Lester Terabon rowed down the rolling river waters in the dark night. He had, of course, looked out into the Mississippi shades from the security of landing, anchorage, and sandbar; he knew the looks of the night but not the activities of currents and bends when a gale is sweeping by and the air is, by turns, penetrated by the hissing of darting whitecaps and the roar of the blustering winds.

He would not from choice have selected a night of gale for a pull down the Mississippi, and his first sensation as he sought a storm wave stroke was one of doubt. What dangers might engulf him was not plain, not the waves, for his skiff bobbed and rocked over them; not river pirates bent on plunder, for they could not see him; perhaps a snag in the shallows of a crossing; perhaps the leap of a sawyer, a great tree trunk with branches fast in the mud and the roots bounding up and down in the current; perhaps a collision with some other craft.

He had salt-water rowlocks on his boat, open-topped “U” sockets, and the oars he used were cased with a foot of black leather and collars of leather strips; the tips were covered with copper sheets which gave them weight and balance. At first he pulled awkwardly, catching crabs in the hollows and backing into the heft of the waves, but after a time he felt the waves as they came, and the oars feathered and caught. While he watched ahead and searched the black horizon for the distant sparkle of government lights, he fell into the swing of his stroke before he knew it, and he was interested and surprised to observe that he swayed to the side-wash while he pulled to the rhythm of the waves. 154

The government lights guided him. He had not paid much attention to them before; he had seen their white post standards as he dropped down, day after day, but his skiff, drawing only five inches of water, passed over the shallowest crossings and along the most gradually sloping sandbars. Now he must keep to the deep water, follow the majestic curves and sweeps of the meandering channel, lest he collide with a boiling eddy, ram the shore line of sunken trees, or climb the point of a towhead.

It was all a new experience, and its novelty compelled him at times to pause in his efforts to jot down a few hasty words by light of a little electric flash to preserve in his memory the sequence of the constantly varying features of the night, beginning with the curtain of the shanty-boat which flicked its good luck after him, passing the bright, clear lights of New Madrid. After leaving far behind their glow against the thin haze in the night he “made” the scattered shoals of Point Pleasant, and hugged down vanishing Ruddles Point, taking a glimpse of Tiptonville—which withdraws year by year from the fatal caving brink of its site—wishing as he passed that he might return to that strange place and visit Reelfoot Lake three or four miles beyond, where the New Madrid earthquakes drowned a forest whose dead stubs rise as monuments to the tragedy.

In Little Cypress Bend, twenty-five miles below where he had left the young woman, he heard the splash and thud of a caving bank, and felt the big rollers from the falling earth twisting and tumbling him about for a third of a mile.

It was after 1 o’clock when he looked at his watch. He was beginning to feel the pull on his shoulders, and the crick which constantly looking over his shoulder 155 to see the lights ahead caused him. The dulness of his vision, due to inevitable fatigue, compelled him constantly to sit more alert and dash away the fine spray which whipped up from the waves. A feeling of listlessness overpowered him. He could not row on forever, without resting at all. Taking advantage of a moment of calm in the wind, he pulled the bow around and drifted down stern first.

He had lost track of his position; he had not counted the lights, and now for many miles there was no town distinguishable. He had felt the loneliness of a mile-breadth; now he wondered whether he was in Missouri or Arkansas, whether he had come forty miles or eighty, and after a little he began to worry for fear he might have gone more than a hundred.

With the wind astern or nearly astern, he knew that he had pulled four or five miles an hour, and he did not know how fast the current of the river ran; it might be four miles or eight miles. In ten hours he might leave more than a hundred miles of river bank behind him.

A new sensation began to possess him: the feeling that he was not alone. He looked around, while he rested trying to find what proximity thus affected him. The wind? Those dull banks, seemingly so distant? Perhaps some fellow traveller? It was none of those things.

It was the river! The “feel” of the flood was that of a person. He could not shake off the sensation, which seemed absurd. He shook his head resolutely and then searched through the gloom to discover what eyes might be shining in it. He saw the inevitable government lights between which was deep water and a safe channel. He had but to keep on the line between the lights, cutting across when he spied another 156 one far ahead. The lights but accentuated the certainty that on all sides, but a little way from him, a host of invisible beings speculated on his presence and influenced his course.

