The River Prophet Part 3

Nelia laughed, but harshly. "I don't give a d.a.m.n for anything now; I tell you that!"

"Don't forget it. Shoot any man that comes."

Nelia, who could row a skiff with any one, set her shanty-boat sweeps on their pins, coiled up the two bow lines by which the boat was moored to the bank, and which the river woman untied, then rowed out of the eddy and into the main current.

"It's good floating right down," Mrs. Tons called after her, "till yo'

git to Grand Tower Rock--thirty mile!"

The river rapidly widened below Chester, and the little houseboat swung out into mid-stream. Nelia knew the river a little from having been down on a steamer, and the misery she left behind was in contrast to the sense of freedom and independence which she now had.

Stillness, peace, the sense of vast motion in the river torrent comforted her. The moment of embarking alone on the river had been full of nervous tenseness and anxiety, but now those feelings were left behind and she could breathe deeply and confront the future with a calm spirit. The veil that the blue mist of distance left behind her was penetrable by memory, but the future was hidden from her gaze, as it was hidden from her imagination.

The determination to dwell in the immediate present caught up her soul with its grim, cold bonds, and as the sun was setting against the sky beyond the long, sky-line of limestone ledges, she entered the cabin, and looked about her with a feeling of home such as she had never had before.

"I'll stand at the breech of my rifle, to defend it," she whispered to herself. "Men are mean! I hate men!"

She found a flat book on a shelf which held a half hundred magazines.

The book was bound in blue boards, and backed with yellow leather. When she opened it, out of curiosity, she discovered that it was full of maps.

"Those dear boys!" she whispered, almost regretfully. "They left this map book for me, because they knew I'd need it; knew everybody down thisaway needs a map!"

They had done more than that; they had left the equally indispensable "List of Post Lights," and when dusk fell and she saw a pale yellow light revealed against a bank the little book named it "Wilkinson Island." She pulled toward the east bank into the deadwater below Lacours Island, cast over her anchor, and came to rest in the dark of a starless night.

CHAPTER V

In mid-afternoon, the man who had so desperately and as a last resource tested the efficiency of moons.h.i.+ne whiskey as a palliative for mental misery awaked gradually, in confusion of mind and aching of body. Noises filled his ears, and streaking lights blurred the keenness of his eyes.

Reason had but little to do with his first thoughts, and feelings had nearly everything. There did not seem to be any possible atonement for him to make. Too late, as it seemed, he realized the enormity of his offence and the bitterness of inevitable punishment.

There remained but one thing for him to do, and that was go away down the rivers and find the fugitive Jock Drones, whose mother feared for him. No other usefulness of purpose remained in his reach. If he stood up, now, before any congregation, the imps of Satan, the patrons of moons.h.i.+ners, would leer up at him in his pulpit, reminding him that he, too, was one of them.

He went over to the corner of his cabin, raised some planks there and dug down into the earth till he found a jug. He dragged the jug into the cabin and out of it poured the Rasba patrimony, a hidden treasure of gold, which he put into a leather money belt and strapped on. There was not much in the cabin worth taking away, but he packed that little up and made ready for his departure.

It was but a few miles over to Tug River, and he readily engaged a wagon to carry him that far. On the wooded river bank he built a flatboat with his own hands, and covered one end of it with a poplar-wood cabin, purchased at a near-by sawmill. He floated out of the eddy in his shack-boat and began his journey down the rivers to the Mississippi, where he would perform the one task that remained for him to do in the service of G.o.d. He would find Jock, give him his mother's message, and after that expiate his own sins in the deserved misery of an exiled penitent.

Tug River was in flood, a heavy storm having cast nearly two inches of rainfall upon part of the watershed. On the crest of the flood it was fast running and there was no delay, no stopping between dawn and dusk.

Standing all day at the sweeps Rasba cleared the sh.o.r.e in sharp bends, avoided the obstacles in mid stream, and outran the wave crests and the racing drift, entering the Big Sandy and emerging into the unimaginable breadths of the Ohio.

He had no time to waste on the Ohio. The object of his search was on the Mississippi, hundreds of miles farther down, and he could not go fast enough to suit him. But at that, pulling nervously at his sweeps and riding down the channel line, he "gain-speeded," till his eyes were smarting with the fury of the changing sh.o.r.es, and his arms were aching with the pulling and pus.h.i.+ng of his great oars, and he neither recognized the miles that he floated nor the repeated days that ensued.

Long since he had escaped from his own mountain environment. The trees no longer overhung his course; railroad trains screamed along endless sh.o.r.es, bridges overhung his path like menacing deadfalls, and the rolling thunder of summer storms was mingled with the black smoke of ten thousand undreamed-of industries. The simplicity of the mountain cornfields of his youth had become a mystery of production, of activity, of pa.s.sing phenomena which he neither knew nor understood. In his thoughts there was but one beacon.

His purpose was to reach the Mississippi, take the young man in hand, and redeem him from the evils into which he had fallen. His object was no more than that, nor any less. From the confusion of his experiences, efforts, and humiliations, he held fast to one fact: the necessity of finding Jock Drones. All things else had melted into that.

