Part 36 (1/2)

”Go!” she cried.

Before he knew what had happened he had backed out upon the bow deck, and she bundled him up onto his own craft. She cast off the bow line and ran to the stern to cast off the line there. As she did so, she discovered Terabon's skiff around at the far side where Carline could not see it.

Her husband was still shaking his fist in her direction, but the two boats were well apart as she rowed away with her sweeps. He stood there, undecided. He had not expected the sudden and effective resistance.

Before he knew it, she was lost in a whole fleet of little houseboats which were, to his eyes, both in the sky, underwater, and scattered all over the tip-tilting surfaces.

The current, under the impulse of her rowing, carried Nelia into an eddy and she saw the cruiser rocking down a crossing into the mirage of the distance. She sat on the bow deck while her boat made a long swing in the eddy. Things did not happen down the river as she planned or expected. She regarded the previous night's entertainment with less indifference now; something about the calm of that broad river affected her. She realized that watching the killing of Palura had given her a shock so deep that now she was trembling with the weakness of horror.

She had seen Gus Carline stumble into her cabin, and with angry defiance she had acted with the intention of doing to him what she had done to Prebol--but she had missed deliberately when she shot. When she recalled the matter, she saw that for weeks she had been living in a false frame of mind; that she was desperate, and not contented; that she was afraid--and that she hated fear.

Her pistol was sign of her bravado, and her shots were the indication of her desperation. The memory of the wan face of Prebol brought down by her bullet was now an accusation, not a pride.

Old Mississip' had received her gently in her most furious mood, but now that immense, active calm of vast power was working on the untamed soul which she owned. The river swept along, and its majesty no longer gave her the feeling that nothing mattered. Far from it! Though she rebelled against the idea, her mind knew that she was in rebellion, that she was going against the current. And the river's mood was dangerous, now, to the wanton feelings to which she had desperately yielded but unsuccessfully.

The old, familiar, sharp division between right and wrong was presented to her gaze as if the river itself were calling her attention to it. She could not escape the necessity of a choice, with evil so persuasive and delightful and virtue so depressing and necessary.

She investigated Terabon's outfit with curiosity and questioning. His typewriter, his maps, his few books, his stack of notes neatly compiled in loose-leaf files, were the materials which caught and held her fancy.

She took them on board her shanty-boat and read the record which he had made, from day to day, from his inspection of Commission records at St.

Louis to the purchase of his boat in shanty-boat town, and his departure down the river.

His words were intimate and revealing:

Oct. 5; In mid-stream among a lot of islands; rafts of ducks; a dull, blue day, still those great limestone hills, with hollows through which the wind comes when opposite--coolies?----; in the far distance a rowboat. On the Missouri side, the hills; on the other the flats, with landing sheds. Ducks in great flocks--look like sea serpents when flying close to the water; like islands on it--wary birds.

That was above the part of the river which she knew; she turned to Kaskaskia, and read facts familiar to her:

I met Crele, an old hunter-trapper, in a slough below St. Genevieve.

He was talkative, and said he had the prettiest girl on a hundred miles of river. She had married a man of the name of Carline, real rich and a big bug. ”But my gal's got the looks, yes, indeed!” If I find her, I must be sure and tell her to write to her folks--river romance!

Nelia's face warmed as she read those phrases as well it might. She wondered what other things he had written in his book of notes, and her eye caught a page:

House boatmen are a bad lot. Once a young man came to work for a farmer back on the hills. He'd been there a month, when one night he disappeared; a set of double harness went with him. Another man hung around a week, and raided a grocery store, filling washtubs with groceries, cloth, and shoes--went away in a skiff.

She turned to where he travelled down the Mississippi with her husband and read the description of Gus Carline's whiskey skiff man, his purchase of a gallon of whiskey; the result, which her imagination needed but few words to visualize; then Terabon's drifting away down stream, leaving the sot to his own insensibilities.

Breathlessly she read his s.n.a.t.c.hing sentences from bend to shoal, from reach to reach, until he described her red-hull, white cabin-boat, described the ”young river woman” who occupied it; and then, page after page of memoranda, telling almost her own words, and his own words, as he had remembered them. What he wrote here had not been intended for her eyes.

She's dropping down this river all alone; pirates nor scoundrels nor river storms nor jeopardies seem to disturb her in the least. She even welcomes me, as an interesting sort of intellectual specimen, who can talk about books and birds and a mult.i.tude of things. She may well rest a.s.sured that none of us river rats have any designs, whatever, on a lady who shoots quick, shoots straight, and dropped Prebol at thirty yards off-hand with an automatic!

She read the paragraph with interest and then with care; she did not know whether to be pleased or not by that brutally frank statement that he was afraid of her--suppose he hadn't been afraid? Then, of what was he really afraid--not of her pistol! She read on through the pages of notes. The description of the walk with her up the sandbar and back, there at Island No. 10, thrilled her, for it told the apparently trifling details--the different kinds of sands, the sounds, the night gloom, the quick sense of the river presence, the glow of distant New Madrid. He had lived it, and he wrote it in terms that she realized were the words she might have used to describe her own observations and sensations.

She searched through his notes in vain for any suggestion of the emotions which she had felt. She shrugged her shoulders, because he had not written anything to indicate that he had discovered her allurement.

He had written in bald words the fact of her sending him on the errand of rescue, to save her husband--and she was obliged to digest in her mind the bare but significant phrase:

And, because she has sent me, I am glad to go!