Terabon’s notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long, lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood itself.

His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump under the term of “histories,” but now, after his hundreds of miles of association with the river, his thought took but brief note of those trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as “river towns.” He had passed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!—bound but wearing away its bonds.

Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed, in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the Mississippi River “spirit”—as he always quoted it in his calm and dispassionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions—had encompassed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been called a “compromising position.”

That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a drunken stupor, and now in the late evening 103 the fugitive wife was taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat—and he had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home—he thought the phrase with difficulty—and he remembered the word “chaperon” as from a foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.

His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the occasion. “I’ll show you I’m a dandy cook,” she had said, and while he followed her on board the boat, with the two big black ducks to help prepare, he wondered and remembered and, in spite of his life-long avoidance of all appearance of evil, submitted to this irresistible circumstance, wherever it might lead.

So he built the fire in her kitchen stove. She mixed up dressing and seasoned the birds, made biscuit batter for hot-bread, brought out stacks and stores of things to eat, or to eat with, and they set the table, ground the coffee, and got the oven hot for the roasting and baking.

One thing took the curse off their position: They had to have all the windows and doors wide open so that they seemed fairly to be cooking on an open sandbar at the edge of the river. Terabon took an inward satisfaction in that fact. It is not possible to feel exceedingly wicked or depraved when there is a mile-wide Mississippi on the one hand and a mile-wide sandbar on the other side, and the sun is shining calmly upon the bright and innocent waters.

As the ducks were young and tender, their cooking took but an hour, or a little more, and the interim was occupied in the countless things that must be done to 104 prepare even a shanty-boat feast. He stirred some cranberry sauce, and she had to baste the ducks, get the flour stirred with water, and condensed cream for gravy, besides setting the table and raising the biscuits, to have them ready for the ducks. She must needs wonder if she’d forgotten the salt, and for ten minutes she was almost in a panic at the thought, while he watched her in breathless wonderment, and took covert glances up the Mississippi River, fearful of, and yet almost wishing to see, that pursuing motorboat come into view.

When at last the smoking viands were on the ample table and they sat with their knees under it, and he began to carve the ducks and dish out the unblessed meal, he glanced up stream through the cabin window on his right. He caught a glimpse of a window pane flashing miles distant in the light of the setting sun—the whiskey boat without doubt. He saw a flock of ducks coming like a great serpent just above the river surface, then a shadow lifted as out of the river, swept up the trees in the lost section of Kentucky opposite, and from spattering gold the scene turned to blue which rapidly became purple, darkening visibly.

Through the open doors and windows swept the chill of twilight, and while she lighted the big lamp he did her bidding and closed the doors and windows. Those shelves of books, classics and famous, time-tried fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of titles, the blues and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all those master minds warn the young against evil?

But they talked over the ducks of what a pity it was that all towns could not engage themselves in thought 105 the way Athens used to do, and they wondered to each other when the hurrying passion of greed and its varying phenomena would become reconciled to a modest competence and the simplicity which they, for example, were enjoying down the Mississippi.

When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful, though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden, risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position.

Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty.

“I think I’d better put up my canvas top,” he blurted out, and she assented.

“And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of dishes,” she added.

“Oh, of course!” he exclaimed.

“I’ll help with the canvas,” she said, and he dared not look at her.

By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the bar, and the river in the dark, running by.

They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power, its resistlessness.

“It’s overwhelming,” he whispered. “When you can’t see it you hear it, or you feel it!” 106

“And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so perfectly negligible,” she added, consciously, and then with vivacity: “I’ll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me for a walk up this sandbar!”

“Gladly,” he laughed, “but I’ll help with the dishes as well!”

She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber, not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different, wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle—they remembered Thoreau’s “Cape Cod” and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had accumulated a vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the simple superstitions with which the river people beguile themselves and add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.

“An old river man can look at the river and tell when a headrise is coming,” he told her. “He knows by the looks of the water when the river is due to fall again. When he dreams, he says he knows what is going to happen, and where to find buried treasure, and if there is going to be an earthquake or a bad storm.”

