the pain of the dressing of the
wound. He knew that it never brought any man good luck to swear within
ear-range of any parson.
He could think of nothing to do, just then, so he pretended weariness,
which was not all pretense, at that. Rasba left him to go to sleep on
his cot, and went over to his own boat, where, after an audible session
on his knees, he went to bed, and fell into a sound and dreamless
sleep.
In the morning, when the parson awakened, his first thought was of his
patient, and he started out to look after the man. He looked at the face
of the sandbar reef against which the little red shanty-boat had been
moored. The boat was gone!
Rasba, studying the hard sand, soon found the prints of bare feet, and
he knew that Prebol had taken his departure precipitately, but the
reason why was not so apparent to the man who had read many a wild
turkey track, deer runway, and trails of other game.
From sun-up till nearly noon, while he made and ate his breakfast, and
while he turned to the Scriptures for some hint as to this river man's
mind, his thoughts turned again and again to the pictures which Prebol's
tales, boastings, whinings, and condition had inspired.
He felt his own isolation, strangeness, and ignorance. He could not
understand the man who had fled from assistance and succour; at the same
time the liveliness of his fancy reverted again and again to the woman
living alone in such a desolation, shooting whoever menaced.
That type was not new to him. Up in his own country he had known of
women who had stood at their rifles, returning shot for shot of feud
raiders. The pathetic courage of the woman who had shot Prebol appealed
to him.
The wounded man, wicked beyond measure, and the woman assailed, he
realized, were like hundreds of other men and women whose shanty-boats
he had seen down the Ohio River, and which lurked in bends and reaches
on both sides of the Mississippi.
"Give thyself no rest!" he read, and he obeyed. He believed that he had
a black sin to expiate, and he dared not begin what his soul was
hungering to do, because knowing wickedness, he had deliberately
sinned.
Alternately, he read his Bible and prayed. Late in the day he dropped
out of the eddy and floated on down.
"I 'low I can keep on huntin' for Jock Drones," he told himself. "I
shore can do that, yes, indeed!"
CHAPTER VIII
Having rid herself of the leering river rat, Nelia Crele trembled for a
time in weak dismay, the reaction from her tense and fiery determination
to protect herself at all costs. But she quickly gathered her strength
and, having brewed a pot of strong coffee, thrown together a light
supper, and settled back in her small, but ample, rocking chair, she
reviewed the incidents of her adventure; the flight from her worthless
husband and her assumption of the right to protect herself.
After all, shooting a man was less than running away from her husband.
She could regard the matter with a rather calm spirit and even a
laughing scorn of the man who had thought to impose himself on her,
against her own will.
"That's it!" she said, half aloud, "I needn't to allow any man to be
mean to me!"
She had given her future but little thought; now she wondered, and she
pondered. She was free, she was independent, and she was assured of her
living. She had even been more shrewd than old Attorney Menard had
suspected; the money she had left with him was hardly half of her
resources. She had another plan, by which she would escape the remote
possibility of Menard's proving faithless to his trust, as attorneys
with his opportunities sometimes have proved.
Nelia Crele could not possibly be regarded as an ordinary woman, as a
mere commonplace, shack-bred, pretty girl. Down through the years had
come a strain of effectiveness which she inherited in its full strength;
she was as inexplicable as Abraham Lincoln. Her stress of mind relieved,
she regarded the shooting of the man with increasing satisfaction,
since by such things a woman could be assured of respect.
Gaiety had never been a part of her childhood or girlhood; she had
withstood the insidious attacks and menaces that threatened her down to
the day when Gus Carline had come to her. Courted by him, married, and
then living in the clammy splendour of the house of a back-country rich
man, she had found no happiness, but merely a kind of animal comfort.
She had had the Carline library to read, and she had brought with her
the handy pocket volumes which had been her own and her delight. She was
glad of the foresight which enabled her to put into a set of book
shelves the companions which had, alone, been her comfort and
inspiration during the few years of her wedded misery.
Now, on the Mississippi, in the shanty-boat, she need consult only her
own fancy and whim. Mistress of her own affairs, as she supposed, she
could read or she could think.
"I do what I please!" she thought, a little defiantly. "It's nobody's
business what I do now; what'd Mrs. Plosell care what people said about
her? I'll read, if I want to, and I'll flirt if I want to--and I'll do
anything I want to----"
She reckoned without the Mississippi. Everybody does, at first. Her
money was but a means to an end. She knew its use, its value, and the
perfect freedom which it gave her; its protection was not
underestimated.
At the same time, sloth was no sin of hers. Living on the river insured
physical activity; her books insured her mental engagement.
She had lived so many years in combat with grim necessity that the
lesson of thrift of all her resources had been brought home to her.
Having been waylaid by circumstance so often, she took grim care now to
count the costs, and to insure her getting what she was seeking. The
trouble was she could not disassociate her feelings from her ideas. They
were inextricably interwoven. The brief years of her wedlock had been in
one way a disillusionment, in another a revelation.
She had found her own hunger for learning, her own strength and
weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly
seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and
shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she had found her
own ability.
For hours she debated there by her pretty lamp, with the curtains down,
and the comforting and reassuring weight of the automatic pistol in her
lap. She knew that she must never have that weapon at arm's length from
her, but as she remembered where it had come from she wondered to think
that she had so easily refused the suggestion of Frank, the market
hunter.
"It's all right, though," she shrugged her shoulders, "I can take care
of myself, and being alone, I can think things out!"
In mid-morning she cut loose from the bank and floated away down stream.
The river was very wide, and covered with crossing-ripples. She looked
down what the map showed was the chute of Hacker Tow Head, and then the
current carried her almost to the bank at the head of Buffalo Island.
Here there was a stretch of caving bank; the earth, undercut by the
river current, was lumping off in chunks and slices. Her boat bobbed and
danced in the waves from the cave-ins, and the rocking pleased her
fancy.
The names along this bit of river awakened her interest; Blackbird
Island was clearly described: Buffalo Island harked back many years into
tradition; Dogtooth Island was a matter of river shape; but Saladin,
Tow Head and Orient Field stirred her imagination, for they might reveal
the scene of steamboat disasters or some surveyor's memory of the
Arabian Nights. Below Dogtooth Island, under Brooks Point, were a number
of golden sandbars and farther down, in the lower curve of the famous
S-bends she read the name "Greenleaf," which was pretty and
picturesque.
She was living! Every minute called upon some resource of her brain. She
had read in old books things which gave even the name Cairo, at the foot
of the long, last reach of the Upper Mississippi, a significance of far
lands and Egyptian mysteries. Gratefully she understood that the
Mississippi was summoning ideals which ought to have been called upon
long since when in the longings of her girlhood she had been circumspect
and patient, keeping her soul satisfied with dreams of fairies playing
among the petals of hill-side flowers, or gnomes wandering among the
stalks of toll-yielding cornfields.
Mature, now; fearless--and, as the word romped through her mind in all
its changes, free--free!--she played with her thoughts. But below
Greenleaf Bend, as another day was lost in waning evening, she early
sought a sandbar mooring at the foot of Missouri Sister Island, where
there were two other shanty-boats, one of them with two children on the
sand. She need not dread a boat where children were found. Possibly she
would be able to talk to another woman, which would be a welcome change,
having had so much of her own thoughts!
This other woman was Mrs. Disbon, out of the Missouri. She and her
husband had been five years coming down from the Yellowstone, and they
had fished, trapped, and enjoyed themselves in their 35-foot cabin-boat
home. Of course, taking care of two children on a shanty-boat was a good
deal of work and some worry, for one or the other was always falling
overboard, but since they had learned to swim it hadn't been so bad, and
they could take care of themselves.
"You all alone?" Mrs. Disbon asked.
"I'm alone," Nelia admitted, having told her name as Nelia Crele.
"Well, I don't know as I blame you," Mrs. Disbon declared, looking at
her husband doubtfully. "Seems to me that on the average, men are more
of a nuisance than they're worth. It's which and t'other about them. I
see you've had experience?"
Nelia looked down at her wedding ring.
"Yes, I've had experience," she nodded.
"Going clear down?"
"You mean----?"
"N'Orleans?"
"Why, I hadn't thought much about it."
"The Lower River's pretty bad." Disbon looked up from cleaning his
repeating shotgun. "My first trip was out of the Ohio and down to
N'Orleans. I wouldn't recommend to no woman that she go down thataway,
not alone. Theh's junker-pirates use up from N'Orleans, and, course,
there's always more or less meanness below Cairo. Above St. Louis it
ain't so bad, but mean men draps down from Little Klondike."
"I haven't made up my mind," Nelia said, adding, with a touch of
bitterness, "I don't reckon it makes so much difference!"
"Lots that comes down feel thataway," Mrs. Disbon nodded, with sympathy,
"Seems like some has more'n their share, and some considerable less!"
Nelia remained there three days, for there was good company, and a
two-day rain had set in between midnight and dawn on the following
morning. There was no hurry, and she was going nowhere. She had the
whole family over to supper the second night, and she ate two meals or
so with them.
The other shanty-boat, about a hundred yards down stream, was an old
man's. He had a soldier's pension, and he lived in serene restfulness,
reading General Grant's memoirs, and poring over the documents of the
Rebellion, discovering points of military interest and renewing his own
memories of his part in thirty-odd battles with Grant before Vicksburg
and down the line with the Army of the Potomac.
Nelia could have remained there indefinitely, but restlessness was in
her mind, as long as she had so much money on board her little
shanty-boat. Disbon knew so many tales of river piracy that she saw the
wisdom of settling her possessions, either at Cairo or Memphis,
whichever should prove best.
Landing against the bank just above the ferry, she walked over to Cairo
and sought for a man who had hired her father to help him hunt for wild
turkeys. He was a banker, and would certainly be the right kind of a man
to help her, if he would.
"Mr. Brankeau," she addressed him in his office, "I don't know if you
remember me, but you came hunting to the River Bottoms below St.
Genevieve, one time, and you and Father went over into Missouri, hunting
turkeys."
"Remember you?" he exclaimed. "Why--you--of course! Mrs. Carline--Nelia
Crele!"
She met his questioning gaze unflinchingly.
"I know I can trust you," she said, simply. "If you'd known Gus
Carline!"
"I knew his father," Brankeau said. "I reckon as faithless a scoundrel
as ever lived. Old man Carline left his first wife and two babies up in
Indiana--I know all about that family! I saw by the newspapers----"
"I want some railroad stocks, so I can have interest on my money," she
said by way of nature of her presence there. "When we separated, he let
me have this paper, showing he wanted me to share his fortune----"
"He was white as that?" Brankeau exclaimed, astonished at the paper
Carline had signed.
"He was that white," she replied, her eyes narrowing. Brankeau from the
wideness of his experience, laughed. She, an instant later, laughed,
too.
"So you settled the question between you?" he suggested, "I thought from
the newspapers he hadn't suspicioned--this paper--um-m!"
"It's not a forgery, Mr. Brankeau," she assured him. "He was one of
those gay sports, you know, and, for a change, he sported around with
me, once. I came away between days. You know his failing."
"Several of them, especially drink," the man nodded "It's in cash?"
"Every dollar, taken through his own banks, on his own orders."
"And you want?"
"Railroads, and some good industrial or two. Here's the amount----"
She handed him a neatly written note. He took out a little green covered
book, showing lists of stocks, range of prices, condition of companies,
and, together, they made out a list. When they had finished it, he read
it into the telephone.
Within an hour the stocks had been purchased, and a week later, he
handed her the certificates. She rented a safe deposit box and put them
into it, subject only to her own use and purposes.
"Thank you, Mr. Brankeau," she said, and turned to leave.
"Where are you stopping?" he asked.
"I'm a shanty-boater."
"You mean it? Not alone?"
"Yes," she admitted.
"I wish I were twenty years younger," he mourned.
"Do you, why?" she looked at him, and, turning, fled.
He caught up his top-coat and hat, but he went to the Ohio River,
instead of to the Mississippi, where Nelia stood doubtfully staring down
at her boat from the top of the big city levee.
At last, she cast off her lines and dropped on down into The Forks.
She sat on the bow deck of her boat, looking at the place where the
pale, greenish Ohio waters mingled with the tawny Missouri flood.
A gleam of gold drew her attention, as she glanced downward and she was
startled to see her wedding ring, with its guard ring, still on her left
hand; it had never been off since the day her husband placed it there.
For a minute she looked at it, and then deliberately, with sustained
calmness, removed the thin guard, and slipped the ring from its place.
She put it upon the same finger of her right hand, where it was snug and
the guard was not necessary.
CHAPTER IX
A whisper, that became a rumour, which became a report, reached Gage and
found the ears of Augustus Carline, whose wife had disappeared sometime
previously. After two wild days of drinking Carline suddenly sobered up
when the fact became assured that Nelia had gone and really meant to
remain away, perhaps forever.
The thing that startled him into certainty was the paper which he found
signed by himself, at the bank. He had forgotten all about signing the
papers that night when Nelia had shown herself to be the gayest sport of
them all. Now he found that he had signed away his stocks and bonds, and
that he had given over his cash account.
The amount was startling enough, but it did not include his real estate,
of which about two thirds of his fortune had been composed. If it had
been all stocks and bonds, he thought he would have been left with
nothing. He considered himself at once fortunate and unlucky.
"I never knew the old girl was as lively as that!" he told himself, and
having tasted a feast, he could not regard the Widow Plosell as more
than a lunch, and a light lunch, at that.
Nelia had been easily traced to Chester. Beyond Chester the trail seemed
to indicate that Dick Asunder had eloped with her, but ten days later
Asunder returned home with a bride whom he had married in St. Louis.
Beyond Chester Nelia had left no trace, and there was nothing even to
indicate whether she had taken the river steamer, the railroad train, or
gone into flight with someone who was unknown and unsuspected. When
Carline, sobered and regretful, began to make searching inquiries, he
learned that there were a score, or half a hundred men for whom Old
Crele had acted as a hunter's and fisher's guide. These sportsmen had
come from far and wide during many years, and both Crele and her wistful
mother admitted that many of them had shown signs of interest and even
indications of affection for the girl as a child and as a pretty maid,
daughter of a poor old ne'er-do-well.
"But she was good," Carline cried. "Didn't she tell you she was
going--or where she'd go?"
"Never a word!" the two denied.
"But where would she go?" the frantic husband demanded. "Did she never
talk about going anywhere?"
"Well-l," Old Crele meditated, "peahs like she used to go down an' watch
Ole Mississip' a heap. What'd she use to say, Old Woman? I disremember,
I 'clar I do."
"Why, she was always wishing she knowed where all that river come from
an' where all it'd be goin' to," Mrs. Crele at last recollected.
"But she wouldn't dare--She wouldn't go alone?" Carline choked.
"Prob'ly not, a gal favoured like her," Old Crele admitted, without
shame. "I 'low if she was a-picking, she'd 'a' had the pick."
Cold rage alternated with hot fear in the mind of Gus Carline. If she
had gone alone, he might yet overtake her; on the other hand, if she had
gone with some man, he was in honour bound to kill that man. He was
sensitive, now, on points of honour. The Widow Plosell, having succeeded
in creating a favourable condition, from her viewpoint, sought to take
advantage of it. She was, however, obliged to go seeking her recent
admirer, only to discover that he blamed her--as men do--for his
trouble. She consulted a lawyer to see if she could not obtain financial
redress for her unhappy position, only to learn of her own financial
danger should Mrs. Carline determine upon legal revenge.
Carline, between trying to convince himself that he was the victim of
fate and the innocent sufferer from a domestic tragedy brought upon
himself by events over which he had no control, fell to hating liquor as
the chief cause of his discomfiture.
Then a whisper that became a rumour, which at last seemed to be a fact,
said that Nelia Carline was somewhere down Old Mississip'. Someone who
knew her by sight was reported to have seen her in Cape Girardeau, and
the husband raced down there in his automobile to see if he could not
learn something about the missing woman, whose absence now proved what a
place she had filled in his heart.
There was no doubt of it. Nelia had been there, but no one had happened
to think to tell Carline about it. She had landed in a pretty
shanty-boat, the wharf-master said, and had pulled out just before a
river man in a brick-red cabin-boat of small size had left the eddy. The
river man had dropped in just behind her, and, according to the
wharf-master:
"I shore kept my eyes on that man, for he was a riveh rat!"
The thought was sickening to Carline. His wife floating down the river
with a river rat close behind presented but two explanations: she was
being followed for crime, or the two were just flirting on the river,
together.
He bought a pretty 28-foot motorboat, 22-inch draft with a 7-foot beam
and a raised deck cabin. Having stocked up with supplies, he started
down the Ohio to find his woman.
He could not tell what his intention was, not even to himself; his mind,
long weakened and depraved by liquor, lacked clarity of thought and
distinctiveness of purpose. One hour he raged with anger, and murder
blackened his heart; another minute, his shattered nerves left him in a
panic of fears and remorse, and he hoped for nothing better than to beg
his wife and sweetheart for forgiveness. At all times dread of what he
might find at the end of the trail tormented him from terror to
despair.
His anguish overcame all his other sensations. It even overcame his lust
for liquor. He grew sturdier under his affliction, so that when he
arrived at Cairo, and swung his craft smartly up to the wharf-boat, his
eyes were clear and his skin was honestly coloured by sunshine and pure
winds. Here fortune favoured him with more news of his wife. The
engineer of the Cairo-Missouri ferryboat had seen a young and pretty
woman moored at the bank some distance from the landing. She had
remained there upward of a week, having no visitors, and making daily
visits over the levee into the little city.
"One day she stood there, I bet half an hour, looking back, like she was
waiting," the engineer said. "I seen her onto the levee top. Then she
come down, jumped aboard with her lines, an' pulled out to go on
trippin' down. I wondered then wouldn't some man be following of her."
When Carline passed below the sandbar point, at which the Ohio and
Mississippi mingle their waters, and the human flotsam from ten thousand
towns is caught by swirling eddies, he found himself subdued by a shadow
that fell athwart his course, dulling the fire of his own spirit with a
doubt and an awe which he had never before known.
His wife had gone past the Jumping Off Place; he had heard a thousand
jests about that fork of the rivers, without comprehending its deeper
meaning, till in his own experience he, too, was flung down the tide by
forces now beyond his control, though he himself had set them in motion.
His suffering was no less acute, his mind was no less active, but it
dawned slowly on him that, after all, the acute pain which was in his
heart was no greater than the sorrow, the suffering, the poisoned
deliriums of the thousands who had given themselves to this mighty
flood, which was so vast and powerful that it dwarfed the senses of
mortals to a feeling of the proper proportion of their affairs in the
workings of the universe.
Insensibly, but surely, his pride began to fade and his selfishness
began to give way to better understanding and kindlier counsels. That
much the River Spirit had done for him. He would not give up the search,
but rather would he increase its thoroughness, and redouble his efforts.
But he would never again be quite without sympathy, quite without
understanding of sensations and experiences which were not of his own
heart and soul.
The river was a mile wide; its current surged from the deeps; it
flowed down the bend and along the reach with a noiselessness, a
resistlessness, a magnitude that seemed to carry him out of his whole
previous existence--and so it did carry him. Still human, still finite,
prone to error and lack of comprehension, nevertheless Augustus
Carline entered for the moment upon a new life recklessly and
willingly.
CHAPTER X
For a minute Elijah Rasba, as the Mississippi revealed itself to him,
contemplated a greater field for service than he had ever dreamed of.
Then, humbled in his pride at the thought of great success, he felt that
it could not be; for such an opportunity an Apostle was needed, and
Rasba's cheeks warmed with shame at the realization of the vanity in his
momentary thought.
He was grateful for the privilege of seeing the panorama that unrolled
and unfolded before his eyes with the same slow dignity with which the
great storm clouds boiled up from the long backs of the mountains of his
own homeland. He missed the elevations, the clustered wildernesses, and
ledges of stone against a limited sky, but in their places he saw the
pale heavens in a dome that was uninterrupted from horizon to horizon.
There seemed to be hardly any earth commensurate with the sky, and the
river seemed to be flowing between bounds so low and insignificant that
he felt as though it might break through one side or the other and fall
into the chaos beyond the brim of the world.
Instinctively he removed his hat in this Cathedral. Familiar from
childhood with mountains and deep valleys, the sense of power and motion
in the river appealed to him as the ocean might have done. He looked
about him with curiosity and inquiry. He felt as though there must be
some special meaning for him in that immediate moment, and it was a long
time before he could quite believe that this thing which he witnessed
had continued far back beyond the memory of men, and would continue into
the unquestionable future.
He floated down stream from bend to bend, carried along as easily as in
the full run of time. He looked over vast reaches, and hardly recognized
other houseboats, tucked in holes along the banks, as craft like his
own. The clusters of houses on points of low ridges did net strike him
as veritable villages, but places akin to those of fairyland.
All the rest of the day he dropped on down, not knowing which side he
should land against, and filled with doubts as to where his duty lay.
Once he caught up his big oars and began to row toward a number of
little shanty-boats moored against a sandbar, close down to a wooded
bank, only to find that the river current carried him away despite his
most muscular endeavours, so he accepted it as a sign that he should not
land there.
For a time Rasba thought that perhaps he had better just let the river
carry him whither it would, but upon reflection he remembered what an
old raftsman, who had run strands of logs down Clinch and Holston, told
him about the nature of rivers:
"Come a falling tide, an' she drags along the banks and all that's
afloat keeps in the middle; but come a fresh an' a risin' tide, an' the
hoist of the water is in the mid-stream, and what's runnin' rolls off to
one side or the other, an' jams up into the drift piles."
The philosophy of that was, for this occasion, that if Old Mississip'
was falling, Elijah Rasba might never get ashore, not in all the rest of
his born days, unless he stirred his boots. So catching up his sweep
handles he began to push a long stroke toward the west bank, and his
boat began to move on the river surface. Under the two corners of his
square bow appeared little swirls and tiny ripples as he approached the
bank and drifted down in the edge of the current looking for a place to
land.
Before he knew it, a big patch of woods grew up behind him, and when he
felt the current under the boat slacken he discovered that he had run
out of the Mississippi River and was in a narrow waterway no larger than
Tug Fork.
"Where all mout I be?" he gasped, in wonderment.
He saw three houseboats just below him, moored against a sandbar, with
hoop nets drying near by, blue smoke curling out of tin pipes, and two
or three people standing by to look at the stranger.
He rowed ashore and carried out a big roped stone, which he used as
anchor; then he walked down the bar toward the man who watched his
approach with interest.
"I am Elijah Rasba," he greeted him. "I come down out of Tug River; I am
looking for Jock Drones; he's down thisaway, somewheres; can yo' all
tell me whichaway is the Mississippi River?"
"I don't know him," the fisherman shook his head. "But this yeah is Wolf
Island Chute; the current caught you off of Columbus bluffs, and you
drifted in yeah; jes' keep a-floatin' an' d'rectly you'll see Old
Mississip' down thataway."
"It's near night," Rasba remarked, looking at the sun through the trees.
"I'm a stranger down thisaway; mout I get to stay theh?"
"Yo' can land anywhere's," the man said. "No man can stop you all!"
"But a woman mout!" Rasba exclaimed, with sudden humour. "Yistehd'y
evenin', up yonway, by the Ohio River, I found a man shot through into
his shanty-boat. He said he 'lowed to land along of the same eddy with a
woman, an' she shot him almost daid!"
"Ho law!" the fisherman cried, and another man and three or four women
drew near to hear the rest of the narrative. "How come hit?"
Rasba stood there talking to them, a speaker to an audience. He told of
his floating down into the Mississippi, and of his surprise at finding
the river so large, so without end. He said he kind of wanted to ask the
way of a shanty-boat, for a poor sinner must needs inquire of those he
finds in the wilderness, and he heard a groan and a weak cry for help.
"I cyard for him, and he thanked me kindly; he said a woman had shot him
when he was trying to be friendly; a pretty woman, young and alone.
Co'rse, I washed his wound and I linimented it, and I cut the bullet out
of his back; law me, but that man swore! Come night, an' he heard say I
was a parson, he apologized because he cursed, and this mo'nin' he'd
done lit out, yas, suh! Neveh no good-bye. Scairt, likely, hearin' me
pray theh because I needed he'p, an' 'count of me being glad of the
chanct to he'p any man in trouble."
"Sho! Who all mout that man be, Parson?"
"He said his name were Jest Prebol----"
"Ho law! Somebody done plugged Jest Prebol!" one of the women cried out,
laughing. "That scoundrel's be'n layin' off to git shot this long time,
an' so he's got hit. I bet he won't think he's so winnin' of purty women
no more! He's bad, that man, gamblin' an' shootin' craps an' workin' the
banks. Served him right, yes, indeedy. But he'd shore hate to know a
parson hearn him cussin' an' swearin' around. Hit don't bring a gambler
any luck, bein' heard swearin', no."
