"A parson?" Prebol asked, doubtfully, his eyes resting a little in their uneasy flickerings. "One of them missionaries?"

"No, suh." Rasba shook his head, humbly. "Jes' a mountang parson, lookin' for one po'r man, low enough fo' me to he'p, maybe."

Prebol made no reply or comment. His mind was grappling with a fact and a condition. He could not tell what he thought. He remembered with some worriment, that he had cursed under the pain of the dressing of the wound. He knew that it never brought any man good luck to swear within ear-range of any parson.

He could think of nothing to do, just then, so he pretended weariness, which was not all pretense, at that. Rasba left him to go to sleep on his cot, and went over to his own boat, where, after an audible session on his knees, he went to bed, and fell into a sound and dreamless sleep.

In the morning, when the parson awakened, his first thought was of his patient, and he started out to look after the man. He looked at the face of the sandbar reef against which the little red shanty-boat had been moored. The boat was gone!

Rasba, studying the hard sand, soon found the prints of bare feet, and he knew that Prebol had taken his departure precipitately, but the reason why was not so apparent to the man who had read many a wild turkey track, deer runway, and trails of other game.

From sun-up till nearly noon, while he made and ate his breakfast, and while he turned to the Scriptures for some hint as to this river man's mind, his thoughts turned again and again to the pictures which Prebol's tales, boastings, whinings, and condition had inspired.

He felt his own isolation, strangeness, and ignorance. He could not understand the man who had fled from a.s.sistance and succour; at the same time the liveliness of his fancy reverted again and again to the woman living alone in such a desolation, shooting whoever menaced.

That type was not new to him. Up in his own country he had known of women who had stood at their rifles, returning shot for shot of feud raiders. The pathetic courage of the woman who had shot Prebol appealed to him.

The wounded man, wicked beyond measure, and the woman a.s.sailed, he realized, were like hundreds of other men and women whose shanty-boats he had seen down the Ohio River, and which lurked in bends and reaches on both sides of the Mississippi.

"Give thyself no rest!" he read, and he obeyed. He believed that he had a black sin to expiate, and he dared not begin what his soul was hungering to do, because knowing wickedness, he had deliberately sinned.

Alternately, he read his Bible and prayed. Late in the day he dropped out of the eddy and floated on down.

"I 'low I can keep on huntin' for Jock Drones," he told himself. "I sh.o.r.e can do that, yes, indeed!"

CHAPTER VIII

Having rid herself of the leering river rat, Nelia Crele trembled for a time in weak dismay, the reaction from her tense and fiery determination to protect herself at all costs. But she quickly gathered her strength and, having brewed a pot of strong coffee, thrown together a light supper, and settled back in her small, but ample, rocking chair, she reviewed the incidents of her adventure; the flight from her worthless husband and her a.s.sumption of the right to protect herself.

After all, shooting a man was less than running away from her husband.

She could regard the matter with a rather calm spirit and even a laughing scorn of the man who had thought to impose himself on her, against her own will.

"That's it!" she said, half aloud, "I needn't to allow any man to be mean to me!"

She had given her future but little thought; now she wondered, and she pondered. She was free, she was independent, and she was a.s.sured of her living. She had even been more shrewd than old Attorney Menard had suspected; the money she had left with him was hardly half of her resources. She had another plan, by which she would escape the remote possibility of Menard's proving faithless to his trust, as attorneys with his opportunities sometimes have proved.

Nelia Crele could not possibly be regarded as an ordinary woman, as a mere commonplace, shack-bred, pretty girl. Down through the years had come a strain of effectiveness which she inherited in its full strength; she was as inexplicable as Abraham Lincoln. Her stress of mind relieved, she regarded the shooting of the man with increasing satisfaction, since by such things a woman could be a.s.sured of respect.

Gaiety had never been a part of her childhood or girlhood; she had withstood the insidious attacks and menaces that threatened her down to the day when Gus Carline had come to her. Courted by him, married, and then living in the clammy splendour of the house of a back-country rich man, she had found no happiness, but merely a kind of animal comfort.

She had had the Carline library to read, and she had brought with her the handy pocket volumes which had been her own and her delight. She was glad of the foresight which enabled her to put into a set of book shelves the companions which had, alone, been her comfort and inspiration during the few years of her wedded misery.

Now, on the Mississippi, in the shanty-boat, she need consult only her own fancy and whim. Mistress of her own affairs, as she supposed, she could read or she could think.

