Fortune, or rather the Father of Waters, had favoured Parson Elijah
Rasba in the accomplishment of his errand. It might not have happened in
a decade that he locate a fugitive within a hundred miles of Cairo,
where the Forks of the Ohio is the jumping-off place of the stream of
people from a million square miles.
Rasba knew it. The fervour of the prophets was in his heart, and the
light of understanding was brightening in his mind. Something seemed to
have caught the doors of his intelligence and thrown them wide open.
In the pent-up valleys of the mountains, with their little streams,
their little trails, their dull and hopeless inhabitants, their wars
begun in disputes over pigs and abandoned peach orchards, their
moonshine and hate of government revenues, there had been no chance for
Parson Rasba to get things together in his mind.
The days and nights on the rivers had opened his eyes. When he asked
himself: "If this is the Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?" he found
a perspective.
Sitting there beside the wounded Jest Prebol, by the light of a big
table lamp, he "wrestled" with his Bible the obscurities of which had
long tormented his ignorance and baffled his mental bondage.
The noises of the witches' hours were in the air. Wavelets splashed
along the side and under the bow of the Prebol shanty-boat. The mooring
ropes stretched audibly, and the timber heads to which they were
fastened squeaked and strained; the wind slapped and hissed and whined
on all sides, crackling through the heavy timber up the bank. The great
river pouring by seemed to have a low, deep growl while the wind in the
skies rumbled among the clouds.
No wonder Rasba could understand! He could imagine anything if he did
not hold fast to that great Book which rested on his knees, but holding
fast to it, the whisperings and chucklings and hissings which filled the
river wilderness, and the deep tone of the flood, the hollow roar of the
passing storm, were but signs of the necessity of faith in the presence
of the mysteries.
So Rasba wrestled; so he grappled with the things he must know, in the
light of the things he did know. And a kind of understanding which was
also peace comforted him. He closed the Book at last, and let his mind
drift whither it would.
Panoramas of the river, like pictures, unfolded before his eyes; he
remembered flashes taken of men, women, and children; he dwelt for a
time on the ruin of the church up there in the valley, standing vainly
against a mountain slide; his face warmed, his eyes moistened. His mind
seized eagerly upon a vision of the memory, the pretty woman, whose
pistol had shot down the deluded and now stricken wretch there in the
cabin.
The anomaly of the fact that he was caring for her victim was not lost
on his shrewd understanding. He was gathering up and helping patch the
wreckage she was making. It was a curious conceit, and Elijah Rasba,
while he smiled at the humour of it, was at the same time conscious of
its sad truth.
Her presence on the river meant no good for any one; Prebol was but one
of her victims; perhaps he was the least unfortunate of them all! Others
might perish through her, while it was not too much to hope that Prebol,
through his sufferings, might be willing to profit by their lesson.
Rasba was glad that he had not overtaken her that night of inexplicable
pursuit. Her brightness, her prettiness, her appeal had been
irresistible to him, and he could but acknowledge, while he trembled at
the fact, that for the time he had been possessed by her enchantment.
Thus he meditated and puzzled about the things which, in his words, had
come to pass. Before he knew it, daylight had arrived, and Jock Drones
came over to greet him with "Good mo'nin', Parson!" Prebol was sleeping
and there was colour in his cheeks, enough to make them look more
natural. When Doctor Grell arrived, just as the three sat down to
breakfast, he cheered them with the information that Prebol was coming
through though the shadow had rested close to him.
None of them admitted, even to himself, the strain the wounded man had
been and was on their nerves. Under his seeming indifference Buck was
near the breaking point; Jock, victim of a thousand worries, was bent
under his burdens. Grell, having fought the all-night fight for a human
life, was still weak with weariness from the effort. Rasba, a newcomer,
brought welcome reserves of endurance, assistance, and confidence.
"Yo' men shore have done yo' duty by a man in need," he told them, and
none of them could understand why that truthful statement should make
them feel so very comfortable.
They left the sick man to go on board the gaming boat, and they sat on
the stern deck, where they looked across the river and the levee to the
roofs of Caruthersville. If they looked at the horizon, their attention
was attracted and their gaze held by the swirling of the river current.
Their eyes could not be drawn away from that tremendous motion, the rush
of a thousand acres of surface; the senses were appalled by the
magnitude of its suggestion.
