Carline recovered his equilibrium after a time. His nerves, long on the ragged edge, had given way, and he was ashamed of his display of emotion.

“Seems as though some things are about all a man can stand,” he said to Terabon, the newspaper man. “You know how it is!”

“Oh, yes! I’ve had my troubles, too,” Terabon admitted.

“It isn’t fair!” Carline exclaimed. “Why can’t a man enjoy himself and have a good time, and not—and not––”

“Have a headache the next day?” Terabon finished the sentence with a grave face.

“That’s it. I’m not what you’d call a hard drinker; I like to take a cocktail, or a whiskey, the same as any man. I like to go out around and see folks, talk to ’em, dance—you know, have a good time!”

“Everybody does,” Terabon admitted.

“And my wife, she wouldn’t go around and she was—she was––”

“Jealous because you wanted to use your talents to entertain?”

“That’s it, that’s it. You understand! I’m a good fellow; I like to joke around and have a good time. Take a man that don’t go around, and he’s a dead one. It ain’t as though she couldn’t be a good sport—Lord! Why, I’d just found out she was the best sport that ever lived. I thought everything was all right. Next day she was gone—tricky as the devil! Why, she got me to sign up a lot of papers, got all my spare cash, stocks, bonds—everything handy. Oh, she’s slick! Bright, 80 too—bright’s anybody. Why, she could talk about books, or flowers, or birds—about anything. I never took much interest in them.”

“And brought up in that shack on Distiller’s Island?”

“Stillhouse Island, yes, sir. What do you know about that?”

“A remarkable woman!”

“Yes, sir—I—I’ve got some photographs,” and Carline turned to a writing desk built into the motorboat. He brought out fifteen or twenty photographs. Terabon looked at them eagerly. He could not associate the girl of the pictures with the island shack, with this weakling man, nor yet with the Mississippi River—at least not at that moment.

“She’s beautiful,” he exclaimed, sincerely.

“Yes, sir.” Carline packed the pictures away.

He started the motor, straightened the boat out and steered into mid-stream, looking uncertainly from side to side.

“There’s no telling,” he said, “not about anything.”

“On the river no one can tell much about anything!” Terabon assented.

“You’re just coming down, I suppose, looking for hist’ries to write?”

“That’s about it. I just sit in the skiff, there, and I write what I see, on the machine: A big sandbar, a flock of geese, a big oak tree just on the brink of the bank half the roots exposed and going to fall in a minute or a day—everything like that!”

“I bet some of these shanty-boaters could tell you histories,” Carline said. “I tell you, some of them are bad. Why, they’d murder a man for ten dollars—those river pirates would.”

“No doubt about it!” 81

“But they wouldn’t talk, ’course. It must be awful hard to make up them stories in the magazines.”

“Oh, if a man gets an idea, he can work it up into a story. It takes work, of course, and time.”

“I don’t see how anybody can do it.” Carline shook his head. “There’s a man up to Gage. He wants to write a book, but he ain’t never been able to find anything to write about. You see, Gage ain’t much but a little landing, you might say.”

“Chester, and the big penitentiary is just below there, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I’d think there might be at least one story for him to write there.”

“Oh, he don’t want to write about crooks; he wants to write about nice people, society people, and that kind, and big cities. He says it’s awful hard to find anybody to write about.”

“You’ve got to look to find heroes,” Terabon admitted. “I came more than a thousand miles to see a shanty-boat.”

“You di-i-d? Just to see a shanty-boat!” Carline stared at Terabon in amazement.

In spite of Terabon being such a queer duck he made a good companion. He was a good cook, for one thing, and when they landed in below Hickman Bend, he went ashore and killed three squirrels and two black ducks in the woods and marsh beyond the new levee.

When he returned, he found a skiff landed near by on the sandbar. Carline was talking to the man, who had just handed over a gallon jug. The man pulled away swiftly and disappeared down the chute. Carline explained:

“He’s a whiskey pedlar; a man always needs to have whiskey on board; malaria is bad down here, and 82 a fellow might catch cold. You see how it is if a man don’t have some whiskey on board.”

“I understand,” Terabon admitted.

After supper Carline decided that there was a lot of night air around, and that a man couldn’t take too many precautions against that deadly river miasma whose insidious menace so many people have ignored to their great cost. As for himself, Carline didn’t propose to be taken bad when he had so universal a specific, to take or leave alone, just as he wanted.

