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. h.e.l.lo, 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 a.s.sorted 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s. 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, a.s.sistance, and confidence.

"Yo' men sh.o.r.e 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 a.s.sured 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----"