Augustus Carline was a long time recovering even his consciousness. A
thousand dreams, a thousand nightmares tormented his thoughts while the
mangling grip of unnumbered vises and ropes sank deep into his flesh;
ploughs and harrows dragged through his twisted muscles.
Yet he did rise at last out of his pit and, leaning against the cabin of
his boat, look about him to see what hell he had escaped into. The sun
was shining somewhere, blinding his eyes, which were already seared. A
river coiled by, every ripple a blistering white flame. He heard birds
and other music which sounded like an anvil chorus performing in the
narrow confines of a head as large as a cabin.
He remembered something. It was even worse than what he was undergoing,
but he could not quite call the horror to the surface of the weltering
sea of his feelings; he did not even know his name, nor his place, nor
any detail except the present pain--and he didn't want to know. He
fought against knowing, till the thing pressed exuberantly forward, and
then he knew that the beautiful girl, the woman he loved and to whom he
was married, had left him. That was the exquisite calamity of his soul,
and he flinched from the fact as from a blow. He was always flinching,
he remembered. He was always turning from the uncomfortable and the
bothering to seek what was easy and unengaging. Now, for the moment, he
could not undertake any relief from his present misery.
Acres and lakes of water were flowing by, but his thirst was worse than
oceans could quench. He wanted to drink, but the thought of drinking
disgusted him beyond measure. It seemed to him that a drop of water
would flame up in his throat like gasolene on a bed of coals, and at
that moment his eyes fell upon the jug which stood by the misty engine
against the intangible locker. The jug was a monument of comfort and
substantiality.
At the odour which filled the air when he had taken out the cork his
very soul was filled with horror.
"But I got to drink it!" he whimpered. "It's the only thing that'll cure
me, the only thing I can stand. If I don't I'll die!"
Not to drink was suicide, and to drink was living death! He could not
choose between the suggestions; he never had been trained to face fate
manfully. His years' long dissipation had unfitted him for every
squarely made decision, and now with horror on one side and terror on
the other, he could not procrastinate and wonder what folly had brought
him to this state.
"Why couldn't it smell good!" he choked. "The taste'll kill me!"
Taste he must, or perish! The taste was all that he had anticipated, and
melted iron could hardly have been more painful than that first torture
of cold, fusil acid. Gulping it down, he was willing to congratulate
himself on his endurance and wisdom, his very heroism in undertaking
that deadly specific.
After it was over with, however, the raw chill, which the heat of the
sun did not help, began to yield to a glow of warmth. He straightened
his twisted muscles and after a hasty look around retreated into his
cabin and flung himself on his bunk.
What length of time he spent in his recovery from the attacks of his
enemy, or rather enemies of a misspent youth, he could not surmise. He
did at last stir from his place and look with subdued melancholy into a
world of woe. He recalled the visitor, the man who wrote for newspapers,
and in a panic he searched for his money.
The money was gone; $250, at least, had disappeared from his pockets. An
empty wallet on the cabin floor showed with what contemptuous calm the
funds had been abstracted from his pockets. He turned, however, to a
cunning little hiding place, and found there his main supply of
currency--a thousand dollars or more.
No man likes to be robbed, and Carline, fixing upon his visitor Terabon
as his assailant, worked himself into a fine frenzy of indignation. The
fellow had purposely encouraged him to drink immoderately--Carline's
memory was clear and unmistaken on that point--and then, taking
advantage of his unconsciousness, the pseudo writer had committed
piracy.
"I'd ought to be glad he didn't kill me!" Carline sneered to himself,
looking around to conjure up the things that might have been.
The prospect was far from pleasing. The sky was dark, although it was
clearly sometime near the middle of a day--what day, he could but guess.
The wind was raw and penetrating, howling through the trees, and
skipping down the chute with a quick rustling of low, breaking waves.
The birds and animals which he had heard were gone with the sunshine.
When Carline took another look over his boat, he found that it had been
looted of many things, including a good blanket, his shot gun and rifle,
ammunition, and most of his food supply--though he could not recall that
he had had much food on board.
He lighted the coal-oil heater to warm the cabin, for he was chilled to
the bone. He threw the jug overboard, bound now never again to touch
another drop of liquor as long as he lived--that is, unless he happened
to want a drink.
Wearily he set about cleaning up his boat. He was naturally rather
inclined to neatness and orderliness. He picked up, folded, swept out,
and put into shape. He appeased his delicate appetite with odds and ends
of things from a locker full of canned goods which had escaped the
looter.
As long as he could, Carline had not engaged his thoughts with the
subject of his runaway wife. Now, his mind clearing and his body numb,
his soul took up the burden again, and he felt his helplessness thrice
confounded. He did not mind anything now compared to the one fact that
he had lost and deserved to lose the respect of the pretty girl who had
become his wife. He took out the photographs which he had of her, and
looked at them, one by one. What a fool he had been, and what a
scoundrel he was!
He could not give over the pursuit, however; he felt that he must save
her from herself; he must seek and rescue her. He hoisted in his anchor
and starting the motor, turned into the chute and ran down before the
wind into the river. Never had he seen the Mississippi in such a dark
and repellent mood.