"Nor if any one else hears him; not if he thinks swearin' in hisn's
heart!" Rasba shook his head gravely. "How come hit yo' know that man?"
"He's used down this riveh ten-fifteen years; besides, he married my
sister what's Mrs. Dollis now. Hit were a long time ago, though, 'fore
anybody knowed he wa'n't no good. I bet we hearn yo' was comin',
Parson. Whiskey Williams said they was a Hallelujah Singer comin' down
the Ohio--said he could hear him a mile. I bet yo' sing out loud
sometimes?"
"Hit's so," Rasba admitted. "I sung right smart comin' down the Ohio.
Seems like I jest wanted to sing, like birds in the posey time."
"Prebol shore should git to a doctor, shot up thataway. He didn't say
which lady shot him, Parson?" a woman asked.
"No; jes' a lady into an eddy into a lonesome bend." Rasba shook his
head. "A purty woman, livin' alone on this riveh. Do many do that?"
"Riveh ladies all do, sometimes. I tripped from Cairo to Vicksburg into
a skift once," a tall, angular woman said. "My man that use to be had
stoled the shanty-boat what I'd bought an' paid for with my own money. I
went up the bank at Columbus Hickories, gettin' nuts; I come back, an'
my boat was gone. Wa'n't I tearin' an' rearin'! Well, I hoofed hit down
to Columbus, an' I bought me a skift, count of me always havin' some
money saved up."
"I bet Vicksburg's a hundred mile!" Rasba mused.
"A hundred mile!" the woman said with a guffaw. "Hit's six hundred an'
sixty-three miles from Cairo to Vicksburg, yes, indeed. A hundred mile!
I made hit in ten days, stoppin' along. I ketched it theh."
"You found yo' man?"
"Shucks! Hit wa'n't the man I wanted, hit were my boat--a nice, reg'lar
pine an' oak-frame boat. I bet me I chucked him ovehbo'd, an' towed back
up to Memphis. Hit were a good $300 bo't, sports built, an' hits on the
riveh yet--Dart Mitto's got hit, junkin'. You'll see him down by
Arkansaw Old Mouth if yo's trippin' right down."
"I expect to," Rasba replied, doubtfully. Never in his life before had
he talked in terms of hundreds of miles, cities, and far rivers,
"Yo'll know that boat; he's went an' painted hit a sickly yeller, like a
railroad station. I hate yeller! Gimme a nice light blue or a right
bright green."
"Hyar comes anotheh bo't!" one of the men remarked, and all turned to
look up the chute, where a little cabin-boat had drifted into sight.
No one was on deck, and it was apparent that the Columbus banks had
shunted the craft clear across the river and down the chute, just as
Rasba himself had been carried. The shadow of the trees on the west side
of the chute fell across the boat and immediately brought the tripper
out of the cabin.
A shadow is a warning on wide rivers. It tells of the nearness of a
bank, or towhead, or even of a steamboat. In mid-stream there is little
need for apprehension, but when the current carries one down into a
caving bend and close to overhanging trees or along the edges of short,
boiling eddies, it is time to get out and look for snags and
jeopardies.
Seeing the group of people on the sandbar, the journeyer, who was a
woman, took the sweeps of her boat and began to work over to them.
"Hit handles nice, that bo't!" one of the fishermen said. "Pulls jes'
like a skift. Wonder who that woman is?"
"I've seen her some'rs," the powerful, angular woman, Mrs. Cooke, said
after a time. "Them's swell clothes she's got on. She's all alone, too,
an' what a lady travels alone down yeah for I don't know. She's purty
enough to have a husband, I bet, if she wants one."
"Looks like one of them Pittsburgh er Cincinnati women," Jim Caope
declared.
"No." Mrs. Caope shook her head. "She's off'n the riveh. Leastwise, she
handles that bo't reg'lar. I cayn't git to see her face, but I seen her
some'rs, I bet. I can tell a man by hisns walk half a mile."
In surprise she stared at the boat as it came nearer, and then walked
down to the edge of the bar to greet the newcomer.
"Why, I jes' knowed I'd seen yo' somers! How's yer maw?" she greeted.
"Ho law! An' yo's come tripping down Ole Mississip'! I 'clare, now, I'd
seen yo', an' I knowed hit, an' hyar yo' be, Nelia Crele. Did yo' git
shut of that up-the-bank feller yo' married, Nelia?"
"I'm alone," the girl laughed, her gaze turning to look at the others,
who stood watching.
"If yo' git a good man," Mrs. Caope philosophized, "hang on to him.
Don't let him git away. But if yo' git somebody that's shif'less an' no
'count, chuck him ovehbo'd. That's what I b'lieve in. Well, I declare!
Hand me that line an' I'll tie yo' to them stakes. Betteh throw the
stern anchor over, fo' this yeah's a shallows, an' the riveh's eddyin',
an' if hit don't go up hit'll go down, an'----"
"Theh's a head rise coming out the Ohio," someone said. "Yo' won't need
no anchor over the stern!"
"Sho! I'm glad to see yo'!" Mrs. Caope cried, wrapping her arms around
the young woman as she stepped down to the sand, and kissing her. "How
is yo' maw?"
"Very well, indeed!" Nelia laughed, clinging to the big river woman's
hand. "I'm so glad to find someone I know!"
"You'll know us all d'rectly. Hyar's my man, Mr. Caope--real nice
feller, too, if I do say hit--an' hyar's Mrs. Dobstan an' her two
darters, an' this is Mr. Falteau, who's French and married May, there,
an' this feller--say, mister, what is yo' name?"
"Rasba, Elijah Rasba."
"Mr. Rasba, he's a parson, out'n the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy, comin'
down. Miss Nelia Crele, suh. I disremember the name of that feller yo'
married, Nelia."
"It doesn't matter," Nelia turned to the mountain man, her face
flushing. "A preacher down this river?"
"I'm looking for a man," Rasba replied, gazing at her, "the son of a
widow woman, and she's afraid for him. She's afraid he'll go wrong."
"And you came clear down here to look for him--a thousand, two thousand
miles?" she continued, quickly.
"I had nothing else to do--but that!" he shook his head. "You see,
missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"
He turned and walked away with bowed head. They all watched him with
quick comprehension and real sympathy.
CHAPTER XI
Jest Prebol, sore and sick with his bullet wound, but more alarmed on
account of having sworn so much while a parson was dressing his injury,
could not sleep, and as he thought it over he determined at last to cut
loose and drop on down the river and land in somewhere among friends, or
where he could find a doctor. But the practised hand of Rasba had
apparently left little to do, and it was superstitious dread that
worried Prebol.
So the river rat crept out on the sandbar, cast off the lines, and with
a pole in one hand, succeeded in pushing out into the eddy where the
shanty-boat drifted into the main current. Prebol, faint and weary with
his exertions, fell upon his bunk. There in anguish, delirious at
intervals, and weak with misery, he floated down reach, crossing, and
bend, without light or signal. In olden days that would have been
suicide. Now the river was deserted and no steamers passed him up or
down. His cabin-boat, but a rectangular shade amidst the river shadows,
drifted like a leaf or chip, with no sound except when a coiling jet
from the bottom suckled around the corners or rippled along the sides.
The current carried him nearly six miles an hour, but two or three times
his boat ran out of the channel and circled around in an eddy, and then
dropped on down again. Morning found him in mid-stream, between two
wooded banks, as wild as primeval wilderness, apparently. The sun, which
rose in a white mist, struck through at last, and the soft light poured
in first on one side then on the other as the boat swirled around. Once
the squirrels barking in near-by trees awakened the man's dim
consciousness, but a few minutes later he was in mid-stream, making a
crossing where the river was miles wide.
He passed Hickman just before dawn, and toward noon he dropped by New
Madrid, and the slumping of high, caving banks pounded in his ears down
three miles of changing channel. Then the boat crossed to the other side
and he lay there with eyes seared and staring. He discovered a grave
stone poised upon the river bank, but he could not tell whether it was
fancy or fact that the ominous thing bent toward him and fell with a
splash into the river, while a wave tossed his boat on its way. He heard
a quavering whine that grew louder until it became a shriek, and then
fell away into silence, but his senses were slow in connecting it with
one of the Tiptonville cotton gins. He heard a voice, curiously human,
and having forgotten the old hay-burner river ferry, worried to think
that he should imagine someone was driving a mule team on the
Mississippi. For a long time he was in acute terror, because he thought
he was blind, and could not see, but to his amazed relief he saw a river
light and knew that another night had fallen upon him, so he went to
sleep once more.
Voices awakened him. He opened his eyes, and the surroundings were
familiar. He smelled iodine, and saw a man looking over a doctor's case.
Leaning against the wall of the cabin-boat was a tall, slender young man
with arms folded.
"How's he comin' Doc'?" the young man was saying.
"He'll be all right. How long has he been this way?"
"Don't know, Doc; he come down the riveh an' drifted into this eddy. I
see his lips movin', so I jes' towed 'im in an' sent fo' yo'!"
"Just as well, for that wound sure needed dressing. I 'low a horse
doctor fixed hit first time," the physician declared. "He'll need some
care now, but he's comin' along."
"Oh, we'll look afteh him, Doc! Friend of ourn."
"I'll come in to-morrow. It's written down what to do, and about that
medicine. You can read?"
"Howdy," Prebol muttered, feebly.
"He's a comin' back, Doc!" the young man cried, starting up with
interest.
"Well, old sport, looks like you'd got mussed up some?" the doctor
inquired.
"Yas, suh," Prebol grinned, feebly, his senses curiously clear. "Hit
don't pay none to mind a lady's business fo' her, no suh!"
"A lady shot you, eh?"
"Yas, suh," Prebol grinned. "'Peahs like I be'n floatin' about two mile
high like a flock o' ducks. Where all mout I be?"
"Little Prairie Bend."
"Into that bar eddy theh?"
"Yas, suh--the short eddy."
"Much obliged, Doc. Co'se I'll pay yo'----"
"Your friend's paid!"
"Yas, suh," Prebol whispered, sleepily, tired by the exertion and
excitement.
"Sleep'll do him good," the doctor said, and returned to his little
motorboat.
The young man went on board his own boat which was moored just below
Prebol's. As he entered the cabin, a burly, whiskered man looked up and
said:
"How's he coming, Slip?"
"Doc says he's all right. Jest said a woman shot him for tryin' to mind
her business, kind-a laughed about hit."
"Theh! I always knowed a man that'd chase women the way he done'd git
what's comin'. A woman'll make trouble quicker'n anything else on Gawd's
earth, she will."
"Sho! Buck, yo's soured!"
"Hit's so 'bout them women!" Buck protested.
"If a man'd mind his business, an' not try to mind their business,
women'd be plumb amusin'," Slip laughed.
"Wait'll yo've had experience," Buck retorted.
"Shucks! Ain't I had experience?"
"Eveh married?"
"No-o."
"Eveh have a lady sic' yo' onto some'n bigger'n yo' is?"
"No-o; reckon I pick my own people to scrap."
"Theh! That shows how much yo' don't know about women. Never had no
woman yo' 'lowed to marry?"
"Huh! Catch me gittin' married--co'se not."
"Sonny, lemme tell yo'; hit ain't yo'll do the catchin', an' hit won't
be yo' who'll be decidin' will yo' git married. An' hit won't be yo'
who'll decide how long yo'll stay married, no, indeed."
"Peah's like yo' got an awful grouch ag'in women, Buck."
"Why shouldn't I have?" Buck started up from shuffling and throwing a
book of cards. "Look't me. If Jest Prebol's shot most daid by a woman,
look't me. Do you know me--where I come from, where the hell I'm goin'?
Yo' bet you don't. I've been shanty-boatin' fifteen years, but I ain't
always been a shanty-boater, no, I haven't. Talk to me about women. When
I think what I've took from one woman--Sho!"
He stared at the floor, his teeth clenched and his strong face set.
Slip stared. His pal had disclosed a new phase of character.
Buck turned and glared into Slip's eyes.
"I'll tell you, Slip, you're helpless when it comes to women. They've
played the game for ten thousand years, practised it every day, wearing
down men's minds and men never knew it. Read history, as I've done.
Study psychology, as I have. Go down into the fundamentals of human
experience and human activities, and learn the lesson. Fifteen years
I've been up and down these rivers, from Fort Benton to the Passes, from
the foothills of the Rockies to the headwaters of Clinch and Holston in
the Appalachians. Why? Because one woman sang her way into my heart, and
because she tied my soul to her little finger, and when she found that I
could not escape--when she had--when she had--What do you know about
women?"
Slip stared at him. His pal, partner in river enterprises, an old river
man, who talked little and who played the slickest games in the slickest
way, had suddenly emerged like a turtle's head, and spoken in terms of
science, education, breeding--regular quality folks' talk--under stress
of an argument about women. And they had argued the subject before with
jest and humour and without personal feeling.
Buck turned away, bent and shivering.
"I 'low I'll roast up them squirrels fo' dinner?" Slip suggested.
"They'll shore go good!" Buck assented. "I'll mux around some hot-bread,
an' some gravy."
"I got to make some meat soup for that feller, too."
"Huh! Jest Prebol's one of them damned fools what tried to forget a
woman among women," Buck sneered.
At intervals during the day Slip went over and gave Prebol his medicine,
or fed him on squirrel meat broth; toward night they floated their
35-foot shanty-boat out into the eddy, and anchored it a hundred yards
from the bank, where the sheriff of Lake County, Tennessee, no longer
had jurisdiction. In the late evening Slip lighted a big carbide light
and turned it toward the town on the opposite bank.
Pretty soon they heard the impatient dip of skiff oars, a river
fisherman came aboard, and stood for a minute over the heater stove,
warming his fingers. He soon went to the long, green-topped crap table
in the end of the room, and Slip stood opposite, to throw bones against
him. A tiny motorboat crossed a little later; and three men, two heavy
set and one a slim youth, entered, to sit down at one of the little
round tables and play a game.
One by one other patrons appeared, and soon there were fourteen or
fifteen. Slip and Buck glided about among them quietly, their eyes
alert, their hats drawn down over their eyes, taking a hand here,
throwing bones there, poking up the coal fire, putting on coffee, making
sandwiches, every moment on the _qui vive_, communicating with each
other by jerks of the hand, lifting of shoulders, or the faintest of
whisperings.
A jar against the side of the boat sent one or other of the two out to
look, to greet a newcomer or to fend off a drift log. A low whistle from
the stern took Buck through the aisle between the staterooms to the
kitchen where a rat-eyed little man waited him on the stern deck,
"Lo, Buck! I'm drappin' down in a hurry; I learn yo' was heah. Theh's a
feller drapping down out the Ohio; he's lookin' fo' a feller name of
Jock Drones--didn't hear what for. Yo' know 'im?"
"Nope, but I'll pass the word around."
"S'long!"
"Jock Drones--huh!" Buck repeated, turning into the lamp-lit kitchen
where Slip was sniffing the coffee pot.
"Friend of mine just stopped," Buck whispered. "There's a detective
coming down out of the Ohio. Told me to pass the word around. He's after
somebody by the name of Drones, Dock or Jock Drones."
Slip started, turned white, and his jaws parted. Buck's eyes opened a
little wider.
"S'all right, Slip! Keep your money in your belt, to be ready to run or
swim. It's a long river."
Slip could not trust himself to speak. Buck, patting him on the
shoulder, went on into the card room and closed the kitchen door behind
him, drawing the aisle curtains shut, too, so that no one would go back
until Slip had recovered his equilibrium.
CHAPTER XII
Augustus Carline instinctively slowed down his motorboat and took to
looking at the wide river, its quivering, palpitating surface; its
vistas at which he had to "look twice to see the end," as the river man
says with whimsical accuracy.
Negligent and thoughtless, he could now feel some things which had never
occurred to him before: his loneliness, his doubts, his very
helplessness and indecision. His wife had been like an island around
which he sailed and cruised, sure in his consciousness that he could
return at any time to that safe mooring. He had returned to find the
island gone, himself adrift on a boundless ocean, and he did not know
which way to turn. The cays and islets, the interesting rocks and the
questionable coral reefs supplied him with not the slightest semblance
of shelter, support, or safety.
He did not even know which side of the river to go to, nor where to
begin his search. He was wistful for human companionship, but as he
looked at the distant shanty-boats, and passed a river town or two, he
found himself diffident and shamed.
He saw a woman in a blue mother-hubbard dress leaning against the cabin
of her low, yellow shanty-boat, a cap a-rake on her head, one elbow
resting on her palm, and in the other a long-stemmed Missouri
meerschaum. Her face was as hard as a man's, her eyes were as blue and
level as a deputy sheriff's in the Bad Lands, and her lips were straight
and thin. How could a man ask her if she had seen his wife going down
that way?
He stopped his motor and let his boat drift. He wondered what he could
or would say when he overtook Nelia. There struck across his
imagination the figure of a man, the Unknown who had, perhaps, promised
her the care he had never given her, the affection which she had almost
never had from him. Having won her, this Unknown would likely defy him
down there in that awful openness and carelessness of the river.
He found a feeling of insignificance making its way into his mind. He
had been vain of his looks, but what did looks amount to down there? He
had been proud of his money, but what privilege did money give him on
that flood? He had rejoiced in his popularity and the attention women
paid him, but the indifferent gaze of that smoking Amazon chilled his
self-satisfaction. He cringed as he seemed to see Nelia's pretty eyes
glancing at him, her puzzled face as she apparently tried to remember
where she had seen him. The river wilted the crumpling flower of his
pride.
As his boat turned like a compass needle in the surface eddies he saw a
speck far up stream. He brought out his binoculars and looked at it,
thinking that it was some toy boat, but to his astonishment it turned
out to be a man in a skiff.
It occurred to Carline that he wished he could talk to someone, to any
one, about anything. He had no resources of his own to draw on. He had
always been obliged to be with people, talk to people, enjoy people; the
silences of his wife's tongue had been more difficult for him to bear
than her edged words. The skiff traveller, leisurely floating in that
block of river, drew him irresistibly. He kicked over the flywheel and
steered up stream, but only enough partly to overcome the speed of the
current. The sensation of being carried down in spite of the motor
power, complicated with the rapid approach of the stranger in his skiff,
was novel and amusing. When he stopped the motor, the rowboat was
within a hundred feet of him, and the two men regarded each other with
interest and caution.
The traveller was unusual, in a way. On his lap was a portable
typewriter, in the stern of the boat a bundle of brown canvas; a brass
oil stove was on the bottom at the man's feet; behind him in the bow
were a number of tins, cans, and boxes.
Neither spoke for some time, and then Carline hailed:
"Nice, pretty day on the river!"
"Fine!" the other replied. "Out the Ohio?"
"No--well, yes--I started at Evansville, where I bought this boat, but I
live up the Mississippi, at Kaskaskia--Gage, they call it now."
"Yes? I stopped at Menard's on my way down from St Louis."
"When was that?"
"About ten days ago--tell you in a minute--Monday a week!" A big quarto
loose-leaf notebook had revealed the day and date.
"Well, say--I----?" Carline's one question leaped to his lips but
remained unasked. For the minute he could not ask it. The thing that had
been his rage, and then his wonder, suddenly drew back into his heart as
a secret sorrow.
"Won't you come over?" Carline asked, "it'd be company!"
"Yes, it'll be company," the other admitted, and with a pull of his oars
brought the skiff alongside. He climbed aboard, painter in hand, and
making the light line fast to one of the cleats, sat down on the locker
across from his host.
"My name's Carline."
"Mine's Lester Terabon; a newspaper let me come down the river to write
stories about it; it's the biggest thing I ever saw!"
"It's an awful size!" Carline admitted, looking around over his
shoulder, and Terabon watched the face.
"Are you a river man?" the visitor asked.
"No. My father was a big farmer, and he made some money when they put a
railroad through one of his places."
"Just tripping down to see the river?"
"No-o--well----" Carline hesitated, looking overside at the water.
"That must be Wolf Island over there?" the reporter suggested.
Carline looked at the island. He looked down the main river and over
toward the chute toward which the Columbus bluffs had shunted them. Then
he started the motor and steered into the main channel to escape the
rippling shoals which flickered in the sunshine ahead of them, past an
island sandbar.
"I don't know if it's Wolf Island." Carline shook his head. "I'm looking
for somebody--somebody who came down this way."
The traveller waited. He looked across the current to the bluffs now
passing up stream, Columbus and all.
"I don't suppose you find very much to write about, coming down?"
Carline changed his mind.
For answer Terabon drew his skiff alongside and reached for his
typewriter. As he began to write, he said: "I write everything down--big
or little. A man can't remember everything, you know."
"Make good money writing for the newspapers?"
"Enough to live on," Terabon replied, "and, of course, it's living,
coming down Old Mississip'!"
"You like it travelling in that skiff? Where do you sleep?"
"I stretch that canvas between the gunwales in those staples; I put
those hoops up, and draw a canvas over the whole length of the boat. I
can sleep like a baby in its cradle."
"Well, that's one way," Carline replied, doubtfully. "If I owned this
old river, you could buy it for two cents."
Terabon laughed, and after a minute Carline joined in, but he had told
the truth. He hated the river, and he was cowed by it; yet he could not
escape its clutches.
"I fancy it hasn't always treated you right," Terabon remarked.
"Treated me right!" Carline doubled his fists and stiffened where he
sat. "It's!--it's----"
He could not speak for his emotion, but his little pointed chin trembled
a minute later as he relaxed and looked over his shoulder again. The
typewriter clicked along for minutes, Terabon's fingers dancing over the
keys as he put down, word for word, and motion for motion, the man who
was afraid of the river and yet was tripping down it. It seemed as
though the man afraid must have some kind of courage, too, because he
was going in spite of his fears.
"It's passing noon, and I think I'll get something to eat," Terabon
suggested; "I'll get up my----"
"I forgot to eat!" Carline said. "I've got everything, and that knob
there is a three-burner oil stove. We'll eat on board. Never mind your
stuff, I've got so much it'll spoil--but I ain't much of a cook!"
"I'm the original cook the Cæsars wanted to buy for gold!" Terabon
boasted. "I got some squirrels, there, I killed up on Buffalo Island,
and we'll fry them."
Nor did he fail to make his boast good, for he soon had hot-bread, gravy
browned in the pan, boiled sweet potatoes, and canned corn ready for the
table. When they sat down to eat, Carline confessed that he hadn't had
a real meal for a week except one he ate in a Cairo restaurant.
"I could have got a kind of a meal," he admitted, "but you see I was
worried a good deal. Did you stop at Stillhouse Island?"
"Where's that?"
"Just above Gage, kind of across from St. Genevieve."
"Let's see--oh, yes. There was an old fellow there, what's his name? He
told me if I happened to see his daughter I should tell her to write
him, for her mother wanted to hear."
"He said that! And you--it was Crele, Darien Crele said that?"
"That's the name--Nelia, his daughter."
"Yes, sir. I know. I guess I know! She's my wife--she was--It's
her----"
"You're looking for?"
"Yes, sir; she ran away and left me. She came down here."
"Kind of a careless girl, I imagine?"
"Careless! God, no! The finest woman you ever saw. It was me--I was to
blame. I never knew, I never knew!"
For a minute he held up his arms, looking tensely at the sky, struggling
to overcome the emotion that long had been boiling up in his heart,
rending the self-complacency of his mind. Then he broke down--broke down
abjectly, and fell upon the cabin floor, crying aloud in his agony,
while the newspaper man sitting there whispered to himself:
"Poor devil, here's a story! He's sure getting his. I don't want to
forget this; got to put this down. Poor devil!"
CHAPTER XIII
"And he says he's a sinner himself," Nelia repeated, when she returned
on board her cabin-boat in the sheltering safety of Wolf Island chute,
with Mamie Caope, Parson Rasba, and the other shanty-boaters within a
stone's toss of her.
Till she was among them, among friends she trusted, she had not noticed
the incessant strain which she endured down those long, grim river
miles. Now she could give way, in the privacy of her boat, to feminine
tears and bitterness. Courage she had in plenty, but she had more
sensitiveness than courage. She was not yet tuned to the river
harmonies.
Something in Rasba's words, or it was in his voice, or in the quick,
full-flood of his glance, touched her senses.
"You see, missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"
What had he meant? If he had meant that she, too, was a sinner, was that
any of his business? Of course, being a parson--she shrugged her
shoulders. Her thoughts ran swiftly back to her home that used-to-be.
She laughed as she recalled the deprecatory little man who had preached
in the church she had occasionally attended. She compared the trim,
bird-like perspicuity and wing-flap gestures of Rev. Mr. Beeve with the
slow, huge turn and stand-fast of Parson Rasba.
She was glad to escape the Mississippi down this little chute; she was
glad to have a phrase to puzzle over instead of the ever-present problem
of her own future and her own fate; she was glad that she had drifted in
on Mrs. Mame Caope and Jim and Mr. Falteau and Mrs. Dobstan and Parson
Rasba, instead of falling among those other kinds of people.
