Parson Rasba and Terabon floated out into the main river current and ran
with the stream. They were passing through the famous, changeable
channels among the great sandbars from Island No. 34 down to Hopefield
Bend. They rounded Dean Island Bend in the darkness, for they had
floated all day and far into the night, driven by an anxiety which was
inexplicable.
They wanted to be going; they felt an urge which they commented upon; it
was a voice in their hearts, and not audible in their ears. Yet when
they stood nervously at the great sweeps of the mission boat, to pull
the occasional strokes necessary to clear a bar or flank a bend, they
could almost declare that the river was talking.
They strained their ears in vain, trying to distinguish the meanings of
the distant murmurings. Terabon, now well familiar with the river, could
easily believe that he was listening to the River Spirit, and his
feelings were melancholy.
For months he had strained every power of his mind to record the exact
facts about the Mississippi, and he put down tens of thousands of words
describing and stating what he saw, heard, and knew. With one stroke he
had been separated from his work, and he feared that he had lost his
precious notes for all time.
Either Carline or river pirates had carried them away. He hoped, he
believed, that he would find them, but there was an uncertainty. He
shivered apprehensively when he recalled with what frankness he had put
down details, names, acts, rumours, reports--all the countless things
which go to make up the "histories" of a voyage down from St. Louis in
skiff, shanty-boat, and launch. What would they say if they read his
notes?
He had notepaper, blank books, and ink, and he set about the weary task
of keeping up his records, and putting down all that he could recall of
the contents of his lost loose-leaf system. It was a staggering task.
In one record he wrote the habitual hour-to-hour description, comment,
talk, and fact; in his "memory journal" he put down all the things he
could recall about the contents of his lost record. He had written the
things down to save him the difficulty of trying to remember, but now he
discovered that he had remembered. A thousand times faster than he could
write the countless scenes and things he had witnessed flocked back into
the consciousness of his mind, pressing for recognition and another
chance to go down in black and white.
As he wrote, Parson Rasba, in the intervals of navigating the big
mission boat, would stand by gazing at the furious energy of his
companion. Rasba had seized upon a few great facts of life, and dwelt in
silent contemplation of them, until a young woman with a library
disturbed the echoing halls of his mind, and brought into them the
bric-a-brac of the thought of the ages. Now, from that brief experience,
he could gaze with nearer understanding at this young man who regarded
the pathway of the moon reflecting in a narrow line across a sandbar and
in a wide dancing of cold blue flames upon the waters, as an important
thing to remember; who recorded the wavering flight of the nigger geese,
or cormorants, as compared to the magnificent V-figure, straight drive
of the Canadians and the other huge water fowl; who paused to seize such
simple terms as "jump line," "dough-bait," "snag line," "reef line," as
though his life might depend on his verbal accuracy.
The Prophet pondered. The Mississippi had taught him many lessons. He
was beginning to look for the lesson in casual phenomena, and when he
said so to Terabon, the writer stared at him with open mouth.
"Why--that explains!" Terabon gasped.
"Explains what?"
"The heathen who was awed by the myriad impressions of Nature, and who
learned, by hard experience, that he must not neglect even the
apparently trivial things lest he suffer disaster."
Then Terabon fell to writing even more furiously in his day-by-day
journal, for that was something of this moment, although he has just
jotted down the renewed impression of coming into the bottoms at Cape
Girardeau. Rasba took up the pages of the notes which Terabon was
rewriting. Happily, Terabon's writing was like copper-plate script,
however fast he wrote, and the mountain man read:
Big hickory tree grove--Columbus Hickories--Largest cane in some
bend down below Helena--Spanish Moss bend--famous river
bend--Fisherman at Brickey's Mill told of hoop nets, trammels,
seines (stillwater bayous), jump, hand, snag, reef, lines----Jugging
for catfish down the crossings, half pound pork, or meat, for bait,
also called "blocking" for catfish.
"What will you do with all this?" Rasba asked.
"Why, I'll----" Terabon hesitated, and then continued: "It's like
building a house. I gather all this material: lumber, stone, logs,
cement, shingles, lathes, quick-lime, bricks, and everything. I store it
all up in this notebook; that's my lumber yard. Then when I dig the
foundation, I'll come in here and I'll find the things I need to build
my house, or mansion. Of course, to start with, I'll just build little
shacks and cabins. See what I mean? I am going to write articles first
and they're kind of like barns and shacks, and even mere fences. But by
and by I'll write fiction stories, and they will be like the mansions,
and the material will all fit in: all about a fisherman, all about a
market hunter, all about a drifter, all about a river----"
"All about a river woman?" Rasba asked, as he hesitated.
