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.
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!"