Lester Terabon rowed down the rolling river waters in the dark night. He
had, of course, looked out into the Mississippi shades from the security
of landing, anchorage, and sandbar; he knew the looks of the night but
not the activities of currents and bends when a gale is sweeping by and
the air is, by turns, penetrated by the hissing of darting whitecaps and
the roar of the blustering winds.
He would not from choice have selected a night of gale for a pull down
the Mississippi, and his first sensation as he sought a storm wave
stroke was one of doubt. What dangers might engulf him was not plain,
not the waves, for his skiff bobbed and rocked over them; not river
pirates bent on plunder, for they could not see him; perhaps a snag in
the shallows of a crossing; perhaps the leap of a sawyer, a great tree
trunk with branches fast in the mud and the roots bounding up and down
in the current; perhaps a collision with some other craft.
He had salt-water rowlocks on his boat, open-topped "U" sockets, and the
oars he used were cased with a foot of black leather and collars of
leather strips; the tips were covered with copper sheets which gave them
weight and balance. At first he pulled awkwardly, catching crabs in the
hollows and backing into the heft of the waves, but after a time he felt
the waves as they came, and the oars feathered and caught. While he
watched ahead and searched the black horizon for the distant sparkle of
government lights, he fell into the swing of his stroke before he knew
it, and he was interested and surprised to observe that he swayed to the
side-wash while he pulled to the rhythm of the waves.
The government lights guided him. He had not paid much attention to them
before; he had seen their white post standards as he dropped down, day
after day, but his skiff, drawing only five inches of water, passed over
the shallowest crossings and along the most gradually sloping sandbars.
Now he must keep to the deep water, follow the majestic curves and
sweeps of the meandering channel, lest he collide with a boiling eddy,
ram the shore line of sunken trees, or climb the point of a towhead.
It was all a new experience, and its novelty compelled him at times to
pause in his efforts to jot down a few hasty words by light of a little
electric flash to preserve in his memory the sequence of the constantly
varying features of the night, beginning with the curtain of the
shanty-boat which flicked its good luck after him, passing the bright,
clear lights of New Madrid. After leaving far behind their glow against
the thin haze in the night he "made" the scattered shoals of Point
Pleasant, and hugged down vanishing Ruddles Point, taking a glimpse of
Tiptonville--which withdraws year by year from the fatal caving brink of
its site--wishing as he passed that he might return to that strange
place and visit Reelfoot Lake three or four miles beyond, where the New
Madrid earthquakes drowned a forest whose dead stubs rise as monuments
to the tragedy.
In Little Cypress Bend, twenty-five miles below where he had left the
young woman, he heard the splash and thud of a caving bank, and felt the
big rollers from the falling earth twisting and tumbling him about for a
third of a mile.
It was after 1 o'clock when he looked at his watch. He was beginning to
feel the pull on his shoulders, and the crick which constantly looking
over his shoulder to see the lights ahead caused him. The dulness of
his vision, due to inevitable fatigue, compelled him constantly to sit
more alert and dash away the fine spray which whipped up from the waves.
A feeling of listlessness overpowered him. He could not row on forever,
without resting at all. Taking advantage of a moment of calm in the
wind, he pulled the bow around and drifted down stern first.
He had lost track of his position; he had not counted the lights, and
now for many miles there was no town distinguishable. He had felt the
loneliness of a mile-breadth; now he wondered whether he was in Missouri
or Arkansas, whether he had come forty miles or eighty, and after a
little he began to worry for fear he might have gone more than a
hundred.
With the wind astern or nearly astern, he knew that he had pulled four
or five miles an hour, and he did not know how fast the current of the
river ran; it might be four miles or eight miles. In ten hours he might
leave more than a hundred miles of river bank behind him.
A new sensation began to possess him: the feeling that he was not alone.
He looked around, while he rested trying to find what proximity thus
affected him. The wind? Those dull banks, seemingly so distant? Perhaps
some fellow traveller? It was none of those things.
It was the river! The "feel" of the flood was that of a person. He could
not shake off the sensation, which seemed absurd. He shook his head
resolutely and then searched through the gloom to discover what eyes
might be shining in it. He saw the inevitable government lights between
which was deep water and a safe channel. He had but to keep on the line
between the lights, cutting across when he spied another one far ahead.
The lights but accentuated the certainty that on all sides, but a little
way from him, a host of invisible beings speculated on his presence and
influenced his course.
