The River Prophet Part 4

"I shall be glad to fix that," he said, wiping his gla.s.ses. "What you wish is a diversified set of investments. How much is there?"

She stacked up before him wads, rolls, briquettes, and bundles. He counted it, slip by slip and when he had completed the tally and reckoned some figures on the back of an envelope, he nodded his approval.

"I expect that this will bring you around twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, safe, and a leetle besides, on speculation."

"That'll do," she said, approvingly.

No one in town connected her with the sensation up around Gage. She was just one of those shanty-boat girls who come down the Mississippi every once in a while, especially below St. Louis. In a hundred cities and towns people were looking for Mrs. Augustus Carline, supposed to be cutting a das.h.i.+ng figure, and probably in company with a certain d.i.c.k Asunder, who had been seen in Chester, with his big black automobile on the same day that Mrs. Carline abandoned her husband's automobile there.

Of course, the shanty-boaters did not tell, if they knew; the River tells no tales. Certainly, of all the women in the world this casual visitor at Attorney Menard's need not attract attention. Menard always did have strange clients, and it was nothing new to see a shanty-boat land in and some man or woman walk up to his corner office and sit down to tell him in legal confidences things more interesting to know than any one not of his curiosity and sympathy would ever dream.

Attorney Menard kept faith with river wastrels, floating nomads who are akin to gypsies, but who are of all bloods--tramps of the running floods. He listened to narratives stranger than any other attorney; in his safe he had doc.u.ments of interest to sweethearts and wives, to husbands and sons, to fugitives and hunters. Letters came to him from all parts of the great basin, giving him directions, or notifying him of the termination of lives whose pa.s.sing had a significance or a meaning.

Nelia's mother knew him, and Nelia herself recalled his good-humoured smile, his weathered face, his appeal to a girl for her confidence, and the certainty that her confidence would be respected. She had gone to him as naturally as she would have gone to a decent father or a wise mother. She took from him his neatly written receipt, but with the feeling that it was superfluous. In a little while she returned to the shanty-boat and dropped out of the eddy on her way down the river. She floated under the big Thebes Bridge, and landed against the west bank before dark, there to have the luck to shoot a wild goose. The maps showed that she was approaching the Lower Mississippi.

When she had left Cape Girardeau, she had noticed a little brick-red shanty-boat which landed in just below her own. Without looking up, she discovered that a man leaned against the roof of his low cabin whose eyes did not cease to watch her every motion while she cast off, coiled her ropes, and leaned to the light sweeps.

When she was a safe distance down the river, she ventured to look up stream, and saw that the little red shanty-boat had left its mooring, and that the man was coming down the current astern of her. It was a free river; any one could go whither he pleased, but the certainty that she had attracted the man's attention revealed to her the necessity of considering her position there alone and dependent on her own resources.

She remembered the two market hunters, and their warnings. The man astern was a patient, lurking, menacing brute, who might suspect her of having property enough to make a river piracy worth while; or he might have other designs, since she was unfortunately good-looking and attractive. Night would surely be his opportunity and the test of her soul.

She could have landed at Commerce, where there were several shanty-boats and temporary safety; she could have floated on down at night and slipped into the sh.o.r.e in the dark, her lights out; she could have tried flight down the river hoping to lose the brick-red boat; she decided against all these.

Boldly she pulled into an eddy just before sunset, and had made fast to a snag and a live root when the little boat came dropping down in the edge of the current hardly forty feet distant, with the man leaning on his sweeps, watching her every motion, especially fastening his gaze upon her trim figure.

As he came opposite she turned and faced him; her jaws set.

"h.e.l.lo, girlie!" he called, leaning upon his sweeps to carry his skiff-like boat into the same eddy.

On the instant she s.n.a.t.c.hed the automatic pistol from her bosom and, dropping the muzzle, fired. The man stumbled back with a cry. He stood grabbing at his shoulder, his florid face turning white, his eyes starting with terror and pain. She saw him reel and fall through the open hatch of his cabin and his boat go drifting on into the crossing below. It occurred to her numbed brain that she was delivered from that peril, but as dusk fell she hated the misery of her loneliness.

CHAPTER VII

The Ohio had the Mississippi eddied. The rains that had fallen over the valleys of Kentucky and southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had brought a tide down the big branch and as there was not much water running out of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi, the flood had backed up the Mississippi for a little while, stopping the current almost dead.

Elijah Rasba, running full tilt in the mid Ohio current, looked ahead that afternoon, and he had a full view of the thing to which he had come, seeking the wandering son of Mrs. Drones.

