Those first free days on the Mississippi River revealed to Nelia Crele a
woman she had never known before. Daring, fearless, making no reckoning,
she despised the past and tripped eagerly into the future. It was no
business of any one what she did. She had married a man who had turned
out to be a scoundrel, and when fate treated her so, she owed nothing to
any one or to anything. Even the fortune which she had easily seized
through the alcoholic imbecility of her semblance of a man brought no
gratitude to her. The money simply insured her against poverty and her
first concern was to put that money where it would be safe from raiders
and sure to bring her an income. This, watchfulness and alertness of
mind had informed her, was the function of money.
She dropped into Cape Girardeau, and sought a man whom she had met at
her husband's house. This was Duneau Menard, who had little interest in
the Carlines, but who would be a safe counsellor for Nelia Crele. He
greeted her with astonishment, and smiles, and told her what she needed
to know.
"I was just thinking of you, Nelia," he said, "Carline's sure raising a
ruction trying to find you. He 'lows you are with some man who needs
slow killing. He telephoned to me, and he's notified a hundred sheriffs,
but, shucks! he's a mean scoundrel, and I'm glad to see yo'."
"I want to have you help me invest some money," she said. "It's mine,
and he signed every paper, for me. Here's one of them."
He took the sheet and read:
I want my wife to share up with me all my fortune, and I hereby
convey to her stocks, bonds, and cash, according to enclosed signed
certificates, etc.
Augustus Carline.
"How come hit?" the man asked.
"He was right friendly, then," she replied, grimly. "For what you-all
said about the daughter of my mother I come here to claim your help. You
know about money, about interest and dividends. I want it so I can have
money, regular, like Gus did----"
"I shall be glad to fix that," he said, wiping his glasses. "What you
wish is a diversified set of investments. How much is there?"
She stacked up before him wads, rolls, briquettes, and bundles. He
counted it, slip by slip and when he had completed the tally and
reckoned some figures on the back of an envelope, he nodded his
approval.
"I expect that this will bring you around twelve or fifteen hundred
dollars a year, safe, and a leetle besides, on speculation."
"That'll do," she said, approvingly.
No one in town connected her with the sensation up around Gage. She was
just one of those shanty-boat girls who come down the Mississippi every
once in a while, especially below St. Louis. In a hundred cities and
towns people were looking for Mrs. Augustus Carline, supposed to be
cutting a dashing figure, and probably in company with a certain Dick
Asunder, who had been seen in Chester, with his big black automobile on
the same day that Mrs. Carline abandoned her husband's automobile
there.
Of course, the shanty-boaters did not tell, if they knew; the River
tells no tales. Certainly, of all the women in the world this casual
visitor at Attorney Menard's need not attract attention. Menard always
did have strange clients, and it was nothing new to see a shanty-boat
land in and some man or woman walk up to his corner office and sit down
to tell him in legal confidences things more interesting to know than
any one not of his curiosity and sympathy would ever dream.
Attorney Menard kept faith with river wastrels, floating nomads who are
akin to gypsies, but who are of all bloods--tramps of the running
floods. He listened to narratives stranger than any other attorney; in
his safe he had documents of interest to sweethearts and wives, to
husbands and sons, to fugitives and hunters. Letters came to him from
all parts of the great basin, giving him directions, or notifying him of
the termination of lives whose passing had a significance or a meaning.
Nelia's mother knew him, and Nelia herself recalled his good-humoured
smile, his weathered face, his appeal to a girl for her confidence, and
the certainty that her confidence would be respected. She had gone to
him as naturally as she would have gone to a decent father or a wise
mother. She took from him his neatly written receipt, but with the
feeling that it was superfluous. In a little while she returned to the
shanty-boat and dropped out of the eddy on her way down the river. She
floated under the big Thebes Bridge, and landed against the west bank
before dark, there to have the luck to shoot a wild goose. The maps
showed that she was approaching the Lower Mississippi.
When she had left Cape Girardeau, she had noticed a little brick-red
shanty-boat which landed in just below her own. Without looking up, she
discovered that a man leaned against the roof of his low cabin whose
eyes did not cease to watch her every motion while she cast off, coiled
her ropes, and leaned to the light sweeps.
When she was a safe distance down the river, she ventured to look up
stream, and saw that the little red shanty-boat had left its mooring,
and that the man was coming down the current astern of her. It was a
free river; any one could go whither he pleased, but the certainty that
she had attracted the man's attention revealed to her the necessity of
considering her position there alone and dependent on her own
resources.
She remembered the two market hunters, and their warnings. The man
astern was a patient, lurking, menacing brute, who might suspect her of
having property enough to make a river piracy worth while; or he might
have other designs, since she was unfortunately good-looking and
attractive. Night would surely be his opportunity and the test of her
soul.
She could have landed at Commerce, where there were several shanty-boats
and temporary safety; she could have floated on down at night and
slipped into the shore in the dark, her lights out; she could have tried
flight down the river hoping to lose the brick-red boat; she decided
against all these.
Boldly she pulled into an eddy just before sunset, and had made fast to
a snag and a live root when the little boat came dropping down in the
edge of the current hardly forty feet distant, with the man leaning on
his sweeps, watching her every motion, especially fastening his gaze
upon her trim figure.
As he came opposite she turned and faced him; her jaws set.
"Hello, girlie!" he called, leaning upon his sweeps to carry his
skiff-like boat into the same eddy.
On the instant she snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom and,
dropping the muzzle, fired. The man stumbled back with a cry. He stood
grabbing at his shoulder, his florid face turning white, his eyes
starting with terror and pain. She saw him reel and fall through the
open hatch of his cabin and his boat go drifting on into the crossing
below. It occurred to her numbed brain that she was delivered from that
peril, but as dusk fell she hated the misery of her loneliness.