The Project Gutenberg EBook of The River Prophet, by Raymond S. Spears This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The River Prophet Author: Raymond S. Spears Illustrator: Ralph Pallen Coleman Release Date: May 16, 2009 [EBook #28848] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVER PROPHET *** Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net “She snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom and ... fired. The man stumbled back with a cry.” The River Prophet By Raymond S. Spears Frontispiece by Ralph Pallen Coleman Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1920, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN The River Prophet THE RIVER PROPHET CHAPTER I Elijah Rasba lived alone in a log cabin on Temple Run. He was a long, lank, blue-eyed young man, with curly brown hair and a pale, almost livid complexion. His eye-brows were heavy and dark brown, and the blue steel of his gaze was fixed unwaveringly upon any object that it distinguished. Two generations before, Old Abe Rasba had built a church on a little brook, a tributary of Jackson River, away up in the mountains. The church was laid up of flat stones, gathered in fields, from ledges of rock and up the wooded mountain side. It was large enough to hold all the people for miles around, and the roof was supported by massive hewn timbers, and some few attempts had been made to decorate the structure. Old Abe had called his church “The Temple,” had preached from a big hollow oak stump, and laid down the Law of the Bible, which he had memorized by heart, and expounded from experience. Elijah Rasba, grandson of Old Abe, thus came honestly by reverence and religion, but the strange glory which had surrounded the old Temple had departed from the ruin, and of all the congregation, only Elijah remained. Land-slips had ruined a score of farms cleared on too-steep hills; lightning had destroyed the overshot grist mill, and the two big stones had been cracked in the hot flames; a feud had opened graves before the allotted time of the victims. It seemed to Elijah, sitting there in his cabin, as though damnation had visited the faithful, and that death was the reward of 1 2 belief. The ruins of the old Temple stood melancholy where the heavy stone wall, built by a man who believed in broad, firm foundations, had split an avalanche, but without avail, for the walls had given way and let the roof beams drop in. No less certain had been the fate of the congregation; they, too, were scattered or dead. There remained but one dwelling in the little valley, with a lone occupant, who was wrestling with his soul, trying to understand, for he knew in his heart that he must read the truth and discover the meaning of all this trouble, privation, disaster, and death. He was quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle, and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from its den. An Almanac, a Bible, and a “Resources of Tennessee” comprised the library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder, about a hundred miles, perhaps—anyhow, from New York. The “Resources of Tennessee” had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, an inheritance. It was a very small article, apparently, to create all the disturbances that seemed to have followed its interpretations there on Temple Run. Elijah would hold it out at arms length and stare at it with those sharp eyes of his, wondering in his soul how it could be that the fate of nations, the future of humanity, the very salvation of every soul rested within the compass of that leather-covered, gilt-edged parcel of thin paper which weighed rather less than half as much as a box of cartridges. Elijah did not spare himself in the least. He toiled at whatever task appeared for him to do. As he required for his own wants fifty bushels of corn for a year, he planted enough to shuck a hundred bushels. Once, in the fervour of the hope that he was called upon to raise corn for humanity, he raised five hundred bushels, only to give it all away to poor white trash who had not raised enough for themselves. Again he felt the call to preach, and he went forth with all the eagerness of a man who had at last discovered his life’s calling. He went on foot, through storms, over mountains, and into a hundred schoolhouses and churches, showing his little leather-skinned Bible and warning sinners to repent, Christians to keep faith, and Baal to lower his loathly head. He had returned from his five months’ pilgrimage with the feeling that his utmost efforts had been futile, and that for all his good will, it had not been vouchsafed him to leave behind one thought in fertile soil. The matter had been brought home to him by an incident of the last meeting he had addressed, over on Clinch. In the Painted Church he had volunteered a sermon, and no sermons had been preached there in years. Feuds, inextricably tangled, had involved five different families, and members of all those families were in the church, answering to his challenge. They sat there with rifles or shotguns between their knees, with their pistols on their hips, and eternal vigilance in their eyes. While listening to his sermon they kept their gaze fastened upon one another, lest an unwary moment bring upon them the alert shot of an enemy. As he had stood there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as though the final burden had been heaped upon him, and that he must break under the weight on his mind. “What can I say to you all?” he burst out with sudden passion. “Theh yo’ set with guns in yo’ hands an’ murder in yo’ souls—to listen to the word of God! How do yo’ expect the Prince of Peace to come to yo’ if yo’ set there thataway?” His indignation rose as he saw them, and his scorn unbridled his tongue, so that in a few minutes the congregation watched one another less, the preacher more, and all settled back, to listen and blink under his accusations and his declarations. It really seemed, for the time, as though he had caught and engaged their attention. But when the sermon ended and he had taken his