The river banks fell apart along his course; the river ridges withdrew to wide distances, even blue at times; mere V-gullies or U-gorges, widened into vast corn fields. A post-office store-house at a rippling ford gave way to smoking cities, rumbling bridges, paved streets, and hurrying throngs. The lone fisherman in an 18-foot dugout had changed insensibly to darting motorboats and to huge, red-wheeled, white-castled monsters, whose pa.s.sage in the midst of vast waters was attended by the sighs of toiling engines and the tossing of troubled seas.

Except for that one sure demand upon him, Elijah Rasba long since would have been lost in the confusion and doubts of his transition from narrow wooded ridges and trembling streamlets to this succession of visions.

But his soul retained its composure, his eyes their quickness to seize the essential detail, and he rode the Tug River freshet into the Ohio flood tide bent upon his mission of redeeming one mountain youth who had strayed down into this far land, of which the sh.o.r.es were washed by the unimaginable sea of a river.

When at the end of a day he arrived in a way-side eddy and moored his poplar-bottom craft against a steep bank and the last twilight had faded from his vision, he would eat some simple thing for supper, and then, by lamp-light, try to read his exotic life into the Bible which accompanied him on his travels. He knew the Book by heart, almost; he knew all the rivers told about in it; he knew the storms of the various biblical seas; he knew the Jordan, in imagination, and the Nile, the Euphrates, the Jabbok, and the Brook of Egypt, but they did not conform in his imagination with this living tide which was carrying him down its course, over shoal, around bend and from vale to vale of a size and grandeur beyond expression.

Elijah was speechless with amazement; the spies who had gone into Canaan, holding their tongues, and befriended by women whose character Elijah Rasba could not identify, were less surprised by the riches which they discovered than Rasba by the panorama which he saw rolled out for his inspection day by day.

Other shanty-boaters were dropping down before the approach of winter.

Sometimes one or another would drift near to Rasba's boat and there would be an exchange of commonplaces.

"How fur mout hit be, strangeh?" he would ask each man. "'Low hit's a hundred mile yet to the Mississippi?"

A hundred miles! They could not understand that this term in the mountain man's mind meant "a long ways," if need be a thousand or ten thousand miles. When one answered that the Mississippi was 670 miles, and another said it was a "month's floating," their replies were equally without meaning to his mind. Rasba could not understand them when they talked of reaches, crossings, wing dams, government works, and chutes and islands, but he would not offend any of them by showing that he did not in the least understand what they were talking about. He must never again hurt the feelings of any man or woman, and he must perform the one service which the Deity had left for him to perform.

Little by little he began to understand that he was approaching the Mississippi River. He saw the c.u.mberland one day, and two hours later, he was witness to the Tennessee, and that long, wonderful bridge which a railroad has flung from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e of the great river. The current carried him down to it, and his face turned up and up till he was swept beneath that monument to man's inspiration and the industry of countless hands.

Rasba had seen cities and railroads and steamboats, but all in a kind of confusion and tumult. They had meant but incidents down the river; this bridge, however, a structure of huge proportions, was clearly one piece, one great idea fixed in steel and stone.

"How big was the man who built that bridge?" he asked himself.

While yet the question echoed in his expanding soul he hailed a pa.s.sing skiff:

"Strangeh! How fur now is it to the Mississippi River?"

"Theh 'tis!" the man cried, pointing down the current. "Down by that air willer point!"

CHAPTER VI

Those first free days on the Mississippi River revealed to Nelia Crele a woman she had never known before. Daring, fearless, making no reckoning, she despised the past and tripped eagerly into the future. It was no business of any one what she did. She had married a man who had turned out to be a scoundrel, and when fate treated her so, she owed nothing to any one or to anything. Even the fortune which she had easily seized through the alcoholic imbecility of her semblance of a man brought no grat.i.tude to her. The money simply insured her against poverty and her first concern was to put that money where it would be safe from raiders and sure to bring her an income. This, watchfulness and alertness of mind had informed her, was the function of money.

She dropped into Cape Girardeau, and sought a man whom she had met at her husband's house. This was Duneau Menard, who had little interest in the Carlines, but who would be a safe counsellor for Nelia Crele. He greeted her with astonishment, and smiles, and told her what she needed to know.

"I was just thinking of you, Nelia," he said, "Carline's sure raising a ruction trying to find you. He 'lows you are with some man who needs slow killing. He telephoned to me, and he's notified a hundred sheriffs, but, shucks! he's a mean scoundrel, and I'm glad to see yo'."

"I want to have you help me invest some money," she said. "It's mine, and he signed every paper, for me. Here's one of them."

He took the sheet and read:

I want my wife to share up with me all my fortune, and I hereby convey to her stocks, bonds, and cash, according to enclosed signed certificates, etc.

Augustus Carline.

"How come hit?" the man asked.

"He was right friendly, then," she replied, grimly. "For what you-all said about the daughter of my mother I come here to claim your help. You know about money, about interest and dividends. I want it so I can have money, regular, like Gus did----"