Mrs. Caope was an old acquaintance of her mother who had lived all her
life on the rivers. She was a better boatman than most, and could pilot
a stern-wheel whiskey boat or set hoop nets for fish.
"If I get a man, and he's mean," Mrs. Caope had said often, "I shift
him. I 'low a lady needs protection up the bank er down the riveh, but I
'low if my cookin' don't pay my board, an' if fish I take out'n my nets
ain't my own, and the boat I live in ain't mine--well, I've drapped two
men off'n the stern of my boat to prove hit!"
Mrs. Caope had not changed at all, not in the years Nelia could recall,
except to change her name. It was the custom, to ask, perfectly
respectfully, what name she might be having now, and Mrs. Mame never
took offence, being good natured, and understanding how hard it was to
keep track of her matrimonial adventures, episodes of sentiment but
without any nonsense.
"Sho!" Mrs. Caope had said once, "I disremember if I couldn't stand him
er he couldn't stand me!"
Nelia, adrift in her own life, and sure now that she never had really
cared very much for Gus Carline, admitted to herself that her husband
had been only a step up out of the poverty and misery of her parents'
shack.
"You see, missy, I'm a sinner myse'f!"
Her ears had caught the depths of the pathos of his regret and sorrow,
and she pitied him. At the same time her own thoughts were ominous, and
her face, regular, bright, vivacious, showed a hardness which was alien
to it.
Nelia went over to Mrs. Caope's for supper, and Parson Rasba was there,
having brought in a wild goose which he had shot on Wolf Island while
going about his meditations that afternoon. Mrs. Caope had the goose
sizzling in the big oven of her coal range--coal from Pittsburgh barges
wrecked along the river on bars--and the big supper was sweeter smelling
than Rasba ever remembered having waited for.
Mrs. Caope told him to "ask one of them blessin's if yo' want, Parson!"
and the four bowed their heads.
Jim Caope then fell upon the bird, neck, wings, and legs, and while he
carved Mrs. Caope scooped out the dressing, piled up the fluffy
biscuits, and handed around the soup tureen full of gravy. Then she
chased the sauce with glass jars full of quivering jellies, reaching
with one hand to take hot biscuits from the oven while she caught up the
six-quart coffee pot with the other.
"I ain't got no patience with them women that don't feed their men!" she
declared. "About all men want's a full stomach, anyhow, an' if you could
only git one that wa'n't lazy, an' didn't drink, an' wasn't impedent,
an' knowed anything, besides, you'd have something. Ain't that so,
Nelia?"
"Oh, indeed yes," Nelia cried, from the fullness of her experience,
which was far less than that of the hostess.
After they had eaten, they went from the kitchen into the sitting room,
where Rasba turned to Nelia.
"You came down the river alone?" he asked.
"Yes," she admitted.
"I wonder you wouldn't be scairt up of it--nights, and those lonesome
bends?"
"It's better than some other things." Nelia shook her head. "Besides,
you've come alone down the Ohio yourself."
He looked at her, and Mrs. Caope chuckled.
"But--but you're a woman!" Rasba exclaimed.
"Suppose a mean man came aboard your boat, and--and tried to rob you,"
Nelia asked, level voiced, "what would you do?"
"Why, course, I'd--I'd likely stop him."
"You'd throw him overboard?"
"Well--if hit were clost to the bank an' he could swim, I mout."
Nelia and the Caopes laughed aloud, and Rasba joined in the merriment.
When the laughter had subsided, Rasba said:
"The reason I was asking, as I came by the River Forks I found a little
red boat there with a man on the cabin floor shot through----"
"Dead?" Nelia gasped.
"No, just kind of pricked up a bit, into one shoulder. He said a lady
shot him because he 'lowed to land into the same eddy with her."
"But--where----?" Nelia half-whispered. "Where did he go?"
"Hit were Jest Prebol," Mrs. Caope said. "You was tellin' of him,
Parson."
"Hit were Prebol," Rasba nodded, "an' he shore needed shooting!"
"Yas, suh. That kind has to be shot some to make 'em behave
theirselves," Mrs Caope exclaimed, sharply. "If it wa'n't fer ladies
shootin' men onct in awhile, down Old Mississip', why, ladies couldn't
git to live here a-tall!"
"And women, sometimes, don't do men any good," Rasba mused, aloud, "I've
wondered right smart about hit. You see, a parson circuit rides around,
an' he sees a sight more'n he tells. Lawse, he shore do!"
The two women glared at him, but he was studying his huge hands, first
the backs and then the calloused palms. He was really wondering, so the
two women glanced at each other, laughing. The idea that probably some
men needed protection from women could not help but amuse while it
exasperated them.
"Prebol said," Rasba continued, "hit were a pretty woman, young an'
alone. 'How'd I know?' he asked. 'How'd I know she were a spit-fire an'
mean, theh all alone into a lonesome bend? How'd I know?'"
"I 'low he shore found out," Mrs. Caope spoke up, tartly, and Nelia
looked at her gratefully. "Hit takes a bullet to learn fellers like Jest
Prebol--an' him thinkin' he's so smart an' such a lady killer. I bet he
knows theh's some ladies that's men killers, too, now. Next time he
meets a lady he'll wait to be invited 'fore he lands into the same eddy
with her, even if hit's a three-mile eddy."
"Theh's Mrs. Minah," Jim Caope suggested.
"Mrs. Minah!" Mrs. Caope exclaimed. "Talk about riveh ladies--theh's
one. She owns Mozart Bend. Seventeen mile of Mississippi River's her'n,
an' nobody but knows hit, if not to start with, then by the end. She
stands theh, at the breech of her rifle, and, ho law, cayn't she shoot!
She's real respectable, too, cyarful an' 'cordin' to law. She's had
seven husbands, four's daid an' two's divorced, an' one she's got yet,
'cordin' to the last I hearn say about it. I tell you, if a lady's got
any self-respect, she'll git a divorce, an' she'll git married ag'in.
That's what I say, with divorces reasonable, like they be, an' costin'
on'y $17.50 to Mendova, or Memphis, er mos' anywheres."
"How long--how long does it take?" Nelia asked, eagerly.
"Why, hardly no time at all. You jes' go theh, an' the lawyer he takes
all he wants to know, an' he says come ag'in, an' next day, er the next
trip, why, theh's yo' papers, an' all for $17.50. Seems like they's got
special reg'lations for us shanty-boaters."
"I'm glad to know about that," Nelia said. "I thought--I never knew much
about--about divorces. I thought there was a lot of--of rigmarole and
testimony and court business."
"Nope! I tell yo', some of them Mendova lawyers is slick an'
'commodatin'. Why, one time I was in an awful hurry, landin' in 'long of
the upper ferry, an' I went up town, an' seen the lawyer, an' told him
right how I was fixed. Les' see, that wa--um-m----Oh, I 'member now,
Jasper Hill. I'd married him up the line, I disremember--anyhow, 'fore
I'd drapped down to Cairo, I knowed he'd neveh do, nohow, so I left him
up the bank between Columbus an' Hickman--law me, how he squawked! Down
by Tiptonville, where I'd landed, they was a real nice feller, Mr.
Dickman. Well, we kind of co'ted along down, one place an anotheh, an'
he wanted to git married. I told how hit was, that I wasn't 'vorced, an'
so on, but if he meant business, we'd drap into Mendova, which we done.
He wanted to pay for the divorce, but I'm independent thataway. I think
a lady ought to pay for her own 'vorces, so I done hit, an' I was
divorced at 3 o'clock, married right next door into the Justice's, an'
we drapped out an' down the riveh onto our honeymoon. Mr. Dickman was a
real gentleman, but, somehow, he couldn't stand the riveh. It sort of
give him the malary, an' he got to thinking about salmon fishin' so he
went to the Columbia. We parted real good friends, but the Mississippi's
good 'nough for me, yes, indeed. I kind of feel zif I knowed hit, an'
hit's real homelike."
"It is lovely down here," Nelia remarked. "Everything is so kind
of--kind of free and easy. But wasn't it dreadful--I mean the first
time--the first divorce, Mamie?"
"Course, yes, course," Mrs. Caope admitted, slowly, with a frown, "I
neveh will forget mine. I'd shifted my man, an' I was right down to
cornmeal an' bacon. Then a real nice feller come along, Mr. Darlet. I
had to take my choice between a divorce an' a new weddin' dress, an' I
tell you hit were real solemocholy fer me decidin' between an' betwixt.
You know how young gals are, settin' a lot by dresses an' how they look,
an' so on. Young gals ain' got much but looks, anyhow. Time a lady gits
experience, she don't set so much store by looks, an' she don't have to,
nohow. Well, theh I was, with a nice man, an' if I didn't divorce that
first scoundrel where'd I be? So I let the dress go, an' mebby you'll
b'lieve hit, an' mebby yo' won't, but I had $18.97, an' I paid my $17.50
real reg'lar, an' I had jest what was left, $1.47, an' me ready to bust
out crying, feelin' so mean about marryin' into an old walking skirt.
"I was all alone, an' I had a good notion to run down the back way, an'
trip off down the riveh without no man, I felt so 'shamed. An' theh,
right on the sidewalk, was a wad of bills, $99 to a penny. My lan'! I
wropped my hand around hit, an' yo' should of seen Mr. Darlet when he
seen me come walking down, new hat, new dress, new shoes, new silk
stockings--the whole business new. I wa'n't such a bad-lookin' gal,
afteh all. That taught me a lesson. I've always be'n real savin' sinct
then, an' I ain't be'n ketched sinct with the choice to make of a 'vorce
er a weddin' dress. No, indeed, not me!"
Parson Rasba looked at her, and Nelia, her eyes twinkling, looked at the
Parson. Nelia could understand the feelings in all their minds. She had
her own viewpoint, too, which was exceedingly different from those of
the others. The strain of weeks of questioning, weeks of mental
suffering, was relieved by the river woman's serious statement and
Parson Rasba's look of bewilderment at the kaleidoscopic matrimonial
adventuring. At the same time, his wonder and Mrs. Caope's unconscious
statement stirred up in her thoughts a new questioning.
When Nelia returned on board her boat, and sat in its cabin, a freed
woman, she very calmly reckoned up the advantages of Mrs. Caope's
standards. Then seeing that it was after midnight, and that only the
stars shone in that narrow, wooded chute, she felt she wanted to go out
into the wide river again, to go where she was not shut in. She cast off
her lines and noiselessly floated out and down the slow current.
She saw Parson Rasba's boat move out into the current behind her and
drift along in the soft, autumn night. Her first thought was one of
indignation, but when a little later they emerged into the broad river
current and she felt the solitude of the interminable surface, her mood
changed.
What the big, quizzical mountain parson had in mind she did not know. It
was possible that he was a very bad man, indeed. She could not help but
laugh under her breath at his bewilderment regarding Mrs. Caope, which
she felt was a genuine expression of his real feelings. At the same
time, whatever his motive in following her, whether it was to protect
her--which she could almost believe--or to court her, which was not at
all unlikely, or whether he had a baser design, she did not know, but
she felt neither worry nor fear.
"I don't care," she shook her head, defiantly, "I like him!"
CHAPTER XIV
Carline recovered his equilibrium after a time. His nerves, long on the
ragged edge, had given way, and he was ashamed of his display of
emotion.
"Seems as though some things are about all a man can stand," he said to
Terabon, the newspaper man. "You know how it is!"
"Oh, yes! I've had my troubles, too," Terabon admitted.
"It isn't fair!" Carline exclaimed. "Why can't a man enjoy himself and
have a good time, and not--and not----"
"Have a headache the next day?" Terabon finished the sentence with a
grave face.
"That's it. I'm not what you'd call a hard drinker; I like to take a
cocktail, or a whiskey, the same as any man. I like to go out around and
see folks, talk to 'em, dance--you know, have a good time!"
"Everybody does," Terabon admitted.
"And my wife, she wouldn't go around and she was--she was----"
"Jealous because you wanted to use your talents to entertain?"
"That's it, that's it. You understand! I'm a good fellow; I like to joke
around and have a good time. Take a man that don't go around, and he's a
dead one. It ain't as though she couldn't be a good sport--Lord! Why,
I'd just found out she was the best sport that ever lived. I thought
everything was all right. Next day she was gone--tricky as the devil!
Why, she got me to sign up a lot of papers, got all my spare cash,
stocks, bonds--everything handy. Oh, she's slick! Bright, too--bright's
anybody. Why, she could talk about books, or flowers, or birds--about
anything. I never took much interest in them."
"And brought up in that shack on Distiller's Island?"
"Stillhouse Island, yes, sir. What do you know about that?"
"A remarkable woman!"
"Yes, sir--I--I've got some photographs," and Carline turned to a
writing desk built into the motorboat. He brought out fifteen or twenty
photographs. Terabon looked at them eagerly. He could not associate the
girl of the pictures with the island shack, with this weakling man, nor
yet with the Mississippi River--at least not at that moment.
"She's beautiful," he exclaimed, sincerely.
"Yes, sir." Carline packed the pictures away.
He started the motor, straightened the boat out and steered into
mid-stream, looking uncertainly from side to side.
"There's no telling," he said, "not about anything."
"On the river no one can tell much about anything!" Terabon assented.
"You're just coming down, I suppose, looking for hist'ries to write?"
"That's about it. I just sit in the skiff, there, and I write what I
see, on the machine: A big sandbar, a flock of geese, a big oak tree
just on the brink of the bank half the roots exposed and going to fall
in a minute or a day--everything like that!"
"I bet some of these shanty-boaters could tell you histories," Carline
said. "I tell you, some of them are bad. Why, they'd murder a man for
ten dollars--those river pirates would."
"No doubt about it!"
"But they wouldn't talk, 'course. It must be awful hard to make up them
stories in the magazines."
"Oh, if a man gets an idea, he can work it up into a story. It takes
work, of course, and time."
"I don't see how anybody can do it." Carline shook his head. "There's a
man up to Gage. He wants to write a book, but he ain't never been able
to find anything to write about. You see, Gage ain't much but a little
landing, you might say."
"Chester, and the big penitentiary is just below there, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes!"
"I'd think there might be at least one story for him to write there."
"Oh, he don't want to write about crooks; he wants to write about nice
people, society people, and that kind, and big cities. He says it's
awful hard to find anybody to write about."
"You've got to look to find heroes," Terabon admitted. "I came more than
a thousand miles to see a shanty-boat."
"You di-i-d? Just to see a shanty-boat!" Carline stared at Terabon in
amazement.
In spite of Terabon being such a queer duck he made a good companion. He
was a good cook, for one thing, and when they landed in below Hickman
Bend, he went ashore and killed three squirrels and two black ducks in
the woods and marsh beyond the new levee.
When he returned, he found a skiff landed near by on the sandbar.
Carline was talking to the man, who had just handed over a gallon jug.
The man pulled away swiftly and disappeared down the chute. Carline
explained:
"He's a whiskey pedlar; a man always needs to have whiskey on board;
malaria is bad down here, and a fellow might catch cold. You see how it
is if a man don't have some whiskey on board."
"I understand," Terabon admitted.
After supper Carline decided that there was a lot of night air around,
and that a man couldn't take too many precautions against that deadly
river miasma whose insidious menace so many people have ignored to their
great cost. As for himself, Carline didn't propose to be taken bad when
he had so universal a specific, to take or leave alone, just as he
wanted.
Terabon, having put up the hoops of his skiff and stretched the canvas
over them, retired to his own boat and spent two hours writing.
In the morning, when he stirred out, he found Carline lying in the
engine pit, oblivious to the night air that had fallen upon him,
protected as he was by his absorption of the sure preventive of night
air getting him first. The jug was on the floor, and Terabon, after a
little thought, poured out about two and a half quarts which he replaced
with distilled water from the motorboat's drinking bottle. Then he
dropped down the chute into the main river to resume his search for
really interesting "histories."
The river had never been more glorious than that morning. The sun shone
from a white, misty sky. It was warm, with the slight tang of autumn,
and the yellow leaves were fluttering down; squirrels were barking, and
a flock of geese, so high in the air that they sparkled, in the
sunshine, were gossiping, and the music of their voices rained upon the
river surface as upon a sounding board.
Terabon was approaching Donaldson's Point, Winchester Chute, Island No.
10, and New Madrid. An asterisk on his map showed that Slough Neck was
interesting, and sure enough, he found a 60-foot boat just above Upper
Slough Landing, anchored off the sandbar. This was a notorious whiskey
boat, and just below it was a flight of steps up the steep bank. No
plantation darky ever used those steps. He would rather scramble in the
loose silt and risk his neck than climb that easy stairway--yes,
indeed!
Terabon, drifting by, close at hand, gazed at the scene. From that craft
Negroes had gone forth to commit crime; white men had gone out to do
murder, and one of them had rolled down those steps, shot dead. On the
other side of Slough Neck, just outside of Tiptonville, there was a tree
on which seven men had been lynched.
He pulled across to the foot of Island No. 10 sandbar, to walk up over
that historic ground, and to visit the remnants of Winchester Chute
where General Grant had moored barges carrying huge mortars with which
to drop shells into the Confederate works on Island No. 10.
He hailed a shanty-boat just below where he landed, and as the window
opened and he saw someone within, he asked:
"Will you kindly watch my skiff? I'm going up over the island."
"Yes, glad to!"
"Thank you." He bowed, and went upon his exploration.
It was hard to believe that this sandbar, grown to switch willows which
increased to poles six or seven inches in diameter, had once been a big
island covered with stalwart trees, with earthworks, cannon, and
desperate soldiers. Its serene quiet, undulating sands and casual
weed-trees, showing the stain of floods that had filled the bark with
sediment, proved the indifference of the river to fleeting human
affairs--the trifling work of human hands had been washed away in a
spring tide or two, and Island No. 10 was half way to the Gulf by this
time.
Terabon returned to his skiff three or four hours later, and taking up
his typewriter, began to write down what he had seen, elaborating the
pencil notes which he had made. As he wrote he became conscious of an
observer, and of the approach of someone who was diffident and
curious--a familiar enough sensation of late.
He looked up, started, and reached for his hat. It was a woman, a young
woman, with bright eyes, grace, dignity--and much curiosity.
"I didn't mean to disturb you," she apologized. "I was just wondering
what on earth you could be doing!"
"Oh, I'm writing--making notes----"
"Yes. But--here!"
"I'm a newspaper writer," he made his familiar statement. "My name is
Lester Terabon. I'm from New York. I came down here from St. Louis to
see the Mississippi."
"You write for newspapers?" she repeated.
She came and sat down on the bow deck of his skiff, frankly curious and
interested.
"My name's Nelia Crele," she smiled. "I'm a shanty-boater. That's my
boat."
"I'm sure I'm glad to meet you," he bowed, "Mrs. Crele."
"You find lots to write about?"
"I can't write fast enough," he replied, enthusiastically, "I've been
coming six weeks--from St. Louis. I've made more than 60,000 words in
notes already, and the more I make the more I despair of getting it all
down. Why, right here--New Madrid, Island 10, and--and----"
"And me?" she asked. "Did you stop at Gage?"
"At Stillhouse Island," he admitted, circumspectly. "Mr. Crele there
said I should be sure and tell his daughter, if I happened to meet her,
that her mother wanted her to be sure and write and let her know how she
is getting along."
"Oh, I'll do that," she assured him. "I was just writing home when you
landed in. Isn't it strange how everybody knows everybody down here, and
how you keep meeting people you know--that you've heard about? You knew
me when you saw me!"
"Yes--I'd seen your pictures."
"Mammy hadn't but one picture of me!" She stared at him.
"That's so," he thought, unused to such quick thought.
"Isn't it beautiful?" she asked him, looking around her. "Do you try to
write all that, too--I mean this sandbar, and those willows, and that
woods down there, and--the caving bank?"
"Everything," he admitted. "See?"
He handed her the page which he had just written. Holding it in one
hand--there was hardly a breath of air stirring--she read it word for
word.
"Yes, that's it!" She nodded her head. "How do you do it? I've just been
reading--let me see, '... the best romance becomes dangerous if by its
excitement it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting,
and--and----' I've forgotten the rest of it. Could anything make this
life down here--anything written, I mean--seem uninteresting?"
He looked at her without answering. What was this she was saying? What
was this shanty-boat woman, this runaway wife, talking about? He was
dazed at being transported so suddenly from his observations to such
reflections.
"That's right," he replied, inanely. "I remember reading
that--somewhere!"
"You've read Ruskin?" she cried. "Really, have you?"
"Sesame and Lilies--there's where it was!"
"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed, looking at him. He caught the full flash
of her delight, as well as surprise, at finding someone who had read
what she quoted, and could place the phrase.
"The sun's bright," she continued. "Won't you come down on my boat in
the shade? I've lots of books, and I'm hungry--I'm starving to talk to
somebody about them!"
It was a pretty little boat, sweet and clean; the sitting room was
draped with curtains along the walls, and there was a bookcase against
the partition. She drew a rocking chair up for him, drew her own little
sewing chair up before the shelves, and began to take out books.
He had but to sit there and show his sympathy with her excitement over
those books. He could not help but remember where he had first heard her
name, seen the depressed woman who was her mother. And the bent old
hunter who was her father. It was useless for him to try to explain
her.
Just that morning, too, he had left Nelia Crele's husband in an
alcoholic stupor--a man almost incredibly stupid!
"I know you don't mind listening to me prattle!" she laughed, archly.
"You're used to it. You're amused, too, and you're thinking what a story
I will make, aren't you, now?"
"If--if a man could only write you!" he said, with such sincerity that
she laughed aloud with glee.
"Oh, I've read books!" she declared. "I know--I've been miserable, and
I've been unhappy, but I've turned to the books, and they've told me.
They kept me alive--they kept me above those horrid little things which
a woman--which I have. You've never been in jail, I suppose?"
"What--in jail? I've been there, but not a prisoner. To see prisoners."
"You couldn't know, then, the way prisoners feel. I know. I reckon most
women know. But now I'm out of jail. I'm free."
He could not answer; her eyes flashed as they narrowed, and she fairly
glared at him in the intensity of her declaration.
"Oh, you couldn't know," she laughed, "but that's the way I feel. I'm
free! Isn't the river beautiful to-day? I'm like the river----"
"Which is kept between two banks?" he suggested.
"I was wrong," she shook her head. "I'm a bird----"
"I can well admit that," he laughed.
"Oh," she cried, in mock rebuke, "the idea!"
"It's your own--and a very brilliant one," he retorted, and they laughed
together.
There was no resisting the gale of Nelia Crete's effervescent spirits.
It was clear that she had burst through bonds of restraint that had
imprisoned her soul for years. Terabon was too acute an observer to
frighten the sensitive exhilaration. It would pass--he was only too sure
of that. What would follow?
The sandbar was miles long, miles wide; six or seven miles of caving
bend was visible below them, part of it over another sandbar that
extended out into the river. There was not a boat, house, human being,
or even fence in sight in any direction. Across the river there was a
cotton field, but so far away it was that the stalks were but a purple
haze under the afternoon sun.
"You think I'm queer?" she suddenly demanded.
"No, but I would be if----"
"If what?"
"If I didn't think you were the dandiest river tripper in the world," he
exclaimed.
"You're a dear boy," she laughed. "You don't know how much good you've
done me already. Now we'll get supper."
"I've two black ducks," he said. "I'll bet they'll make a good----"
"Roast," she took his word. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook, too!"
CHAPTER XV
The Mississippi River brings people from the most distant places to
close proximity; Pittsburg and even Salamanca meet Fort Benton and St.
Paul at the Forks of the Ohio. On the other hand, with uncanny
certainty, those most eager to meet are kept apart and thrown to the
ends of the world.
Parson Rasba saw Nelia Crele's boat drift out into the current and drop
down the Chute of Wolf Island, and impelled by solitude and imagination
he followed her. She had awakened sensations in his heart which he had
never before known, so he acted with primitive directness and moved out
into the Mississippi.
The river carried him swiftly toward a town whose electric lights
sparkled on a high bluff, Hickman, and he saw the cabin-boat of the
young and venturesome woman clearly outlined between him and the town.
For nearly an hour he was conscious of the assistance of the river in
carrying him along at an even pace, permitting him to remain as guardian
of the woman. He felt that she needed him, that he must help her, and
there grew in his heart an emotion which strangely made him desire to
sing and to shout.
He watched the cabin-boat drift down right into the pathway of
reflections that fell from the lights on Hickman bluffs. His eyes were
apparently fixed upon the boat, and he could not lose sight of it. The
river carried him right into the same glare, and for a few minutes he
looked up at the arcs, and shaded his eyes to get some view of the town
whose sounds consisted of the mournful howling of a dog.
Rasba looked back at the town, and felt the awe which a sleeping
village inspires in the thoughts of a passer-by. He thought perhaps he
would never again see that town. He wondered if there was a lost soul
there whose slumberings he could disturb and bring it to salvation. He
looked down the river, and the next instant his boat was seized as by a
strong hand and whirled around and around, and flung far from its
course. He remembered the phenomenon at the Forks of the Ohio, and again
at Columbus bluff's. With difficulty he found his bearings.