departure, before he was a hundred yards down the road he heard loud words, angry shouts, and then the scream of a woman. The next instant there came a salvo of gun and pistol shots and in all directions up and down the cross-roads people fled on horseback. Three men had been killed, five wounded and a dozen become fugitives from justice at the end of the church service. Elijah Rasba fled homeward, his will and hopes broken, and sank dejectedly into a slough of despondency. All his good intentions, all the inspiration of his endeavour, his very spiritual exaltation had terminated in a tragedy, as inexplicable as it was depressing. His conscience would neither let him rest nor work. He looked at his Bible, inside and out, the very fibres of his brain struggling by reason, by effort, by main strength, to discover what his duty was. No answer soothed his waking hours or gave him rest from his dreams. On him rested a kind of superstitious scorn and fear, and he began to believe the whisperings of his neighbours which reached his ears. They said: “He’s possessed!” To his own freighted mind the statement seemed to be true. He did not know what new sin he had committed, nor could he look back on long years of his youth and young manhood and discover any sin which he had not already expiated, over and over again. He had obeyed the scriptural injunctions to the best of his knowledge, and the reward was this daily 2 3 4 5 and nightly torment, the scorn of his fellows, and the questioning of his own soul. Worst of all, constructively, he had given feud fighters the chance to do murder upon one another. Under the guise of preaching for them for the good of their souls, he had enabled them to meet in antagonism, watch in wrath, and kill without mercy. Too late he realized that he should have foreseen the tragedy, and that he should have provided against it by going first to each faction, preaching to each family, and then, when he had brought them to their knees, united them in the common cause of religion. “On me is Thy wrath!” he cried out in the anguish of his soul. “Give thy tortured slave something good to do, ere I go down!” There was no reply, immediate or audible; he was near the limits of his endurance; he drew his arm back to throw the Bible into the flames of his fireplace, but that he could not do. He tossed it upon the shelf, drew his hat down upon his ears and at the approach of night started over the ridges to the Kalbean stillhouse. He stalked down a ridge into that split-board shack of infamy. He found five or six men in the hot, sour-smelling place. They started to their feet when they saw the mountain preacher among them. “Gimme some!” he told Old Kalbean. “I’m a fool! I’m damned. I’ll go with the rest of ye to Hell! Gimme some!” “Wha—What?” Old Kalbean choked with horror. “Yo’ gwine to drink, Parson?” “Suttinly!” Rasba cried. “Hit ain’ no ust for me to preach! I preach, an’ the congregation murders one anotheh! Ef I don’t preach, I cayn’t live peaceable! They say hit makes a man happy—I ain’ be’n happy, not in ten, not in twenty yeahs!” He caught up the jug that rested on the floor, threw the tin cup to one side, up-ended the receptacle, and the moonshiner and his customers stared. “Theh!” Rasba grunted, when he had to take the jug down for breath. He reached into his pocket, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to the amazed mountain man. “Theh!” he repeated, defiantly. “I’ve shore gone to Hell, now, an’ I don’t give a damn, nuther. S’long, boys! D’rectly, yo’l heah me jes’ a whoopin’, yas suh! Jes’ a whoopin’!” He left them abruptly and he went up into the darkness of the laurels. They heard him crashing away into the night. When he was gone the men looked at one another: “Yo’ ’low he’ll bring the revenuers?” one asked, nervously. “Bring nothin’!” another grinned. “No man eveh lived could drink fifteen big gulps, like he done, an’ git furder’n a stuck hog, no, suh!” They listened for the promised whoops; they strained their ears for the cries of jubilation; but none came. “Co’rse,” the stiller explained, as though an explanation were needed, “Parson Rasba ain’ used to hit; he could carry more, an’ hit’ll take him longer to get lit up. But, law me, when hit begins to act! That’s three yeah old, boys, mild, but no mewl yo’ eveh saw has the kick that’s got, apple an’ berry cider, stilled down from the ferment!” CHAPTER II Virtue had not been rewarded. This much was clear and plain to the consciousness of Nelia Carline. Looking at herself in the glass disclosed no special reason why she should be unhappy and suffering. She was a pretty girl; everybody said that, and envy said she was too pretty. It seemed that poor folks had no right to be good-looking, anyhow. If poor folks weren’t good-looking, then wealthy young men, with nothing better to do, wouldn’t go around looking among poor folks for pretty girls. Augustus Carline had, apparently, done that. Carline had a fortune that had been increased during three generations, and now he didn’t have to work. That was bad in Gage, Illinois. It had never done any one any good, that kind of living. One of the fruits of the matter was when Nelia Crele’s pretty face attracted his attention. She lived in a shack up the Bottoms near St. Genevieve, and he tried to flirt with her, but she wouldn’t flirt. In some surprise, startled by his rebuff, he withdrew from the scene with a memory that would not forget. The scene was a wheat field near the Turkey bayou, where he was hunting wild ducks with a shotgun. She had been gathering forty pounds of hickory nuts to eke out a meagre food supply. Poor she might be; ill clad was her strong young figure; her face showed the strain of years of effort; her eyes had the fire of experience in suffering; and she stood, a supple girl of heightened beauty while the hunter, sure of his welcome, walked up to her, and, as both her hands held the awkward bushel basket, ventured to tickle her under the chin. She dropped the basket and before it reached the ground she caught the rash youth broad-handed from cheek to back of the ear, and he stumbled