“They get queer living alone!” she said, thoughtfully. “Lots of them used to stop in at our slough on Kaw River. I was afraid of them!” 107

“You afraid of anything!” he exclaimed. “Of any one!”

“Oh, that was a long time ago—ages ago!” She laughed, and then gave voice to that most tragic riverside thought. “But now—nothing at all matters now!”

She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing, that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin’s most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring tears.

He knew in that very moment, as by revelation, that he had caught from her lips one of the bitterest phrases which the human mind is capable of forming. He was glad of the favour which fate had bestowed upon him, and he thrilled, while he regretted, that in that hour he could not forget that he was a seeker of facts, a gatherer of information.

To match her mood was beyond his own power. By a simple statement of fact she had given herself a place in his thought comparable to—he went at making ideas again, despite himself—comparable to one of those wonderful widows which are the delight, while they rend to tatters the ambitions of delvers into the mysteries of Olympian lore. This bright, pretty, vivacious young woman had suffered till she had arrived at a Helen’s recklessness—nothing mattered!

There was a pause.

“I think you are in a fair way to become unforgetable in connection with the Mississippi River,” he suggested, with even voice.

“What do you mean?” she demanded, quickly.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” with the semblance of perfect frankness. “I’ve been wondering which one of the 108 Grecian goddesses you would have been if you had lived, say, in Homer’s time.”

“Which one of them I resemble?” she asked, amused.

“Exactly that,” he declared.

“Oh, that’s such a pretty compliment,” she cried. “It fits so well into the things I’ve been thinking. The river grows and grows on me, and I feel as though I grew with it! You don’t know—you could never know—you’re a man—masculine! For the first time in my life I’m free—and—and I don’t—I don’t care a damn!”

“But the future!” he protested, feebly.

“That’s it!” she retorted. “For a river goddess there is no future. It’s all in the present for her, because she is eternal.”

They had walked clear up to the southernmost tip of the sandbar point. They could hear someone, perhaps a chorus of voices, singing on the whiskey boat at the Upper Landing. They could see the light of the boat’s windows. There they turned and started back down the sandbar, reaching the two boats moored side by side in the deadwater.

“Shall I help with those dishes to-night?” he asked.

“No, we’ll do them in the morning,” she replied without emphasis and as a matter of course, which left him unassisted in his obvious predicament.

“Well,” he drawled, after a time, “it’s about midnight. I must say a river goddess is—is beyond my most vivid dreams. I wonder––”

“What do you wonder?”

“If you’ll let me kiss you good-night now?”

“Yes,” she answered.

The stars twinkled as he put his arm around her and took the kiss which her lips gave—smiling.

“I’ll help with those dishes in the morning,” he said, helping her up the gang plank of her boat. “Good-night!” 109

“Good-night,” she answered, and entered the cabin, the dim light of her turned-down lamp flashing across the sandbar and revealing his face for a moment. Then the door closed between them.

He went to his skiff, raised the cover, and crawled into his canvas hammock which was swung from both sides of his boat. Before going to sleep he looked under the canvas at the river, at the stars, at the dark cabin-boat forty feet distant in the eddy.

At the same moment he saw a face against a window pane in the cabin.

“What does it mean?” he asked himself, but there was no answer. The river, when asked, seldom answers. Just as he was about to go to sleep, he started up, wide awake.

For the first time on the river, he had forgotten to post up his notes. He felt that he had come that day, as never before, to the forks in the road—when he must choose between the present and the future. He lighted his lantern, sat up in his cot, and reached for his typewriter.

He wrote steadily, at full speed, for an hour. When he had those wonderful and fleeting thoughts and observations nailed down and safe, he again put out his lantern, and turned in once more.

Then he heard a light, gay laugh, clear and distinct-a river voice beyond question—full of raillery, and yet beneath the mocking note was something else which he could neither identify nor analyze, which he hoped was not scorn or mere derision, which he wished might be understanding and sympathy—till he thought of his making those notes.

Then he despised himself, which was really good for his soul. His conscience, instead of rejoicing, rebuked him as a cad. He swore under his breath.