"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! G.o.d, 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 gla.s.s 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.