Terabon, having put up the hoops of his skiff and stretched the canvas over them, retired to his own boat and spent two hours writing.

In the morning, when he stirred out, he found Carline lying in the engine pit, oblivious to the night air that had fallen upon him, protected as he was by his absorption of the sure preventive of night air getting him first. The jug was on the floor, and Terabon, after a little thought, poured out about two and a half quarts which he replaced with distilled water from the motorboat’s drinking bottle. Then he dropped down the chute into the main river to resume his search for really interesting “histories.”

The river had never been more glorious than that morning. The sun shone from a white, misty sky. It was warm, with the slight tang of autumn, and the yellow leaves were fluttering down; squirrels were barking, and a flock of geese, so high in the air that they sparkled, in the sunshine, were gossiping, and the music of their voices rained upon the river surface as upon a sounding board.

Terabon was approaching Donaldson’s Point, Winchester Chute, Island No. 10, and New Madrid. An asterisk on his map showed that Slough Neck was interesting, and sure enough, he found a 60-foot boat just 83 above Upper Slough Landing, anchored off the sandbar. This was a notorious whiskey boat, and just below it was a flight of steps up the steep bank. No plantation darky ever used those steps. He would rather scramble in the loose silt and risk his neck than climb that easy stairway—yes, indeed!

Terabon, drifting by, close at hand, gazed at the scene. From that craft Negroes had gone forth to commit crime; white men had gone out to do murder, and one of them had rolled down those steps, shot dead. On the other side of Slough Neck, just outside of Tiptonville, there was a tree on which seven men had been lynched.

He pulled across to the foot of Island No. 10 sandbar, to walk up over that historic ground, and to visit the remnants of Winchester Chute where General Grant had moored barges carrying huge mortars with which to drop shells into the Confederate works on Island No. 10.

He hailed a shanty-boat just below where he landed, and as the window opened and he saw someone within, he asked:

“Will you kindly watch my skiff? I’m going up over the island.”

“Yes, glad to!”

“Thank you.” He bowed, and went upon his exploration.

It was hard to believe that this sandbar, grown to switch willows which increased to poles six or seven inches in diameter, had once been a big island covered with stalwart trees, with earthworks, cannon, and desperate soldiers. Its serene quiet, undulating sands and casual weed-trees, showing the stain of floods that had filled the bark with sediment, proved the indifference of the river to fleeting human affairs—the trifling 84 work of human hands had been washed away in a spring tide or two, and Island No. 10 was half way to the Gulf by this time.

Terabon returned to his skiff three or four hours later, and taking up his typewriter, began to write down what he had seen, elaborating the pencil notes which he had made. As he wrote he became conscious of an observer, and of the approach of someone who was diffident and curious—a familiar enough sensation of late.

He looked up, started, and reached for his hat. It was a woman, a young woman, with bright eyes, grace, dignity—and much curiosity.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she apologized. “I was just wondering what on earth you could be doing!”

“Oh, I’m writing—making notes––”

“Yes. But—here!”

“I’m a newspaper writer,” he made his familiar statement. “My name is Lester Terabon. I’m from New York. I came down here from St. Louis to see the Mississippi.”

“You write for newspapers?” she repeated.

She came and sat down on the bow deck of his skiff, frankly curious and interested.

“My name’s Nelia Crele,” she smiled. “I’m a shanty-boater. That’s my boat.”

“I’m sure I’m glad to meet you,” he bowed, “Mrs. Crele.”

“You find lots to write about?”

“I can’t write fast enough,” he replied, enthusiastically, “I’ve been coming six weeks—from St. Louis. I’ve made more than 60,000 words in notes already, and the more I make the more I despair of getting it all down. Why, right here—New Madrid, Island 10, and—and––”

“And me?” she asked. “Did you stop at Gage?” 85

“At Stillhouse Island,” he admitted, circumspectly. “Mr. Crele there said I should be sure and tell his daughter, if I happened to meet her, that her mother wanted her to be sure and write and let her know how she is getting along.”

“Oh, I’ll do that,” she assured him. “I was just writing home when you landed in. Isn’t it strange how everybody knows everybody down here, and how you keep meeting people you know—that you’ve heard about? You knew me when you saw me!”