over a pile of wheat sheaves and fell headlong. As he had dropped his shotgun, she picked it 6 7 8 up and with her thumb on the safety, her finger on the trigger, and her left hand on the breech, showed him how a $125 shotgun looks in the hands of one who could and would use it on any further provocation. He took his departure, and she carried the gun and hickory nuts home with her. Thus began the inauspicious acquaintance of Nelia Crele and Augustus Carline. The shotgun was very useful to the young woman. She killed gray and fox squirrels, wild turkeys, geese and ducks, several saleable fur-bearers, and other game in her neighbourhood. She told no one how she obtained the weapon, merely saying she had found it; and Augustus Carline did not pass any remarks on the subject. By and by, however, when the tang of the slap and the passion of the moment had left him, he knew that he had been foolish and cowardly. He had some good parts, and he was sorry that he had been precipitate in his attentions. After that encounter, he found the girls he met at dances lacked a certain appearance, a kindling of the eye, a complexion, and, a figure. He ventured again into the river bottoms across from St. Genevieve and fortune favoured him while tricking her. He apologized and gave his name. Nelia was poor, abjectly poor. Her father was no ’count, and her mother was abject in suffering. One brother had gone West, a whisky criminal; a sister had gone wrong, with the inheritance of moral obliquity. Nelia had, somehow, become possessed with a hate and horror of wrong. She had pictured to herself a home, happiness, and a life of plenty, but she held herself at the highest price a woman demands. That price Augustus Carline was only too willing to pay. He had found a girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days mansion in Gage. There he installed her with everything he thought she needed, and—pursued his usual futile life. Too late she learned that he was weak, insignificant, and, like her own father, no ’count. Augustus Carline was a brute, a creature of appetites and desires, who by no chance rose to the heights of his wife’s mental demands. Nelia Carline regarded the tragedy of her life with impatience. She studied the looking glass to see wherein she had failed to measure up to her duty; she ransacked her mind, and compared it with all the women she met by virtue of her place as Gus Carline’s wife. Those women had not proved to be what she had expected grand dames of society to be. “I want to talk learning,” she told herself, “and they talk hairpins and dirty dishes and Bill-don’t-behave!” Now one of those women, a kind of a grass widow, Mrs. Plosell, had attracted Gus Carline, and when he came home from her house, he was always drunk. When Nelia remonstrated, he was ugly. He had thrown her down and gone back to the grass widow’s the night before. Nelia considered that grim fact, and, having made up her mind, acted. In her years of poverty she had learned many things, and now she put into service certain practical ideas. She had certain rights, under the law, since she had taken the name of Augustus Carline. There were, too, moral rights, and she preferred to exercise her moral rights. Part of the Carline fortune was in unregistered stocks and bonds, and when Gus Carline returned from the widow’s one day he found that Nelia was in great good humour, more attractive than he had ever known her, and so very pleasant during the two days of his headache that he was willing to do anything she asked. She asked him to have a good time with her, and put down on the table before him a filled punch bowl and two glasses. He had never known the refinements of intoxicating liquors. Now he found them in his own home, and for a while forgot all else. He sang, danced, laughed and, in due course, signed a number of papers, receipts, bills and checks to settle up some accounts. These were sort of hit-or-miss, between-the-acts affairs, to which he paid little attention. To Nelia, however, they represented a rite as valid as any solemn court procedure could be, for to her river-trained instinct there was no moral question as to the justice of her claim upon a part of Carline’s fortune. Her later experience, her reading, had taught her that society and the law also held with the principle, if not the manner of her primitive method, for obtaining her rights to separate support. When Carline awakened, Nelia was gone. Nelia had departed that morning, one of the servants said. The girl did not know where she had gone. She had taken a box of books, two trunks, two suitcases and was dressed up, departing in the automobile, which she drove herself. He had a feeling of alarm, which he banished as unworthy. Finally toward night he went down to the post office where he found several letters. One seared his consciousness; Gus: Don’t bother to look for me. I’m gone, and I’m going to stay gone. You have shown yourself to be a mere soak, a creature of appetite and vice, and with no redeeming mental traits whatever. I hate you, and worse yet, I despise you. Get a divorce get another woman—the widow is about your calibre. But, I give you fair warning, leave me alone. I’m sick of men. Nelia. 