It was the river! The "feel" of the flood was that of a person. He could not shake off the sensation, which seemed absurd. He shook his head resolutely and then searched through the gloom to discover what eyes might be shining in it. He saw the inevitable government lights between which was deep water and a safe channel. He had but to keep on the line between the lights, cutting across when he spied another one far ahead.

The lights but accentuated the certainty that on all sides, but a little way from him, a host of invisible beings speculated on his presence and influenced his course.

A newspaper man of much experience could not help but protest in his practical mind against such a determination of the invisible and the unknown to give him such nonsensical ideas. He had in play, in intellectual persiflage, and with some show of traditional reasonableness, called Nelia Crele "a river G.o.ddess." She was very well placed in his mind--a reckless woman, pretty, with a fine character for a masterpiece of fiction (should he ever get to the story-writing stage) and a delight to think about; commanding, too, mysterious and exacting; and now he thought it might be the laughter of her voice that carried in the wind, not a mocking laugh, nor a jeering one, but one of sweet encouragement which neither distance nor circ.u.mstances could dismiss from a distressed and reluctant heart, let alone a heart so willing to receive as his.

Lester Terabon accepted the possibility of river lore and proclaimed beliefs. Fishermen, store-boaters, trippers, pirates, and all sorts of the shanty-boaters whom he had interviewed on his way down had solemnly a.s.sured him that there were spirits who promenaded down mid-stream, and who sometimes could be seen.

Terabon was sorry when his cool, calculating mind refused to believe his eyes, which saw shapes; his flesh, which felt creeps; his ears, which heard voices; and his nostrils, which caught a whiff of a faint, sweet perfume more exquisite than any which he remembered. He knew that when he had kissed the river G.o.ddess whose eyes were blue, whose flesh was fair, whose grace was lovely, he had tasted that nectar and sniffed that ambrosia. He wondered if she were near him, watching to see whether he performed well the task which she had set for him, the rescue of the husband who had forfeited her love, and yet who still was under her protection since in his indignant sorrow he had supposed himself capable of finding and retaining her.

Terabon would have liked nothing better than to believe what the Grecians used to believe, that G.o.ddesses and G.o.ds do come down to the earth to mingle among mankind. He fought the impossibility with his reason, and night winds laughed at him, while the voices of the waves chuckled at his predicament. They a.s.sailed him with their presence like living things, and then roared away to give room to new voices and new presences.

"Anyhow," Terabon laughed, in spite of himself, "you're good company, Old Mississip'!"

Yet he felt the chilling and depressing possibility that he might never again see that woman who would remain as a "river G.o.ddess" in his imagination. He had been heart-free, a bystander in the world's affairs.

Now he knew what it was to see the memory of a woman rise unbidden to disturb his calculations; more than that, too, he was a part of the affairs of the River People.

As a reporter "back home" he had never been able quite to reconcile himself to his constant position as a spectator, a neutral observer, obliged to write news without feeling and impartially. A politician could look him in the eye and tell him any smooth lie, and he could not, with white heat, deny the statement. He could not rise with his own strength to champion the cause of what he knew to be right against wrong; he could not elaborate on the details of things that he felt most interested in, but must consult the fancies of a not-particularly discriminating public, whose average intelligence, according to some learned students, must be placed at seventeen-years plus. As he was twenty-four plus, Terabon was immensely discouraged with the public when he had set forth down the Mississippi.

Now he was on the way from a river G.o.ddess to interfere with the infamous plans of river pirates, through a dry gale out of the north, on the winding course of the Mississippi, a transition which troubled the self-possession while it awakened the spirit of the young man.

Dawn broke on the troubled river, and the prospect was enchanting to the heroic in the mind of the skiff-tripper. He could not be sure which was east or west, for the gray light appeared on all sides, in spots and patches of varying size. No gleam reflected from the yellow clay of the tumbling and tortured waters. As far as he could see there was light, but not a bright light. Dull purples, muddy waters, gray tree trunks, black limbs against dark clouds; Terabon felt the weariness of a desert, the melancholy of a wet, dripping-tree wilderness, and of a tumbling waste of waters; and yet never had the solid body of the stream been so awe-inspiring as in that hour of creeping and insinuating dawn.