“Yes—I’d seen your pictures.”

“Mammy hadn’t but one picture of me!” She stared at him.

“That’s so,” he thought, unused to such quick thought.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked him, looking around her. “Do you try to write all that, too—I mean this sandbar, and those willows, and that woods down there, and—the caving bank?”

“Everything,” he admitted. “See?”

He handed her the page which he had just written. Holding it in one hand—there was hardly a breath of air stirring—she read it word for word.

“Yes, that’s it!” She nodded her head. “How do you do it? I’ve just been reading—let me see, ‘... the best romance becomes dangerous if by its excitement it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and—and––’ I’ve forgotten the rest of it. Could anything make this life down here—anything written, I mean—seem uninteresting?”

He looked at her without answering. What was this she was saying? What was this shanty-boat woman, this runaway wife, talking about? He was dazed at being transported so suddenly from his observations to such reflections. 86

“That’s right,” he replied, inanely. “I remember reading that—somewhere!”

“You’ve read Ruskin?” she cried. “Really, have you?”

“Sesame and Lilies—there’s where it was!”

“Oh, you know?” she exclaimed, looking at him. He caught the full flash of her delight, as well as surprise, at finding someone who had read what she quoted, and could place the phrase.

“The sun’s bright,” she continued. “Won’t you come down on my boat in the shade? I’ve lots of books, and I’m hungry—I’m starving to talk to somebody about them!”

It was a pretty little boat, sweet and clean; the sitting room was draped with curtains along the walls, and there was a bookcase against the partition. She drew a rocking chair up for him, drew her own little sewing chair up before the shelves, and began to take out books.

He had but to sit there and show his sympathy with her excitement over those books. He could not help but remember where he had first heard her name, seen the depressed woman who was her mother. And the bent old hunter who was her father. It was useless for him to try to explain her.

Just that morning, too, he had left Nelia Crele’s husband in an alcoholic stupor—a man almost incredibly stupid!

“I know you don’t mind listening to me prattle!” she laughed, archly. “You’re used to it. You’re amused, too, and you’re thinking what a story I will make, aren’t you, now?”

“If—if a man could only write you!” he said, with such sincerity that she laughed aloud with glee.

“Oh, I’ve read books!” she declared. “I know—I’ve 87 been miserable, and I’ve been unhappy, but I’ve turned to the books, and they’ve told me. They kept me alive—they kept me above those horrid little things which a woman—which I have. You’ve never been in jail, I suppose?”

“What—in jail? I’ve been there, but not a prisoner. To see prisoners.”

“You couldn’t know, then, the way prisoners feel. I know. I reckon most women know. But now I’m out of jail. I’m free.”

He could not answer; her eyes flashed as they narrowed, and she fairly glared at him in the intensity of her declaration.

“Oh, you couldn’t know,” she laughed, “but that’s the way I feel. I’m free! Isn’t the river beautiful to-day? I’m like the river––”

“Which is kept between two banks?” he suggested.

“I was wrong,” she shook her head. “I’m a bird––”

“I can well admit that,” he laughed.

“Oh,” she cried, in mock rebuke, “the idea!”

“It’s your own—and a very brilliant one,” he retorted, and they laughed together.

There was no resisting the gale of Nelia Crete’s effervescent spirits. It was clear that she had burst through bonds of restraint that had imprisoned her soul for years. Terabon was too acute an observer to frighten the sensitive exhilaration. It would pass—he was only too sure of that. What would follow?

The sandbar was miles long, miles wide; six or seven miles of caving bend was visible below them, part of it over another sandbar that extended out into the river. There was not a boat, house, human being, or even fence in sight in any direction. Across the river there was a cotton field, but so far away it was that the stalks were but a purple haze under the afternoon sun. 88

“You think I’m queer?” she suddenly demanded.

“No, but I would be if––”

“If what?”

“If I didn’t think you were the dandiest river tripper in the world,” he exclaimed.

“You’re a dear boy,” she laughed. “You don’t know how much good you’ve done me already. Now we’ll get supper.”

“I’ve two black ducks,” he said. “I’ll bet they’ll make a good––”

“Roast,” she took his word. “I’ll show you I’m a dandy cook, too!”