9 10 11 CHAPTER III Elijah Rasba stalked homeward from the still in the dark, grimly and expectantly erect. Now he was going to have that period of happiness which he knew was the chief reason for people drinking moonshine whiskey. He looked forward to the sensation of exuberant joy very much as a man would look forward to five hours of happiness, to be followed by hanging by the neck, till dead. The stars were shining, and the over-ridge trail which he followed was familiar enough under his feet, once he had struck into it from the immediate vicinity of the lawbreakers. He saw the bare-limbed oak trees against the sky, and he heard rabbits and other night runners scurrying away in the dead leaves. The stars fluttering in the sky were stern eyes whose gaze he avoided with determined wickedness and unrepentance. Arriving at his own cabin, he stirred up the big pine-root log, and drew his most comfortable rocking chair up before the leaping flames. He sat there, and waited for the happiness of mind which was the characteristic of his idea of intoxication. He waited for it, all ready to welcome it. If it had come into his cabin, all dressed up like some image of temptation or allurement, he would not have been in the least surprised. He rather expected a real and tangible manifestation, a vision of delight, clothed in some fair figure. He sat there, rigidly, watching for the least symptom of unholy pleasure. He had no clock by which to tell the time, and his watch was thoroughly unreliable. Again and again he poked up the fire. He was surprised, at last, to hear a far-away gobble, the welcome of a wild turkey for the first false dawn. By and by he became conscious of the light which was crowding the fire flare into a subordinate place. Day had arrived, and as yet, the delight which everybody said was in moonshine whiskey had failed to touch him. However, he knew that he was not properly in a receptive mood for happiness. His soul was still stubborn against the allurements of sin. He stirred from his chair, fried a rabbit in a pan, and baked a batch of hot-bread in a dutch oven, brewing strong coffee and bringing out the jug of sorghum molasses. He ate breakfast. He was conscious of a certain rigidity of action, a certain precision of motion, ascribing them to the stern determination which he had that when he should at last discover the whiskey-happiness in his soul, he would let go with a whoop. “Some hit makes happy, and some hit makes fightin’ mad!” Rasba suddenly thought, with much concern, “S’posen hit’d make me fightin’ mad?” A fluttering trepidation clutched his heart. The bells ringing in his ears fairly clanged the alarm. He hadn’t looked for anything else but joy from being drunk, and now suppose he should be stricken with a mad desire to fight—to kill someone! No deadlier fear ever clutched a man’s heart than the one that seized Elijah Rasba. Suppose that when the deferred hilarity arrived, he was made fighting drunk instead of joyous? The thought seized his soul and he looked about himself wondering how he could chain his hands and save his soul from murder, violence, fighting, and similar crimes! No feasible way appeared to his frightened mind. He dropped on his knees and began to pray for happiness, instead of for violence, when the drink that he had had should seize him in its embrace. He prayed with a voice that roared like thunder and which made the charcoal fall from the log in the fireplace, and which alarmed the jays and inquisitive mockingbirds about the little clearing. He prayed while his voice grew huskier and huskier, and his head bowed lower and lower as he wrestled with this peril which he had not foreseen. All he asked was that when the moonshine began to operate, it make him laugh instead of mad, but terrible doubts smote him. A glance at his rifle on the wall made him fairly grovel on the floor, and he knew that in his hands the andirons, the axe, the very hot-bread rolling pin would be deadly weapons. He hoped that he would not be able to shoot straight, but this hope was instantly blasted, for a flock of wild turkeys came down into the cornfield about ninety yards from his cabin, and although he seldom shot anything in his own clearing, he now tried a shot at the turkey gobbler and shot it dead where it strutted. If he should be stricken with anger instead of with joy, no worse man could possibly live! There was no telling what he would do if the liquor would work “wrong” on him. He could kill men at two hundred yards! He determined that he would see no human beings that day. Few people ever visited him in his cabin, but he took no chances. He crept up the mountain and skulking through the woods found an immense patch of laurels. He crawled into it, and sat down there for hours and hours, so that no one should have an opportunity to speak to him and stir the latent devil of violence. He returned to his cabin long after dark, and raking some hot coals out of the ashes, whittled splinters and started a blaze. He was assailed by hunger, and he baked corn pones and dry-salted pork, then added a great flapjack of delicious sage sausage to the meal. He brought out cans of fruit, whose juice assuaged his increasing thirst. Having eaten heartily he resumed his vigil before the fireplace, and then he noticed that some one had tied something on the stock of 12 13 14 15 his rifle. It was a letter which a passer-by had brought up from the Ford Post Office, and when he opened it and looked at the writing, remorse assailed him: Dear Parsun: Ever senct you preched here I ben sufrin count of my boy JocK. You know Him for he set right thar, frade of no man, not the Tobblys, nor the Crents. When tha drawed DOWN to shoot, he stud right thar an shot back shoot fer shoot, an now he has goned awa down the Rivehs an I am worited abot his soul because he is a gud boy an neveh was no whars in all his borned days an an i hear now he is gettin bad down thataway on Misipy riveh where thas all Bad Peple an i wisht yud prey fer him so’s he wont get bad. Mrs. drones panted church on Clinch. Rasba read the letter for the words at first. Then he went back after the meaning, and the meaning struck him like a blow in the heart. “Me pray fo’ any man again,” he gasped. “Lawse! Lawse!” He didn’t feel fit to pray for himself, let alone for any other sinner, but there came to his memory a picture of Mrs. Drones, a motherly little woman who had taken him home to a dinner at which seven kinds of preserved fruit were on the table, and where the family laughed around the fireplace—only to see Jock a fugitive the next night, and the terrors of a feud war upon them. “And Jock’s getting bad down the Mississippi River!” Rasba repeated to himself, striving to grapple with that fact. He could not think clearly or coherently. The widow’s voice, however, was as clearly speaking in his thoughts as though she stood there, instead of merely having written to him. He took to walking up and down the floor, back and forth, on