He ran out into the main river again, and a wonderful prospect opened before his eyes. Sandbars spread out for miles across the river and lengthwise of the river; the bulk of the stream seemed broken up into channels and chutes and wandering waterways. He saw column after column of lines of spiles, like black teeth, through which the water broke with protesting foam.

When he thought to reckon up, as he pa.s.sed Osceola Bar, he found that he had come ninety-five miles. Yankee Bar was only five or six miles below him, and he eagerly pulled down to inspect the long beaches, the chutes and channels, which the river pirates had used for not less than 150 years; where they still had their rendezvous.

Wild ducks and geese were there in many flocks. There were waters sheltered from the wind by willow patches. The woods of Plum Point Peninsula were heavy and dark. The river main current slashed down the miles upon miles of Craighead Point, and shot across to impinge upon Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1, where a made dirt bank was silhouetted against the sky.

Not until his binoculars rested upon the bar at the foot of Fort Pillow Bluff did Terabon's eyes discover any human beings, and then he saw a white houseboat with a red hull. He headed toward it to ask the familiar river question.

"No, suh!" the lank, sharp-eyed fisherman shook his head. "Theh's no motorboat landed up theh, not this week. Who all mout you be?"

"Lester Terabon; I'm a newspaper writer; I live in New York; I came down the Mississippi looking for things to tell about in the newspapers. You see, lots of people hardly know there's a Mississippi River, and it's the most interesting place I ever heard of."

"Terabon? I expect you all's the feller Whiskey Williams was tellin'

about; yo'n a feller name of Carline was up by No. 8. He said yo' had one of them writin' machines right into a skift. Sho! An' yo' have! The woman an' me'd jes' love to see yo' all use hit."

"You'll see me," Terabon laughed, "if you'll let me sit by your stove.

I've some writing I could do. Here's a goose for dinner, too."

"Sho! The woman sh.o.r.e will love to cook that goose! I'm a fisherman but no hunter. 'Tain't of'en we git a roast bird!"

So Terabon sat by the stove, writing. He wrote for more than an hour--everything he could remember, with the aid of his pencilled midnight notes, about that long run down. With his maps before him he recognized the bends and reaches, the sandbars and islands which had loomed up in the dark. Of all the parts of the river, the hundred miles from Island No. 10 down to Fort Pillow became the most familiar to his thoughts, black though the night had been. Even each government light began to have characteristics, and the sky-line of levee, wilderness, sandbar, and caving bank grew more and more defined.

Having written his notes, and Jeff Slamey having fingered the nine loose-leaf sheets with exclamatory interest and delight, Terabon said he must go rest awhile.

"Yas, suh," the fisherman cried, "when a man's pulled a hundred mile he sh.o.r.e needs sleep. When the woman's got that goose cooked, I bet yo'll be ready to eat, too."

So Terabon turned in to sleep. He was awakened at last by the sizzling of a goose getting its final basting. He started up, and Slamey said:

"Hit's ready. I bet yo' feel betteh, now; six hours asleep!"

It didn't seem like six minutes of dreamless recreation.

With night the wind fell. The flood of sunset brilliance spread down the radiant sandbars and the bright waterways. The trees were plated with silver and gold, and the sweep of the caving bend was a dark shadow against which the river current swept with ceaseless attack.

For hours that night Terabon amused his host with his adventures, except that he made but most casual mention of the woman whom Carline was seeking. He was cautious, too, about the motorboat and the companion who had taken Carline down the river, till Slamey burst out:

"I know that feller. He's a bad man; he's a river rat. If he don't kill Gus Carline, I don't know these yeah riveh fellers. They use down thisaway every winter. I know; I know them all. I leave them alone, an'

they leave me alone. I knew they was comin'. They got three four boats now. One feller, name of Prebol--he's bad, too--was shot by a lady above Cairo. He's with a coupla gamblers to Caruthersville now. Everybody stops yeah; I know everybody; everybody knows me."

The next day was calm all day long, and Terabon went up the bank to shoot squirrels or other woods game; he went almost up to the Plum Point, killed several head of game, and rejoiced in the bayous and sloughs and chutes of a changing land.