"I wasn't thinking that." Terabon shook his head, his colour coming a
little. "I had in mind, all about a River Prophet!"
"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "What could you all find to write about a Riveh
Prophet?"
Terabon looked at the stern, kindly, friendly, picturesque mountaineer
who had come so far to find one man, for that man's mother, and he
rejoiced in his heart to think that the parson did not know, could never
know, because of the honest simplicity of his heart, how extraordinarily
interesting he was.
So they drifted with the current, absorbed in their immediate present.
It seemed as though they found their comprehension expanding and
widening till it encompassed the answers to a thousand questions. Rasba,
dazed by his own accretion of new interests, discovery of undreamed-of
powers, seizure of opportunities never known before, could but gaze with
awe and thankfulness at the evidences of his great good fortune, the
blessings that were his in spite of his wondering why one of so little
desert had received such bountiful favour. Terabon, remembering what he
feared was irrevocably lost, knew that he had escaped disaster, and that
the pile of notes which he had made only to be deprived of them were
after all of less importance than that he should have suffered the deep
emotion of seeing so much of his toil and time vanish.
Here it was again--Rasba might well wonder at that gathering and
hoarding of trifles. They were not the important things, those minute
words and facts and points; no, indeed.
At last Terabon knew that most important fact of all that it was the
emotions that counted. As a mere spectator, he could never hope to know
the Mississippi, to describe and write it truly; the river had forced
him into the activities of the river life, and had done him by that act
its finest service.
He was in the fervour of his most recent discovery when Rasba went out
on the bow deck and looked into the night. He called Terabon a minute
later, and the two looked at a phenomenon. The west was aglow, like a
sunset, but with flarings and flashings instead of slowly changing
lights and hues. The light under the clouds at the horizon extended
through 90 degrees of the compass, and in the centre of the bright
greenish flare there was a compact, black, apparently solid mass from
which streaks of lightning constantly exuded on all sides.
For a minute Terabon stared, cold chills goose-pimpling his flesh. Then
he cried:
"Cyclone, Parson! Get ready!"
They were opposite the head of a long bend near the end of a big
sandbar, and skirting the edge of an eddy, near its foot. Terabon sprang
into the gasolene launch, started the motor, and steered for the shelter
of the west bank. In the quiet he and Rasba told each other what to do.
Rasba ran out two big anchors with big mooring lines tied to them. He
closed the bow door but opened all the windows and other doors. Then, as
they heard the storm coming, they covered the launch with the heavy
canvas, heaved over the anchors into a fathom of water, let out long
lines, and played the launch out over the stern on a heavy line fast to
towing bits.
A sweep of hail and rain was followed by a moment of calm. Then a blast
of wind, which scraped over the cabin roof, was succeeded by the suck of
the tornado, which swept, a waterspout, across the river a quarter of a
mile down stream, struck a sandbar, and carried up a golden yellow cloud
of dust, which disappeared in the gray blackness of a terrific downpour
of rain.
They stretched out on their anchor lines till the whole fabric of the
cabin hummed and crackled with the strain, but the lines held, and the
windows being open, prevented the semi-vacuum created by the storm's
passing from "exploding" the boat, and tearing off the cabin, or the
roof.
After the varying gusts and blasts the wind settled down, colder by
forty degrees, and with the steady white of a norther. It meant days and
nights of waiting while the storm blew itself out. And when the danger
had passed and the boats were safe against the lines, the two men turned
in to sleep, more tired after their adventures than they remembered ever
being before.
In the morning rain was falling intermittently with some sleet, but
toward afternoon there was just a cold wind. They built hot fires in
their heater, burning coal with which the gamblers had filled bow and
stern bins from coal barges somewhere up the river. Having plenty to eat
on board, there was nothing to worry them.
Terabon, his fountain pen racing, wrote for his own distant Sunday
Editor a narrative which excited the compiler of the Magazine Supplement
to deep oaths of admiration for the fertile, prolific imagination of
the wandering writer--for who would believe in a romance ready made?
The night of the big wind was followed by a day and a night of gusts of
wind and sleety rain; then followed a day and a night of rising clouds,
then a day when the clouds were scattered and the sun was cold. That day
the sunset was grim, white, and freezing cold.