"I do what I please!" she thought, a little defiantly. "It's n.o.body's business what I do now; what'd Mrs. Plosell care what people said about her? I'll read, if I want to, and I'll flirt if I want to--and I'll do anything I want to----"

She reckoned without the Mississippi. Everybody does, at first. Her money was but a means to an end. She knew its use, its value, and the perfect freedom which it gave her; its protection was not underestimated.

At the same time, sloth was no sin of hers. Living on the river insured physical activity; her books insured her mental engagement.

She had lived so many years in combat with grim necessity that the lesson of thrift of all her resources had been brought home to her.

Having been waylaid by circ.u.mstance so often, she took grim care now to count the costs, and to insure her getting what she was seeking. The trouble was she could not disa.s.sociate her feelings from her ideas. They were inextricably interwoven. The brief years of her wedlock had been in one way a disillusionment, in another a revelation.

She had found her own hunger for learning, her own strength and weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she had found her own ability.

For hours she debated there by her pretty lamp, with the curtains down, and the comforting and rea.s.suring weight of the automatic pistol in her lap. She knew that she must never have that weapon at arm's length from her, but as she remembered where it had come from she wondered to think that she had so easily refused the suggestion of Frank, the market hunter.

"It's all right, though," she shrugged her shoulders, "I can take care of myself, and being alone, I can think things out!"

In mid-morning she cut loose from the bank and floated away down stream.

The river was very wide, and covered with crossing-ripples. She looked down what the map showed was the chute of Hacker Tow Head, and then the current carried her almost to the bank at the head of Buffalo Island.

Here there was a stretch of caving bank; the earth, undercut by the river current, was lumping off in chunks and slices. Her boat bobbed and danced in the waves from the cave-ins, and the rocking pleased her fancy.

The names along this bit of river awakened her interest; Blackbird Island was clearly described: Buffalo Island harked back many years into tradition; Dogtooth Island was a matter of river shape; but Saladin, Tow Head and Orient Field stirred her imagination, for they might reveal the scene of steamboat disasters or some surveyor's memory of the Arabian Nights. Below Dogtooth Island, under Brooks Point, were a number of golden sandbars and farther down, in the lower curve of the famous S-bends she read the name "Greenleaf," which was pretty and picturesque.

She was living! Every minute called upon some resource of her brain. She had read in old books things which gave even the name Cairo, at the foot of the long, last reach of the Upper Mississippi, a significance of far lands and Egyptian mysteries. Gratefully she understood that the Mississippi was summoning ideals which ought to have been called upon long since when in the longings of her girlhood she had been circ.u.mspect and patient, keeping her soul satisfied with dreams of fairies playing among the petals of hill-side flowers, or gnomes wandering among the stalks of toll-yielding cornfields.

Mature, now; fearless--and, as the word romped through her mind in all its changes, free--free!--she played with her thoughts. But below Greenleaf Bend, as another day was lost in waning evening, she early sought a sandbar mooring at the foot of Missouri Sister Island, where there were two other shanty-boats, one of them with two children on the sand. She need not dread a boat where children were found. Possibly she would be able to talk to another woman, which would be a welcome change, having had so much of her own thoughts!

This other woman was Mrs. Disbon, out of the Missouri. She and her husband had been five years coming down from the Yellowstone, and they had fished, trapped, and enjoyed themselves in their 35-foot cabin-boat home. Of course, taking care of two children on a shanty-boat was a good deal of work and some worry, for one or the other was always falling overboard, but since they had learned to swim it hadn't been so bad, and they could take care of themselves.

"You all alone?" Mrs. Disbon asked.

"I'm alone," Nelia admitted, having told her name as Nelia Crele.

"Well, I don't know as I blame you," Mrs. Disbon declared, looking at her husband doubtfully. "Seems to me that on the average, men are more of a nuisance than they're worth. It's which and t'other about them. I see you've had experience?"

Nelia looked down at her wedding ring.

"Yes, I've had experience," she nodded.

"Going clear down?"

"You mean----?"

"N'Orleans?"

"Why, I hadn't thought much about it."

"The Lower River's pretty bad." Disbon looked up from cleaning his repeating shotgun. "My first trip was out of the Ohio and down to N'Orleans. I wouldn't recommend to no woman that she go down thataway, not alone. Theh's junker-pirates use up from N'Orleans, and, course, there's always more or less meanness below Cairo. Above St. Louis it ain't so bad, but mean men draps down from Little Klondike."

"I haven't made up my mind," Nelia said, adding, with a touch of bitterness, "I don't reckon it makes so much difference!"

"Lots that comes down feel thataway," Mrs. Disbon nodded, with sympathy, "Seems like some has more'n their share, and some considerable less!"