one plank. He had forgotten that there was such a thing for humans as sleep. The incongruity of his having been wide awake for two days and two nights did not occur to him till suddenly his eyes turned to the bed in the corner of the room and its purpose was recalled to his mind. He blinked at it. His eyes opened with difficulty. He threw chunks on the fire and went toward the bed, but as he stood by it the world grew black before his eyes and clutching about him, he sank to the floor. CHAPTER IV Nelia Carline would not return to that miserable little river-bottom cabin where she had grown up in unhappy privation. She had other plans. She drove the little automobile down to Chester, put it in the Star Garage, then walked to the river bank and gave the eddy a critical inspection. For years she had lived between the floods of the river and the poverty of the uplands. Her life had often crossed that of river people, and although she had never been on the river, she had frequently gone visiting shanty-boaters who had landed in for a night or a week at the bank opposite her own shack home. She knew river men, and she had no illusions about river women. Best of all now, in her great emergency, she knew shanty-boats, and as she gazed at the eddy and saw the fleet of houseboats there her heart leaped exultantly. No less than a score of boats were landed along the eddy bank, and instantly her eyes fell upon first one and then another that would serve her purpose. She walked down to the uppermost of the boats, and hailed from the bank: “U-whoo!” A lank, stoop-shouldered woman emerged from the craft and fixed the well-favoured young woman with keen, bright eyes. “You-all know if there’s a shanty-boat here for sale—cheap?” Nelia asked, without eagerness. The woman looked at the bank, reflectively. “I expect,” she admitted at last. “This un yaint, but theh’s two spo’ts down b’low, that’s quittin’ the riveh, that blue boat theh, but theh’s spo’ts.” “I ’lowed they mout be,” Nelia dropped into her childhood vernacular as she looked down the bank, “Likely yo’ mout he’p me bargain, er somebody?” “I ’low I could!” the river woman replied. “Me an’ my ole man he’ped a feller up to St. Louis, awhile back, who was green on the river, but he let us kind of p’int out what he’d need fo’ a skift trip down this away. Real friendly feller, kind of city-like, an’ sort of out’n the country, too. ’Lowed he was a writin’ feller, fer magazines an’ books an’ histries an’ them kind of things. Lawsy! He could ask questions, four hundred kinds of questions, an’ writin’ hit all down into a writin’ machine onto paper. We shore told him a heap an’ a passel, an’ he writes mornin’ an’ nights. Lots of curius fellers on Ole Mississip’. We’ll sort of look aroun’. Co’se, yo’ got a man to go ’long?” 16 17 18 “No.” “Wha-a-t! Yo’ ain’ goin’ to trip down alone?” “I might’s well.” “But, goodness, gracious sake, you’re pretty, pretty as a picture! I ’lowed yo’ had a man scoutin’ aroun’. Why somethin’ mout happen to a lady, if she didn’t have a man or know how to take cyar of herse’f.” Nelia shrugged her shoulders. Mrs. Tons, the river woman, gazed for a minute at the pretty, partly averted face. It was almost desperate, quite reckless, and by the expression, the river woman understood. She thought in silence, for a minute, and then looked down the eddy at a boat some distance away. “Theh’s a boat. Like the looks of it?” “It’s a fine boat, I ’low,” Nelia said. “Fresh painted.” “Hit’s new,” the woman said. “Is it for sale?” “We’ll jes walk down thataway,” the river woman suggested. “Two ladies is mostly safe down thisaway.” “My name’s Nelia Crele. We used to live up by Gage, on the Bottoms––” “Sho! Co’se I know Ole Jim Crele, an’ his woman. My name’s Mrs. Tons. We stopped in thah ’bout six weeks ago. I hearn say yo’d—yo’d married right well!” “Umph!” Nelia shrugged her shoulders, “Liquor spoils many a home!” “Yo’ maw said he was a drinkin’ man, an’ I said to myse’f, from my own ’sperience.... Yo’ set inside yeah, Nelia. I’ll go down theh an’ talk myse’f. We come near buyin’ that bo’t yistehd’y. Leave hit to me!” Nelia sat down in the shanty-boat, and waited. She had not long to wait. A tall, rather burly man returned with the woman, who introduced the two; “Mis’ Crele, this is Frank Commer. His bo’t’s fo’ sale, an’ he’ll take $75 cash, for everything, ropes, anchor, stoves, a brass bedstead, an’ everything and I said hit’s reasonable. Hit’s a pine boat, built last fall, and the hull’s sound, with oak framing. Co’se, hit’s small, 22 foot long an’ 7 foot wide, but hit’s cheap.” “I’ll take it, then,” Nelia nodded. “You can come look it over,” the man declared. “Tight hull and tight roof. We built it ourselves. But we’re sick of the river, and we’ll sell cheap, right here.” The three went down to the boat, and Nelia handed him seventy-five dollars in bills. He and his partner, who came down from the town a few minutes later, packed up their personal property in two trunks. They left the dishes and other outfit, including several blankets. The four talked as the two packed up. One of them suddenly looked sharply at Nelia: “You dropping down alone?” She hesitated, and then laughed: “Yes.” “It’s none of my business,” the man said, doubtfully, “but it’s a mean old river, some ways. A lady alone might get into trouble. River pirates, you know.” It was a challenge. He was a clear-eyed, honest man, hardly twenty-five years of age, and not an evil type at all. What he had to suggest he did boldly, sure of his right at such a time, under such circumstances, to do. He was entirely likeable. In spite of herself, Nelia wavered for a moment. She knew river people; the woman by her side would have said she would be safer with him than without his protection. There was only one reason why Nelia could not accept that protection. “I’ll have to take care of myself,” she shook her head, without rebuke to the youth. “You see, I’m running away from a mean scoundrel.” “Hit’s so,” the river woman approved, and the men took their departure without further comment. The two women, disapproving the men’s housekeeping, scrubbed the boat and washed all the bedding. Nelia brought down her automobile and the two carried her own outfit on board. Then Nelia took the car back to the garage, and said that she would call for it in the morning. “All right, Mrs. Carline,” the garage man replied, without suspicion. Back at the landing, Nelia bade the river woman good-bye. “I got to be going,” she said, “likely there’ll be a whole pack after me directly––” “Got a gun?” the woman asked. “Two,” Nelia smiled. “Bill gave me a goose rifle and Frank let me have this—he said it’s the Law down Old Mississip’!” “The Law” was a 32-calibre automatic pistol in perfect condition. 