Having rid herself of the leering river rat, Nelia Crele trembled for a
time in weak dismay, the reaction from her tense and fiery determination
to protect herself at all costs. But she quickly gathered her strength
and, having brewed a pot of strong coffee, thrown together a light
supper, and settled back in her small, but ample, rocking chair, she
reviewed the incidents of her adventure; the flight from her worthless
husband and her assumption of the right to protect herself.
After all, shooting a man was less than running away from her husband.
She could regard the matter with a rather calm spirit and even a
laughing scorn of the man who had thought to impose himself on her,
against her own will.
"That's it!" she said, half aloud, "I needn't to allow any man to be
mean to me!"
She had given her future but little thought; now she wondered, and she
pondered. She was free, she was independent, and she was assured of her
living. She had even been more shrewd than old Attorney Menard had
suspected; the money she had left with him was hardly half of her
resources. She had another plan, by which she would escape the remote
possibility of Menard's proving faithless to his trust, as attorneys
with his opportunities sometimes have proved.
Nelia Crele could not possibly be regarded as an ordinary woman, as a
mere commonplace, shack-bred, pretty girl. Down through the years had
come a strain of effectiveness which she inherited in its full strength;
she was as inexplicable as Abraham Lincoln. Her stress of mind relieved,
she regarded the shooting of the man with increasing satisfaction,
since by such things a woman could be assured of respect.
Gaiety had never been a part of her childhood or girlhood; she had
withstood the insidious attacks and menaces that threatened her down to
the day when Gus Carline had come to her. Courted by him, married, and
then living in the clammy splendour of the house of a back-country rich
man, she had found no happiness, but merely a kind of animal comfort.
She had had the Carline library to read, and she had brought with her
the handy pocket volumes which had been her own and her delight. She was
glad of the foresight which enabled her to put into a set of book
shelves the companions which had, alone, been her comfort and
inspiration during the few years of her wedded misery.
Now, on the Mississippi, in the shanty-boat, she need consult only her
own fancy and whim. Mistress of her own affairs, as she supposed, she
could read or she could think.
"I do what I please!" she thought, a little defiantly. "It's nobody's
business what I do now; what'd Mrs. Plosell care what people said about
her? I'll read, if I want to, and I'll flirt if I want to--and I'll do
anything I want to----"
She reckoned without the Mississippi. Everybody does, at first. Her
money was but a means to an end. She knew its use, its value, and the
perfect freedom which it gave her; its protection was not
underestimated.
At the same time, sloth was no sin of hers. Living on the river insured
physical activity; her books insured her mental engagement.
She had lived so many years in combat with grim necessity that the
lesson of thrift of all her resources had been brought home to her.
Having been waylaid by circumstance so often, she took grim care now to
count the costs, and to insure her getting what she was seeking. The
trouble was she could not disassociate her feelings from her ideas. They
were inextricably interwoven. The brief years of her wedlock had been in
one way a disillusionment, in another a revelation.
She had found her own hunger for learning, her own strength and
weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly
seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and
shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she had found her
own ability.
For hours she debated there by her pretty lamp, with the curtains down,
and the comforting and reassuring weight of the automatic pistol in her
lap. She knew that she must never have that weapon at arm's length from
her, but as she remembered where it had come from she wondered to think
that she had so easily refused the suggestion of Frank, the market
hunter.
"It's all right, though," she shrugged her shoulders, "I can take care
of myself, and being alone, I can think things out!"
In mid-morning she cut loose from the bank and floated away down stream.
The river was very wide, and covered with crossing-ripples. She looked
down what the map showed was the chute of Hacker Tow Head, and then the
current carried her almost to the bank at the head of Buffalo Island.
Here there was a stretch of caving bank; the earth, undercut by the
river current, was lumping off in chunks and slices. Her boat bobbed and
danced in the waves from the cave-ins, and the rocking pleased her
fancy.
The names along this bit of river awakened her interest; Blackbird
Island was clearly described: Buffalo Island harked back many years into
tradition; Dogtooth Island was a matter of river shape; but Saladin,
Tow Head and Orient Field stirred her imagination, for they might reveal
the scene of steamboat disasters or some surveyor's memory of the
Arabian Nights. Below Dogtooth Island, under Brooks Point, were a number
of golden sandbars and farther down, in the lower curve of the famous
S-bends she read the name "Greenleaf," which was pretty and
picturesque.
She was living! Every minute called upon some resource of her brain. She
had read in old books things which gave even the name Cairo, at the foot
of the long, last reach of the Upper Mississippi, a significance of far
lands and Egyptian mysteries. Gratefully she understood that the
Mississippi was summoning ideals which ought to have been called upon
long since when in the longings of her girlhood she had been circumspect
and patient, keeping her soul satisfied with dreams of fairies playing
among the petals of hill-side flowers, or gnomes wandering among the
stalks of toll-yielding cornfields.
Mature, now; fearless--and, as the word romped through her mind in all
its changes, free--free!--she played with her thoughts. But below
Greenleaf Bend, as another day was lost in waning evening, she early
sought a sandbar mooring at the foot of Missouri Sister Island, where
there were two other shanty-boats, one of them with two children on the
sand. She need not dread a boat where children were found. Possibly she
would be able to talk to another woman, which would be a welcome change,
having had so much of her own thoughts!