"Going to play to-night?" Grell asked, uneasily.
"No," Buck replied, instantly.
"So!" the doctor exclaimed.
"Slip's going up on the steamboat."
"For good?"
"So'm I!" Buck continued, breathlessly; "I'm quitting the riveh, too!
I've been down here a good many years. I've been thinking. I'm going
back. I'm going up the bank again."
"What'll you do with the boat?" Grell continued.
"Slip and I've been talking it all over. We're through with it. We
guessed the Prophet, here, could use it. We're going to give it to
him."
"Going to give hit to me!" Rasba started up and stared at the man.
"Yes, Parson; that poplar boat of yours isn't what you need down here."
Buck smiled. "This big pine boat's better; you could preach in this
boat."
Tears started in Rasba's eyes and dripped through his dark whiskers.
Buck and Jock had acted with the impulsiveness of gambling men.
Something in the fact that Rasba had come down those strange miles had
touched them, had given Drones courage to go back and face the music,
and to Buck the desire to return into his old life.
"We're going up on the _Kate_ to-morrow morning," Buck explained.
"Slip'd better show you how to run the gasolene boat if you don't know
how, Parson!"
Dazed by the access of fortune, Rasba spent the mid-afternoon learning
to run the 28-foot gasolene launch which was used to tow the big
houseboat which would make such a wonderful floating church. It was a
big boat only a little more than two years old. Buck had made it
himself, on the Upper Mississippi, for a gambling boat. The frame was
light, and the cabin was built with double boards, with building paper
between, to keep out the cold wintry winds.
"Gentlemen," Rasba choked, looking at the two donors of the gift, "I'm
going to be the best kind of a man I know how----"
"It's your job to be a parson," Buck laughed. "If it wasn't for men like
us, that need reforming, you'd be up against it for something to look
out for. You aren't much used to the river, and I'll suggest that when
you drop down you land in eddies sheltered from the west and south
winds. They sure do tear things up sometimes. I've had the roof tore off
a boat I was in, and I saw sixty-three boats sunk at Cairo's Kentucky
shanty-boat town one morning after a big wind."
"I'll keep a-lookin'," Rasba assured him, "but I've kind-a lost the
which-way down heah. One day I had the sun ahead, behind, and both
sides----"
"There's maps in that pile of stuff in the corner," Buck said, going to
the duffle. "You're on Sheet 4 now. Here's Caruthersville."
"Yas, suh. Those red lines?"
"The new survey. You see, that sandbar up in Little Prairie Bend has cut
loose from Island No. 15, and moved down three miles, and we're at the
foot of this bar, here. That's moved down, too, and that big bar down
there was made between the surveys. You see, they had to move the levee
back, and Caruthersville moved over the new levee----"
"Sho!" Rasba gasped. "What ails this old riveh?"
"She jes' wriggles, same's water into a muddy road downhill," Kippy
laughed. "Up there in Little Prairie Bend hit's caved right through the
old levee, and they had to loop around. Now they've reveted it."
"Reveted?"
"They've woven a willow mattress and weighted it down with broken rock
from up the river--more than a mile of it, now, and they'll have to put
down another mile before they can head the river off there."
"Put a carpet down. How wide?"
"Four hundred feet probably----"
"An' a mile long!" Rasba whispered, awed. "Every thing's big on the
riveh!"
"Yes, sir--that's it--big!" Buck laughed.
Thus the four gossiped, and when Doctor Grell had taken his departure
the three talked together about the river and its wonders. At intervals
they went over to look after Prebol whose chief requirement was quiet,
meat broths, and his medicines.
As night drew down Drones turned to Buck:
"It's goin' to be hard leaving the riveh! I neveh will forget, Buck. If
I'm sent to jail for all my life, I'll have something to remember. If
they hang me, I shore will come back to walk with those that walk in the
middle of the river."
"What's that?" Rasba turned and demanded.
"Riveh folks believe that thousands of people who died down thisaway,
sunk in snagged steamers, caught in burned-up boats, blown to kingdom
come in boiler explosions, those that have been murdered, and who died
along the banks, keep a-goin' up and down."
"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "Yo' b'lieve that?"
"A man believes a heap more after he's tripped the riveh once or twice,
than he ever believed in all his borned days, eh, Buck?"