19 20 21 “Them boys thought a heap of yo’, gal!” The river woman shook her head. “Frank’d sure made you a good man!” “Oh, I know it,” replied Nelia, “but I’m sick of men—I hate men! I’m going to go droppin’ along, same’s the rest.” “Don’t let go of that pistol. Theh’s mean, bad men down thisaway, Nelia!” Nelia laughed, but harshly. “I don’t give a damn for anything now; I tell you that!” “Don’t forget it. Shoot any man that comes.” Nelia, who could row a skiff with any one, set her shanty-boat sweeps on their pins, coiled up the two bow lines by which the boat was moored to the bank, and which the river woman untied, then rowed out of the eddy and into the main current. “It’s good floating right down,” Mrs. Tons called after her, “till yo’ git to Grand Tower Rock—thirty mile!” The river rapidly widened below Chester, and the little houseboat swung out into mid-stream. Nelia knew the river a little from having been down on a steamer, and the misery she left behind was in contrast to the sense of freedom and independence which she now had. Stillness, peace, the sense of vast motion in the river torrent comforted her. The moment of embarking alone on the river had been full of nervous tenseness and anxiety, but now those feelings were left behind and she could breathe deeply and confront the future with a calm spirit. The veil that the blue mist of distance left behind her was penetrable by memory, but the future was hidden from her gaze, as it was hidden from her imagination. The determination to dwell in the immediate present caught up her soul with its grim, cold bonds, and as the sun was setting against the sky beyond the long, sky-line of limestone ledges, she entered the cabin, and looked about her with a feeling of home such as she had never had before. “I’ll stand at the breech of my rifle, to defend it,” she whispered to herself. “Men are mean! I hate men!” She found a flat book on a shelf which held a half hundred magazines. The book was bound in blue boards, and backed with yellow leather. When she opened it, out of curiosity, she discovered that it was full of maps. “Those dear boys!” she whispered, almost regretfully. “They left this map book for me, because they knew I’d need it; knew everybody down thisaway needs a map!” They had done more than that; they had left the equally indispensable “List of Post Lights,” and when dusk fell and she saw a pale yellow light revealed against a bank the little book named it “Wilkinson Island.” She pulled toward the east bank into the deadwater below Lacours Island, cast over her anchor, and came to rest in the dark of a starless night. CHAPTER V In mid-afternoon, the man who had so desperately and as a last resource tested the efficiency of moonshine whiskey as a palliative for mental misery awaked gradually, in confusion of mind and aching of body. Noises filled his ears, and streaking lights blurred the keenness of his eyes. Reason had but little to do with his first thoughts, and feelings had nearly everything. There did not seem to be any possible atonement for him to make. Too late, as it seemed, he realized the enormity of his offence and the bitterness of inevitable punishment. There remained but one thing for him to do, and that was go away down the rivers and find the fugitive Jock Drones, whose mother feared for him. No other usefulness of purpose remained in his reach. If he stood up, now, before any congregation, the imps of Satan, the patrons of moonshiners, would leer up at him in his pulpit, reminding him that he, too, was one of them. He went over to the corner of his cabin, raised some planks there and dug down into the earth till he found a jug. He dragged the jug into the cabin and out of it poured the Rasba patrimony, a hidden treasure of gold, which he put into a leather money belt and strapped on. There was not much in the cabin worth taking away, but he packed that little up and made ready for his departure. It was but a few miles over to Tug River, and he readily engaged a wagon to carry him that far. On the wooded river bank he built a flatboat with his own hands, and covered one end of it with a poplar-wood cabin, purchased at a near-by sawmill. He floated out of the eddy in his shack-boat and began his journey down the rivers to the Mississippi, where he would perform the one task that remained for him to do in the service of God. He would find Jock, give him his mother’s message, and after that expiate his own sins in the deserved misery of an exiled penitent. Tug River was in flood, a heavy storm having cast nearly two inches of rainfall upon part of the watershed. On the crest of the flood it was fast running and there was no delay, no stopping between dawn and dusk. Standing all day at the sweeps Rasba cleared the shore in sharp bends, avoided the obstacles in mid stream, and outran the wave crests and the racing drift, entering the Big Sandy and emerging into the unimaginable breadths of the Ohio. 22 23 24 He had no time to waste on the Ohio. The object of his search was on the Mississippi, hundreds of miles farther down, and he could not go fast enough to suit him. But at that, pulling nervously at his sweeps and riding down the channel line, he “gain-speeded,” till his eyes were smarting with the fury of the changing shores, and his arms were aching with the pulling and pushing of his great oars, and he neither recognized the miles that he floated nor the repeated days that ensued. Long since