He looked around and saw to his surprise that he was drifting up stream.
He looked about him in amazement. He searched the blackness of the
river, and stared at the blinding lights of the town. He began to row
with his sweeps, and look down stream whither had disappeared the
cabin-boat whose occupant he had felt called upon to guard and protect.
That boat was gone. In the few minutes it had disappeared from his view.
He surmised, at last, that he had been thrust into an eddy, for the
current was carrying him up stream, and he rowed against it in vain.
Only when he had floated hundreds of yards in the leisurely reverse
current below the great bar of Island No. 6 and had drifted out into the
main current again, almost under the Hickman lights once more, was he
able in his ignorance to escape from the time-trap into which he had
fallen.
Standing at his oars, and rowing down stream, he tried to overtake the
young woman whose good looks, bright eyes, sympathetic understanding,
and need of his spiritual tutoring had caught his mind and made it
captive.
Dawn, following false dawn, saw him passing New Madrid, still rowing
impatiently, his eyes staring down the wild current, past a graveyard
poised ready to plunge on the left bank, and then down the baffling
crossing at Point Pleasant and through the sunny breadths up to
Tiptonville, half sunk in the river, only to fall away toward Little
Cypress--and still no sight of the lost cabin-boat.
In mid-afternoon, weary and worn by sleeplessness and expectancy, he
pulled his boat into the deadwater at the foot of an eddy and having
thrown over his stone anchor, sadly entered his cabin and, without
prayer, subsided into sleep.
If he dreamed he was not awakened to consciousness by his visions. He
slept on in the deep weariness which followed the wakefulness that had
continued through a night of undiminished anxiety into a day of doubt
and increasing despair. It had not occurred to him, in his simplicity,
that the young woman would escape from him. The shadow and the gloom
next to the bank on either side had not suggested his passing by the
object of his intention. His thought was that she must have gone right
on down stream, though he might have divined from his own condition that
she, too, long since must have been weary.
He awakened some time in the morning, after twelve hours or so of
uninterrupted slumber. He turned out into the fascinating darkness of
early morning on the Mississippi. A gust of chill wind swept down out of
the sky, rippling the surface and roaring through the woods up the bank.
The gust was followed by a raw calm and further blanketing of the few
stars that penetrated the veil of mist.
He had in mind the further pursuit of Nelia, and hauling in his anchor
he pulled out into mid-current and then by lamp-light prepared his
breakfast. While he worked, he discovered that dawn was near, and at
lengthening intervals he went out to look ahead, hoping to see the
object of his pursuit. Perhaps he would have gone on down to New
Orleans, only it is not written in Mississippi weather prophecies that
the tenor of one's way shall be even.
He heard wind blowing, and felt his boat bobbing about inexplicably. He
went out to look about him, and in the morning twilight he discovered
that the whole aspect of the Mississippi had changed. With the invisible
sunrise had come an awe-inspiring spectacle which excited in his mind
forebodings and dismay.
First, there was the cold wind which penetrated his clothes and
shrivelled the very meat of his bones. The river's surface, which he had
come to regard as a shimmering, polished floor, was now rumpled and
broken into lumpy waves, like mud on a road, and the waves broke into
dull yellow foam caps. There was not a light gleam on the whole surface,
and dark shadows seemed to crawl and twist about in the very substance
of the heavy and turgid waters.
Rasba stared. Born and trained in mountains, where he remembered clear
streams of pale, beautiful green, catching reflections of white clouds
and clean foliage, with only occasional patches of sullen clay-bank
wash, he refused to acknowledge the great tawny Mississippi at its best,
as a relation of the streams he knew. Certainly this menacing dawn
reminded him of nothing he had ever witnessed. Waves slapped against his
boat, waves which did not conceal, but rather accentuated, the sullen
and relentless rush of the vast body of the water. While the surface
leaped and struggled, wind-racked, the deeps moved steadily on. Elijah
saw that his boat was being driven into a river chute, and seizing his
sweeps, he began to row toward a sandbar which promised shoal water and
a landing.
He managed to strike the foot of the bar, and threw out his anchor rock.
He let go enough line to let the boat swing, and went in to breakfast.
While he was eating, he noticed that the table turned gray and that a
yellowish tinge settled upon everything. When he went out to look
around, he found that the air was full of a cloud that filled his eyes
with dust, and that a little drift of sand had already formed on the
deck of his boat, gritting under his feet. The cloud was so thick that
he could hardly see the river shores; a gale was blowing, and a whole
sandbar, miles long, was coming down upon him from the air. The sandbar,
when he looked at it, seemed fairly to be running, like water.
Parson Rasba remembered the storms of biblical times, and better
understood the wrath that was visited upon the Children of Israel.
He dwelt in that storm all that day. He shut the door to keep the sand
out, but it spurted through the cracks. He could see the puffing gusts
as they burst through the keyhole, and he could hear the heavier grains
rattling upon the thin, painted boards of his roof. His clothes grayed,
his hands gritted, his teeth crunched fine stone; he pondered upon the
question of what sin he had committed to bring on him this ancient
punishment.
For a long time his finite mind was without inspiration, without
understanding, and then he choked with terror and regret. He had
beguiled himself into believing that it was his duty to take care of
Nelia Crele, the fair woman of the river. He had believed only too
readily that his duty lay where his heart's desire had been most eager.
He sat there in dumb horror at the sin which had blinded him.
"I come down yeah to find Jock Drones for his mother!" He reminded
himself by speaking his mission aloud, adding, "And hyar I've be'n
floating down looking for a woman, looking for a pretty woman!"
And because he could remember her shoes, the smooth leather over those
exquisite ankles, Parson Rasba knew that his sin was mortal, and that no
other son of man had ever strayed so far as he.
No wonder he was caught in a desert blizzard where no one had ever said
there was a desert!
"Lord God," he cried out, "he'p this yeah po'r sinner! He'p! He'p!"
CHAPTER XVI
Jock, _alias_ "Slip," Drones, was discovering how small the world really
is. Like many another man, he had figured that no one would know him, no
one could possibly find him, down the Mississippi River, more than a
thousand miles from home. Having killed, or at least fought his man in a
deadly feud war, he had escaped into the far places. His many months of
isolation had given him confidence and taken the natural uneasiness of
flight from his mind.
Now someone was coming down the Mississippi inquiring for Jock Drones! A
detective, as relentless, as sure as a bullet in the heart, was coming.
He might even then be lurking in the brush up the bank, waiting to get a
sure drop. He might be dropping down that very night. He might step in
among the players, unnoticed, unseen, and wait there for the moment of
surprise and action.
Slip's mind ransacked the far places of which he had heard: Oklahoma,
the Missouri River, California, the Mexican border, Texas. Far havens
seemed safest, but against their lure he felt the balance of Buck's
comradeship.
Caruthersville had a sporting crowd with money, lots of money. The
people there were liberal spenders, and they liked a square game better
than any other sport in the world. The boat was making good money, big
money. The two partners had only to break even in their own play to make
a big living out of the kitty in the poker tables, and there was always
a big percentage in favour of the boat, because Buck and Slip understood
each other so well. Slip's share often amounted to more in a week than
he had earned in two years up there in the mountains felling trees,
rafting them in eddies, and tripping them down painfully to the
sawmills. These never did pay the price they were advertised to pay for
timber, and one had to watch the sealers to see that they didn't short
the measure in the under water and goose-egg good logs.
He remembered Jest Prebol, who was lying shot through in the boat
alongside, and he went over to the boat, lighted the lamp, and sat down
by the wounded man. Prebol was a little delirious, and Slip went over on
his own boat, and called Buck out.
"We got a sick man on our hands," he whispered. "Ain't Doc Grell come
oveh yet?"
"Come the last boat," Buck said, and called the doctor out.
"Say, Doc, that sick feller out here, will you look't him?"
Doctor Grell went over to the boat. He looked at the wounded man, and
frowned as he took the limp wrist. He tried the temperature, too, and
then shook his head.
"He's a sick man, Slip," he said. "Thought he was coming all right last
night. Now----"
He looked at the wound, and gazed at the great, blue plate around the
bullet hole.
"He's bad?" Slip said, in alarm. "Poison's workin', Doc?"
"Mighty bad!"
There was nothing for it. Doctor Grell's night of pleasure had turned
into one of life-saving and effort. He sent Slip over to drag away one
of the young men from his game, and they rigged up two square trunks and
a waterproof tarpaulin into an operating table. Then, as Slip was faint
and sick, the two drove him back to the gambling boat, while they, the
graduate and the student, entered upon a gamble with a human life the
stake.
Of that night's efforts, fighting the "poison" with the few sharp
weapons at their command--later reinforced by a hasty trip across the
river to get others--the two need never tell. While they worked, they
could hear at intervals the shout of a winner in the other boat. In
moments of perfect quiet they heard the quick rustling of shuffled
cards; they heard the rattling of dice in hard, muffled boxes; they
heard, at intervals, the rattling of stove lids and smelt the soft-coal
smoke which blew down on them from the kitchen chimney. Slip, not
forgetful of them, brought over pots of black coffee and inquired after
the patient. He found the two men paler on each visit, and stripped down
more and more, till they were merely in their sweaty undershirts.
Toward morning the wind began to blow; it began to grow cold. The noises
on the neighbouring boat grew fainter in the low rumble of a stormy wind
out of the northwest, and the shanty-boat lifted at intervals on a wave
that rolled out of the main current and across the eddy, making their
operating room even more unstable.
Under their onslaught the death which was taking hold of Jest Prebol was
checked, and the river rat whose life had been forfeited for his sly
crimes became the object of a doctor's sentiment and belief in his own
training.
Long after midnight, when some few of the patrons of the games had
already taken their departure, the doors opened oftener and oftener,
letting the geometrical shaft of the yellow light flare out across the
waters, and the grotesque shadows of those who departed stood out
against the night and waters as the men shivered in the wind and bent to
feel their way into the boats.
After dawn Doctor Grell and his assistant, peaked and white, limp with
their tremendous effort, and shivering with exhaustion of mind and body,
walked out of the little shanty-boat, up to the big one, sat down with
Buck and Slip to breakfast, and then took their own course across the
ruffled and tumble-surfaced river.
"I 'low he'll pull through," Doctor Grell admitted, almost reluctantly.
"He's in bad shape, though, with the things the bullet carried into him,
but we sure swabbed him out. How'd the game go to-night, boys?"
"Purty good." Buck shook his head. "Tammer sure had luck his way--won a
seventy-dollar pot onct."
"I sure wanted to play," Grell shook his head, "but in my profession you
aren't your own, and you cayn't quit."
"We owe you for it," Buck said. "He's our friend----"
"And he's ourn, too," Grell declared, "so we'll split the difference. I
expect it was worth a hundred dollars what we two did to-night. That'll
be fifty, boys, if it's all right."
"Yes, suh," Slip said, handing over five ten-dollar bills, and Grell
handed two of them to his companion, who shook his head, saying:
"Nope, Doc! Ten only to-night. My first fee!"
"And you'll never have a more interesting case," Grell declared. "No,
indeed! You'll see cases, come you go to college, but none more
interesting, and if we've pulled him through, you'll never have better
reason for satisfaction."
The two got into a little motorboat and went bounding and rocking in the
wind and waves toward the town behind the levee on the far bank. The
two gamblers watched the little boat rocking along till it was but a
black fleck in the midst of the weltering brown waters.
"I don't reckon any one'll drap down to-day," Slip muttered, looking up
the river.
"We'll keep our eyes open," Buck replied. "You needn't to worry, you're
plumb worn out, Slip. Git to bed, now, an' I'll slick up around."
It was a cold, dry gale. From sharp gusts with near calms between the
wind grew till it was a steady, driving storm that flattened against the
shanty-boat sides, and whistled and roared through the trees up the
bank. And instead of dying down at dusk, it increased so much that the
big acetylene light was not hung out, and if any one came down to the
opposite shore he saw that there would be no game that night.
Buck went in and sat down by the wounded man's bed, giving him the
medicines Doctor Grell had left. For the attentions Prebol, in lucid
intervals, showed wondering looks of gratitude, like an ugly dog which
has been trapped and then set free. What he had suffered during the
night even he could hardly recall in the enfeebled condition of his
mind, but the spoonfuls of broth, the medicine that thrilled his body,
the man's very companionship, lending strength, took away the feeling of
despair which a man in the extremities of anguish and alone in the world
finds hardest to resist.
Buck, sitting there, gazed at the wan countenance, studying it. Prebol
had forgotten, but when Buck first arrived on the river, the pirate, a
much younger man then, had carelessly and perhaps for display told the
stranger and softpaw many things about the river which were useful. It
occurred to Buck that he was now paying back a debt of gratitude.
Something boiled up in his thoughts, and he swore to himself that
he owed nothing, that the world owed him, and he bridged the years of
his disappointment and desolation back to the hour when he had stormed
out of the life he had known, to come down the Mississippi to be a
gambler. Prebol, in his lapses into delirium, called a woman's name,
Sadie--always Sadie! And if he would have cursed that name in his
consciousness, out of the depths of his soul it came with softness and
gentleness of affection.
Buck wondered what Jest Prebol had done to Sadie that she had driven him
down there, and he cursed with his own lips, while he stifled in the
depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been
wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life
was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of
memories and reflections. He wondered what had become of the woman for
love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this heartless
occupation of common gambler?
True to Slip, he had watched the river for the stranger whose inquiries
had been carried down in fair warning to all the river people--and Buck,
suddenly conscious of his own part in that river system, laughed in
surprise.
"Why," he said to himself, "humans are faithful to one another! It's
what they live for, to be faithful to one another!"
It was an incredible, but undeniable theory. In spite of his own wilful
disbelief in the faith of mankind, here he was sitting by one poor
devil's bed while he kept his weather eye out upon the rough river in
the interests of another--a murderer! He pondered on the question of
whether any one kept faith with him. His mind cried out angrily, "No!"
but on second thought, in spite of himself, he realized distinctly that
he had let one person's faithlessness overcome his trust of all others.
No day on the Mississippi is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a
dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which
depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling
wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry
gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an early spring.
Steamboats are driven into the refuge of landing or eddy, and if the
power craft cannot stand the buffetings, much less are the exposed
little houseboats, toys of current and breeze, able to escape the
resistless blasts. So the wind possesses itself of the whole river
breadth and living creatures are driven to shelter.
Prebol, shot through and conscious of the reward of his manner of
living; Slip, a fugitive under the menace of a murderer's fate; and
Buck, given over to melancholy, were but types on the lengths and
tributaries of the indifferent flood.
Nothing happened, nothing could happen. The arrival of Slip from his
restless bunk relieved Buck of his vigil, and he went to bed and slept
into the dawn of another day--a day like the previous one, and fit to
drive him up the bank, into the woods, and among the fallen branches of
rotten trees seeking in physical activity to check the mourning and
tauntings of a mind over which he found, as often before, that he had no
control.
And yet, when the storm suddenly blew itself out with a light puff and a
sudden flood of sunshine, just as the sun went down, Prebol's condition
took a sudden turn for the better, Slip forgot his fears, and Buck burst
into a gay little whistled tune, which he could never whistle except
when he was absurdly and inexplicably merry.
CHAPTER XVII
Terabon's notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the
Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long,
lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little
bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off
there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more
into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or
cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood
itself.
His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and
gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump
under the term of "histories," but now, after his hundreds of miles of
association with the river, his thought took but brief note of those
trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as "river towns." He had
passed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the
prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!--bound but wearing away
its bonds.
Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed,
in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a
young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the
Mississippi River "spirit"--as he always quoted it in his calm and
dispassionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions--had
encompassed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him
down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been
called a "compromising position."
That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a
drunken stupor, and now in the late evening the fugitive wife was
taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat--and he
had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which
could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a
vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home--he thought the
phrase with difficulty--and he remembered the word "chaperon" as from a
foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.
His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of
uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the
occasion. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook," she had said, and while he
followed her on board the boat, with the two big black ducks to help
prepare, he wondered and remembered and, in spite of his life-long
avoidance of all appearance of evil, submitted to this irresistible
circumstance, wherever it might lead.
So he built the fire in her kitchen stove. She mixed up dressing and
seasoned the birds, made biscuit batter for hot-bread, brought out
stacks and stores of things to eat, or to eat with, and they set the
table, ground the coffee, and got the oven hot for the roasting and
baking.
One thing took the curse off their position: They had to have all the
windows and doors wide open so that they seemed fairly to be cooking on
an open sandbar at the edge of the river. Terabon took an inward
satisfaction in that fact. It is not possible to feel exceedingly wicked
or depraved when there is a mile-wide Mississippi on the one hand and a
mile-wide sandbar on the other side, and the sun is shining calmly upon
the bright and innocent waters.
As the ducks were young and tender, their cooking took but an hour, or a
little more, and the interim was occupied in the countless things that
must be done to prepare even a shanty-boat feast. He stirred some
cranberry sauce, and she had to baste the ducks, get the flour stirred
with water, and condensed cream for gravy, besides setting the table and
raising the biscuits, to have them ready for the ducks. She must needs
wonder if she'd forgotten the salt, and for ten minutes she was almost
in a panic at the thought, while he watched her in breathless
wonderment, and took covert glances up the Mississippi River, fearful
of, and yet almost wishing to see, that pursuing motorboat come into
view.
When at last the smoking viands were on the ample table and they sat
with their knees under it, and he began to carve the ducks and dish out
the unblessed meal, he glanced up stream through the cabin window on his
right. He caught a glimpse of a window pane flashing miles distant in
the light of the setting sun--the whiskey boat without doubt. He saw a
flock of ducks coming like a great serpent just above the river surface,
then a shadow lifted as out of the river, swept up the trees in the lost
section of Kentucky opposite, and from spattering gold the scene turned
to blue which rapidly became purple, darkening visibly.
Through the open doors and windows swept the chill of twilight, and
while she lighted the big lamp he did her bidding and closed the doors
and windows. Those shelves of books, classics and famous, time-tried
fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of titles, the blues
and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself
struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and
carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all those
master minds warn the young against evil?
But they talked over the ducks of what a pity it was that all towns
could not engage themselves in thought the way Athens used to do, and
they wondered to each other when the hurrying passion of greed and its
varying phenomena would become reconciled to a modest competence and the
simplicity which they, for example, were enjoying down the Mississippi.
When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at
him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made
him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at
least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful,
though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own
success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden,
risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position.
Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked
a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood
grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty.
"I think I'd better put up my canvas top," he blurted out, and she
assented.
"And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of
dishes," she added.
"Oh, of course!" he exclaimed.
"I'll help with the canvas," she said, and he dared not look at her.
By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat
from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the
strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the
bar, and the river in the dark, running by.
They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power,
its resistlessness.
"It's overwhelming," he whispered. "When you can't see it you hear it,
or you feel it!"
"And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so
perfectly negligible," she added, consciously, and then with vivacity:
"I'll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me
for a walk up this sandbar!"
"Gladly," he laughed, "but I'll help with the dishes as well!"
She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they
romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber,
not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could
see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different,
wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like
hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the
gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes
side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle--they remembered Thoreau's
"Cape Cod" and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now
under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings
and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had accumulated a
vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the
simple superstitions with which the river people beguile themselves and
add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.
"An old river man can look at the river and tell when a headrise is
coming," he told her. "He knows by the looks of the water when the river
is due to fall again. When he dreams, he says he knows what is going to
happen, and where to find buried treasure, and if there is going to be
an earthquake or a bad storm."
"They get queer living alone!" she said, thoughtfully. "Lots of them
used to stop in at our slough on Kaw River. I was afraid of them!"
"You afraid of anything!" he exclaimed. "Of any one!"
"Oh, that was a long time ago--ages ago!" She laughed, and then gave
voice to that most tragic riverside thought. "But now--nothing at all
matters now!"
She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing,
that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin's
most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a
human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring
tears.
He knew in that very moment, as by revelation, that he had caught from
her lips one of the bitterest phrases which the human mind is capable of
forming. He was glad of the favour which fate had bestowed upon him, and
he thrilled, while he regretted, that in that hour he could not forget
that he was a seeker of facts, a gatherer of information.
To match her mood was beyond his own power. By a simple statement of
fact she had given herself a place in his thought comparable to--he went
at making ideas again, despite himself--comparable to one of those
wonderful widows which are the delight, while they rend to tatters the
ambitions of delvers into the mysteries of Olympian lore. This bright,
pretty, vivacious young woman had suffered till she had arrived at a
Helen's recklessness--nothing mattered!
There was a pause.
"I think you are in a fair way to become unforgetable in connection with
the Mississippi River," he suggested, with even voice.
"What do you mean?" she demanded, quickly.
"Well, I'll tell you," with the semblance of perfect frankness. "I've
been wondering which one of the Grecian goddesses you would have been
if you had lived, say, in Homer's time."
"Which one of them I resemble?" she asked, amused.
"Exactly that," he declared.
"Oh, that's such a pretty compliment," she cried. "It fits so well into
the things I've been thinking. The river grows and grows on me, and I
feel as though I grew with it! You don't know--you could never
know--you're a man--masculine! For the first time in my life I'm
free--and--and I don't--I don't care a damn!"
"But the future!" he protested, feebly.
"That's it!" she retorted. "For a river goddess there is no future. It's
all in the present for her, because she is eternal."
They had walked clear up to the southernmost tip of the sandbar point.
They could hear someone, perhaps a chorus of voices, singing on the
whiskey boat at the Upper Landing. They could see the light of the
boat's windows. There they turned and started back down the sandbar,
reaching the two boats moored side by side in the deadwater.
"Shall I help with those dishes to-night?" he asked.
"No, we'll do them in the morning," she replied without emphasis and as
a matter of course, which left him unassisted in his obvious
predicament.
"Well," he drawled, after a time, "it's about midnight. I must say a
river goddess is--is beyond my most vivid dreams. I wonder----"
"What do you wonder?"
"If you'll let me kiss you good-night now?"
"Yes," she answered.
The stars twinkled as he put his arm around her and took the kiss which
her lips gave--smiling.
"I'll help with those dishes in the morning," he said, helping her up
the gang plank of her boat. "Good-night!"
"Good-night," she answered, and entered the cabin, the dim light of her
turned-down lamp flashing across the sandbar and revealing his face for
a moment. Then the door closed between them.
He went to his skiff, raised the cover, and crawled into his canvas
hammock which was swung from both sides of his boat. Before going to
sleep he looked under the canvas at the river, at the stars, at the dark
cabin-boat forty feet distant in the eddy.
At the same moment he saw a face against a window pane in the cabin.
"What does it mean?" he asked himself, but there was no answer. The
river, when asked, seldom answers. Just as he was about to go to sleep,
he started up, wide awake.
For the first time on the river, he had forgotten to post up his notes.
He felt that he had come that day, as never before, to the forks in the
road--when he must choose between the present and the future. He lighted
his lantern, sat up in his cot, and reached for his typewriter.
He wrote steadily, at full speed, for an hour. When he had those
wonderful and fleeting thoughts and observations nailed down and safe,
he again put out his lantern, and turned in once more.
Then he heard a light, gay laugh, clear and distinct-a river voice
beyond question--full of raillery, and yet beneath the mocking note was
something else which he could neither identify nor analyze, which he
hoped was not scorn or mere derision, which he wished might be
understanding and sympathy--till he thought of his making those notes.
Then he despised himself, which was really good for his soul. His
conscience, instead of rejoicing, rebuked him as a cad. He swore under
his breath.
CHAPTER XVIII
Augustus Carline was a long time recovering even his consciousness. A
thousand dreams, a thousand nightmares tormented his thoughts while the
mangling grip of unnumbered vises and ropes sank deep into his flesh;
ploughs and harrows dragged through his twisted muscles.
Yet he did rise at last out of his pit and, leaning against the cabin of
his boat, look about him to see what hell he had escaped into. The sun
was shining somewhere, blinding his eyes, which were already seared. A
river coiled by, every ripple a blistering white flame. He heard birds
and other music which sounded like an anvil chorus performing in the
narrow confines of a head as large as a cabin.
He remembered something. It was even worse than what he was undergoing,
but he could not quite call the horror to the surface of the weltering
sea of his feelings; he did not even know his name, nor his place, nor
any detail except the present pain--and he didn't want to know. He
fought against knowing, till the thing pressed exuberantly forward, and
then he knew that the beautiful girl, the woman he loved and to whom he
was married, had left him. That was the exquisite calamity of his soul,
and he flinched from the fact as from a blow. He was always flinching,
he remembered. He was always turning from the uncomfortable and the
bothering to seek what was easy and unengaging. Now, for the moment, he
could not undertake any relief from his present misery.