He arrived at the moment when the Mississippi, having been banked up long enough, began to feel the restraint of the Ohio and resent it. The gathered waters moved down against the Ohio flood and pressed them back against the Kentucky side. Once more the Mississippi River resumed its sway. On the loosed waters was a little cigar-box of a shanty-boat, and Rasba rowed toward it across the saucer-like sucks and depressions where the two currents of different speeds dragged by each other.

He pulled alongside, hailed, and, for answer, heard a groan, a weak cry:

"Help!"

He carried a line across to the stranger's deck and made it fast. Then he saw, stretched upon the floor, a stricken man, from whose side a pool of blood had run. Working rapidly, Elijah discovered the wound and as gunshot injuries were only too familiar in his mountain experience he well knew what he should do. Examination showed that it was a painful and dangerous shoulder shot. He cleared away the stains, washed the hole, plucked the threads of cloth out of it, turned the man on his face and, with two quick slashes of a razor, cut out the missile which had done the injury.

Healing liniment, the inevitable concoction of a mountaineer's cabin, soothed while it dressed the wound. Pads of cotton, and a bandage supplied the final need, and Rasba stretched his patient upon the cabin-boat bunk, then looked out upon the world to which he had drifted.

It was still a vast river, coming from the unknown and departing into the unknown. He knew it must be the Mississippi, but he acknowledged it with difficulty.

He did not ask the man about the bullet. Born and bred in the mountains, he knew that that would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette. But the wounded man was uneasy, and when he was eased of his pain, he began to talk:

"I wa'nt doin' nothing!" he explained, "I were jes' drappin' down, up above Buffalo Island, an' b'low Commerce, an' a lady shot me--bang! Ho law! She jes' shot me thataway. No 'count for hit at all."

"A lady you knowed?" Rasba asked.

"No suh! But she's onto the riveh, into a shanty-boat, purty, too, an'

jes' drappin' down, like she wa'nt goin' no wheres, an' like she mout of be'n jes' moseyin'. I jes 'lowed I'd drap in, an' say howdy like, an'

she drawed down an' shot--bang!"

"Was she frightened?"

"Hit were a lonesome reach, along of Powerses Island," the man admitted, whining and reluctant. "She didn't own that there riveh. Hain't a man no right to land in anywheres? She shot me jes' like I was a dawg, an' she hadn't no feelin's nohow. Jes' like a dawg!"

"Did you know her?"

"No, suh. We'd be'n drappin' down, an' drappin' down--come down below Chester, an' sometimes she'd be ahead, an' sometimes me, an' how'd I know she wouldn't be friendly? Ain't riveh women always friendly? An'

theh she ups an' shoots me like a dawg. She's mean, that woman, mean an'

pretty, too, like some women is!"

Rasba wondered. He had been long enough on the Ohio to get the feeling of a great river. He saw the specious pleading of the wounded wretch, and his quick imagination pictured the woman alone in a vast, wild wood, at the edge of that running mile-wide flood.

"Of co'rse!" he said, half aloud, "of co'rse!"

"Co'rse what?" the man demanded, querulously.

"Co'rse she shot," Rasba answered, tartly. "Sometimes a lady jes'

naturaly has to shoot, fearin' of men."

Rasba landed the two boats in at the foot of a sandbar, and made them fast to old stakes driven into the top of the low reef. He brought his patient some hot soup, and after they had eaten supper, he sat down to talk to him, keeping the man company in his pain, and leading him on to talk about the river, and the river people.

In that first adventure at the Ohio's forks Rasba had discovered his own misconceptions, and the truth of the Mississippi had been partly revealed to him. What the Tug was to the Big Sandy, what the Big Sandy was to the Ohio, the Ohio was to the Mississippi. What he had looked to as the end was but the beginning, and Rasba was lost in the immensity of the river that was a mile wide, thousands of miles long, and unlike anything the mountain preacher had ever dreamed of. If this was the Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?

"My name's Prebol," the man said, "Jest Prebol. I live on Old Mississip'! I live anywhere, down by N'Orleans, Vicksburg--everywhere!

I'm a grafter, I am--"

"A grafter?" Rasba repeated the strange word.

"Yas, suh, cyards, an' tradin' slum, barberin' mebby, an' mebby some otheh things. I can sell patent medicine to a doctor, I can! I clean cisterns, an' anything."

"You gamble?" Rasba demanded, grasping one fact.

"Sho!" Prebol grinned. "Who all mout _yo'_ be?"

"Elijah Rasba," was the reply. "I am seeking a soul lost from the sheepfold of G.o.d. I ask but the strength to find him."