In the morning there was a bright, warm sunrise, a breath of sweet, soft
air, and unimaginable brightness and buoyancy, birds singing, squirrels
barking, and all the dismal pangs banished.
Shanty-boats shot out into the gay river and dotted the wide surface up
and down the current for miles. The ears of the parson and the writer,
keener with the acuteness of distant sounds, could hear music from a
boat so far away that they could not see it, a wonderfully enchanting
experience.
They, too, ran out into the flood of sunshine to float down with the
rest.
At the foot of Brandywine Bar a little cabin-boat suddenly rowed out
into the current and signalled them; somebody recognized and wanted to
speak to the mission boat. They were rapidly sucking down the swift
chute current, but Terabon turned over the motor, and flanked the big
houseboat across the current so that the hail could be answered.
The little cabin-boat, almost lost to view astern, rapidly gained, and
as they ran down Beef Island chute, where the current is slow, they were
overtaken.
"Sho!" Parson Rasba cried aloud, "hit's Missy Carline, Missy Nelia,
shore as I'm borned!"
Terabon had known it for half an hour. He had been noticing river
details, and he could not fail to recognize that little boat. His hands
trembled as he steered the launch to take advantage of slack current and
dead water, and his throat choked with an emotion which he controlled
with difficulty. He looked fearfully at the gaunt River Prophet whose
own cheeks were staining with warm blood, and whose eyes gazed so keenly
at the young woman who was coming, leaning to her sweeps with Viking
grace and abandon.
She was coming to _them_, with the fatalistic certainty that is so
astonishing to the student observer. Carried away by her sottish
husband; threatened by the tornado; rescued, perhaps, by the storm from
worse jeopardy, caught in safety under an island sandbar; her eyes,
sweeping the lonesome breadths of the flowing river-sea, had seen and
recognized her friend's boat, the floating mission, and pulled to join
safe company.
She rowed up, with her eyes on the Prophet. He stood there in his
majesty while Terabon stooped unnoticed in the engine pit of the
motorboat. Not till she had run down near enough to throw a line did she
take her eyes off the mountain parson, and then she turned and looked
into the eyes, dumb with misery, of the other man, Terabon.
Her cheeks, red with her exertions, turned white. Three days she had
read that heap of notes in loose-leaf file which Terabon had written.
She had read the lines and between the lines, facts and ideas,
descriptions and reminiscence, dialogue and history, statistics and
appreciation of a thousand river things, all viewpoints, including her
own.
She knew, now, how wicked she was. She knew, now, the wilfulness of her
sins, and the merciful interposition of the river's inviolable strength.
Her sight of the mission boat had awakened in her soul the knowledge
that she must go out and talk to the good man on board, confess her
naughtiness, and beg the Prophet for instruction. Woman-like, she knew
what the outcome would be.
He would take her, protect her, and there would be some way out of the
predicament in which they both found themselves. But again she reckoned
without the river. How could she know that Terabon and he had come down
the Mississippi together?
But there he was, chauffeuring for the Prophet!
She threw the line, Rasba caught it, drew the two boats together and
made them fast. He welcomed her as a father might have welcomed a
favourite child. He threw over the anchor, and Terabon dropped the
launch back to the stern, and hung it there on a light line.
When he entered the big cabin Nelia was sitting beside a table, and
Rasba was leaning against the shelves which he had put up for the books.
Nelia, dumbfounded, had said little or nothing. When she glanced up at
Terabon, she looked away again, quickly, flushing.
She was lost now. That was her feeling. Her defiance and her courage
seemed to have utterly left her, and in those bitter days of cold wind
and clammy rain, sleet and discomfort had changed the outlook of
everything.
Married, without a husband; capable of great love, and yet sure that she
must never love; two lovers and an unhappy marriage between her and
happiness; a mind made up to sin, wantonly, and a soul that taunted her
with a life-time of struggle against sordidness. The two men saw her
burst into tears and cry out in an agony of spirit.
Dumbly they stood there, man-like, not knowing what to do, or what
thought was in the woman's mind. The Prophet Rasba, his face full of
compassion, turned from her and went aft through the alley into the
kitchen, closing the doors behind him. He knew, and with knowledge he
accepted the river fate.
Terabon went to her, and gave her comfort. He talked to her as a lover
should when his sweetheart is in misery, her heart breaking. And she
accepted his gentleness, and sobbed out the impossibility of everything,
while she clung to him.
Within the hour they had plighted troth, regardless. She confessed to
her lover, instead of to the Prophet. He said he didn't care, and she
said she didn't care, either--which was mutually satisfactory.