When he had cleared the partial shelter of Island No. 8, he felt the
wind and current at the stern of his boat, driving it first one way then
the other. Steering was difficult, and fear began to clutch at his
heart. He felt his helplessness and the hopelessness of his search down
that wide river with its hundred thousand hiding places. He knew nothing
of the gossiping river people except that he despised them. He could not
dream that his ignorance of things five or ten miles from his home was
not typical of the shanty-boaters; he could not know that where he was a
stranger in the next township to his own home, a shanty-boater would
know the landing place of his friends a thousand miles or so down
stream.
Without maps, without knowledge, without instinct, he might almost as
well have been blind. His careless, ignorant glance swept the eight or
nine miles of shoreline of sandbar from above Island No. 10 clear down
to the fresh sloughing above Hotchkiss's Landing, opposite the dry
Winchester Chute--in which deep-draft gun-barges had been moored fifty
years or so before. He did not even know it was Island No. 10,
Donaldson's Point; he didn't know that he was leaving Kentucky to skirt
Tennessee; much less did he dream that he was passing Kentucky again. He
looked at a shanty-boat moored at the foot of a mile-long sandbar; saw,
without observing, a skiff against the bar just above the cabined scow.
His gaze discovered smoke, houses, signs of settlement miles below, and
he quickened the beat of his motor to get down there.
He longed for people, for humanity, for towns and cities; and that was a
big sawmill and cotton-gin town ahead of him, silhouetted along the top
of a high bank. He headed straight for it, and found his boat
inexplicably slowed up and rebuffed. Strangers on the river always do
find themselves baffled by the big New Madrid eddy, which even power
boats engage with difficulty of management. He landed at last against a
floating dock, and found that it was a fish market.
Having made fast, he went up town and spent hours, till long after dark,
buying supplies, talking to people, getting the lonesomeness out of his
system, and making veiled inquiries to learn if anything had been heard
about a woman coming down the Mississippi. He succeeded in giving the
impression that he was a detective. In the restaurant he talked with a
cocky little bald-headed man all spruced up and dandyish.
"I'm from Pittsburgh," the man said. "My name's Doss, Ronald Doss; I'm a
sportsman, but every winter I drop down here, hunting and fishing;
sometimes on the river, sometimes back in the bottoms. I suppose, Mr.
Carline, that you're a stranger on the river?"
"Why, yes-s, down this way; I live near it, up at Gage."
"I see, your first trip down. Got a nice gasolene boat, though!"
"Oh, yes! You're stopping here?"
"Just arrived this morning; trying to make up my mind whether I'll go
over on St. Francis, turkey-and deer-hunting, or get a boat and drop
down the Mississippi. Been wondering about that."
"Well, say, now--why can't you drop down with me?"
"Oh, I'd be in the way----"
"Not a bit----"
"Costs a lot to run a motorboat, and I'd have to----"
"No, you wouldn't! Not a cent! Your experience and my boat----"
"Well, of course, if you put it that way. If it'd be any accommodation
to you to have an old river man--I mean I've always tripped the river,
off and on, for sport."
"It'd be an education for me, a great help!"
"Yes, I expect it would be an education, if you don't know the river."
Doss smiled.
They walked over to the river bank. An arc light cast its rays upon the
end of the street, down the sloping bank, and in a light circle upon the
rocking, muddy waters where the fish dock and several shanty-boats
rested against the bank.
Doss whistled a little tune as he rested on his cane.
The front door of the third houseboat up the eddy opened and closed. A
man climbed the bank and passed the two with a basket on his arm.
"Come on down," Carline urged.
"Not to-night," Doss said. "I've got my room up at the hotel, and I'll
have to get my stuff out of the railroad baggage room. But I'll come
down about 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning. Then we'll fit up and drop
down the river. Good-night!"
Doss watched Carline go down to the dock and on to his boat. Then he
went up the street and held earnest confab with a man who had a basket
on his arm. They whispered ten minutes or so, then the man with the
basket returned to his shanty-boat, and within half an hour was back up
town, carrying two suitcases, a gun case, and a duffle bag.
Doss went to the smaller hotel with these things and registered. He
walked down to the river in the morning and noticed that the third
shanty-boat had dropped out into the river during the night, in spite of
the storm that was blowing up. He went down and ate breakfast with
Carline, and the two went up and got Doss's outfit at the hotel. They
returned to the motorboat, and, having laid in a supply of groceries,
cast off their lines and steered away down the river.
"Yes, sir, we'll find that girl if it takes all winter!" the fish-market
man heard Doss tell Carline in a loud voice.
That afternoon a man in a skiff came down the river and turned into the
dock. As he landed, the fish-market man said to him:
Yes.
"If you see any lady coming down, tell her a detector is below, lookin'
fo' her. He's a cheap skate, into a motorboat--but I don't expect he'll
be into hit long, 'count of some river fellers bein' with him. But he
mout be bad, that detector. If you should see a nice lady, tell her."
"You bet!" the skiff man, who was Lester Terabon, exclaimed.