The Ohio had the Mississippi eddied. The rains that had fallen over the
valleys of Kentucky and southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had brought
a tide down the big branch and as there was not much water running out
of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi, the flood had backed up the
Mississippi for a little while, stopping the current almost dead.
Elijah Rasba, running full tilt in the mid Ohio current, looked ahead
that afternoon, and he had a full view of the thing to which he had
come, seeking the wandering son of Mrs. Drones.
He arrived at the moment when the Mississippi, having been banked up
long enough, began to feel the restraint of the Ohio and resent it. The
gathered waters moved down against the Ohio flood and pressed them back
against the Kentucky side. Once more the Mississippi River resumed its
sway. On the loosed waters was a little cigar-box of a shanty-boat, and
Rasba rowed toward it across the saucer-like sucks and depressions where
the two currents of different speeds dragged by each other.
He pulled alongside, hailed, and, for answer, heard a groan, a weak
cry:
"Help!"
He carried a line across to the stranger's deck and made it fast. Then
he saw, stretched upon the floor, a stricken man, from whose side a pool
of blood had run. Working rapidly, Elijah discovered the wound and as
gunshot injuries were only too familiar in his mountain experience he
well knew what he should do. Examination showed that it was a painful
and dangerous shoulder shot. He cleared away the stains, washed the
hole, plucked the threads of cloth out of it, turned the man on his face
and, with two quick slashes of a razor, cut out the missile which had
done the injury.
Healing liniment, the inevitable concoction of a mountaineer's cabin,
soothed while it dressed the wound. Pads of cotton, and a bandage
supplied the final need, and Rasba stretched his patient upon the
cabin-boat bunk, then looked out upon the world to which he had
drifted.
It was still a vast river, coming from the unknown and departing into
the unknown. He knew it must be the Mississippi, but he acknowledged it
with difficulty.
He did not ask the man about the bullet. Born and bred in the mountains,
he knew that that would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette. But the
wounded man was uneasy, and when he was eased of his pain, he began to
talk:
"I wa'nt doin' nothing!" he explained, "I were jes' drappin' down, up
above Buffalo Island, an' b'low Commerce, an' a lady shot me--bang! Ho
law! She jes' shot me thataway. No 'count for hit at all."
"A lady you knowed?" Rasba asked.
"No suh! But she's onto the riveh, into a shanty-boat, purty, too, an'
jes' drappin' down, like she wa'nt goin' no wheres, an' like she mout of
be'n jes' moseyin'. I jes 'lowed I'd drap in, an' say howdy like, an'
she drawed down an' shot--bang!"
"Was she frightened?"
"Hit were a lonesome reach, along of Powerses Island," the man admitted,
whining and reluctant. "She didn't own that there riveh. Hain't a man no
right to land in anywheres? She shot me jes' like I was a dawg, an' she
hadn't no feelin's nohow. Jes' like a dawg!"
"Did you know her?"
"No, suh. We'd be'n drappin' down, an' drappin' down--come down below
Chester, an' sometimes she'd be ahead, an' sometimes me, an' how'd I
know she wouldn't be friendly? Ain't riveh women always friendly? An'
theh she ups an' shoots me like a dawg. She's mean, that woman, mean an'
pretty, too, like some women is!"
Rasba wondered. He had been long enough on the Ohio to get the feeling
of a great river. He saw the specious pleading of the wounded wretch,
and his quick imagination pictured the woman alone in a vast, wild wood,
at the edge of that running mile-wide flood.
"Of co'rse!" he said, half aloud, "of co'rse!"
"Co'rse what?" the man demanded, querulously.
"Co'rse she shot," Rasba answered, tartly. "Sometimes a lady jes'
naturaly has to shoot, fearin' of men."
Rasba landed the two boats in at the foot of a sandbar, and made them
fast to old stakes driven into the top of the low reef. He brought his
patient some hot soup, and after they had eaten supper, he sat down to
talk to him, keeping the man company in his pain, and leading him on to
talk about the river, and the river people.
In that first adventure at the Ohio's forks Rasba had discovered his own
misconceptions, and the truth of the Mississippi had been partly
revealed to him. What the Tug was to the Big Sandy, what the Big Sandy
was to the Ohio, the Ohio was to the Mississippi. What he had looked to
as the end was but the beginning, and Rasba was lost in the immensity of
the river that was a mile wide, thousands of miles long, and unlike
anything the mountain preacher had ever dreamed of. If this was the
Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?
"My name's Prebol," the man said, "Jest Prebol. I live on Old
Mississip'! I live anywhere, down by N'Orleans, Vicksburg--everywhere!
I'm a grafter, I am--"
"A grafter?" Rasba repeated the strange word.
"Yas, suh, cyards, an' tradin' slum, barberin' mebby, an' mebby some
otheh things. I can sell patent medicine to a doctor, I can! I clean
cisterns, an' anything."
"You gamble?" Rasba demanded, grasping one fact.
"Sho!" Prebol grinned. "Who all mout _yo'_ be?"
"Elijah Rasba," was the reply. "I am seeking a soul lost from the
sheepfold of God. I ask but the strength to find him."
"A parson?" Prebol asked, doubtfully, his eyes resting a little in their
uneasy flickerings. "One of them missionaries?"
"No, suh." Rasba shook his head, humbly. "Jes' a mountang parson,
lookin' for one po'r man, low enough fo' me to he'p, maybe."
Prebol made no reply or comment. His mind was grappling with a fact and
a condition. He could not tell what he thought. He remembered with some
worriment, that he had cursed under the pain of the dressing of the
wound. He knew that it never brought any man good luck to swear within
ear-range of any parson.
He could think of nothing to do, just then, so he pretended weariness,
which was not all pretense, at that. Rasba left him to go to sleep on
his cot, and went over to his own boat, where, after an audible session
on his knees, he went to bed, and fell into a sound and dreamless
sleep.
In the morning, when the parson awakened, his first thought was of his
patient, and he started out to look after the man. He looked at the face
of the sandbar reef against which the little red shanty-boat had been
moored. The boat was gone!
Rasba, studying the hard sand, soon found the prints of bare feet, and
he knew that Prebol had taken his departure precipitately, but the
reason why was not so apparent to the man who had read many a wild
turkey track, deer runway, and trails of other game.
From sun-up till nearly noon, while he made and ate his breakfast, and
while he turned to the Scriptures for some hint as to this river man's
mind, his thoughts turned again and again to the pictures which Prebol's
tales, boastings, whinings, and condition had inspired.
He felt his own isolation, strangeness, and ignorance. He could not
understand the man who had fled from assistance and succour; at the same
time the liveliness of his fancy reverted again and again to the woman
living alone in such a desolation, shooting whoever menaced.
That type was not new to him. Up in his own country he had known of
women who had stood at their rifles, returning shot for shot of feud
raiders. The pathetic courage of the woman who had shot Prebol appealed
to him.
The wounded man, wicked beyond measure, and the woman assailed, he
realized, were like hundreds of other men and women whose shanty-boats
he had seen down the Ohio River, and which lurked in bends and reaches
on both sides of the Mississippi.
"Give thyself no rest!" he read, and he obeyed. He believed that he had
a black sin to expiate, and he dared not begin what his soul was
hungering to do, because knowing wickedness, he had deliberately
sinned.
Alternately, he read his Bible and prayed. Late in the day he dropped
out of the eddy and floated on down.
"I 'low I can keep on huntin' for Jock Drones," he told himself. "I
shore can do that, yes, indeed!"