The River Prophet Part 7

Carline, between trying to convince himself that he was the victim of fate and the innocent sufferer from a domestic tragedy brought upon himself by events over which he had no control, fell to hating liquor as the chief cause of his discomfiture.

Then a whisper that became a rumour, which at last seemed to be a fact, said that Nelia Carline was somewhere down Old Mississip'. Someone who knew her by sight was reported to have seen her in Cape Girardeau, and the husband raced down there in his automobile to see if he could not learn something about the missing woman, whose absence now proved what a place she had filled in his heart.

There was no doubt of it. Nelia had been there, but no one had happened to think to tell Carline about it. She had landed in a pretty shanty-boat, the wharf-master said, and had pulled out just before a river man in a brick-red cabin-boat of small size had left the eddy. The river man had dropped in just behind her, and, according to the wharf-master:

"I sh.o.r.e kept my eyes on that man, for he was a riveh rat!"

The thought was sickening to Carline. His wife floating down the river with a river rat close behind presented but two explanations: she was being followed for crime, or the two were just flirting on the river, together.

He bought a pretty 28-foot motorboat, 22-inch draft with a 7-foot beam and a raised deck cabin. Having stocked up with supplies, he started down the Ohio to find his woman.

He could not tell what his intention was, not even to himself; his mind, long weakened and depraved by liquor, lacked clarity of thought and distinctiveness of purpose. One hour he raged with anger, and murder blackened his heart; another minute, his shattered nerves left him in a panic of fears and remorse, and he hoped for nothing better than to beg his wife and sweetheart for forgiveness. At all times dread of what he might find at the end of the trail tormented him from terror to despair.

His anguish overcame all his other sensations. It even overcame his l.u.s.t for liquor. He grew st.u.r.dier under his affliction, so that when he arrived at Cairo, and swung his craft smartly up to the wharf-boat, his eyes were clear and his skin was honestly coloured by suns.h.i.+ne and pure winds. Here fortune favoured him with more news of his wife. The engineer of the Cairo-Missouri ferryboat had seen a young and pretty woman moored at the bank some distance from the landing. She had remained there upward of a week, having no visitors, and making daily visits over the levee into the little city.

"One day she stood there, I bet half an hour, looking back, like she was waiting," the engineer said. "I seen her onto the levee top. Then she come down, jumped aboard with her lines, an' pulled out to go on trippin' down. I wondered then wouldn't some man be following of her."

When Carline pa.s.sed below the sandbar point, at which the Ohio and Mississippi mingle their waters, and the human flotsam from ten thousand towns is caught by swirling eddies, he found himself subdued by a shadow that fell athwart his course, dulling the fire of his own spirit with a doubt and an awe which he had never before known.

His wife had gone past the Jumping Off Place; he had heard a thousand jests about that fork of the rivers, without comprehending its deeper meaning, till in his own experience he, too, was flung down the tide by forces now beyond his control, though he himself had set them in motion.

His suffering was no less acute, his mind was no less active, but it dawned slowly on him that, after all, the acute pain which was in his heart was no greater than the sorrow, the suffering, the poisoned deliriums of the thousands who had given themselves to this mighty flood, which was so vast and powerful that it dwarfed the senses of mortals to a feeling of the proper proportion of their affairs in the workings of the universe.

Insensibly, but surely, his pride began to fade and his selfishness began to give way to better understanding and kindlier counsels. That much the River Spirit had done for him. He would not give up the search, but rather would he increase its thoroughness, and redouble his efforts.

But he would never again be quite without sympathy, quite without understanding of sensations and experiences which were not of his own heart and soul.

The river was a mile wide; its current surged from the deeps; it flowed down the bend and along the reach with a noiselessness, a resistlessness, a magnitude that seemed to carry him out of his whole previous existence--and so it did carry him. Still human, still finite, p.r.o.ne to error and lack of comprehension, nevertheless Augustus Carline entered for the moment upon a new life recklessly and willingly.

CHAPTER X

For a minute Elijah Rasba, as the Mississippi revealed itself to him, contemplated a greater field for service than he had ever dreamed of.

Then, humbled in his pride at the thought of great success, he felt that it could not be; for such an opportunity an Apostle was needed, and Rasba's cheeks warmed with shame at the realization of the vanity in his momentary thought.