"It's so!" Buck cried out. "Last night I was thinking that I'd wasted my
life down here; years and years I've been a shanty-boater, drifter,
fisherman, trapper, market hunter, and late years, I've gambled. I've
been getting in bad, worse all the while. The Prophet here, coming
along, seemed to wake me up--the man I used to be--I mean. It wasn't so
much what you said, Parson, but your being here. Then I've been thinking
all over again. I've an idea, boys, that when I go back up to-morrow I
won't be so sorry for what I've been, as glad that I didn't grow worse
than I did. It won't be easy, boys--going back. I'm taking the old river
with me, though. I've framed its bends and islands, its chutes and
reaches, like pictures in my mind. Old Parson here, too, coming in on us
the way he did, saying that this was hell, but he'd come here to live in
it. That's what waked me up, Parson! I could see how you felt. You'd
never seen such a place before, but you said in your heart and your eyes
showed it, Parson, that you would leave God's country to help us poor
devils. It's just a point of view, though. I'm going right up to my
particular hell, and I'll look back here to this thousand miles of river
as heaven. Yes, sir! But my job is up there--in that hell!"
So they talked, and always their thoughts were on the river channel, and
their minds groping into the future.
When the _Kate_ whistled way down at Bell's Landing, Rasba took the two
across to Caruthersville and bade them good-bye at the landing.
The _Kate_ pulled out and Parson Rasba crossed to the three houseboats,
two of them his own. He went in to see Prebol, who was lonesome and
wanted to talk a little.
"What you going to do, Parson?" Prebol asked.
"I'd kind-a like to get to see shanty-boaters, and talk to them," the
man answered. "I wonder couldn't yo' sort of he'p me; tell me where I
mout begin and where it'd he'p the most, an' hurt people's feelin's the
least? I'd jes' kind-a like to be useful. Course, I got to get you
cured up an' took cyar of first."
"I cayn't say much about being pious on Old Mississip'," Prebol grinned,
"but theh's two ways of findin' trouble. One's to set still long enough,
and then, again, you can go lookin' fo' hit. Course, yo' know me! I've
hunted trouble pretty fresh, an' I've found hit, an' I've lived onto
hit. I cayn't he'p much about doin' good, an' missionaryin', an' River
Prophetin'."
When Prebol's voice showed the strain of talking Rasba bade him rest.
Then he went over to the big boat, a gift that would have sold for
$1,000. He looked at the crap table, the little poker tables with the
brass-slot kitties; he stared at the cabinet of cards and dice.
"All mine!" he said.
He walked out on the deck where he could commune with the river, using
his eyes, his ears, and the feeling that the warm afternoon gave him.
The sun shone upon him, and made a narrow pathway across the rushing
torrent. The sky was blue and cloudless. Of the cold, the wind, the sea
of liquid mud, not one trace remained.
He looked down and up the river, and his eyes caught a flicker which
became a flutter, like the agitation of a duck preening its feathers on
a smooth surface.
He watched it for a long time. He did not know what it was. As a river
man, his curiosity was excited, but there was something more than mere
curiosity; the river instinct that the inexplicable and unknown should
be watched and inquired into moved him almost unconsciously to watch
that distant agitation which became a dot afloat in a mirage of light. A
little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the
thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling currents at the bend.
The sun drew nearer the tree tops. The little cabin-boat was seeking a
place to land or anchor for the night. If it was an old river man, the
boat would drop into some little eddy at Caruthersville or down below;
but a stranger on the river would likely shoot across into the gamblers'
eddy tempted, perhaps, by the three boats already there.
The boat drew swiftly near, and as it ran down, the navigator rowed to
make the shanty-boat eddy. Parson Rasba discovered that it was a woman
at the sweeps, and a few strokes later he knew that it was a slim, young
woman. When she coasted down outside the eddy, to swing in at the foot,
and arrived opposite him, he recognized her.
"God he'p me!" he choked, "hit's Missy Nelia. Hit's Missy Nelia! An'
she's a runned away married woman--an' theh's the man she shot!"
"Hello-o, Parson!" she hailed him, "did you see a skiff with a reporter
man drop by?"
"No, missy!" he shook his head, his heart giving a painful thump
"I'm a-landing in, Parson!" she cried. "I want to talk with you!"
With that she leaned forward, drove the sweeps deep, and her boat
started in like a skiff. It seemed to Parson Rasba that he had never
seen a more beautiful picture in all his days.