"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 G.o.ddesses 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 d.a.m.n!"

"But the future!" he protested, feebly.

"That's it!" she retorted. "For a river G.o.ddess 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 una.s.sisted in his obvious predicament.

"Well," he drawled, after a time, "it's about midnight. I must say a river G.o.ddess 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 a.n.a.lyze, 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 h.e.l.l 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 a.s.sailant, 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 appet.i.te 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.