This other woman was Mrs. Disbon, out of the Missouri. She and her
husband had been five years coming down from the Yellowstone, and they
had fished, trapped, and enjoyed themselves in their 35-foot cabin-boat
home. Of course, taking care of two children on a shanty-boat was a good
deal of work and some worry, for one or the other was always falling
overboard, but since they had learned to swim it hadn't been so bad, and
they could take care of themselves.
"You all alone?" Mrs. Disbon asked.
"I'm alone," Nelia admitted, having told her name as Nelia Crele.
"Well, I don't know as I blame you," Mrs. Disbon declared, looking at
her husband doubtfully. "Seems to me that on the average, men are more
of a nuisance than they're worth. It's which and t'other about them. I
see you've had experience?"
Nelia looked down at her wedding ring.
"Yes, I've had experience," she nodded.
"Going clear down?"
"You mean----?"
"N'Orleans?"
"Why, I hadn't thought much about it."
"The Lower River's pretty bad." Disbon looked up from cleaning his
repeating shotgun. "My first trip was out of the Ohio and down to
N'Orleans. I wouldn't recommend to no woman that she go down thataway,
not alone. Theh's junker-pirates use up from N'Orleans, and, course,
there's always more or less meanness below Cairo. Above St. Louis it
ain't so bad, but mean men draps down from Little Klondike."
"I haven't made up my mind," Nelia said, adding, with a touch of
bitterness, "I don't reckon it makes so much difference!"
"Lots that comes down feel thataway," Mrs. Disbon nodded, with sympathy,
"Seems like some has more'n their share, and some considerable less!"
Nelia remained there three days, for there was good company, and a
two-day rain had set in between midnight and dawn on the following
morning. There was no hurry, and she was going nowhere. She had the
whole family over to supper the second night, and she ate two meals or
so with them.
The other shanty-boat, about a hundred yards down stream, was an old
man's. He had a soldier's pension, and he lived in serene restfulness,
reading General Grant's memoirs, and poring over the documents of the
Rebellion, discovering points of military interest and renewing his own
memories of his part in thirty-odd battles with Grant before Vicksburg
and down the line with the Army of the Potomac.
Nelia could have remained there indefinitely, but restlessness was in
her mind, as long as she had so much money on board her little
shanty-boat. Disbon knew so many tales of river piracy that she saw the
wisdom of settling her possessions, either at Cairo or Memphis,
whichever should prove best.
Landing against the bank just above the ferry, she walked over to Cairo
and sought for a man who had hired her father to help him hunt for wild
turkeys. He was a banker, and would certainly be the right kind of a man
to help her, if he would.
"Mr. Brankeau," she addressed him in his office, "I don't know if you
remember me, but you came hunting to the River Bottoms below St.
Genevieve, one time, and you and Father went over into Missouri, hunting
turkeys."
"Remember you?" he exclaimed. "Why--you--of course! Mrs. Carline--Nelia
Crele!"
She met his questioning gaze unflinchingly.
"I know I can trust you," she said, simply. "If you'd known Gus
Carline!"
"I knew his father," Brankeau said. "I reckon as faithless a scoundrel
as ever lived. Old man Carline left his first wife and two babies up in
Indiana--I know all about that family! I saw by the newspapers----"
"I want some railroad stocks, so I can have interest on my money," she
said by way of nature of her presence there. "When we separated, he let
me have this paper, showing he wanted me to share his fortune----"
"He was white as that?" Brankeau exclaimed, astonished at the paper
Carline had signed.
"He was that white," she replied, her eyes narrowing. Brankeau from the
wideness of his experience, laughed. She, an instant later, laughed,
too.
"So you settled the question between you?" he suggested, "I thought from
the newspapers he hadn't suspicioned--this paper--um-m!"
"It's not a forgery, Mr. Brankeau," she assured him. "He was one of
those gay sports, you know, and, for a change, he sported around with
me, once. I came away between days. You know his failing."
"Several of them, especially drink," the man nodded "It's in cash?"
"Every dollar, taken through his own banks, on his own orders."
"And you want?"
"Railroads, and some good industrial or two. Here's the amount----"
She handed him a neatly written note. He took out a little green covered
book, showing lists of stocks, range of prices, condition of companies,
and, together, they made out a list. When they had finished it, he read
it into the telephone.
Within an hour the stocks had been purchased, and a week later, he
handed her the certificates. She rented a safe deposit box and put them
into it, subject only to her own use and purposes.
"Thank you, Mr. Brankeau," she said, and turned to leave.
"Where are you stopping?" he asked.
"I'm a shanty-boater."
"You mean it? Not alone?"
"Yes," she admitted.
"I wish I were twenty years younger," he mourned.
"Do you, why?" she looked at him, and, turning, fled.
He caught up his top-coat and hat, but he went to the Ohio River,
instead of to the Mississippi, where Nelia stood doubtfully staring down
at her boat from the top of the big city levee.
At last, she cast off her lines and dropped on down into The Forks.
She sat on the bow deck of her boat, looking at the place where the
pale, greenish Ohio waters mingled with the tawny Missouri flood.
A gleam of gold drew her attention, as she glanced downward and she was
startled to see her wedding ring, with its guard ring, still on her left
hand; it had never been off since the day her husband placed it there.
For a minute she looked at it, and then deliberately, with sustained
calmness, removed the thin guard, and slipped the ring from its place.
She put it upon the same finger of her right hand, where it was snug and
the guard was not necessary.