he had escaped from his own mountain environment. The trees no longer overhung his course; railroad trains screamed along endless shores, bridges overhung his path like menacing deadfalls, and the rolling thunder of summer storms was mingled with the black smoke of ten thousand undreamed-of industries. The simplicity of the mountain cornfields of his youth had become a mystery of production, of activity, of passing phenomena which he neither knew nor understood. In his thoughts there was but one beacon. His purpose was to reach the Mississippi, take the young man in hand, and redeem him from the evils into which he had fallen. His object was no more than that, nor any less. From the confusion of his experiences, efforts, and humiliations, he held fast to one fact: the necessity of finding Jock Drones. All things else had melted into that. The river banks fell apart along his course; the river ridges withdrew to wide distances, even blue at times; mere V-gullies or U-gorges, widened into vast corn fields. A post-office store-house at a rippling ford gave way to smoking cities, rumbling bridges, paved streets, and hurrying throngs. The lone fisherman in an 18-foot dugout had changed insensibly to darting motorboats and to huge, red-wheeled, white-castled monsters, whose passage in the midst of vast waters was attended by the sighs of toiling engines and the tossing of troubled seas. Except for that one sure demand upon him, Elijah Rasba long since would have been lost in the confusion and doubts of his transition from narrow wooded ridges and trembling streamlets to this succession of visions. But his soul retained its composure, his eyes their quickness to seize the essential detail, and he rode the Tug River freshet into the Ohio flood tide bent upon his mission of redeeming one mountain youth who had strayed down into this far land, of which the shores were washed by the unimaginable sea of a river. When at the end of a day he arrived in a way-side eddy and moored his poplar-bottom craft against a steep bank and the last twilight had faded from his vision, he would eat some simple thing for supper, and then, by lamp-light, try to read his exotic life into the Bible which accompanied him on his travels. He knew the Book by heart, almost; he knew all the rivers told about in it; he knew the storms of the various biblical seas; he knew the Jordan, in imagination, and the Nile, the Euphrates, the Jabbok, and the Brook of Egypt, but they did not conform in his imagination with this living tide which was carrying him down its course, over shoal, around bend and from vale to vale of a size and grandeur beyond expression. Elijah was speechless with amazement; the spies who had gone into Canaan, holding their tongues, and befriended by women whose character Elijah Rasba could not identify, were less surprised by the riches which they discovered than Rasba by the panorama which he saw rolled out for his inspection day by day. Other shanty-boaters were dropping down before the approach of winter. Sometimes one or another would drift near to Rasba’s boat and there would be an exchange of commonplaces. “How fur mout hit be, strangeh?” he would ask each man. “’Low hit’s a hundred mile yet to the Mississippi?” A hundred miles! They could not understand that this term in the mountain man’s mind meant “a long ways,” if need be a thousand or ten thousand miles. When one answered that the Mississippi was 670 miles, and another said it was a “month’s floating,” their replies were equally without meaning to his mind. Rasba could not understand them when they talked of reaches, crossings, wing dams, government works, and chutes and islands, but he would not offend any of them by showing that he did not in the least understand what they were talking about. He must never again hurt the feelings of any man or woman, and he must perform the one service which the Deity had left for him to perform. Little by little he began to understand that he was approaching the Mississippi River. He saw the Cumberland one day, and two hours later, he was witness to the Tennessee, and that long, wonderful bridge which a railroad has flung from shore to shore of the great river. The current carried him down to it, and his face turned up and up till he was swept beneath that monument to man’s inspiration and the industry of countless hands. Rasba had seen cities and railroads and steamboats, but all in a kind of confusion and tumult. They had meant but incidents down the river; this bridge, however, a structure of huge proportions, was clearly one piece, one great idea fixed in steel and stone. “How big was the man who built that bridge?” he asked himself. While yet the question echoed in his expanding soul he hailed a passing skiff: “Strangeh! How fur now is it to the Mississippi River?” “Theh ’tis!” the man cried, pointing down the current. “Down by that air willer point!” 25 26 27 CHAPTER VI Those first free days on the Mississippi River revealed to Nelia Crele a woman she had never known before. Daring, fearless, making no reckoning, she despised the past and tripped eagerly into the future. It was no business of any one what she did. She had married a man who had turned out to be a scoundrel, and when fate treated her so, she owed nothing to any one or to anything. Even the fortune which she had easily seized through the alcoholic imbecility of her semblance of a man brought no gratitude to her. The money simply insured her against poverty and her first concern was to put that money where it would be safe from raiders and sure to bring her an income. This, watchfulness and alertness of mind had informed her, was the function of money. She dropped into Cape Girardeau, and sought a man whom she had met at her husband’s house. This was Duneau Menard, who had little interest in the Carlines, but who would be a safe counsellor for Nelia Crele. He greeted her with astonishment, and smiles, and told her what she needed to know. “I was just thinking of you, Nelia,” he said, “Carline’s sure raising a ruction trying to find you. He ’lows you are with some man who needs slow