Jock, _alias_ "Slip," Drones, was discovering how small the world really
is. Like many another man, he had figured that no one would know him, no
one could possibly find him, down the Mississippi River, more than a
thousand miles from home. Having killed, or at least fought his man in a
deadly feud war, he had escaped into the far places. His many months of
isolation had given him confidence and taken the natural uneasiness of
flight from his mind.
Now someone was coming down the Mississippi inquiring for Jock Drones! A
detective, as relentless, as sure as a bullet in the heart, was coming.
He might even then be lurking in the brush up the bank, waiting to get a
sure drop. He might be dropping down that very night. He might step in
among the players, unnoticed, unseen, and wait there for the moment of
surprise and action.
Slip's mind ransacked the far places of which he had heard: Oklahoma,
the Missouri River, California, the Mexican border, Texas. Far havens
seemed safest, but against their lure he felt the balance of Buck's
comradeship.
Caruthersville had a sporting crowd with money, lots of money. The
people there were liberal spenders, and they liked a square game better
than any other sport in the world. The boat was making good money, big
money. The two partners had only to break even in their own play to make
a big living out of the kitty in the poker tables, and there was always
a big percentage in favour of the boat, because Buck and Slip understood
each other so well. Slip's share often amounted to more in a week than
he had earned in two years up there in the mountains felling trees,
rafting them in eddies, and tripping them down painfully to the
sawmills. These never did pay the price they were advertised to pay for
timber, and one had to watch the sealers to see that they didn't short
the measure in the under water and goose-egg good logs.
He remembered Jest Prebol, who was lying shot through in the boat
alongside, and he went over to the boat, lighted the lamp, and sat down
by the wounded man. Prebol was a little delirious, and Slip went over on
his own boat, and called Buck out.
"We got a sick man on our hands," he whispered. "Ain't Doc Grell come
oveh yet?"
"Come the last boat," Buck said, and called the doctor out.
"Say, Doc, that sick feller out here, will you look't him?"
Doctor Grell went over to the boat. He looked at the wounded man, and
frowned as he took the limp wrist. He tried the temperature, too, and
then shook his head.
"He's a sick man, Slip," he said. "Thought he was coming all right last
night. Now----"
He looked at the wound, and gazed at the great, blue plate around the
bullet hole.
"He's bad?" Slip said, in alarm. "Poison's workin', Doc?"
"Mighty bad!"
There was nothing for it. Doctor Grell's night of pleasure had turned
into one of life-saving and effort. He sent Slip over to drag away one
of the young men from his game, and they rigged up two square trunks and
a waterproof tarpaulin into an operating table. Then, as Slip was faint
and sick, the two drove him back to the gambling boat, while they, the
graduate and the student, entered upon a gamble with a human life the
stake.
Of that night's efforts, fighting the "poison" with the few sharp
weapons at their command--later reinforced by a hasty trip across the
river to get others--the two need never tell. While they worked, they
could hear at intervals the shout of a winner in the other boat. In
moments of perfect quiet they heard the quick rustling of shuffled
cards; they heard the rattling of dice in hard, muffled boxes; they
heard, at intervals, the rattling of stove lids and smelt the soft-coal
smoke which blew down on them from the kitchen chimney. Slip, not
forgetful of them, brought over pots of black coffee and inquired after
the patient. He found the two men paler on each visit, and stripped down
more and more, till they were merely in their sweaty undershirts.
Toward morning the wind began to blow; it began to grow cold. The noises
on the neighbouring boat grew fainter in the low rumble of a stormy wind
out of the northwest, and the shanty-boat lifted at intervals on a wave
that rolled out of the main current and across the eddy, making their
operating room even more unstable.
Under their onslaught the death which was taking hold of Jest Prebol was
checked, and the river rat whose life had been forfeited for his sly
crimes became the object of a doctor's sentiment and belief in his own
training.
Long after midnight, when some few of the patrons of the games had
already taken their departure, the doors opened oftener and oftener,
letting the geometrical shaft of the yellow light flare out across the
waters, and the grotesque shadows of those who departed stood out
against the night and waters as the men shivered in the wind and bent to
feel their way into the boats.
After dawn Doctor Grell and his assistant, peaked and white, limp with
their tremendous effort, and shivering with exhaustion of mind and body,
walked out of the little shanty-boat, up to the big one, sat down with
Buck and Slip to breakfast, and then took their own course across the
ruffled and tumble-surfaced river.
"I 'low he'll pull through," Doctor Grell admitted, almost reluctantly.
"He's in bad shape, though, with the things the bullet carried into him,
but we sure swabbed him out. How'd the game go to-night, boys?"
"Purty good." Buck shook his head. "Tammer sure had luck his way--won a
seventy-dollar pot onct."
"I sure wanted to play," Grell shook his head, "but in my profession you
aren't your own, and you cayn't quit."