A newspaper man of much experience could not help but protest in his practical mind against such a determination of the invisible and the unknown to give him such nonsensical ideas. He had in play, in intellectual persiflage, and with some show of traditional reasonableness, called Nelia Crele “a river goddess.” She was very well placed in his mind—a reckless woman, pretty, with a fine character for a masterpiece of fiction (should he ever get to the story-writing stage) and a delight to think about; commanding, too, mysterious and exacting; and now he thought it might be the laughter of her voice that carried in the wind, not a mocking laugh, nor a jeering one, but one of sweet encouragement which neither distance nor circumstances could dismiss from a distressed and reluctant heart, let alone a heart so willing to receive as his.

Lester Terabon accepted the possibility of river lore and proclaimed beliefs. Fishermen, store-boaters, trippers, pirates, and all sorts of the shanty-boaters whom he had interviewed on his way down had solemnly assured him that there were spirits who promenaded down mid-stream, and who sometimes could be seen.

Terabon was sorry when his cool, calculating mind refused to believe his eyes, which saw shapes; his flesh, which felt creeps; his ears, which heard voices; and his nostrils, which caught a whiff of a faint, sweet perfume more exquisite than any which he remembered. He knew that when he had kissed the river goddess whose eyes were blue, whose flesh was fair, whose grace was lovely, he had tasted that nectar and sniffed that ambrosia. He wondered if she were near him, watching 157 to see whether he performed well the task which she had set for him, the rescue of the husband who had forfeited her love, and yet who still was under her protection since in his indignant sorrow he had supposed himself capable of finding and retaining her.

Terabon would have liked nothing better than to believe what the Grecians used to believe, that goddesses and gods do come down to the earth to mingle among mankind. He fought the impossibility with his reason, and night winds laughed at him, while the voices of the waves chuckled at his predicament. They assailed him with their presence like living things, and then roared away to give room to new voices and new presences.

“Anyhow,” Terabon laughed, in spite of himself, “you’re good company, Old Mississip’!”

Yet he felt the chilling and depressing possibility that he might never again see that woman who would remain as a “river goddess” in his imagination. He had been heart-free, a bystander in the world’s affairs. Now he knew what it was to see the memory of a woman rise unbidden to disturb his calculations; more than that, too, he was a part of the affairs of the River People.

As a reporter “back home” he had never been able quite to reconcile himself to his constant position as a spectator, a neutral observer, obliged to write news without feeling and impartially. A politician could look him in the eye and tell him any smooth lie, and he could not, with white heat, deny the statement. He could not rise with his own strength to champion the cause of what he knew to be right against wrong; he could not elaborate on the details of things that he felt most interested in, but must consult the fancies of a not-particularly discriminating public, whose average 158 intelligence, according to some learned students, must be placed at seventeen-years plus. As he was twenty-four plus, Terabon was immensely discouraged with the public when he had set forth down the Mississippi.

Now he was on the way from a river goddess to interfere with the infamous plans of river pirates, through a dry gale out of the north, on the winding course of the Mississippi, a transition which troubled the self-possession while it awakened the spirit of the young man.

Dawn broke on the troubled river, and the prospect was enchanting to the heroic in the mind of the skiff-tripper. He could not be sure which was east or west, for the gray light appeared on all sides, in spots and patches of varying size. No gleam reflected from the yellow clay of the tumbling and tortured waters. As far as he could see there was light, but not a bright light. Dull purples, muddy waters, gray tree trunks, black limbs against dark clouds; Terabon felt the weariness of a desert, the melancholy of a wet, dripping-tree wilderness, and of a tumbling waste of waters; and yet never had the solid body of the stream been so awe-inspiring as in that hour of creeping and insinuating dawn.

He ran out into the main river again, and a wonderful prospect opened before his eyes. Sandbars spread out for miles across the river and lengthwise of the river; the bulk of the stream seemed broken up into channels and chutes and wandering waterways. He saw column after column of lines of spiles, like black teeth, through which the water broke with protesting foam.

When he thought to reckon up, as he passed Osceola Bar, he found that he had come ninety-five miles. Yankee Bar was only five or six miles below him, and he eagerly pulled down to inspect the long beaches, the 159 chutes and channels, which the river pirates had used for not less than 150 years; where they still had their rendezvous.

Wild ducks and geese were there in many flocks. There were waters sheltered from the wind by willow patches. The woods of Plum Point Peninsula were heavy and dark. The river main current slashed down the miles upon miles of Craighead Point, and shot across to impinge upon Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1, where a made dirt bank was silhouetted against the sky.