The following morning he was hailed by Slamey:

"Hi--i, Terabon! Theh's a shanty-boat up the head of Flower Island Bar jes' drappin' in. They've floated down all night!"

Through his gla.s.ses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.

They were too far away for him to distinguish their personalities, but one was a tall, active man, the other obviously chunky, and when they ran their lines out and made fast to half-buried snags, it was with the quick decision of men used to work against currents and to unison of effort. There was something suggestive in their bearing, their scrutiny up and down the river, their standing close to each other as they talked. If Terabon had not suspected them of being pirates, their att.i.tude and actions would have betrayed them.

Terabon, after a little while, pulled up the eddy toward them; he was willing to take a long chance. Few men resent a newspaper man's presence. The worst of them like to put themselves, their ideas, right with the world. Terabon risked their knavery to win their approbation.

Come what might, he would seek to save Augustus Carline from the consequences of his ignorance, money, folly, and remorse.

CHAPTER XXIV

The flow of the Mississippi River is down stream--a perfectly absurd and trite statement at first thought. On second thought, one reverts to the people who are always trying to fight their way up that adverse current, with the thrust of two miles perpendicular descent and the body of a thousand storms in its rush.

There are steamers which endeavour to stem the current, but they make scant headway; sometimes a fugitive afraid of the rails will pull up stream; the birds do fly with the spring winds against the retreat of winter; but all these things are trifles, and merely accentuate the fact that everything goes down.

The sandbars are not fixed, they are literally rivers of sand flowing down, tormenting the current, and keeping human beings speculating on their probable course and the effect, when after a few years on a point, they disappear under the water. Later they will lunge up and out into the wind again, gallumphing along, some coa.r.s.e gravel bars, some yellow sand, some white sand, some fine quicksand, some gritty mud, and others of mud almost fit to use in polishing silver.

Thousands of people in shanty-boats, skiff's, fancy little yachts, and jon-boats, rag-shacks on rafts, and serviceable cruisers drift down with the flood, and are a part of it.

Autumn was pa.s.sing; most of the birds had speeded south when the wild geese brought the alarm that a cold norther was coming. When the storm had gone by, shanty-boaters, having shivered with the cold, determined not to be caught again. The sunshine of the evening, when the wind died, saw boats drifting out for the all-night run. Dawn, calm and serene, found boats moving out into mid-channel more or less in haste.

So they floated down, sometimes within a few hundred feet of other boats, sometimes in merry fleets tied together by ropes and common joyousness, sometimes alone in the midst of the vacant waters. The migration of the shanty-boaters was watched with mingled hate, envy, and admiration by Up-the-Bank folks, who pretend to despise those who live as they please.

And Nelia Carline pulled out into the current and followed her river friend, Lester Terabon, who had gone on ahead to save her husband from the river pirates. She despised her husband more as she let her mind dwell on the man who had shown no common frailties while he did enjoy a comradeship which included the charm of a pretty woman, recognizing her equality, and not permitting her to forget for a moment that he knew she was lovely, as well as intelligent.

She had not noticed that fact so much at the time, as afterward, when she subjected him to the merciless scrutiny of a woman who has heretofore discovered in men only depravity, ignorance, selfishness, or brutality. Her first thought had been to use Terabon, play with him, and, if she could, hurt him. She knew that there were men who go about plaguing women, and as she subjected herself to grim a.n.a.lysis, she realized that in her disappointment and humiliation she would have hurt, while she hated, men.

The long hours down the river, in pleasant sunshine, with only an occasional stroke of the oar to set the boat around broadside to the current, enabled her to sit on the bow of her boat and have it out with herself. She had never had time to think. Things crowded her Up-the-Bank. Now she had all the time in the world, and she used that time. She brought out her familiar books and compared the masters with her own mind. She could do it--there.

"Ruskin, Carlyle, Old Mississip', Plato, Plutarch, Th.o.r.eau, the Bible, Sh.e.l.ley, Byron, and I, all together, dropping down," she chuckled, catching her breath. "I'm tripping down in that company. And there's Terabon. He's a good sport, too, and he'll be better when I've--when I've caught him."