"We owe you for it," Buck said. "He's our friend----"
"And he's ourn, too," Grell declared, "so we'll split the difference. I
expect it was worth a hundred dollars what we two did to-night. That'll
be fifty, boys, if it's all right."
"Yes, suh," Slip said, handing over five ten-dollar bills, and Grell
handed two of them to his companion, who shook his head, saying:
"Nope, Doc! Ten only to-night. My first fee!"
"And you'll never have a more interesting case," Grell declared. "No,
indeed! You'll see cases, come you go to college, but none more
interesting, and if we've pulled him through, you'll never have better
reason for satisfaction."
The two got into a little motorboat and went bounding and rocking in the
wind and waves toward the town behind the levee on the far bank. The
two gamblers watched the little boat rocking along till it was but a
black fleck in the midst of the weltering brown waters.
"I don't reckon any one'll drap down to-day," Slip muttered, looking up
the river.
"We'll keep our eyes open," Buck replied. "You needn't to worry, you're
plumb worn out, Slip. Git to bed, now, an' I'll slick up around."
It was a cold, dry gale. From sharp gusts with near calms between the
wind grew till it was a steady, driving storm that flattened against the
shanty-boat sides, and whistled and roared through the trees up the
bank. And instead of dying down at dusk, it increased so much that the
big acetylene light was not hung out, and if any one came down to the
opposite shore he saw that there would be no game that night.
Buck went in and sat down by the wounded man's bed, giving him the
medicines Doctor Grell had left. For the attentions Prebol, in lucid
intervals, showed wondering looks of gratitude, like an ugly dog which
has been trapped and then set free. What he had suffered during the
night even he could hardly recall in the enfeebled condition of his
mind, but the spoonfuls of broth, the medicine that thrilled his body,
the man's very companionship, lending strength, took away the feeling of
despair which a man in the extremities of anguish and alone in the world
finds hardest to resist.
Buck, sitting there, gazed at the wan countenance, studying it. Prebol
had forgotten, but when Buck first arrived on the river, the pirate, a
much younger man then, had carelessly and perhaps for display told the
stranger and softpaw many things about the river which were useful. It
occurred to Buck that he was now paying back a debt of gratitude.
Something boiled up in his thoughts, and he swore to himself that
he owed nothing, that the world owed him, and he bridged the years of
his disappointment and desolation back to the hour when he had stormed
out of the life he had known, to come down the Mississippi to be a
gambler. Prebol, in his lapses into delirium, called a woman's name,
Sadie--always Sadie! And if he would have cursed that name in his
consciousness, out of the depths of his soul it came with softness and
gentleness of affection.
Buck wondered what Jest Prebol had done to Sadie that she had driven him
down there, and he cursed with his own lips, while he stifled in the
depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been
wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life
was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of
memories and reflections. He wondered what had become of the woman for
love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this heartless
occupation of common gambler?
True to Slip, he had watched the river for the stranger whose inquiries
had been carried down in fair warning to all the river people--and Buck,
suddenly conscious of his own part in that river system, laughed in
surprise.
"Why," he said to himself, "humans are faithful to one another! It's
what they live for, to be faithful to one another!"
It was an incredible, but undeniable theory. In spite of his own wilful
disbelief in the faith of mankind, here he was sitting by one poor
devil's bed while he kept his weather eye out upon the rough river in
the interests of another--a murderer! He pondered on the question of
whether any one kept faith with him. His mind cried out angrily, "No!"
but on second thought, in spite of himself, he realized distinctly that
he had let one person's faithlessness overcome his trust of all others.
No day on the Mississippi is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a
dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which
depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling
wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry
gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an early spring.
Steamboats are driven into the refuge of landing or eddy, and if the
power craft cannot stand the buffetings, much less are the exposed
little houseboats, toys of current and breeze, able to escape the
resistless blasts. So the wind possesses itself of the whole river
breadth and living creatures are driven to shelter.
Prebol, shot through and conscious of the reward of his manner of
living; Slip, a fugitive under the menace of a murderer's fate; and
Buck, given over to melancholy, were but types on the lengths and
tributaries of the indifferent flood.
Nothing happened, nothing could happen. The arrival of Slip from his
restless bunk relieved Buck of his vigil, and he went to bed and slept
into the dawn of another day--a day like the previous one, and fit to
drive him up the bank, into the woods, and among the fallen branches of
rotten trees seeking in physical activity to check the mourning and
tauntings of a mind over which he found, as often before, that he had no
control.
And yet, when the storm suddenly blew itself out with a light puff and a
sudden flood of sunshine, just as the sun went down, Prebol's condition
took a sudden turn for the better, Slip forgot his fears, and Buck burst
into a gay little whistled tune, which he could never whistle except
when he was absurdly and inexplicably merry.