killing. He telephoned to me, and he’s notified a hundred sheriffs, but, shucks! he’s a mean scoundrel, and I’m glad to see yo’.” “I want to have you help me invest some money,” she said. “It’s mine, and he signed every paper, for me. Here’s one of them.” He took the sheet and read: I want my wife to share up with me all my fortune, and I hereby convey to her stocks, bonds, and cash, according to enclosed signed certificates, etc. Augustus Carline. “How come hit?” the man asked. “He was right friendly, then,” she replied, grimly. “For what you-all said about the daughter of my mother I come here to claim your help. You know about money, about interest and dividends. I want it so I can have money, regular, like Gus did––” “I shall be glad to fix that,” he said, wiping his glasses. “What you wish is a diversified set of investments. How much is there?” She stacked up before him wads, rolls, briquettes, and bundles. He counted it, slip by slip and when he had completed the tally and reckoned some figures on the back of an envelope, he nodded his approval. “I expect that this will bring you around twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, safe, and a leetle besides, on speculation.” “That’ll do,” she said, approvingly. No one in town connected her with the sensation up around Gage. She was just one of those shanty-boat girls who come down the Mississippi every once in a while, especially below St. Louis. In a hundred cities and towns people were looking for Mrs. Augustus Carline, supposed to be cutting a dashing figure, and probably in company with a certain Dick Asunder, who had been seen in Chester, with his big black automobile on the same day that Mrs. Carline abandoned her husband’s automobile there. Of course, the shanty-boaters did not tell, if they knew; the River tells no tales. Certainly, of all the women in the world this casual visitor at Attorney Menard’s need not attract attention. Menard always did have strange clients, and it was nothing new to see a shanty-boat land in and some man or woman walk up to his corner office and sit down to tell him in legal confidences things more interesting to know than any one not of his curiosity and sympathy would ever dream. Attorney Menard kept faith with river wastrels, floating nomads who are akin to gypsies, but who are of all bloods— tramps of the running floods. He listened to narratives stranger than any other attorney; in his safe he had documents of interest to sweethearts and wives, to husbands and sons, to fugitives and hunters. Letters came to him from all parts of the great basin, giving him directions, or notifying him of the termination of lives whose passing had a significance or a meaning. Nelia’s mother knew him, and Nelia herself recalled his good-humoured smile, his weathered face, his appeal to a girl for her confidence, and the certainty that her confidence would be respected. She had gone to him as naturally as she would have gone to a decent father or a wise mother. She took from him his neatly written receipt, but with the feeling that it was superfluous. In a little while she returned to the shanty-boat and dropped out of the eddy on her way down the river. She floated under the big Thebes Bridge, and landed against the west bank before dark, there to have the luck to shoot a wild goose. The maps showed that she was approaching the Lower Mississippi. When she had left Cape Girardeau, she had noticed a little brick-red shanty-boat which landed in just below her own. Without looking up, she discovered that a man leaned against the roof of his low cabin whose eyes did not cease to 28 29 30 watch her every motion while she cast off, coiled her ropes, and leaned to the light sweeps. When she was a safe distance down the river, she ventured to look up stream, and saw that the little red shanty-boat had left its mooring, and that the man was coming down the current astern of her. It was a free river; any one could go whither he pleased, but the certainty that she had attracted the man’s attention revealed to her the necessity of considering her position there alone and dependent on her own resources. She remembered the two market hunters, and their warnings. The man astern was a patient, lurking, menacing brute, who might suspect her of having property enough to make a river piracy worth while; or he might have other designs, since she was unfortunately good-looking and attractive. Night would surely be his opportunity and the test of her soul. She could have landed at Commerce, where there were several shanty-boats and temporary safety; she could have floated on down at night and slipped into the shore in the dark, her lights out; she could have tried flight down the river hoping to lose the brick-red boat; she decided against all these. Boldly she pulled into an eddy just before sunset, and had made fast to a snag and a live root when the little boat came dropping down in the edge of the current hardly forty feet distant, with the man leaning on his sweeps, watching her every motion, especially fastening his gaze upon her trim figure. As he came opposite she turned and faced him; her jaws set. “Hello, girlie!” he called, leaning upon his sweeps to carry his skiff-like boat into the same eddy. On the instant she snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom and, dropping the muzzle, fired. The man stumbled back with a cry. He stood grabbing at his shoulder, his florid face turning white, his eyes starting with terror and pain. She saw him reel and fall through the open hatch of his cabin and his boat go drifting on into the crossing below. It occurred to her numbed brain that she was delivered from that peril, but as dusk fell she hated the misery of her loneliness. CHAPTER VII The Ohio had the Mississippi eddied. The rains that had fallen over the valleys of Kentucky and southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had brought a tide down the big branch and as there was not much water running out of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi, the flood had backed up the Mississippi for a little while,...