"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 sh.o.r.e 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 h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d's country to help us poor devils. It's just a point of view, though. I'm going right up to my particular h.e.l.l, and I'll look back here to this thousand miles of river as heaven. Yes, sir! But my job is up there--in that h.e.l.l!"

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 c.r.a.p table, the little poker tables with the bra.s.s-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.

"G.o.d 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!"

"h.e.l.lo-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 bl.u.s.tering 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, pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.e 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, pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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.