A newspaper man of much experience could not help but protest in
his practical mind against such a determination of the invisible
and the unknown to give him such nonsensical ideas. He had in play,
in intellectual persiflage, and with some show of traditional
reasonableness, called Nelia Crele "a river goddess." She was very
well placed in his mind--a reckless woman, pretty, with a fine
character for a masterpiece of fiction (should he ever get to the
story-writing stage) and a delight to think about; commanding, too,
mysterious and exacting; and now he thought it might be the
laughter of her voice that carried in the wind, not a mocking
laugh, nor a jeering one, but one of sweet encouragement which
neither distance nor circumstances could dismiss from a distressed
and reluctant heart, let alone a heart so willing to receive as
his.
Lester Terabon accepted the possibility of river lore and proclaimed
beliefs. Fishermen, store-boaters, trippers, pirates, and all sorts of
the shanty-boaters whom he had interviewed on his way down had solemnly
assured him that there were spirits who promenaded down mid-stream, and
who sometimes could be seen.
Terabon was sorry when his cool, calculating mind refused to believe his
eyes, which saw shapes; his flesh, which felt creeps; his ears, which
heard voices; and his nostrils, which caught a whiff of a faint, sweet
perfume more exquisite than any which he remembered. He knew that when
he had kissed the river goddess whose eyes were blue, whose flesh was
fair, whose grace was lovely, he had tasted that nectar and sniffed that
ambrosia. He wondered if she were near him, watching to see whether he
performed well the task which she had set for him, the rescue of the
husband who had forfeited her love, and yet who still was under her
protection since in his indignant sorrow he had supposed himself capable
of finding and retaining her.
Terabon would have liked nothing better than to believe what the
Grecians used to believe, that goddesses and gods do come down to the
earth to mingle among mankind. He fought the impossibility with his
reason, and night winds laughed at him, while the voices of the waves
chuckled at his predicament. They assailed him with their presence like
living things, and then roared away to give room to new voices and new
presences.
"Anyhow," Terabon laughed, in spite of himself, "you're good company,
Old Mississip'!"
Yet he felt the chilling and depressing possibility that he might never
again see that woman who would remain as a "river goddess" in his
imagination. He had been heart-free, a bystander in the world's affairs.
Now he knew what it was to see the memory of a woman rise unbidden to
disturb his calculations; more than that, too, he was a part of the
affairs of the River People.
As a reporter "back home" he had never been able quite to reconcile
himself to his constant position as a spectator, a neutral observer,
obliged to write news without feeling and impartially. A politician
could look him in the eye and tell him any smooth lie, and he could not,
with white heat, deny the statement. He could not rise with his own
strength to champion the cause of what he knew to be right against
wrong; he could not elaborate on the details of things that he felt most
interested in, but must consult the fancies of a not-particularly
discriminating public, whose average intelligence, according to some
learned students, must be placed at seventeen-years plus. As he was
twenty-four plus, Terabon was immensely discouraged with the public when
he had set forth down the Mississippi.
Now he was on the way from a river goddess to interfere with the
infamous plans of river pirates, through a dry gale out of the north, on
the winding course of the Mississippi, a transition which troubled the
self-possession while it awakened the spirit of the young man.
Dawn broke on the troubled river, and the prospect was enchanting to the
heroic in the mind of the skiff-tripper. He could not be sure which was
east or west, for the gray light appeared on all sides, in spots and
patches of varying size. No gleam reflected from the yellow clay of the
tumbling and tortured waters. As far as he could see there was light,
but not a bright light. Dull purples, muddy waters, gray tree trunks,
black limbs against dark clouds; Terabon felt the weariness of a desert,
the melancholy of a wet, dripping-tree wilderness, and of a tumbling
waste of waters; and yet never had the solid body of the stream been so
awe-inspiring as in that hour of creeping and insinuating dawn.
He ran out into the main river again, and a wonderful prospect opened
before his eyes. Sandbars spread out for miles across the river and
lengthwise of the river; the bulk of the stream seemed broken up into
channels and chutes and wandering waterways. He saw column after column
of lines of spiles, like black teeth, through which the water broke with
protesting foam.
When he thought to reckon up, as he passed Osceola Bar, he found that he
had come ninety-five miles. Yankee Bar was only five or six miles below
him, and he eagerly pulled down to inspect the long beaches, the chutes
and channels, which the river pirates had used for not less than 150
years; where they still had their rendezvous.