Acres and lakes of water were flowing by, but his thirst was worse than
oceans could quench. He wanted to drink, but the thought of drinking
disgusted him beyond measure. It seemed to him that a drop of water
would flame up in his throat like gasolene on a bed of coals, and at
that moment his eyes fell upon the jug which stood by the misty engine
against the intangible locker. The jug was a monument of comfort and
substantiality.
At the odour which filled the air when he had taken out the cork his
very soul was filled with horror.
"But I got to drink it!" he whimpered. "It's the only thing that'll cure
me, the only thing I can stand. If I don't I'll die!"
Not to drink was suicide, and to drink was living death! He could not
choose between the suggestions; he never had been trained to face fate
manfully. His years' long dissipation had unfitted him for every
squarely made decision, and now with horror on one side and terror on
the other, he could not procrastinate and wonder what folly had brought
him to this state.
"Why couldn't it smell good!" he choked. "The taste'll kill me!"
Taste he must, or perish! The taste was all that he had anticipated, and
melted iron could hardly have been more painful than that first torture
of cold, fusil acid. Gulping it down, he was willing to congratulate
himself on his endurance and wisdom, his very heroism in undertaking
that deadly specific.
After it was over with, however, the raw chill, which the heat of the
sun did not help, began to yield to a glow of warmth. He straightened
his twisted muscles and after a hasty look around retreated into his
cabin and flung himself on his bunk.
What length of time he spent in his recovery from the attacks of his
enemy, or rather enemies of a misspent youth, he could not surmise. He
did at last stir from his place and look with subdued melancholy into a
world of woe. He recalled the visitor, the man who wrote for newspapers,
and in a panic he searched for his money.
The money was gone; $250, at least, had disappeared from his pockets. An
empty wallet on the cabin floor showed with what contemptuous calm the
funds had been abstracted from his pockets. He turned, however, to a
cunning little hiding place, and found there his main supply of
currency--a thousand dollars or more.
No man likes to be robbed, and Carline, fixing upon his visitor Terabon
as his assailant, worked himself into a fine frenzy of indignation. The
fellow had purposely encouraged him to drink immoderately--Carline's
memory was clear and unmistaken on that point--and then, taking
advantage of his unconsciousness, the pseudo writer had committed
piracy.
"I'd ought to be glad he didn't kill me!" Carline sneered to himself,
looking around to conjure up the things that might have been.
The prospect was far from pleasing. The sky was dark, although it was
clearly sometime near the middle of a day--what day, he could but guess.
The wind was raw and penetrating, howling through the trees, and
skipping down the chute with a quick rustling of low, breaking waves.
The birds and animals which he had heard were gone with the sunshine.
When Carline took another look over his boat, he found that it had been
looted of many things, including a good blanket, his shot gun and rifle,
ammunition, and most of his food supply--though he could not recall that
he had had much food on board.
He lighted the coal-oil heater to warm the cabin, for he was chilled to
the bone. He threw the jug overboard, bound now never again to touch
another drop of liquor as long as he lived--that is, unless he happened
to want a drink.
Wearily he set about cleaning up his boat. He was naturally rather
inclined to neatness and orderliness. He picked up, folded, swept out,
and put into shape. He appeased his delicate appetite with odds and ends
of things from a locker full of canned goods which had escaped the
looter.
As long as he could, Carline had not engaged his thoughts with the
subject of his runaway wife. Now, his mind clearing and his body numb,
his soul took up the burden again, and he felt his helplessness thrice
confounded. He did not mind anything now compared to the one fact that
he had lost and deserved to lose the respect of the pretty girl who had
become his wife. He took out the photographs which he had of her, and
looked at them, one by one. What a fool he had been, and what a
scoundrel he was!
He could not give over the pursuit, however; he felt that he must save
her from herself; he must seek and rescue her. He hoisted in his anchor
and starting the motor, turned into the chute and ran down before the
wind into the river. Never had he seen the Mississippi in such a dark
and repellent mood.
When he had cleared the partial shelter of Island No. 8, he felt the
wind and current at the stern of his boat, driving it first one way then
the other. Steering was difficult, and fear began to clutch at his
heart. He felt his helplessness and the hopelessness of his search down
that wide river with its hundred thousand hiding places. He knew nothing
of the gossiping river people except that he despised them. He could not
dream that his ignorance of things five or ten miles from his home was
not typical of the shanty-boaters; he could not know that where he was a
stranger in the next township to his own home, a shanty-boater would
know the landing place of his friends a thousand miles or so down
stream.
Without maps, without knowledge, without instinct, he might almost as
well have been blind. His careless, ignorant glance swept the eight or
nine miles of shoreline of sandbar from above Island No. 10 clear down
to the fresh sloughing above Hotchkiss's Landing, opposite the dry
Winchester Chute--in which deep-draft gun-barges had been moored fifty
years or so before. He did not even know it was Island No. 10,
Donaldson's Point; he didn't know that he was leaving Kentucky to skirt
Tennessee; much less did he dream that he was passing Kentucky again. He
looked at a shanty-boat moored at the foot of a mile-long sandbar; saw,
without observing, a skiff against the bar just above the cabined scow.
His gaze discovered smoke, houses, signs of settlement miles below, and
he quickened the beat of his motor to get down there.
He longed for people, for humanity, for towns and cities; and that was a
big sawmill and cotton-gin town ahead of him, silhouetted along the top
of a high bank. He headed straight for it, and found his boat
inexplicably slowed up and rebuffed. Strangers on the river always do
find themselves baffled by the big New Madrid eddy, which even power
boats engage with difficulty of management. He landed at last against a
floating dock, and found that it was a fish market.
Having made fast, he went up town and spent hours, till long after dark,
buying supplies, talking to people, getting the lonesomeness out of his
system, and making veiled inquiries to learn if anything had been heard
about a woman coming down the Mississippi. He succeeded in giving the
impression that he was a detective. In the restaurant he talked with a
cocky little bald-headed man all spruced up and dandyish.
"I'm from Pittsburgh," the man said. "My name's Doss, Ronald Doss; I'm a
sportsman, but every winter I drop down here, hunting and fishing;
sometimes on the river, sometimes back in the bottoms. I suppose, Mr.
Carline, that you're a stranger on the river?"
"Why, yes-s, down this way; I live near it, up at Gage."
"I see, your first trip down. Got a nice gasolene boat, though!"
"Oh, yes! You're stopping here?"
"Just arrived this morning; trying to make up my mind whether I'll go
over on St. Francis, turkey-and deer-hunting, or get a boat and drop
down the Mississippi. Been wondering about that."
"Well, say, now--why can't you drop down with me?"
"Oh, I'd be in the way----"
"Not a bit----"
"Costs a lot to run a motorboat, and I'd have to----"
"No, you wouldn't! Not a cent! Your experience and my boat----"
"Well, of course, if you put it that way. If it'd be any accommodation
to you to have an old river man--I mean I've always tripped the river,
off and on, for sport."
"It'd be an education for me, a great help!"
"Yes, I expect it would be an education, if you don't know the river."
Doss smiled.
They walked over to the river bank. An arc light cast its rays upon the
end of the street, down the sloping bank, and in a light circle upon the
rocking, muddy waters where the fish dock and several shanty-boats
rested against the bank.
Doss whistled a little tune as he rested on his cane.
The front door of the third houseboat up the eddy opened and closed. A
man climbed the bank and passed the two with a basket on his arm.
"Come on down," Carline urged.
"Not to-night," Doss said. "I've got my room up at the hotel, and I'll
have to get my stuff out of the railroad baggage room. But I'll come
down about 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning. Then we'll fit up and drop
down the river. Good-night!"
Doss watched Carline go down to the dock and on to his boat. Then he
went up the street and held earnest confab with a man who had a basket
on his arm. They whispered ten minutes or so, then the man with the
basket returned to his shanty-boat, and within half an hour was back up
town, carrying two suitcases, a gun case, and a duffle bag.
Doss went to the smaller hotel with these things and registered. He
walked down to the river in the morning and noticed that the third
shanty-boat had dropped out into the river during the night, in spite of
the storm that was blowing up. He went down and ate breakfast with
Carline, and the two went up and got Doss's outfit at the hotel. They
returned to the motorboat, and, having laid in a supply of groceries,
cast off their lines and steered away down the river.
"Yes, sir, we'll find that girl if it takes all winter!" the fish-market
man heard Doss tell Carline in a loud voice.
That afternoon a man in a skiff came down the river and turned into the
dock. As he landed, the fish-market man said to him:
Yes.
"If you see any lady coming down, tell her a detector is below, lookin'
fo' her. He's a cheap skate, into a motorboat--but I don't expect he'll
be into hit long, 'count of some river fellers bein' with him. But he
mout be bad, that detector. If you should see a nice lady, tell her."
"You bet!" the skiff man, who was Lester Terabon, exclaimed.
CHAPTER XIX
For long hours Parson Rasba endured the drifting sand and the biting
wind which penetrated the weather-cracks in his poplar shanty-boat. It
was not until near nightfall that it dawned on him that he need not
remain there, that it was the simplest thing in the world to let go his
hold and blow before the wind till he was clear of the sandblast.
He did haul in his anchor and float away. As he rode the waves and
danced before the wind the clouds of sand were flung swiftly down upon
the water, where the surface was covered with a film and a sheet of
dust.
Standing at his sweeps, he saw that he was approaching the head of
another sandbar, and as he felt the water shoaling under the boat he
cast over the anchor and rode in clear air again. He was not quite
without a sense of humour.
Shaking the dust out of his long hair and combing it out of his
whiskers, he laughed at his ignorance and lack of resource. He swept the
decks and floor of his cabin, and scooped the sand up with an ash shovel
to throw overboard. A lesson learned on the Mississippi is part of the
education of the future--if there is anything in the pupil's head to
hold a memory of a fact or experience.
Even though he knew it was his own ignorance that had kept him a
prisoner in that storm, Parson Rasba did not fail to realize that his
ignorance had been sin, and that his punishment was due to his
absorption in the fate of a pretty woman.
Certainly after such a sharp rebuke he could not fail to return to his
original task, imposed upon him because of his fault in bringing the
feud fighters of his home mountains together, untrained and
unrepentant, to hear the voice of his pride declare the Word for the
edification of sinners. Parson Rasba did not mince his words as he
contemplated the joy he had felt in being eloquent and a "power" of a
speaker from the pulpits of the mountain churches. The murdering by the
feud fighters had taught him what he would never forget, and his frank
acknowledgment of each rebuke gave him greater understanding.
While the gale lasted he watched the river and the sky. The wild fowl
flying low, and dropping into woods behind him led to forays seeking
game, and in a bayou a mile distant he drew down with deadly aim on one
of a flock of geese. He killed that bird, and then as its startled and
lumbering mates sought flight, he got two more of them, missing another
shot or two in the excitement.
The three great birds made a load for him, and he returned to his boat
with a heart lighter than he had known in many a day because it seemed
to him a "sign" that he need not hate himself overmuch. The river
consoled him, and its constancy and integrity were an example which he
could not help but take to heart.
Gales might blow, fair weather might tempt, islands might interpose
themselves in its way, banks and sandbars might stand against the flood,
but come what might, the river poured on through its destined course
like a human life.
He entertained the whimsical fancy, as his smallest goose was roasting,
that perhaps the Mississippi might sin. In so many ways the river
reminded him of humankind. He had stood beside a branch of the
Mississippi which was so small and narrow that he could dam it with his
ample foot, or scoop it up with a bucket--and yet here it was a mile
wide! In its youth it was subject to the control of trifling things, a
stone or a log, or the careless handiwork of a man. Down here all the
little threads of its being had united in a full tide of life still
subject to the influences of its normal course, but wearing and tearing
along beyond any power to stop till its appointed course was run.
Insensibly Parson Rasba felt the resources of his own mind flocking to
help him. Just being there beside that mighty torrent helped him to get
a perspective on things. Tiny things seemed so useless in the front of
that overwhelming power. What were the big things of his own life? What
were the important affairs of his existence?
He could not tell. He had always meant to do the right thing. He could
see now, looking back on his life, that his good intentions had not
prevented his ignorance from precipitating a feud fight.
"I should have taken them, family by family, and brought them to their
own knees fustest," he thought, grimly. "Then I could have helt 'em all
together in mutual repentance!"
Having arrived at that idea, he shrugged his shoulders almost
self-contemptuously. "I'm a learnin'. That's one consolation, I'm a
learnin'!"
And then Rasba heard the Call!
It was Old Mississip's voice; the river was heaping duties upon him more
and more. So far, he had been rather looking out for himself, now he
recalled the houseboats which he had seen moored down the reaches and in
the bends. Those river people, dropping down incessantly with the river
current, must sometimes need help, comfort, and perhaps advice. His
humility would not permit him to think that he could preach to them or
exhort them.
"Man to man, likely I could he'p some po'r sinner see as much as I can
see. If I could kind of get 'em to see what this big, old riveh is like!
Hit's carryin' a leaf er a duck, an' steamboats an' shanty-bo'ts; hit
carries the livin' an' hit carries the daid; hit begrudges no man it's
he'p if he comes to it to float down a log raft er a million bushels of
coal. If Ole Mississip'll do that fo' anybody, suttin'ly hit's clear an'
plain that God won't deny a sinner His he'p! Yas, suh! Now I've shore
found a handle to keep hold of my religion!"
Peace of mind had come to him, but not the peace of indolence and
neglect. Far from that! He saw years of endless endeavour opening before
him, but not with multitudes looking up to him as he stood, grand and
noble, in the bright light of a thousand pulpits, circuit riding the
earth. Instead, he would go to a sinning man here, a sorrowing woman
there, and perhaps sit down with a little child, to give it comfort and
instruction.
People were too scattered down the Mississippi to think of
congregations. All days were Sunday, and for him there could be no
day of rest. If he could not do big work, at least he could meet
men and women, and he could get to know little children, to
understand their needs. He knew it was a good thought, and when he
looked across the Mississippi, he saw night coming on, but between
him and the dark was sunset.
The cold white glare changed to brilliant colours; clouds whose
gray-blue had oppressed the soul of the mountain man flashed red and
purple, growing thinner and thinner, and when he had gazed for a minute
at the glow of a fixed government light he was astonished by the
darkness of night--only the night was filled with stars.
Thus the river, the weather, the climate, the sky, the sandbars, and the
wooded banks revealed themselves in changing moods and varying lights to
the mountain man whose life had always been pent in and narrowed,
without viewpoint or a sense of the future. The monster size of the
river dwarfed the little affairs of his own life and humbled the pride
which had so often been humbled before. At last he began to look down on
himself, seeing something of the true relation of his importance to the
immeasurable efforts of thousands and millions of men.
The sand clouds carried by the north wind must ever remain an epoch in
his experience. Definitely he was rid of a great deal of nonsense,
ignorance, and pride; at the same time it seemed, somehow, to have
grounded him on something much firmer and broader than the vanities of
his youth.
His eyes searched the river in the dark for some place to begin his
work, and as they did so, he discovered a bright, glaring light a few
miles below him across the sandbar at the head of which he had anchored.
He saw other lights down that way, a regular settlement of lights across
the river, and several darting firefly gleams in the middle of the
stream which he recognized were boats, probably small gasolene craft.
In forty minutes he was dipping his sweep blades to work his way into
the eddy where several small passenger craft were on line-ends from a
large, substantial craft which was brightly lighted by lanterns and a
big carbide light. Its windows were aglow with cheeriness, and the
occupants engaged in strange pastimes.
"Come, now, come on, now!" someone was crying in a sing-song. "Come
along like I said! Come along, now--Seven--Seven--Seven!"
Parson Rasba's oar pins needed wetting, for the strain he put on the
sweeps made them squeak. The splash of oars down the current was heard
by people on board and several walked out on the deck.
"Whoe-e-e!" one hailed. "Who all mout yo' be?"
"Rasba!" the newcomer replied. "Parson Elijah Rasba, suh. Out of the
Ohio!"
"Hi-i-i!" a listener cried out, gleefully, "hyar comes the Riveh Prophet
after yo sinners. Hi-i-i!"
There was a laugh through the crowd. Others strolled out to see the
phenomenon. A man who had been playing with fortune at one of the poker
tables swore aloud.
"I cayn't neveh git started, I don't shift down on my luck!" he whined.
"Las' time, jes' when I was coming home, I see a piebald mewl, an' now
hyar comes a parson. Dad drat this yeah ole riveh! I'm goin' to quit.
I'm gwine to go to Hot Springs!"
These casual asides were as nothing, however, to the tumult that stirred
in the soul of Jock Drones, who had been cutting bread to make
boiled-ham sandwiches for their patrons that night. His acute hearing
had picked up the sound of the coming shanty-boat, and he had felt the
menace of a stranger dropping in after dark. Few men not on mischief
bent, or determined to run all night, run into shanty-boat eddies.
He even turned down the light a little, and looked toward the door to
see if the way was clear. The hail relieved the tension of his mind
strain, but only for a minute. Then he heard that answer.
"Rasba!" he heard. "Parson Elijah Rasba, suh. Out of the Ohio!"
In a flash he knew the truth! Old Rasba, whose preaching he had
listened to that bloody night away up in the mountains, had come down
the rivers. A parson, none else, was camping on the mountain fugitive's
trail. That meant tribulation, that meant the inescapableness of sin's
punishment--not in jails, not in trial courts, not on the gallows, but
worse than that!
"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."
Her smile bewitched them; she went aboard her boat, pulled over into the
main current, and floated away in the sunset--her favourite river hour.
After hours of argument, debate, doubts, they, too, pulled out and
floated past Fort Pillow.
CHAPTER XXVI
Parson Rasba piled the books on the crap table in his cabin and stood
them in rows with their lettered backs up. He read their titles, which
were fascinating: "Arabian Nights," "Representative Men," "Plutarch's
Lives," "Modern Painters," "Romany Rye"--a name that made him shudder,
for it meant some terrible kind of whiskey to his mind--"Lavengro," a
foreign thing, "Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases," "The Stem
Dictionary," "Working Principles of Rhetoric"--he wondered what rhetoric
meant--"The Fur Buyers' Guide," "Stones of Venice," "The French
Revolution," "Sartor Resartus," "Poe's Works," "Balzac's Tales," and
scores of other titles.
All at once the Mississippi had brought down to him these treasures and
a fair woman with blue eyes and a smile of understanding and sympathy,
who had handed them to him, saying:
"I want to do something for your mission boat; will you let me?"
No fairyland, no enchantment, no translation from poverty and sorrow to
a realm of wealth and happiness could have caught the soul of the
Prophet Rasba as this revelation of unimagined, undreamed-of riches as
he plucked the fruits of learning and enjoyed their luxuries. He had
descended in his humility to the last, least task for which he felt
himself worthy. He had humbly been grateful for even that one thing left
for him to do: find Jock Drones for his mother.
He had found Jock, and there had been no wrestling with an obdurate
spirit to send him back home, like a man, to face the law and accept the
penalty. There had been nothing to it. Jock had seen the light
instantly, and with relief. His partner had also turned back after a
decade of doubt and misery, to live a man's part "back home." The two of
them had handed him a floating Bethel, turning their gambling hell over
to him as though it were a night's lodging, or a snack, or a handful of
hickory nuts. The temple of his fathers had been no better for its
purpose than this beautiful, floating boat.
Then a woman had come floating down, a beautiful strange woman whose
voice had clutched at his heart, whose smile had deprived him of reason,
whose eyes had searched his soul. With tears on her lashes she had flung
to him that treasure-store of learning, and gone on her way, leaving him
strength and consolation.
He left his treasure and went out to look at the river. Everybody leaves
everything to look at the river! There is nothing in the world that will
prevent it. He saw, in the bright morning, that Prebol had raised his
curtain, and was looking at the river, too, though the effort must have
caused excruciating pain in his wounded shoulder. Day was growing; from
end to end of that vast, flowing sheet of water thousands upon thousands
of old river people were taking a look at the Mississippi.
Rasba carried a good broth over to Prebol for breakfast, and then
returned to his cabin, having made Prebol comfortable and put a dozen of
the wonderful books within his reach. Then the River Prophet sat down to
read his treasures, any and all of them, his lap piled up, three or four
books in one hand and trying to turn the pages of another in his other
hand by unskilful manipulation of his thumb. He was literally starving
for the contents of those books.
He was afraid that his treasure would escape from him; he kept glancing
from his printed page to the serried ranks on the crap table, and his
hands unconsciously felt around to make sure that the weight on his lap
and in his grasp was substantial and real, and not a dream or vision of
delight.
He forgot to eat; he forgot that he had not slept; he sat oblivious of
time and river, the past or the future; he grappled with pages of print,
with broadsides of pictures, with new and thrilling words, with
sentences like hammer blows, with paragraphs that marched like music,
with thoughts that had the gay abandon of a bird in song. And the things
he learned!
When night fell he was dismayed by his weariness, and could not
understand it. For a little while he ransacked his dulled wits to find
the explanation, and when he had fixed Prebol for the night, with
medicine, water, and a lamp handy to matches, he told the patient:
"Seems like the gimp's kind of took out of me. My eyes are sore, an' I
doubt am I quite well."
"Likely yo' didn't sleep well," Prebol suggested. "A man cayn't sleep
days if he ain't used to hit."
"Sleep days?" Rasba looked wildly about him.
"Sho! When did I git to sleep, why, I ain't slept--I----Lawse!"
Prebol laughed aloud.
"Yo' see, Parson, yo' all cayn't set up all night with a pretty gal an'
not sleep hit off. Yo' shore'll git tired, sportin' aroun'."
"Sho!" Rasba snapped, and then a smile broke across his countenance. He
cried out with laughter, and admitted: "Hit's seo, Prebol! I neveh set
up with a gal befo' I come down the riveh. Lawse! I plumb forgot."
"I don't wonder," Prebol replied, gravely. "She'd make any man forget.
She sung me to sleep, an' I slept like I neveh slept befo'."
Rasba went on board his boat and, after a light supper, turned in. For
a minute he saw in retrospect the most wonderful day in his life, a day
which a kindly Providence had drawn through thirty or forty hours of
unforgettable exaltation. Then he settled into the blank, deep sleep of
a soul at peace and at rest.
When in the full tide of the sunshine he awakened, he went about his
menial tasks, attending Prebol, cleaning out the boats, shaking up the
beds, hanging the bedclothes to air in the sun, and getting breakfast.
On Prebol's suggestion he moved the fleet of boats out into the eddy,
for the river was falling and they might ground. He went over to
Caruthersville and bought some supplies, brought Doctor Grell over to
examine the patient to make sure all was well, killed several squirrels
and three ducks back in the brakes, and, all the while, thought what
duties he should enter upon.
Doctor Grell advised that Prebol go down to Memphis, to the hospital, so
as to have an X-ray examination, and any special treatment which might
be necessary. The wound was healing nicely, but it would be better to
make sure.
Rasba took counsel of Prebol. The river man knew the needs of the
occasion, and he agreed that he had better drop down to Memphis or
Mendova, preferring the latter place, for he knew people there. He told
Rasba to line the two small shanty-boats beside the big mission boat,
and fend them off with wood chunks. The skiffs could float on lines
alongside or at the stern. The power boat could tow the fleet out into
the current, and hold it off sandbars or flank the bends.
Rasba did as he was bid, and lashed the boats together with mooring
lines, pin-head to towing bits, and side to side. Then he floated the
boats all on one anchor line, and ran the launch up to the bow. He
hoisted in the anchor, rowed in a skiff out to the motorboat, and swung
wide in the eddy to run out to the river current. There was a good deal
of work to the task, and it was afternoon before the fleet reached the
main stream.
Then Rasba cast off his tow lines, ran the launch back to the fleet, and
made it fast to the port bow of the big boat, so that it was part of the
fleet, with its power available to shove ahead or astern. A big oar on
the mission boat's bow and another one out from Prebol's boat insured a
short turn if it should be necessary to swing the boats around either
way.
Rasba carried Prebol on his cot up to the bow of the big boat, and put
him down where he could help watch the river, and they cast off. Prebol
knew the bends and reaches, and named most of the landings; they
gossiped about the people and the places. Prebol told how river rats
sometimes stole hogs or cattle for food, and Rasba learned for the first
time of organized piracy, of river men who were banded together for
stealing what they could, raiding river towns, attacking "sports,"
tripping the river, and even more desperate enterprises.
While he talked, Prebol slyly watched his listener and thought for a
long time that Rasba was merely dumbfounded by the atrocities, but at
last the Prophet grinned:
"An' yo's a riveh rat. Ho law!"
"Why, I didn't say----" Prebol began, but his words faltered.
"Yo' know right smart about such things," Rasba reminded him. "I 'low
hit were about time somebody shot yo' easy, so's to give yo' repentance
a chance to catch up with yo' wickedness. Don't yo'?"
Prebol glared at the accusation, but Rasba pretended not to notice.