When they went out to Parson Rasba, they found him calmly reading one of
the books which she had given him. He looked up at their red faces and
smiled with indulgence. They would never know what went on inside his
heart, what was in his mind behind that kindly smile. That he knew and
understood everything was clear to them, but they did not and would not
have believed that he had, for a minute, hated Terabon as standing
between him and happiness.
"What are we going to do?" Terabon cried, when he had told the Parson
that they loved each other, that they would complete the voyage down the
river together, that her husband still lived, and that they could get a
$17.50 divorce at Memphis.
"Hit wouldn't be no 'count, that divorce." The Prophet shrugged his
shoulders, and the two hung their heads. They knew it, and yet they had
been willing to plead ignorance as an excuse for sin.
He seemed to close the incident by suggesting that it was time to eat
something, and the three turned to getting a square meal. They cooked a
bountiful dinner, and sat down to it, the Prophet asking a blessing that
seared the hearts of the two because of its fervour.
Rasba asked her to read to them after they had cleared up the dishes,
and she took down the familiar volumes and read. Rasba sat with his eyes
closed, listening. Terabon watched her face. She seemed to choose the
pages at random, and read haphazardly, but it was all delight and all
poetry.
She was reading, which was strange, the Humphrey-Abbott book about the
Mississippi River levees, the classic report on river facts, all
fascinating to the mind that grasps with pleasure any river fact. When
Rasba looked up and smiled, the two were absorbed in their occupations,
one reading, the other watching her read. She stopped in conscious
confusion.
"Yas, suh!" he smiled aloud. "I 'low we uns can leave hit to Old
Mississip', these yeah things that trouble us: I, my triflin' doubts,
and you children yo' own don't-know-yets."
What made him say that, if he wasn't a River Prophet? Who told him, what
voice informed him, at that moment? Who can say?
The following morning the big mission boat and Missy Nelia's boat landed
in at Memphis wharf, and the three went up town to buy groceries,
newspapers and magazines to read, and to help Nelia choose another set
of books from the shelves of local book stores. Old Rasba had never been
in a book store before, and he stared at the hundreds of feet of
shelves, with books of all sizes, kinds, and makes.
"Sho!" he cried aloud, and then, again, "Sho! Sho!"
It was fairyland for him, a land of enchantment, of impossible
satisfaction and glory-be! Terabon and Nelia saw that they had given him
another pleasure, and Rasba was happy to know that he would always be
able to visit such places, and add to his own store of literature, when
he had read the books which he had, as he would do, page by page, and
word by word, his dictionary at hand.
Magazines and newspapers had little interest for him. Nelia and Terabon
could not help but wish to keep closer in touch with the world. They
picked up a copy of the _Trade-Appealer_, and then a copy of the
_Evening Battle Ax_, just out.
They read one headline:
UNKNOWN DROWNS IN CRUISER
It was a brutally frank description of a motorboat cruiser which had
floated down Hopefield Bend, awash and waterlogged, but held afloat by
air-tight tanks:
In the cabin was the body of a man, apparently about 30 years of
age, with a whiskey jug clasped in one hand by the handle. He was
face downward, and had been dead two or three days. It is supposed
he was caught in the heavy wind-storm of Wednesday night and
drowned.
The river had planned again. The river had acted again. They went to
look at the boat, which was pumped out and in Ash Slough. It was
Carline's cruiser. Then they went to the morgue, and it was Carline's
body.
Nelia broke down and cried. After all, one's husband is one's husband.
She did the right thing. She owned him, now, and she carried his remains
back home to Gage, and there she buried him, and wept on his grave.
She put on widow's weeds for him, and though she might have claimed his
property, she ignored the will which left her all of it, and gave to his
relatives and to her own poor people what was theirs. She gave Parson
Rasba, whom she had brought home with her to bury her husband, $5,000
for his services.
Then, after the estate was all settled up, she returned to Memphis, and
Terabon met her at the Union Station, dutifully, as she had told him to
do. Together they went to the City Clerk's and obtained a marriage
license, and the River Prophet, Rasba, with firm voice and unflinching
gaze, united them in wedlock.
They went aboard their own little shanty-boat, and while the rice and
old shoes of a host of river people rattled and clattered on their
cabin, they drifted out into the current and rapidly slipped away toward
President's Island. Parson Rasba, as they drifted clear, said to them:
"I 'lowed we uns could leave hit to Old Mississip'!"
THE END
[Illustration]
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.