Wild ducks and geese were there in many flocks. There were waters
sheltered from the wind by willow patches. The woods of Plum Point
Peninsula were heavy and dark. The river main current slashed down the
miles upon miles of Craighead Point, and shot across to impinge upon
Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1, where a made dirt bank was silhouetted against
the sky.
Not until his binoculars rested upon the bar at the foot of Fort Pillow
Bluff did Terabon's eyes discover any human beings, and then he saw a
white houseboat with a red hull. He headed toward it to ask the familiar
river question.
"No, suh!" the lank, sharp-eyed fisherman shook his head. "Theh's no
motorboat landed up theh, not this week. Who all mout you be?"
"Lester Terabon; I'm a newspaper writer; I live in New York; I came down
the Mississippi looking for things to tell about in the newspapers. You
see, lots of people hardly know there's a Mississippi River, and it's
the most interesting place I ever heard of."
"Terabon? I expect you all's the feller Whiskey Williams was tellin'
about; yo'n a feller name of Carline was up by No. 8. He said yo' had
one of them writin' machines right into a skift. Sho! An' yo' have! The
woman an' me'd jes' love to see yo' all use hit."
"You'll see me," Terabon laughed, "if you'll let me sit by your stove.
I've some writing I could do. Here's a goose for dinner, too."
"Sho! The woman shore will love to cook that goose! I'm a fisherman but
no hunter. 'Tain't of'en we git a roast bird!"
So Terabon sat by the stove, writing. He wrote for more than an
hour--everything he could remember, with the aid of his pencilled
midnight notes, about that long run down. With his maps before him he
recognized the bends and reaches, the sandbars and islands which had
loomed up in the dark. Of all the parts of the river, the hundred miles
from Island No. 10 down to Fort Pillow became the most familiar to his
thoughts, black though the night had been. Even each government light
began to have characteristics, and the sky-line of levee, wilderness,
sandbar, and caving bank grew more and more defined.
Having written his notes, and Jeff Slamey having fingered the nine
loose-leaf sheets with exclamatory interest and delight, Terabon said he
must go rest awhile.
"Yas, suh," the fisherman cried, "when a man's pulled a hundred mile he
shore needs sleep. When the woman's got that goose cooked, I bet yo'll
be ready to eat, too."
So Terabon turned in to sleep. He was awakened at last by the sizzling
of a goose getting its final basting. He started up, and Slamey said:
"Hit's ready. I bet yo' feel betteh, now; six hours asleep!"
It didn't seem like six minutes of dreamless recreation.
With night the wind fell. The flood of sunset brilliance spread down the
radiant sandbars and the bright waterways. The trees were plated with
silver and gold, and the sweep of the caving bend was a dark shadow
against which the river current swept with ceaseless attack.
For hours that night Terabon amused his host with his adventures, except
that he made but most casual mention of the woman whom Carline was
seeking. He was cautious, too, about the motorboat and the companion
who had taken Carline down the river, till Slamey burst out:
"I know that feller. He's a bad man; he's a river rat. If he don't kill
Gus Carline, I don't know these yeah riveh fellers. They use down
thisaway every winter. I know; I know them all. I leave them alone, an'
they leave me alone. I knew they was comin'. They got three four boats
now. One feller, name of Prebol--he's bad, too--was shot by a lady above
Cairo. He's with a coupla gamblers to Caruthersville now. Everybody
stops yeah; I know everybody; everybody knows me."
The next day was calm all day long, and Terabon went up the bank to
shoot squirrels or other woods game; he went almost up to the Plum
Point, killed several head of game, and rejoiced in the bayous and
sloughs and chutes of a changing land.
The following morning he was hailed by Slamey:
"Hi--i, Terabon! Theh's a shanty-boat up the head of Flower Island Bar
jes' drappin' in. They've floated down all night!"
Through his glasses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the
dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.
They were too far away for him to distinguish their personalities, but
one was a tall, active man, the other obviously chunky, and when they
ran their lines out and made fast to half-buried snags, it was with the
quick decision of men used to work against currents and to unison of
effort. There was something suggestive in their bearing, their scrutiny
up and down the river, their standing close to each other as they
talked. If Terabon had not suspected them of being pirates, their
attitude and actions would have betrayed them.
Terabon, after a little while, pulled up the eddy toward them; he was
willing to take a long chance. Few men resent a newspaper man's
presence. The worst of them like to put themselves, their ideas, right
with the world. Terabon risked their knavery to win their approbation.
Come what might, he would seek to save Augustus Carline from the
consequences of his ignorance, money, folly, and remorse.