"Yo' see, Prebol, this world is jes' the hounds a-chasin' the rabbits,
er the rabbits a-gittin' out the way. The good that's into a man keeps
a-runnin', to git shut of the sin that's in him, an' theh's a heap of
wrestlin' when one an' tother catches holt an' fights."
"Hit's seo!" Prebol admitted, reluctantly. He didn't have much use for
religious arguments. "I wisht yo'd read them books to me, Parson. I
ain't neveh had much eddycation. I'll watch the riveh, an' warn ye, 'gin
we make the crossin's."
Nothing suited them better. Rasba read aloud, stabbing each word with
his finger while he sought the range and rhythm of the sentences, and,
as they happened to strike a book of fables, their minds could grasp the
stories and the morals at least sufficiently to entertain and hold their
attention.
Prebol said, warningly, after a time:
"Betteh hit that sweep a lick, Parson, she's a-swingin' in onto that bar
p'int."
A few leisurely strokes, the boats drifted away into deep water, and
Rasba expressed his admiration.
"Sho, Prebol! Yo' seen that bar a mile up. We'd run down onto hit."
"Yas, suh," the wounded man grinned. "Three-four licks on the oars up
theh, and down yeah yo' save pullin' yo' livin' daylights out, to keep
from goin' onto a sandbar or into a dryin'-up chute."
"How's that?" Rasba cocked his ear. "Say hit oveh--slow!"
"Why, if yo's into the set of the current up theh, hit ain't strong; yo'
jes' give two-three licks an' yo' send out clear. Down theh on the bar
she draws yo' right into shallow water, an' yo' hang up."
Rasba looked up the river; he looked down at the nearing sandbar, and as
they passed the rippling head in safety he turned a grave face toward
the pilot.
"Up theh, theh wasn't much suck to hit, but down yeah, afteh yo've
drawed into the current, theh's a strong drag an' bad shoals?"
"Jes' so!"
"Hit's easy to git shut of sin, away long in the beginnin'," Rasba bit
his words out, "but when yo' git a long ways down into hit--Ho law!"
Prebol started, caught by surprise. Then both laughed together. They
could understand each other better and if Prebol felt himself being
drawn in spite of his own reluctance by a new current in his life, Rasba
did not fail to gratify the river man's pride by turning always to him
for advice about the river, its currents and its jeopardies.
"I've tripped down with all kinds," Prebol grinned as he spoke, "but
this yeah's the firstest time I eveh did get to pilot a mission boat."
"If you take it through in safety, do yo' reckon God will forget?" Rasba
asked, and Prebol's jaw dropped. He didn't want to be reformed; he had
no use for religion. He was very well satisfied with his own way of
living. He objected to being prayed over and the good of his soul
inquired into--but this Parson Rasba was making the idea interesting.
They anchored for the night in the eddy at the head of Needham's Cut-Off
Bar, and Prebol was soon asleep, but Rasba sat under the big lamp and
read. He could read with continuity now; dread that the dream would
vanish no longer afflicted him. He could read a book without having more
than two or three other books in his lap.
Sometimes it was almost as though Nelia were speaking the very words he
read; sometimes he seemed to catch her frown of disapproval. The books,
more precious than any other treasure could have been, seemed living
things because she had owned them, because her pencil had marked them,
and because she had given them all to his service, to fill the barren
and hungry places in the long-empty halls of his mind.
He would stop his reading to think, and thinking, he would take up a
book to discover better how to think. He found that his reading and
thinking worked together for his own information.
He was musing, his mind enjoying the novelty of so many different images
and ideas and facts, when something trickled among his senses and
stirred his consciousness into alert expectancy. For a little he was
curious, and then touched by dismay, for it was music which had roused
him--music out of the black river night. People about to die sometimes
hear music, and Parson Rasba unconsciously braced himself for the
shock.
It grew louder, however, more distinct, and the sound was too gay and
lively to fit in with his dreams of a heavenly choir. He caught the
shout of a human voice and he knew that dancers were somewhere, perhaps
dancers damned to eternal mirth. He went out on the deck and closed the
door on the light behind him; at first he could see nothing but black
night. A little later he discovered boats coming down the river, eight
or nine gleaming windows, and a swinging light hung on a flag staff or
shanty-boat mast.
As they drew nearer, someone shouted across the night:
"Goo-o-o-d wa-a-a-ter thar?"
"Ya-s-su-uh!" Rasba called back.
"Where'll we come in?"
"Anywhere's b'low me fo' a hundred yards!"
"Thank-e-e!"
Three or four sweeps began to beat the water, and a whole fleet of
shanty-boats drifted in slowly. They began to turn like a wheel as part
of them ran into the eddy while the current carried the others down, but
old river men were at the sweeps, and one of them called the orders:
"Raunch 'er, boys! Raunch 'er! Raunchin's what she needs!"
They floated out of the current into the slow reverse eddy, and coming
up close to Rasba's fleet, talked back and forth with him till a gleam
of light through a window struck him clearly out of the dark.
"Hue-e-e!" a shrill woman's voice laughed. "Hit's Rasba, the Riveh
Prophet Rasba! Did yo' all git to catch Nelia Crele, Parson?"
"Did I git to catch Missy Crele!" he repeated, dazed.
"When yo' drapped out'n Wolf Island Chute, Parson, that night she pulled
out alone?"
"No'm; I lost her down by the Sucks, but she drapped in by
Caruthersville an' give me books an' books--all fo' my mission boat!"
"That big boat yourn?"
"Yeh."
"Where all was hit built?"
"I don' remembeh, but Buck done give hit to me, him an' Jock Drones."
"Hi-i-i! Yo' all found the man yo' come a-lookin' fo'. Ho law!"
"Hit's the Riveh Prophet," someone replied to a hail from within, the
dance ending.
A crowd came tumbling out onto the deck of the big boat of the dance
hall, everyone talking, laughing, catching their breaths.
"Hi-i! Likely he'll preach to-morrow," a woman cried. "To-morrow's
Sunday."
"Sunday?" Rasba gasped. "Sunday--I plumb lost track of the days."
"You'll preach, won't yo', Parson? I yain't hearn a sermon in a hell of
a while," a man jeered, facetiously.
"Suttingly. An' when hit's through, yo'll think of hell jes' as long,"
Rasba retorted, with asperity, and his wit turned the laugh into a
cheer.
The fleet anchored a hundred yards up the eddy, and Rasba heard a woman
say it was after midnight and she'd be blanked if she ever did or would
dance on Sunday. The dance broke up, the noise of voices lessened, one
by one the lights went out, and the eddy was still again. But the
feeling of loneliness was changed.
"Lord God, what'll I preach to them about?" Rasba whispered. "I neveh
'lowed I'd be called to preach ag'in. Lawse! Lawse! What'll I say?"
CHAPTER XXVII
Carline ascended into the world again. It was a painful ascent, and when
he looked around him, he recognized the interior of his motorboat cabin,
heard and felt the throbbing of his motor, and discovered aches and
pains that made his extremities tingle. He sat up, but the blackness
that seemed to rise around him caused him to fall hastily back upon the
stateroom bunk.
He remembered his discovery of his own firearms on the shanty-boat, and
fear assailed him. He remembered his folly in crying out that those were
his guns. He might have known he had fallen among thieves. He cursed
himself, and dread of what might yet follow his indiscretion made him
whimper with terror. A most disgusting odour of whiskey was in his
nostrils, and his throat was like a corrugated iron pipe partly filled
with soot.
The door of the tiny stateroom was closed, but the two ports were open
to let the air in. It occurred to him that he might be a captive, and
would be held for ransom. Perhaps the pirates would bleed him for
$50,000; perhaps they would take all his fortune! He began to cry and
sob. They might cut his throat, and not give him any chance of escape.
He had heard of men having had their throats cut down the river.
He tried to sit up again, and succeeded without undue faintness. He
could not wait, but must know his fate immediately. He found the door
was unlocked, and when he slipped out into the cabin, he found that
there was only one man on board, the steersman, who was sitting in the
engine pit, and steering with the rail wheel instead of the bow-cabin
one.
He peered out, and found that it was Terabon, who discovered him and
hailed him, cheerily:
"How are you feeling?"
"Tough--my head!"
"You're lucky to be alive!" Terabon said. "You got in with a crew of
river pirates, but they let me have you. Did they leave you anything?"
"Leave me anything!" Carline repeated, feeling in his pockets. "I've got
my watch, and here's----"
He opened up his change pocketbook. There were six or seven dollars in
change and two or three wadded bills. When he looked for his main
supply, however, there was a difference. The money was all gone. He was
stripped to the last dollar in his money belt and of his hidden
resources.
"They did me!" he choked. "They got all I had!"
"They didn't kill you," Terabon said. "You're lucky. How did they bang
you and knock you out?"
"Why, I found they had my guns on board----"
"And you accused them?"
"No! I just said they were mine, I was surprised!"
"Then?"
"My light went out."
"When did they get your guns?"
"I woke up, up there, and you were gone. My guns and pocket money were
gone, too. I thought----"
"You thought I'd robbed you?"
"Ye----Well, I didn't know!"
"This is a devil of a river, old man!" said Terabon. "I guess you
travelled with the real thing out of New Madrid----"
"Doss, Renald Doss. He said he was a sportsman----"
"Oh, he is, all right, he's a familiar type here on the river. He's the
kind of a sport who hunts men, Up-the-Bankers and game of that kind.
He's a very successful hunter, too----"
"He said we'd hunt wild geese. We went up Obion River, and had lots of
fun, and he said he'd help--he'd help----"
"Find your wife?"
"Yes, sir."
Carline was abject. Terabon, however, was caught wordless. This man was
the husband of the woman for whose sake he had ventured among the
desperate river rats, and now he realized that he had succeeded in the
task she had set him. Looking back, he was surprised at the ease of its
accomplishment, but he was under no illusions regarding the jeopardy he
had run. He had trusted to his aloofness, his place as a newspaper man,
and his frankness, to rescue Carline, and he had brought him away.
"You're all righ now," Terabon suggested. "I guess you've had your
lesson."
"A whole book full of them!" Carline cried. "I owe you something--an
apology, and my thanks! Where are we going?"
"I was taking you down to a Memphis hospital, or to Mendova----"
"I don't need any hospital. I'm broke; I must get some money. We'll go
to Mendova. I know some people there. I've heard it was a great old
town, too! I always wanted to see it."
Terabon looked at him; Carline had learned nothing. For a minute remorse
and comprehension had flickered in his mind, now he looked ahead to a
good time in Mendova, to sight-seeing, sporting around, genial friends,
and all the rest. Argument would do no good, and Terabon retreated from
his position as friend and helper to that of an observer and a recorder
of facts. Whatever pity he might feel, he could not help but perceive
that there was no use trying to help fools.
It was just dusk when they ran into Mendova. The city lights sparkled as
they turned in the eddy and ran up to the shanty-boat town. They dropped
an anchor into the deep water and held the boat off the bank by the
stern while they ran a line up to a six-inch willow to keep the bow to
the bank. The springy, ten-foot gangplank bridged the gap to the shore.
More than thirty shanty-boats and gasolene cruisers were moored along
that bank, and from nearly every one peered sharp eyes, taking a look at
the newcomers.
"Hello, Terabon!" someone hailed, and the newspaper man turned,
surprised. One never does get over that feeling of astonishment when,
fifteen hundred miles or so from home, a familiar voice calls one's name
in greeting.
"Hello!" Terabon replied, heartily, and then shook hands with a market
hunter he had met for an hour's gossip in the eddy at St. Louis. "Any
luck, Bill? How's Frank?"
"Averaging fine," was the answer. "Frank's up town. Going clear down
after all, eh?"
"Probably."
"Any birds on Yankee Bar?"
"I saw some geese there--hunters stopped in, too. How is the flight?"
"We're near the tail of it; mostly they've all gone down. We're going to
drive for it, and put out our decoys down around Big Island and below."
"Then I'll likely see you down there."
"Sure thing; here's Frank."
Terabon shook hands with the two, introduced Carline, and then the
hunters cast off and steered away down the stream. They had come more
than a thousand miles with the migrating ducks and geese, intercepting
them at resting or feeding places. That touch and go impressed Terabon
as much as anything he had ever experienced.
He went up town with Carline, who found a cotton broker, a timber
merchant, and others who knew him. It was easy to draw a check, have it
cashed, and Carline once more had ready money. Nothing would do but they
must go around to Palura's to see Mendova's great attraction for
travellers.
Palura supplied entertainment and excitement for the whole community,
and this happened to be one of his nights of special effort. Personally,
Palura was in a temper. Captain Dalkard, of the Mendova Police, had been
caught between the Citizens' Committee and Palura's frequenters. There
were 100 citizens in the committee, and Palura's frequenters were
unnamed, but familiar enough in local affairs.
The cotton broker thought it was a good joke, and he explained the whole
situation to Terabon and Carline for their entertainment.
"Dalkard called in Policeman Laddam and told him to stand in front of
Palura's, and tell people to watch out. You see, there's been a lot of
complaints about people being short changed, having their pockets
picked, and getting doped there, and some people think it doesn't do the
town any good. Some think we got to have Palura's for the sake of the
town's business. I'm neutral, but I like to watch the fun. We'll go down
there and look in to-night."
They had dinner, and about 9 o'clock they went around to Palura's. It
was an old market building made over into a pleasure resort, and it
filled 300 feet front on Jimpson Street and 160 feet on the flanking
side streets. A bright electric sign covered the front with a flare of
yellow lights and there was one entrance, under the sign.
As Terabon, Carline, and the cotton broker came along, they saw a tall,
broad-shouldered, smooth-shaven policeman in uniform standing where the
lights showed him up.
"Watch your pocketbooks!" the policeman called softly to the patrons.
"Watch your change; pickpockets, short-changers, and card-stackers work
the unwary here! Keep sober--look out for knock-out drops!"
He said it over and over again, in a purring, jeering tone, and Terabon
noticed that he was poised and tense. In the shadows on both sides of
the policeman Terabon detected figures lurking and he was thrilled by
the evident fact that one brave policeman had been sent alone into that
deadly peril to confront a desperate gang of crooks, and that the lone
policeman gloried to be there.
The cotton broker, neutral that he was, whispered as they disregarded
the warnings: "Laddam cleaned up Front Street in six months; the mob has
all come up here, and this is their last stand. It'll hurt business if
they close this joint up, because the town'll be dead, but I wish
Palura'd kind of ease down a bit. He's getting rough."
Little hallways and corridors led into dark recesses on either side of
the building, and faint lights of different colours showed the way to
certain things. Terabon saw a wonderfully beautiful woman, in furs, with
sparkling diamonds, and of inimitable grace waiting in a little
half-curtained cubby hole; he heard a man ask for "Pete," and caught the
word "game" twice. The sounds were muffled, and a sense of repression
and expectancy permeated the whole establishment.
They entered a reception room, with little tables around the sides,
music blaring and blatant, a wide dancing floor, and a scurrying throng.
All kinds were there: spectators who were sight-seeing; participants who
were sporting around; men, women, and scoundrels; thugs and their
prospective victims; people of supposed allurement; and sports of
insipid, silly pose and tricked-up conspicuousness.
Terabon's gaze swept the throng. Noise and merriment were increasing.
Liquor was working on the patrons. The life of Mendova was stirring to
blaring music. The big hall was bare, rough, and gaunt. Dusty flags and
cobwebs dangled from the rafters and hog-chain braces. A few hard, white
lights cast a blinding glare straight down on the heads of the dancers
and drinkers and onlookers.
Business was brisk, and shouts of "Want the waiter!" indicated the
insistence with which trade was encouraged and even insisted upon. No
sooner had Terabon and his companions seated themselves than a burly
flat-face with a stained white apron came and inflicted his determined
gaze upon them. He sniffed when Terabon ordered plain soda.
"We got a man's drink."
"I'm on the water wagon for awhile," Terabon smiled, and the waiter
nodded, sympathetically. A tip of a quarter mollified his air of surly
expectancy completely, and as he put the glasses down he said:
"The Boss is sick the way he's bein' treated. They ain't goin' to git
away wit' stickin' a bull in front of his door like he was a crook."
Terabon heard a woman at a near-by table making her protest against the
policeman out in front. No other topic was more than mentioned, and the
buzz and burr of voices vied with the sound of the band till it ended.
Then there was a hush.
"Palura!" a whisper rippled in all directions.
Terabon saw a man about 5 feet 10 inches tall, compactly built, square
shouldered, and just a trifle pursy at the waist line, approaching along
the dancing floor. He was light on his small feet, his shoulders worked
with feline grace, but his face was a face as hard as limestone and of
about the same colour--bluish gray. His eyes were the colour of ice,
with a greenish tinge. Smooth-shaven cheeks, close-cropped hair,
wing-like ears, and a little round head were details of a figure that
might have been heroic--for his jaw was square, his nose large, and his
forehead straight and broad.
Everyone knew he was going out to throw the policeman, Laddam, into the
street. The policeman had not hurt business a pennyworth as yet, but
Palura felt the insult. Palura knew the consequences of failing to meet
the challenge.
"Give 'im hell!" someone called.
Palura turned and nodded, and a little yelping cheer went up, which
ceased instantly. Terabon, observing details, saw that Palura's coat
sagged on the near side--in the shape of an automatic pistol. He saw,
too, that the man's left sleeve sagged round and hard--a slingshot or
black-jack.
There was no delay; Palura went straight through to his purpose. He
disappeared in the dark and narrow entrance way and not a sound was
audible except the scuffling of feet.
"Palura's killed four men," the cotton broker whispered to Terabon,
under his breath.
What seemed an age passed. The lights flickered. Terabon looked about in
alarm lest that gang----
A crash outside brought all to their feet, and the whole crowd fell back
against the walls. Out of the corridor surged a mass of men, and among
them stalked a stalwart giant of a man draped with the remnants of a
policeman's uniform. He had in his right hand a club which he was
swinging about him, and every six feet a man dropped upon the floor.
Terabon saw Palura writhing, twisting, and working his way among the
fighting mass. He heard a sharp bark:
"Back, boys!"
Four or five men stumbled back and two rolled out of the way of the feet
of the policeman. It flashed to Terabon what had been done. They had
succeeded in getting the policeman into the huge den of vice, where he
could not legally be without a warrant, where Palura could kill him and
escape once more on the specious plea of self-defence. Terabon saw the
grin of perfect hate on Palura's face as both his hands came up with
automatics in them--a two-handed gunman with his prey.
This would teach the policemen of Mendova to mind their own business!
Suddenly Policeman Laddam threw his night stick backhanded at the
infamous scoundrel, and Palura dodged, but not quite quickly nor quite
far enough. The club whacked noisily against his right elbow and Palura
uttered a cry of pain as one pistol fell to the floor.
Then Laddam snatched out his own automatic, a 45-calibre gun, three
pounds or more in weight, and began to shoot, calmly, deliberately, and
with the artistic appreciation of doing a good job thoroughly.
His first bullet drove Palura straight up, erect; his next carried the
bully back three steps; his next whirled him around in a sagging spiral,
and the fourth dropped the dive keeper like a bag of loose potatoes.
Laddam looked around curiously. He had never been there before. Lined up
on all sides of him were the waiters, bouncers, men of prey, their
faces ghastly, and three or four of them sick. The silent throng around
the walls stared at the scene from the partial shadows; no one seemed
even to be breathing. Then Palura made a horrible gulping sound, and
writhed as he gave up his last gasp of life.
"Now then!" Laddam looked about him, and his voice was the low roar of a
man at his kill. "You men pick them up, pack them outside there, and up
to headquarters. March!"
As one man, the men who had been Palura's marched. They gathered up the
remains of Palura and the men with broken skulls, and carried them out
into the street. The crowd followed, men and women both. But outside,
the hundreds scurried away in all directions, men afraid and women
choking with horror. Terabon's friend the cotton broker fled with the
rest, Carline disappeared, but Terabon went to headquarters, writing in
his pocket notebook the details of this rare and wonderful tragedy.
Policeman Laddam had single-handed charged and captured the last citadel
of Mendova vice, and the other policemen, when they looked at him, wore
expressions of wonder and bewilderment. They knew the Committee of 100
would make him their next chief and a man under whom it would be a
credit to be a cop.
Terabon, just before dawn, returned toward Mousa Slough. As he did so,
from a dull corner a whisper greeted him:
"Say, Terabon, is it straight, Palura killed up?"
"Sure thing!"
"Then Mendova's sure gone to hell!" Hilt Despard the river pirate cried.
"Say, Terabon, there's a lady down by the slough wants to get to talk to
you."
"Who----?"
"She just dropped in to-night, Nelia Crele! She's into her boat down at
the head of the sandbar, facing the switch willows. There's a little
gasolene sternwheeler next below her boat."
"She's dropped in? All right, boys, much obliged!"
They separated.
But when Terabon searched along the slough for Nelia's boat he did not
find it, and to his amazed anger he found that the gasolene boat in
which he had arrived was also gone, as well as his own skiff and all his
outfit.
"Darn this river!" he choked. "But that's a great story I sent of the
killing of Palura!"
CHAPTER XXVIII
Nelia Crele had laughed in her heart at Elijah Rasba as he sat there
listening to her reading. She knew what she was doing to the mountain
parson! She played with his feelings, touched strings of his heart that
had never been touched before, teased his eyes with a picture of
feminine grace, stirred his mind with the sense of a woman who was
bright and who knew so much that he had never known. At the same time,
there was no malice in it--just the delight in making a strong man
discover a strength beyond his own, and in humbling a masculine pride by
the sheer superiority of a woman who had neglected no opportunity to
satisfy a hunger to know.
She knew the power of a single impression and a clear, quick getaway.
She left him dazed by the fortune which heaped upon him literary
classics in a dozen forms--fiction, essays, history, poetry, short
stories, criticism, fable, and the like; she laughed at her own quick
liking for the serious-minded, self-deprecatory, old-young man whose big
innocent eyes displayed a soul enamoured by the spirited intelligence of
an experienced and rather disillusioned young woman who had fled from
him partly because she did know what a sting it would give him.
So with light heart and singing tongue she floated away on the river,
not without a qualm at leaving those books with Rasba; she loved them
too much, but the sacrifice was so necessary--for his work! The river
needed him as a missionary. He could help ease the way of the old
sinners, and perhaps by and by he would reform her, and paint her again
with goodness where she was weather-beaten.
It is easy to go wrong on the Mississippi--just as easy, or easier, than
elsewhere in the world. The student of astronomy, gazing into the vast
spaces of the skies, feels his own insignificance increasing, while the
magnitude of the constellations grows upon him. What can it matter what
such a trifling thing, such a mere atom, as himself does when he is to
the worlds of less size than the smallest of living organisms in a drop
of water?
Nelia Crele looked around as she left the eddy and saw that her
houseboat was but a trifle upon a surface containing hundreds of square
miles. A human being opposite her on the bank was less in proportion
than a fly on the cabin window pane. Then what could it matter what she
did? Why shouldn't she be reckless, abandoned, and live in the gaiety of
ages?
She had read thousands of pages of all kinds with no guide posts or
moral landmarks. A picture of dangerous delights had come into her
imagination. Having read and understood so much, she had not failed to
discover the inevitable Nemesis on the trail of wrongdoing, as well as
the inevitableness of reward for steadfastness in virtues--but she
wondered doubtfully what virtue really was, whether she was not absolved
from many rigid commandments by the failure of the world to keep faith
with her and reward her for her own patience and atone for her own
sufferings.
It was easy, only too easy, on the surface to feel that if she wanted to
be gay and wanton, living for the hour, it was no one's affair but her
own. She fought the question out in her mind. She fixed her
determination on the young and, in one sense, inexperienced newspaper
man whose ambitions pleased her fancy and whose innocence delighted her
own mood.
He was down the river somewhere, and when she landed in at Mendova in
the late twilight she saw his skiff swinging from the stern of a
motorboat. Having made fast near it, she quickly learned that he had
gone up town, and that someone had heard him say that he was going to
Palura's.
Palura's! Nelia had heard the fascination of that den's ill-fame. She
laughed to herself when she thought that Terabon would excuse his going
there on the ground of its being right in his line of work, that he must
see that place because otherwise he would not know how to describe it.
"If I can catch him there!" she thought to herself.
She went to Palura's, and Old Mississippi seemed to favour her. She
found another woman who knew the ropes there and who was glad to help
her play the game. From a distance Nelia Crele discovered that Terabon
was with Carline, her own husband. She dismissed him with a shrug of her
shoulders, and told her companion to take care of him.
Nelia, having plagued the soul of the River Prophet, Rasba, now with
equal zest turned to seize Terabon, careless of where the game ended if
only she could begin it and carry it on to her own music and in her own
measure.
They had it all determined: Carline was to be wedged away with his
friend, a cotton broker that Daisy--Nelia's newfound accomplice--knew,
and Terabon was to be tempted to "do the Palace," and he was to be
caught unaware, by Nelia, who wanted to dance with him, dine with him
under bright lights, and drink dangerous drinks with him. She knew him
sober and industrious, good and faithful, a decent, reputable working
man--she wanted to see him waked up and boisterous, careless for her
sake and because of her desires.