Not until his binoculars rested upon the bar at the foot of Fort Pillow Bluff did Terabon’s eyes discover any human beings, and then he saw a white houseboat with a red hull. He headed toward it to ask the familiar river question.

“No, suh!” the lank, sharp-eyed fisherman shook his head. “Theh’s no motorboat landed up theh, not this week. Who all mout you be?”

“Lester Terabon; I’m a newspaper writer; I live in New York; I came down the Mississippi looking for things to tell about in the newspapers. You see, lots of people hardly know there’s a Mississippi River, and it’s the most interesting place I ever heard of.”

“Terabon? I expect you all’s the feller Whiskey Williams was tellin’ about; yo’n a feller name of Carline was up by No. 8. He said yo’ had one of them writin’ machines right into a skift. Sho! An’ yo’ have! The woman an’ me’d jes’ love to see yo’ all use hit.”

“You’ll see me,” Terabon laughed, “if you’ll let me sit by your stove. I’ve some writing I could do. Here’s a goose for dinner, too.”

“Sho! The woman shore will love to cook that goose! I’m a fisherman but no hunter. ’Tain’t of’en we git a roast bird!” 160

So Terabon sat by the stove, writing. He wrote for more than an hour—everything he could remember, with the aid of his pencilled midnight notes, about that long run down. With his maps before him he recognized the bends and reaches, the sandbars and islands which had loomed up in the dark. Of all the parts of the river, the hundred miles from Island No. 10 down to Fort Pillow became the most familiar to his thoughts, black though the night had been. Even each government light began to have characteristics, and the sky-line of levee, wilderness, sandbar, and caving bank grew more and more defined.

Having written his notes, and Jeff Slamey having fingered the nine loose-leaf sheets with exclamatory interest and delight, Terabon said he must go rest awhile.

“Yas, suh,” the fisherman cried, “when a man’s pulled a hundred mile he shore needs sleep. When the woman’s got that goose cooked, I bet yo’ll be ready to eat, too.”

So Terabon turned in to sleep. He was awakened at last by the sizzling of a goose getting its final basting. He started up, and Slamey said:

“Hit’s ready. I bet yo’ feel betteh, now; six hours asleep!”

It didn’t seem like six minutes of dreamless recreation.

With night the wind fell. The flood of sunset brilliance spread down the radiant sandbars and the bright waterways. The trees were plated with silver and gold, and the sweep of the caving bend was a dark shadow against which the river current swept with ceaseless attack.

For hours that night Terabon amused his host with his adventures, except that he made but most casual mention of the woman whom Carline was seeking. 161 He was cautious, too, about the motorboat and the companion who had taken Carline down the river, till Slamey burst out:

“I know that feller. He’s a bad man; he’s a river rat. If he don’t kill Gus Carline, I don’t know these yeah riveh fellers. They use down thisaway every winter. I know; I know them all. I leave them alone, an’ they leave me alone. I knew they was comin’. They got three four boats now. One feller, name of Prebol—he’s bad, too—was shot by a lady above Cairo. He’s with a coupla gamblers to Caruthersville now. Everybody stops yeah; I know everybody; everybody knows me.”

The next day was calm all day long, and Terabon went up the bank to shoot squirrels or other woods game; he went almost up to the Plum Point, killed several head of game, and rejoiced in the bayous and sloughs and chutes of a changing land.

The following morning he was hailed by Slamey:

“Hi—i, Terabon! Theh’s a shanty-boat up the head of Flower Island Bar jes’ drappin’ in. They’ve floated down all night!”

Through his glasses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.

They were too far away for him to distinguish their personalities, but one was a tall, active man, the other obviously chunky, and when they ran their lines out and made fast to half-buried snags, it was with the quick decision of men used to work against currents and to unison of effort. There was something suggestive in their bearing, their scrutiny up and down the river, their standing close to each other as they talked. If Terabon had not suspected them of being pirates, their attitude and actions would have betrayed them. 162

Terabon, after a little while, pulled up the eddy toward them; he was willing to take a long chance. Few men resent a newspaper man’s presence. The worst of them like to put themselves, their ideas, right with the world. Terabon risked their knavery to win their approbation. Come what might, he would seek to save Augustus Carline from the consequences of his ignorance, money, folly, and remorse.