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 pa.s.sed 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 compa.s.s 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 bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 k.n.o.b there is a three-burner oil stove. We'll eat on board. Never mind your stuff, I've got so much it'll spoil--but I ain't much of a cook!"

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

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