She just felt wicked, wanted to be wicked, and didn't care how wicked
she might be. She counted, however, without the bonds which the
Mississippi River seems at times to cast around its favourites--the
Spirit of the river which looks after his own.
She had not even seen Policeman Laddam standing at the main entrance of
the notorious resort, for Daisy had taken her through another door. She
went to the exclusive "Third," and from there emerged onto the dancing
floor just as Palura ostentatiously went forth to drive Laddam away, or
to kill him.
Daisy checked her, for the minute or two of suspense, and then the whole
scene, the tragedy, was enacted before her gaze. She was not frightened;
she was not even excited; the thing was so astonishing that she did not
quite grasp its full import till she saw Palura stumbling back, shot
again and again. Daisy caught her arm and clutched it in dumb panic, and
when the policeman calmly bent the cohorts of the dead man to his will
and carried away his victims, Daisy dragged Nelia away.
Then Daisy disappeared and Nelia was left to her own devices.
She was vexed and disappointed. She knew nothing of the war in Mendova.
Politics had never engaged her attention, and the significance of the
artistic killing of Palura did not appear to her mind. She was simply
possessed by an indignant feminine impatience to think that Terabon had
escaped, and she was angry when she had only that glimpse of him, as
with his notebook in hand he raced his pencil across the blank pages,
jotting down the details and the hasty, essential impressions as he
caught them.
She heard the exodus. She heard women sobbing and men gasping as they
swore and fled. She gathered up her own cloak and left with reluctant
footsteps.
She realized that she had arrived there just one day too late to "do"
Palura's. The fugitives, as they scurried by, reminded her of some
description which she had read of the Sack of Rome; or was it the Fall
of Babylon? Their sins were being visited upon the wicked, and Nelia
Crele, since she had not sinned, could not thrill with quite the same
terror and despair of the wretches who had sinned in spite of their
consciences, instead of through ignorance or wantonness. She took her
departure not quite able to understand why there had been so much furore
because one man had been killed.
She was among the last to leave the accursed place, and she saw the
flight of the ones who had delayed, perhaps to loot, perhaps having just
awakened to the fact of the tragedy. She turned toward Mousa Slough, and
her little shanty-boat seemed very cool and bare that late evening. The
bookshelves were all empty, and she was just a little too tired to
sleep, just a little too stung by reaction to be happy, and rather too
much out of temper to be able to think straight and clearly on the
disappointment.
Mendova had been familiar in her ears since childhood; she had heard
stories of its wildness, its gayeties, its recklessness. Impression had
been made upon impression, so that when she had found herself nearing
the place of her dreams, she was in the mood to enter into its wildest
and gayest activities; she had expected to, and she had known in her own
mind that when she met Terabon she would be irresistible.
At last she shuddered. She seemed to hear a voice, the river's voice,
declare that this thing had happened to prevent her seeking to betray
herself and Terabon, not to mention that other matter which did not
affect her thought in the least, her husband's honour.
The idea of her husband's honour made the thing absurd to her. There was
no such thing as that honour. She had plotted to get Carline out of the
way now that she heard he was clear of the pirates. On second thought,
she was sorry that she had been so hasty in returning to the boat,
wishing that she had followed up Terabon.
She walked out onto the bow deck, and standing in the dark, with her
door closed, looked up and down the slough. A dozen boats were in sight.
She heard a number of men and women talking in near-by boats, and the
few words she heard indicated that the river people had a pretty morsel
of gossip in the killing of Palura.
She heard men rustling through the weeds and switch willows of the
boatmen's pathway, and she hailed; she was now a true river woman,
though she did not know it.
"Say, boys, do you know if Terabon and Carline landed here to-night?"
"We just landed in," one answered. "I don't know."
"Going up town?"
"Yes----"
"I want to know about them----"
"Hit's Nelia Crele!" one exclaimed.
"That's right. Hello, boys--Despard--Jet--Cope!"
"Sure! When'd you land?"
"Late this evening; I was up to Palura's when----"
"That ain't no place fo' a lady."
She laughed aloud, as she added, "I was there when Palura was killed by
the policeman."
"Palura killed a policeman!" Despard said. "He's killed----"
"No, Palura was killed by a policeman. Shot him dead right on the
dance-hall floor."
The pirates choked. The thing was unbelievable. They came down to the
boat and she described the affair briefly, and they demanded details.
They felt that it would vitally affect Mendova. They whispered among
themselves as to what it meant. They learned that a policeman had been
stationed in front of the notorious resort and that that policeman had
done the shooting during a fight with waiters and bouncers and with
Palura himself.
"We hadn't better get to go up town," Jet whimpered. "Hit don't sound
right!"
They argued and debated, and finally went on their way, having promised
Nelia that they would see and tell Terabon, on the quiet, that she had
come into the slough, and that she wanted to see him.
She waited for some time, hoping that Terabon would come, but finally
went to sleep. She was tired, and excitement had deserted her. She slept
more soundly than in some time.
Once she partly awakened, and thought that some drift log had bumped
into her boat; then she felt a gentle undulation, as of the waves of a
passing steamer, but she was too sleepy to contemplate that phenomenon
in a rather narrow water channel around a bend from the main current.
It was not till she had slept long and well that she began to dream
vividly. She was impatient with dreams; they were always full of
disappointment.
Daylight came, and sunshine penetrated the window under which she slept.
The bright rays fell upon her closed eyes and stung her cheeks. She
awakened with difficulty, and looked around wonderingly. She saw the
sunlight move along the wall and then drift back again. She felt the
boat teetering and swaggering. She looked out of the window and saw a
distant wood across the familiar, glassy yellow surface of the
Mississippi. With a low whisper of dismay she started out to look
around, and found that she was really adrift in mid-river.
On the opposite side of the boat she saw the blank side of a boat
against her cabin window. As she stood there, she heard or felt a motion
on the boat alongside. Someone stepped, or rather jumped heavily, onto
the bow deck of her boat and flung the cabin door open.
She sprang to get her pistol, and stood ready, as the figure of a man
stumbled drunkenly into her presence.
CHAPTER XXIX
Parson Elijah Rasba, the River Prophet, could not think what he would
say to these river people who had determined to have a sermon for their
Sabbath entertainment. Neither his Bible nor his hurried glances from
book to book which Nelia Crele had given him brought any suggestion
which seemed feasible. His father had always declared that a sermon, to
be effective, "must have one bullet fired straight."
What bullet would reach the souls of these river people who sang ribald
songs, danced to lively music, and lived clear of all laws except the
one they called "The Law," a deadly, large-calibre revolver or automatic
pistol?
"I 'low I just got to talk to them like folks," he decided at last, and
with that comforting decision went to sleep.
The first thing, after dawn, when he looked out upon the river in all
the glory of sunshine and soft atmosphere and young birds, he heard a
hail:
"Eh, Prophet! What time yo' all goin' to hold the meeting?"
"Round 10 or 11 o'clock," he replied.
Rasba went to one of the boats for breakfast, and he was surprised when
Mamie Caope asked him to invoke a blessing on their humble meal of
hot-bread, sorghum, fried pork chops, oatmeal, fried spuds, percolator
coffee, condensed cream, nine-inch perch caught that morning, and some
odds and ends of what she called "leavings."
Then the women all went over on his big mission boat and cleaned things
up, declaring that men folks didn't know how to keep their own faces
clean, let alone houseboats. They scrubbed and mopped and re-arranged,
and every time Rasba appeared they splashed so much that he was obliged
to escape.
When at last he was allowed to return he found the boat all cleaned up
like a honey-comb. He found that the gambling apparatus had been taken
away, except the heavy crap table, which was made over into a pulpit,
and that chairs and benches had been arranged into seats for a
congregation. A store-boat man climbed to the boat's roof at 10:30, with
a Texas steer's horn nearly three feet long, and began to blow.
The blast reverberated across the river, and echoed back from the shore
opposite; it rolled through the woods and along the sandbars; and the
Prophet, listening, recalled the tales of trumpets which he had read in
the Bible. At intervals of ten minutes old Jodun filled his great lungs,
pursed his lips, and swelled his cheeks to wind his great horn, and the
summons carried for miles. People appeared up the bank, swamp angels
from the timber brakes who strolled over to see what the river people
were up to, and skiffs sculled over to bring them to the river meeting.
The long bend opposite, and up and down stream, where no sign of life
had been, suddenly disgorged skiffs and little motorboats of people
whose floating homes were hidden in tiny bays, or covered by neutral
colours against their backgrounds.
The women hid Rasba away, like a bridegroom, to wait the moment of his
appearance, and when at last he was permitted to walk out into the
pulpit he nearly broke down with emotion. There were more than a hundred
men and women, with a few children, waiting eagerly for him. He was a
good old fellow; he meant all right; he'd taken care of Jest Prebol, who
had deserved to be shot; he was pretty ignorant of river ways, but he
wanted to learn about them; he hadn't hurt their feelings, for he minded
his own business, saying not a word about their good times, even if he
wouldn't dance himself. They could do no better than let him know that
they hadn't any hard feelings against him, even if he was a parson, for
he didn't let on that they were sinners. Anyway, they wanted to hear him
hit it up!
"I came down here to find a son whose mother was worrited about him,"
Rasba began at the beginning. "I 'lowed likely if I could find Jock it'd
please his mammy, an' perhaps make her a little happier. And Jock 'lowed
he'd better go back, and stand trial, even if it was a hanging matter.
"You see, I didn't expect you'd get to learn very much from me, and I
haven't been disappointed. I'm the one that's learning, and when I think
what you've done for me, and when I see what Old Mississip' does,
friendlying for all of us, tripping us along----"
They understood. He looked at the boat, at them, and through the
wide-open windows at the sun-rippled water.
"Now for religion. Seems like I'm impudent, telling you kindly souls
about being good to one another, having no hard, mean feelings against
anybody, and living like you ought to live. We're all sinners! Time and
again hit's ag'in the grain to do what's right, and if we taste a taste
of white liquor, or if hit's stained with burnt sugar to make hit red,
why----"
"Sho!" someone grinned. "Parson Rasba knows!"
The preacher joined the laughter.
"Yas, suh!" he admitted, more gravely, "I know. I 'lowed, one time, that
I'd git to know this yeah happiness that comes of liquor, an' I shore
took one awful gulp. Three nights an' three days I neveh slept a wink,
an' me settin' theh by the fireplace, waitin' to be lit up an'
jubulutin', but hit didn't come. I've be'n happier, jes' a-settin' an'
lookin' at that old riveh, hearin' the wild geese flocking by!
"That old riveh--Lawse! If the Mississippi brings you fish and game; if
it gives you sheltered eddies to anchor in, and good banks or sandbars
to tie against; if this great river out here does all that for you, what
do you reckon the Father of that river, of all the world, of all the
skies would do, He being so much friendlier and powerfuller?
"Hit's easy to forget the good that's done to you. Lots an' lots of
times, I bet you've not even thought of the good you've had from the
river, from the sunshine, from the winds, plenty to eat and warm of
nights on your boats and in your cabins. It's easy to remember the
little evil things, the punishments that are visited upon us for our
sins or because we're ignorant and don't know; but reckon up the
happiness you have, the times you are blessed with riches of comfort and
pleasure, and you'll find yourself so much happier than you are sad that
you'll know how well you are cared for.
"I cayn't preach no reg'lar sermon, with text-tes and singing and all
that. Seems like I jes' want to talk along rambling like, and tell you
how happy you are all, for I don't reckon you're much wickeder than you
are friendly on the average. I keep a-hearing about murdering and
stealing and whiskey boating and such things. They're signs of the
world's sinfulness. We talk a heap about such things; they're real, of
course, and we cayn't escape them. At the same time, look at me!
"I came down here, sorry with myse'f, and you make me glad, not asking
if I'd done meanness or if I'd betrayed my friends. You 'lowed I was
jes' a man, same's you. I couldn't tell you how to be good, because I
wasn't no great shakes myse'f, and the worse I was the better you got.
Buck an' Jock gives me this boat for a mission boat; I'm ignorant, an' a
woman gives me----"
He choked up. What the woman had given him was too immeasurable and too
wonderful for mere words to express his gratitude.
"I'm just one of those shoutin', ignorant mountain parsons. I could
out-whoop most of them up yonder. But down yeah, Old Mississip' don't
let a man shout out. When yo' play dance music, hit's softer and sweeter
than some of those awful mountain hymns in which we condemn lost souls
to the fire. Course, the wicked goes to hell, but somehow I cayn't git
up much enthusiasm about that down yeah. What makes my heart rejoice is
that there's so much goodness around that I bet 'most anybody's got a
right smart chanct to get shut of slippin' down the claybanks into
hell."
"Jest Prebol?" someone asked, seeing Prebol's face in the window of the
little red shanty-boat moored close by, where he, too, could listen.
"Jest Prebol's been my guide down the riveh," the Prophet retorted. "I
can say that I only wish I could be as good a pilot for poor souls and
sinners toward heaven as Jest is a river pilot for a wandering old
mountain parson on the Mississippi----"
"Hi-i-i!" a score of voices laughed, and someone shouted, "So row me
down the Jordan!"
They all knew the old religious song which fitted so nicely into the
conditions on the Mississippi. Somebody called to someone else, and the
musicians in the congregation slipped away to return with their
violins, banjos, accordions, guitars, and other familiar instruments.
Before the preacher knew it, he had more music in the church than he had
ever heard in a church before--and they knew what to play and what to
sing.
The sermon became a jubilee, and he would talk along awhile till
something he said struck a tuneful suggestion, and the singing would
begin again; and when at last he brought the service to an end, he was
astonished to find that he had preached and they had sung for more than
two hours.
Then there was scurrying about, and from all sides the calm airs of the
sunny Sabbath were permeated with the odours of roasts and fried things,
coffee and sauces. A score wanted Rasba to dine out, but Mrs. Caope
claimed first and personal acquaintance, and her claim was acknowledged.
The people from far boats and tents returned to their own homes. Two or
three boats of the fleet, in a hurry to make some place down stream,
dropped out in mid-afternoon, and the little shanty-boat town was
already breaking up, having lasted but a day, but one which would long
be remembered and talked about. It was more interesting than murder, for
murders were common, and the circumstances and place were so remarkable
that even a burning steamboat would have had less attention and
discussion.
The following morning Mrs. Caope offered Rasba $55 for his old poplar
boat, and he accepted it gladly. She said she had a speculation in mind,
and before nightfall she had sold it for $75 to two men who were going
pearling up the St. Francis, and who thought that a boat a parson had
tripped down in would bring them good luck.
The dancers of Saturday night, the congregation of Sunday, on Monday
afternoon were scattered. Mrs. Caope's and another boat dropped off the
river to visit friends, and mid-afternoon found Parson Rasba and Prebol
alone again, drawing down toward Mendova.
Prebol knew that town, and he told Rasba about it. He promised that they
would see something of it, but they could not make it that evening, so
they landed in Sandbar Reach for the night. Just after dawn, while the
rising sun was flashing through the tree tops from east to west, a
motorboat driving up stream hailed as it passed.
"Ai-i-i, Prebol! Palura's killed up!"
Prebol shouted out for details, and the passer-by, slowing down, gave a
few more:
"Had trouble with the police, an' they shot him daid into his own dance
floor--and Mendova's no good no more!"
"Now what the boys goin' to do when they make a haul?" Prebol demanded
in great disgust of Parson Rasba. "Fust the planters shot up whiskey
boats; then the towns went dry, an' now they closed up Palura's an' shot
him daid. Wouldn't hit make yo' sick, Parson! They ain't no fun left
nowheres for good sports."
Rasba could not make any comment. He was far from sure of his
understanding. He felt as though his own life had been sheltered, remote
from these wild doings of murders and shanty-boat-fleet dances and a
congregation assembling in a gambling boat handed to him for a mission!
He could not quite get his bearings, but the books blessed him with
their viewpoints, as numerous as the points of the compass. He could not
turn a page or a chapter without finding something that gave him a
different outlook or a novel idea.
They landed in late on Monday at Mendova bar, just above the wharf. Up
the slough were many shanty-boats, and gaunt dogs and floppy buzzards
fed along the bar and down the wharf.
Groups of men and women were scattered along both the slough and the
river banks, talking earnestly and seriously. Rasba, bound up town to
buy supplies, heard the name of Palura on many lips; the policemen on
their beats waltzed their heavy sticks about in debonair skilfulness;
and stooped, rat-like men passing by, touched their hats nervously to
the august bluecoats.
When Rasba returned to the boat, he found a man waiting for him.
"My name is Lester Terabon," the man said. "I landed in Saturday, and
went up town. When I returned, my skiff and outfit were all
gone--somebody stole them."
"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "I've heard of you. You write for newspapers?"
"Yes, sir, and I'm some chump, being caught that way."
"They meant to rob you?" Rasba asked.
"Why, of----I don't know!" Terabon saw a new outlook on the question.
"Did they go down?"
"Yes, sir, I heard so. I don't care about my boat, typewriter, and
duffle; what bothers me is my notebooks. Months of work are in them. If
I could get them back!"
"What can I do for you?"
"I don't know--I'm going down stream; it's down below, somewhere."
"I need someone to help me," Rasba said. "I've a wounded man here who
has a doctor with him. If he goes up to the hospital or stays with us,
I'll be glad to have you for your help and company."
"I'm in luck." Terabon laughed with relief.
Just that way the Mississippi River's narrow channel brought the River
Prophet and the river reporter together. Terabon went up town and bought
some clothes, some writing paper, a big blank notebook, and a bottle of
fountain-pen ink. With that outfit he returned on board, and a delivery
car brought down his share of things to eat.
The doctor said Prebol ought to go into the hospital for at least a
week, and Terabon found Prebol's pirate friends, hidden up the slough on
their boat, not venturing to go out except at night. They took the
little red shanty-boat up the slough, and Prebol went to the hospital.
Rasba, frankly curious about the man who wrote for newspapers for a
living, listened to accounts of an odd and entertaining occupation. He
asked about the Palura shooting which everyone was talking about, and
when Terabon described it as he had witnessed it, Rasba shook his head.
"Now they'll close up that big market of sin?" he asked. "They've all
scattered around."
"Yes, and they scattered with my skiff, too, and probably robbed Carline
of his boat----"
"Carline! You know him?"
"I came down with him from Yankee Bar, and we went up to Palura's
together. I lost him in the shuffle, when the big cop killed Palura."
"And Mrs. Carline, Nelia Crele?" Rasba demanded.
"Why--I--they said she'd landed in. She's gone, too----"
"You know her?"
"Why, yes--I----"
"So do I. Those books," he waved his hand toward the loaded shelves,
"she gave them all to me for my mission boat!"
Terabon stared. He went to the shelves and looked at the volumes. In
each one he found the little bookmark which she had used in cataloguing
them:
Nelia Carline,
A Loved Book.
No. 87
A jealous pang seized him, in spite of his reportorial knowledge that
jealousy is vanity for a literary person.
"I 'low we mout 's well drop out," Rasba suggested. "Missy Crele's down
below some'rs. Her boat floated out to'd mornin', one of the boys
said."
CHAPTER XXX
Carline had discovered his wife in the excitement at Palura's, and with
the cunning of a drunken man had shadowed her. He followed her down to
Mousa Bayou, and saw her go on board her cabin-boat. He watched, with
more cunning, to see for whom she was waiting. He had in his pocket a
heavy automatic pistol with which to do murder.
He had seen killing done, and the thing was fascinating; some
consciousness that the policeman had done the right thing seemed now to
justify his own intention of killing a man, or somebody.
Disappointment lingered in his mind when the lights went out on board
Nelia's boat, and for a long time he meditated as to what he should do.
He saw skiffs, motorboats, shanty-boats pulling hastily down the slough
into the Mississippi. It was the Exodus of Sin. Mendova's rectitude had
asserted its strength and power, and now the exits of the city were
flickering with the shadows of departing hordes of the night and of the
dark, all of whom had two fears: one of daylight, the other of sudden
death.
Their departure before his eyes, with darkened boats, gave Carline
an idea at last. He wanted to get away off somewhere, where he could
be alone, without any interruption. Bitter anger surged in his
breast because his wife had shamed him, left him, led him this
any-thing-but-merry chase down the Mississippi. A proud Carline had
no call to be treated thataway by any woman, especially by the
daughter of an old ne'er-do-well whom he had condescended to marry.
He had always been a hunter and outdoor man, and it was no particular
trick for him to cast off the lines of Nelia's boat and push it out
into the sluggish current, and it was as easy for him to take his own
boat and drop down into the river. He brought the two boats quietly
together and lashed them fast with rope fenders to prevent rubbing and
bumping--did it with surprising skill.
The Mississippi carried them down the reach into the crossing, and
around a bend out of sight of even the glow of the Mendova lights. Here
was one of those lonesome stretches of the winding Mississippi, with
wooded bank, sandbar, sky-high and river-deep loneliness.
Carline, with alcoholic persistency, held to his scheme. He drank the
liquor which he had salvaged in the riotous night. He thought he knew
how to bring people to time, especially women. He had seen a big
policeman set the pace, and the sound of the club breaking skull bones
was still a shock in his brain, oft repeated.
The sudden dawn caught him by surprise, and he stared rather nonplussed
by the sunrise, but when he looked around and saw that he was in
mid-stream and miles from anywhere and from any one, he knew that there
was no better place in the world for taming one's wife, and extorting
from her the apologies which seemed to Carline appropriate, all things
considered, for the occasion.
The time had arrived for action. He rose with dignity and buttoned up
his waistcoat; he pulled down his coat and gave his cravat a hitch; he
rubbed a tentative hand on the lump where the pirates had bumped him; he
scrambled over the side onto the cabin-boat deck, and entered upon the
scene of his conquest.
He found himself confronted by Nelia in a white-faced, low-voiced fury
instead of in the mood he had expected. She wasn't sorry; she wasn't
apologetic; she wasn't even amiable or conciliatory.
"Gus Carline! Drunk, as usual. What do you mean by this?"
"S'all right!" he assured her, flapping his hands. "Y're m'wife; I'm
your husban'! S'all right!"
She drew her pistol and fired a bullet past him.
"Go!" she cried.
Before he knew what had happened he had backed out upon the bow deck,
and she bundled him up onto his own craft. She cast off the bow line and
ran to the stern to cast off the line there. As she did so, she
discovered Terabon's skiff around at the far side where Carline could
not see it.
Her husband was still shaking his fist in her direction, but the two
boats were well apart as she rowed away with her sweeps. He stood there,
undecided. He had not expected the sudden and effective resistance.
Before he knew it, she was lost in a whole fleet of little houseboats
which were, to his eyes, both in the sky, underwater, and scattered all
over the tip-tilting surfaces.
The current, under the impulse of her rowing, carried Nelia into an eddy
and she saw the cruiser rocking down a crossing into the mirage of the
distance. She sat on the bow deck while her boat made a long swing in
the eddy. Things did not happen down the river as she planned or
expected. She regarded the previous night's entertainment with less
indifference now; something about the calm of that broad river affected
her. She realized that watching the killing of Palura had given her a
shock so deep that now she was trembling with the weakness of horror.
She had seen Gus Carline stumble into her cabin, and with angry defiance
she had acted with the intention of doing to him what she had done to
Prebol--but she had missed deliberately when she shot. When she recalled
the matter, she saw that for weeks she had been living in a false frame
of mind; that she was desperate, and not contented; that she was
afraid--and that she hated fear.
Her pistol was sign of her bravado, and her shots were the indication of
her desperation. The memory of the wan face of Prebol brought down by
her bullet was now an accusation, not a pride.
Old Mississip' had received her gently in her most furious mood, but now
that immense, active calm of vast power was working on the untamed soul
which she owned. The river swept along, and its majesty no longer gave
her the feeling that nothing mattered. Far from it! Though she rebelled
against the idea, her mind knew that she was in rebellion, that she was
going against the current. And the river's mood was dangerous, now, to
the wanton feelings to which she had desperately yielded but
unsuccessfully.
The old, familiar, sharp division between right and wrong was presented
to her gaze as if the river itself were calling her attention to it. She
could not escape the necessity of a choice, with evil so persuasive and
delightful and virtue so depressing and necessary.
She investigated Terabon's outfit with curiosity and questioning. His
typewriter, his maps, his few books, his stack of notes neatly compiled
in loose-leaf files, were the materials which caught and held her fancy.
She took them on board her shanty-boat and read the record which he had
made, from day to day, from his inspection of Commission records at St.
Louis to the purchase of his boat in shanty-boat town, and his departure
down the river.
His words were intimate and revealing:
Oct. 5; In mid-stream among a lot of islands; rafts of ducks; a
dull, blue day, still those great limestone hills, with hollows
through which the wind comes when opposite--coolies?----; in the far
distance a rowboat. On the Missouri side, the hills; on the other
the flats, with landing sheds. Ducks in great flocks--look like sea
serpents when flying close to the water; like islands on it--wary
birds.
That was above the part of the river which she knew; she turned to
Kaskaskia, and read facts familiar to her:
I met Crele, an old hunter-trapper, in a slough below St. Genevieve.
He was talkative, and said he had the prettiest girl on a hundred
miles of river. She had married a man of the name of Carline, real
rich and a big bug. "But my gal's got the looks, yes, indeed!" If I
find her, I must be sure and tell her to write to her folks--river
romance!
Nelia's face warmed as she read those phrases as well it might. She
wondered what other things he had written in his book of notes, and her
eye caught a page:
House boatmen are a bad lot. Once a young man came to work for a
farmer back on the hills. He'd been there a month, when one night he
disappeared; a set of double harness went with him. Another man hung
around a week, and raided a grocery store, filling washtubs with
groceries, cloth, and shoes--went away in a skiff.
She turned to where he travelled down the Mississippi with her husband
and read the description of Gus Carline's whiskey skiff man, his
purchase of a gallon of whiskey; the result, which her imagination
needed but few words to visualize; then Terabon's drifting away down
stream, leaving the sot to his own insensibilities.
Breathlessly she read his snatching sentences from bend to shoal, from
reach to reach, until he described her red-hull, white cabin-boat,
described the "young river woman" who occupied it; and then, page after
page of memoranda, telling almost her own words, and his own words, as
he had remembered them. What he wrote here had not been intended for her
eyes.
She's dropping down this river all alone; pirates nor scoundrels nor
river storms nor jeopardies seem to disturb her in the least. She
even welcomes me, as an interesting sort of intellectual specimen,
who can talk about books and birds and a multitude of things. She
may well rest assured that none of us river rats have any designs,
whatever, on a lady who shoots quick, shoots straight, and dropped
Prebol at thirty yards off-hand with an automatic!
She read the paragraph with interest and then with care; she did not
know whether to be pleased or not by that brutally frank statement that
he was afraid of her--suppose he hadn't been afraid? Then, of what was
he really afraid--not of her pistol! She read on through the pages of
notes. The description of the walk with her up the sandbar and back,
there at Island No. 10, thrilled her, for it told the apparently
trifling details--the different kinds of sands, the sounds, the night
gloom, the quick sense of the river presence, the glow of distant New
Madrid. He had lived it, and he wrote it in terms that she realized were
the words she might have used to describe her own observations and
sensations.
She searched through his notes in vain for any suggestion of the
emotions which she had felt. She shrugged her shoulders, because he had
not written anything to indicate that he had discovered her allurement.
He had written in bald words the fact of her sending him on the errand
of rescue, to save her husband--and she was obliged to digest in her
mind the bare but significant phrase:
And, because she has sent me, I am glad to go!
His notes made her understand him better, but they did not reveal all
his own feelings. He wrote her down as an object of curiosity, as he
spoke of the sour face and similitude of good humour in the whiskey
boater's expression. In the same painstaking way he described her own
friendliness for a passing skiff boater. The impersonality of his
remarks about himself surprised while it perplexed her.
The mass of material which he had gathered for making articles and
stories amazed her. The stack of pages, closely typewritten, was more
than two inches thick. A few pages disclosed consecutive paragraphs with
subjects, predicates, and complete sense, but other pages showed only
disjointed phrases, words, and flashes of ideas.
The changing notes, the questioning, the observations, the minute
recording were fascinating to her. It revealed a phase of writers' lives
of which she had known nothing--the gathering of myriads of details, in
order to free the mind for accurate rendering of pictures and
conditions. She wished she could see some of the finished product of
Terabon's use of these notes, and the wish revealed a chasm, an abyss
that confronted her. She felt deserted, as though she had need of
Terabon to give her a view of his own life, that she might be diverted
into something not sordid, and decidedly not according to Augustus
Carline's ideals!
After a time, seeing that Carline's boat had disappeared down river, she
threw over her anchor, and rested in the eddy. It was on the west side,
with a chute entrance through a sandbar and willow-grown island points
opposite. She brought out her map book to see if she could learn where
she was anchored, but the printed map, with the bright red lines of
recent surveys, helped her not at all. She turned from sheet to sheet
down to Memphis, without finding what she wanted to know.
She saw some shanty-boats down the river; she saw some up the river; but
there was none near her till just before dark a motor skiff came down in
the day's gray gloom, and passed within a few yards of her. When she
looked at the two men in the boats she learned to know what fear
is--river terror--horror of mankind in its last extremities of depravity
and heartlessness.
She saw men stooped and slinking, whose glance was sidelong and whose
expression was venomous, casting covert looks toward her as they passed
by into the gray mist of falling night. They entered a narrow waterway
among the sandbars, and left behind the feeling that along that waterway
was the abiding place of lost souls. She wanted to take up the anchor
and flee out onto the river, but when she looked into the darkening
breadths, she felt the menace of the miles, of the mists, of the wooded
shores. Foreboding was in her tired soul.
She examined her pistol, to make sure that it was ready to use; she
locked the stern door, and drew the curtains; she went to the bow and
looked carefully at the anchor-line fastenings. With no light on board
to blind her gaze, she scrutinized all the surroundings, to make sure of
her locality. In that blank gloom she was dubious but brave. Not a thing
visible, not a sound audible, nothing but her remote and little
understood sensation of premonitory dread explained her perturbation.
She entered the cabin, locked the door, set the window catches and
sticks, lighted the lamp, and sat down to--think. Her bookshelves were
empty, and she was glad that she had emptied them in a good cause. It
occurred to her that she ought to make up another list for her own
service, and with pencil and paper she began that most fascinating
work, the compilation of one's own library. As she made her selections,
she forgot the menace which she had observed.
In the stillness she thought her own ears were ringing and paid no
attention to the humming that increased in volume moment by moment. It
was a flash of lightning without thunder that stirred her senses. She
looked up from her absorption.
She heard a distant rumble, a near-by stirring. The wavelets along the
side of the boat were noisy; they rattled like paper. Something fell
clattering on the roof of the cabin, and a tearing, ripping, crashing
struck the boat and fairly tossed it skipping along the surface of the
water. The lamp blew out as a window pane broke, and the woman was
thrown to the floor in a confusion of chairs, table, and other loose
objects. Happily, the stove was screwed fast to the floor. The anchor
line broke with a loud twang, and the black confusion was lighted with
flares and flashes of gray-blue glaring.
The river had made Nelia Crele believe that she was in jeopardy from
man; but it was a little hurricane, or, as the river people call them,
cyclones, that menaced. Dire as was the confusion and imminent as was
the peril, Nelia felt a sense of relief from what would have been harder
to bear--an attack by men. She had searched the map for information, but
it was the river which inspired her to understand that the hurricane was
her deliverance rather than her assailant.
She did not know whether she would live or die during those seconds when
the gale crashed like maul blows and wind and rain poured and whistled
in at the broken window pane. She laughed at her predicament, tumbling
in dishevelment around the bouncing cabin floor, and when the suck and
send of the storm crater passed by, leaving a driving wind, she stepped
out on the bows, and caught up her sweeps to ride the waves and face the
gale that set steadily in from the north.
It was gray, impenetrable black--that night. She could see nothing,
neither the waves nor the sky nor the river banks; but singing aloud,
she steadied the boat, bow to the wind, holding it to the gale by
dipping the sweeps deep and strong.
Beaten steadily back, unable to know how far or in what direction, she
found her soul, serenely above the mere physical danger, loving that
vast torrent more than ever.
The Mississippi trains its own to be brave.
CHAPTER XXXI
Parson Rasba and Terabon floated out into the main river current and ran
with the stream. They were passing through the famous, changeable
channels among the great sandbars from Island No. 34 down to Hopefield
Bend. They rounded Dean Island Bend in the darkness, for they had
floated all day and far into the night, driven by an anxiety which was
inexplicable.
They wanted to be going; they felt an urge which they commented upon; it
was a voice in their hearts, and not audible in their ears. Yet when
they stood nervously at the great sweeps of the mission boat, to pull
the occasional strokes necessary to clear a bar or flank a bend, they
could almost declare that the river was talking.
They strained their ears in vain, trying to distinguish the meanings of
the distant murmurings. Terabon, now well familiar with the river, could
easily believe that he was listening to the River Spirit, and his
feelings were melancholy.
For months he had strained every power of his mind to record the exact
facts about the Mississippi, and he put down tens of thousands of words
describing and stating what he saw, heard, and knew. With one stroke he
had been separated from his work, and he feared that he had lost his
precious notes for all time.
Either Carline or river pirates had carried them away. He hoped, he
believed, that he would find them, but there was an uncertainty. He
shivered apprehensively when he recalled with what frankness he had put
down details, names, acts, rumours, reports--all the countless things
which go to make up the "histories" of a voyage down from St. Louis in
skiff, shanty-boat, and launch. What would they say if they read his
notes?
He had notepaper, blank books, and ink, and he set about the weary task
of keeping up his records, and putting down all that he could recall of
the contents of his lost loose-leaf system. It was a staggering task.
In one record he wrote the habitual hour-to-hour description, comment,
talk, and fact; in his "memory journal" he put down all the things he
could recall about the contents of his lost record. He had written the
things down to save him the difficulty of trying to remember, but now he
discovered that he had remembered. A thousand times faster than he could
write the countless scenes and things he had witnessed flocked back into
the consciousness of his mind, pressing for recognition and another
chance to go down in black and white.
As he wrote, Parson Rasba, in the intervals of navigating the big
mission boat, would stand by gazing at the furious energy of his
companion. Rasba had seized upon a few great facts of life, and dwelt in
silent contemplation of them, until a young woman with a library
disturbed the echoing halls of his mind, and brought into them the
bric-à-brac of the thought of the ages. Now, from that brief experience,
he could gaze with nearer understanding at this young man who regarded
the pathway of the moon reflecting in a narrow line across a sandbar and
in a wide dancing of cold blue flames upon the waters, as an important
thing to remember; who recorded the wavering flight of the nigger geese,
or cormorants, as compared to the magnificent V-figure, straight drive
of the Canadians and the other huge water fowl; who paused to seize such
simple terms as "jump line," "dough-bait," "snag line," "reef line," as
though his life might depend on his verbal accuracy.
The Prophet pondered. The Mississippi had taught him many lessons. He
was beginning to look for the lesson in casual phenomena, and when he
said so to Terabon, the writer stared at him with open mouth.
"Why--that explains!" Terabon gasped.
"Explains what?"
"The heathen who was awed by the myriad impressions of Nature, and who
learned, by hard experience, that he must not neglect even the
apparently trivial things lest he suffer disaster."
Then Terabon fell to writing even more furiously in his day-by-day
journal, for that was something of this moment, although he has just
jotted down the renewed impression of coming into the bottoms at Cape
Girardeau. Rasba took up the pages of the notes which Terabon was
rewriting. Happily, Terabon's writing was like copper-plate script,
however fast he wrote, and the mountain man read:
Big hickory tree grove--Columbus Hickories--Largest cane in some
bend down below Helena--Spanish Moss bend--famous river
bend--Fisherman at Brickey's Mill told of hoop nets, trammels,
seines (stillwater bayous), jump, hand, snag, reef, lines----Jugging
for catfish down the crossings, half pound pork, or meat, for bait,
also called "blocking" for catfish.
"What will you do with all this?" Rasba asked.
"Why, I'll----" Terabon hesitated, and then continued: "It's like
building a house. I gather all this material: lumber, stone, logs,
cement, shingles, lathes, quick-lime, bricks, and everything. I store it
all up in this notebook; that's my lumber yard. Then when I dig the
foundation, I'll come in here and I'll find the things I need to build
my house, or mansion. Of course, to start with, I'll just build little
shacks and cabins. See what I mean? I am going to write articles first
and they're kind of like barns and shacks, and even mere fences. But by
and by I'll write fiction stories, and they will be like the mansions,
and the material will all fit in: all about a fisherman, all about a
market hunter, all about a drifter, all about a river----"
"All about a river woman?" Rasba asked, as he hesitated.
"I wasn't thinking that." Terabon shook his head, his colour coming a
little. "I had in mind, all about a River Prophet!"
"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "What could you all find to write about a Riveh
Prophet?"
Terabon looked at the stern, kindly, friendly, picturesque mountaineer
who had come so far to find one man, for that man's mother, and he
rejoiced in his heart to think that the parson did not know, could never
know, because of the honest simplicity of his heart, how extraordinarily
interesting he was.
So they drifted with the current, absorbed in their immediate present.
It seemed as though they found their comprehension expanding and
widening till it encompassed the answers to a thousand questions. Rasba,
dazed by his own accretion of new interests, discovery of undreamed-of
powers, seizure of opportunities never known before, could but gaze with
awe and thankfulness at the evidences of his great good fortune, the
blessings that were his in spite of his wondering why one of so little
desert had received such bountiful favour. Terabon, remembering what he
feared was irrevocably lost, knew that he had escaped disaster, and that
the pile of notes which he had made only to be deprived of them were
after all of less importance than that he should have suffered the deep
emotion of seeing so much of his toil and time vanish.
Here it was again--Rasba might well wonder at that gathering and
hoarding of trifles. They were not the important things, those minute
words and facts and points; no, indeed.
At last Terabon knew that most important fact of all that it was the
emotions that counted. As a mere spectator, he could never hope to know
the Mississippi, to describe and write it truly; the river had forced
him into the activities of the river life, and had done him by that act
its finest service.
He was in the fervour of his most recent discovery when Rasba went out
on the bow deck and looked into the night. He called Terabon a minute
later, and the two looked at a phenomenon. The west was aglow, like a
sunset, but with flarings and flashings instead of slowly changing
lights and hues. The light under the clouds at the horizon extended
through 90 degrees of the compass, and in the centre of the bright
greenish flare there was a compact, black, apparently solid mass from
which streaks of lightning constantly exuded on all sides.
For a minute Terabon stared, cold chills goose-pimpling his flesh. Then
he cried:
"Cyclone, Parson! Get ready!"
They were opposite the head of a long bend near the end of a big
sandbar, and skirting the edge of an eddy, near its foot. Terabon sprang
into the gasolene launch, started the motor, and steered for the shelter
of the west bank. In the quiet he and Rasba told each other what to do.
Rasba ran out two big anchors with big mooring lines tied to them. He
closed the bow door but opened all the windows and other doors. Then, as
they heard the storm coming, they covered the launch with the heavy
canvas, heaved over the anchors into a fathom of water, let out long
lines, and played the launch out over the stern on a heavy line fast to
towing bits.
A sweep of hail and rain was followed by a moment of calm. Then a blast
of wind, which scraped over the cabin roof, was succeeded by the suck of
the tornado, which swept, a waterspout, across the river a quarter of a
mile down stream, struck a sandbar, and carried up a golden yellow cloud
of dust, which disappeared in the gray blackness of a terrific downpour
of rain.
They stretched out on their anchor lines till the whole fabric of the
cabin hummed and crackled with the strain, but the lines held, and the
windows being open, prevented the semi-vacuum created by the storm's
passing from "exploding" the boat, and tearing off the cabin, or the
roof.
After the varying gusts and blasts the wind settled down, colder by
forty degrees, and with the steady white of a norther. It meant days and
nights of waiting while the storm blew itself out. And when the danger
had passed and the boats were safe against the lines, the two men turned
in to sleep, more tired after their adventures than they remembered ever
being before.
In the morning rain was falling intermittently with some sleet, but
toward afternoon there was just a cold wind. They built hot fires in
their heater, burning coal with which the gamblers had filled bow and
stern bins from coal barges somewhere up the river. Having plenty to eat
on board, there was nothing to worry them.
Terabon, his fountain pen racing, wrote for his own distant Sunday
Editor a narrative which excited the compiler of the Magazine Supplement
to deep oaths of admiration for the fertile, prolific imagination of
the wandering writer--for who would believe in a romance ready made?
The night of the big wind was followed by a day and a night of gusts of
wind and sleety rain; then followed a day and a night of rising clouds,
then a day when the clouds were scattered and the sun was cold. That day
the sunset was grim, white, and freezing cold.
In the morning there was a bright, warm sunrise, a breath of sweet, soft
air, and unimaginable brightness and buoyancy, birds singing, squirrels
barking, and all the dismal pangs banished.
Shanty-boats shot out into the gay river and dotted the wide surface up
and down the current for miles. The ears of the parson and the writer,
keener with the acuteness of distant sounds, could hear music from a
boat so far away that they could not see it, a wonderfully enchanting
experience.
They, too, ran out into the flood of sunshine to float down with the
rest.
At the foot of Brandywine Bar a little cabin-boat suddenly rowed out
into the current and signalled them; somebody recognized and wanted to
speak to the mission boat. They were rapidly sucking down the swift
chute current, but Terabon turned over the motor, and flanked the big
houseboat across the current so that the hail could be answered.
The little cabin-boat, almost lost to view astern, rapidly gained, and
as they ran down Beef Island chute, where the current is slow, they were
overtaken.
"Sho!" Parson Rasba cried aloud, "hit's Missy Carline, Missy Nelia,
shore as I'm borned!"
Terabon had known it for half an hour. He had been noticing river
details, and he could not fail to recognize that little boat. His hands
trembled as he steered the launch to take advantage of slack current and
dead water, and his throat choked with an emotion which he controlled
with difficulty. He looked fearfully at the gaunt River Prophet whose
own cheeks were staining with warm blood, and whose eyes gazed so keenly
at the young woman who was coming, leaning to her sweeps with Viking
grace and abandon.
She was coming to _them_, with the fatalistic certainty that is so
astonishing to the student observer. Carried away by her sottish
husband; threatened by the tornado; rescued, perhaps, by the storm from
worse jeopardy, caught in safety under an island sandbar; her eyes,
sweeping the lonesome breadths of the flowing river-sea, had seen and
recognized her friend's boat, the floating mission, and pulled to join
safe company.
She rowed up, with her eyes on the Prophet. He stood there in his
majesty while Terabon stooped unnoticed in the engine pit of the
motorboat. Not till she had run down near enough to throw a line did she
take her eyes off the mountain parson, and then she turned and looked
into the eyes, dumb with misery, of the other man, Terabon.
Her cheeks, red with her exertions, turned white. Three days she had
read that heap of notes in loose-leaf file which Terabon had written.
She had read the lines and between the lines, facts and ideas,
descriptions and reminiscence, dialogue and history, statistics and
appreciation of a thousand river things, all viewpoints, including her
own.
She knew, now, how wicked she was. She knew, now, the wilfulness of her
sins, and the merciful interposition of the river's inviolable strength.
Her sight of the mission boat had awakened in her soul the knowledge
that she must go out and talk to the good man on board, confess her
naughtiness, and beg the Prophet for instruction. Woman-like, she knew
what the outcome would be.
He would take her, protect her, and there would be some way out of the
predicament in which they both found themselves. But again she reckoned
without the river. How could she know that Terabon and he had come down
the Mississippi together?
But there he was, chauffeuring for the Prophet!
She threw the line, Rasba caught it, drew the two boats together and
made them fast. He welcomed her as a father might have welcomed a
favourite child. He threw over the anchor, and Terabon dropped the
launch back to the stern, and hung it there on a light line.
When he entered the big cabin Nelia was sitting beside a table, and
Rasba was leaning against the shelves which he had put up for the books.
Nelia, dumbfounded, had said little or nothing. When she glanced up at
Terabon, she looked away again, quickly, flushing.
She was lost now. That was her feeling. Her defiance and her courage
seemed to have utterly left her, and in those bitter days of cold wind
and clammy rain, sleet and discomfort had changed the outlook of
everything.
Married, without a husband; capable of great love, and yet sure that she
must never love; two lovers and an unhappy marriage between her and
happiness; a mind made up to sin, wantonly, and a soul that taunted her
with a life-time of struggle against sordidness. The two men saw her
burst into tears and cry out in an agony of spirit.
Dumbly they stood there, man-like, not knowing what to do, or what
thought was in the woman's mind. The Prophet Rasba, his face full of
compassion, turned from her and went aft through the alley into the
kitchen, closing the doors behind him. He knew, and with knowledge he
accepted the river fate.
Terabon went to her, and gave her comfort. He talked to her as a lover
should when his sweetheart is in misery, her heart breaking. And she
accepted his gentleness, and sobbed out the impossibility of everything,
while she clung to him.
Within the hour they had plighted troth, regardless. She confessed to
her lover, instead of to the Prophet. He said he didn't care, and she
said she didn't care, either--which was mutually satisfactory.
When they went out to Parson Rasba, they found him calmly reading one of
the books which she had given him. He looked up at their red faces and
smiled with indulgence. They would never know what went on inside his
heart, what was in his mind behind that kindly smile. That he knew and
understood everything was clear to them, but they did not and would not
have believed that he had, for a minute, hated Terabon as standing
between him and happiness.
"What are we going to do?" Terabon cried, when he had told the Parson
that they loved each other, that they would complete the voyage down the
river together, that her husband still lived, and that they could get a
$17.50 divorce at Memphis.
"Hit wouldn't be no 'count, that divorce." The Prophet shrugged his
shoulders, and the two hung their heads. They knew it, and yet they had
been willing to plead ignorance as an excuse for sin.
He seemed to close the incident by suggesting that it was time to eat
something, and the three turned to getting a square meal. They cooked a
bountiful dinner, and sat down to it, the Prophet asking a blessing that
seared the hearts of the two because of its fervour.
Rasba asked her to read to them after they had cleared up the dishes,
and she took down the familiar volumes and read. Rasba sat with his eyes
closed, listening. Terabon watched her face. She seemed to choose the
pages at random, and read haphazardly, but it was all delight and all
poetry.
She was reading, which was strange, the Humphrey-Abbott book about the
Mississippi River levees, the classic report on river facts, all
fascinating to the mind that grasps with pleasure any river fact. When
Rasba looked up and smiled, the two were absorbed in their occupations,
one reading, the other watching her read. She stopped in conscious
confusion.
"Yas, suh!" he smiled aloud. "I 'low we uns can leave hit to Old
Mississip', these yeah things that trouble us: I, my triflin' doubts,
and you children yo' own don't-know-yets."
What made him say that, if he wasn't a River Prophet? Who told him, what
voice informed him, at that moment? Who can say?
The following morning the big mission boat and Missy Nelia's boat landed
in at Memphis wharf, and the three went up town to buy groceries,
newspapers and magazines to read, and to help Nelia choose another set
of books from the shelves of local book stores. Old Rasba had never been
in a book store before, and he stared at the hundreds of feet of
shelves, with books of all sizes, kinds, and makes.
"Sho!" he cried aloud, and then, again, "Sho! Sho!"
It was fairyland for him, a land of enchantment, of impossible
satisfaction and glory-be! Terabon and Nelia saw that they had given him
another pleasure, and Rasba was happy to know that he would always be
able to visit such places, and add to his own store of literature, when
he had read the books which he had, as he would do, page by page, and
word by word, his dictionary at hand.
Magazines and newspapers had little interest for him. Nelia and Terabon
could not help but wish to keep closer in touch with the world. They
picked up a copy of the _Trade-Appealer_, and then a copy of the
_Evening Battle Ax_, just out.
They read one headline:
UNKNOWN DROWNS IN CRUISER
It was a brutally frank description of a motorboat cruiser which had
floated down Hopefield Bend, awash and waterlogged, but held afloat by
air-tight tanks:
In the cabin was the body of a man, apparently about 30 years of
age, with a whiskey jug clasped in one hand by the handle. He was
face downward, and had been dead two or three days. It is supposed
he was caught in the heavy wind-storm of Wednesday night and
drowned.
The river had planned again. The river had acted again. They went to
look at the boat, which was pumped out and in Ash Slough. It was
Carline's cruiser. Then they went to the morgue, and it was Carline's
body.
Nelia broke down and cried. After all, one's husband is one's husband.
She did the right thing. She owned him, now, and she carried his remains
back home to Gage, and there she buried him, and wept on his grave.
She put on widow's weeds for him, and though she might have claimed his
property, she ignored the will which left her all of it, and gave to his
relatives and to her own poor people what was theirs. She gave Parson
Rasba, whom she had brought home with her to bury her husband, $5,000
for his services.
Then, after the estate was all settled up, she returned to Memphis, and
Terabon met her at the Union Station, dutifully, as she had told him to
do. Together they went to the City Clerk's and obtained a marriage
license, and the River Prophet, Rasba, with firm voice and unflinching
gaze, united them in wedlock.
They went aboard their own little shanty-boat, and while the rice and
old shoes of a host of river people rattled and clattered on their
cabin, they drifted out into the current and rapidly slipped away toward
President's Island. Parson Rasba, as they drifted clear, said to them:
"I 'lowed we uns could leave hit to Old Mississip'!"
THE END
[Illustration]
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
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