He was grateful for the privilege of seeing the panorama that unrolled and unfolded before his eyes with the same slow dignity with which the great storm clouds boiled up from the long backs of the mountains of his own homeland. He missed the elevations, the cl.u.s.tered wildernesses, and ledges of stone against a limited sky, but in their places he saw the pale heavens in a dome that was uninterrupted from horizon to horizon.

There seemed to be hardly any earth commensurate with the sky, and the river seemed to be flowing between bounds so low and insignificant that he felt as though it might break through one side or the other and fall into the chaos beyond the brim of the world.

Instinctively he removed his hat in this Cathedral. Familiar from childhood with mountains and deep valleys, the sense of power and motion in the river appealed to him as the ocean might have done. He looked about him with curiosity and inquiry. He felt as though there must be some special meaning for him in that immediate moment, and it was a long time before he could quite believe that this thing which he witnessed had continued far back beyond the memory of men, and would continue into the unquestionable future.

He floated down stream from bend to bend, carried along as easily as in the full run of time. He looked over vast reaches, and hardly recognized other houseboats, tucked in holes along the banks, as craft like his own. The cl.u.s.ters of houses on points of low ridges did net strike him as veritable villages, but places akin to those of fairyland.

All the rest of the day he dropped on down, not knowing which side he should land against, and filled with doubts as to where his duty lay.

Once he caught up his big oars and began to row toward a number of little shanty-boats moored against a sandbar, close down to a wooded bank, only to find that the river current carried him away despite his most muscular endeavours, so he accepted it as a sign that he should not land there.

For a time Rasba thought that perhaps he had better just let the river carry him whither it would, but upon reflection he remembered what an old raftsman, who had run strands of logs down Clinch and Holston, told him about the nature of rivers:

"Come a falling tide, an' she drags along the banks and all that's afloat keeps in the middle; but come a fresh an' a risin' tide, an' the hoist of the water is in the mid-stream, and what's runnin' rolls off to one side or the other, an' jams up into the drift piles."

The philosophy of that was, for this occasion, that if Old Mississip'

was falling, Elijah Rasba might never get ash.o.r.e, not in all the rest of his born days, unless he stirred his boots. So catching up his sweep handles he began to push a long stroke toward the west bank, and his boat began to move on the river surface. Under the two corners of his square bow appeared little swirls and tiny ripples as he approached the bank and drifted down in the edge of the current looking for a place to land.

Before he knew it, a big patch of woods grew up behind him, and when he felt the current under the boat slacken he discovered that he had run out of the Mississippi River and was in a narrow waterway no larger than Tug Fork.

"Where all mout I be?" he gasped, in wonderment.

He saw three houseboats just below him, moored against a sandbar, with hoop nets drying near by, blue smoke curling out of tin pipes, and two or three people standing by to look at the stranger.

He rowed ash.o.r.e and carried out a big roped stone, which he used as anchor; then he walked down the bar toward the man who watched his approach with interest.

"I am Elijah Rasba," he greeted him. "I come down out of Tug River; I am looking for Jock Drones; he's down thisaway, somewheres; can yo' all tell me whichaway is the Mississippi River?"

"I don't know him," the fisherman shook his head. "But this yeah is Wolf Island Chute; the current caught you off of Columbus bluffs, and you drifted in yeah; jes' keep a-floatin' an' d'rectly you'll see Old Mississip' down thataway."

"It's near night," Rasba remarked, looking at the sun through the trees.

"I'm a stranger down thisaway; mout I get to stay theh?"

"Yo' can land anywhere's," the man said. "No man can stop you all!"

"But a woman mout!" Rasba exclaimed, with sudden humour. "Yistehd'y evenin', up yonway, by the Ohio River, I found a man shot through into his shanty-boat. He said he 'lowed to land along of the same eddy with a woman, an' she shot him almost daid!"

"Ho law!" the fisherman cried, and another man and three or four women drew near to hear the rest of the narrative. "How come hit?"

Rasba stood there talking to them, a speaker to an audience. He told of his floating down into the Mississippi, and of his surprise at finding the river so large, so without end. He said he kind of wanted to ask the way of a shanty-boat, for a poor sinner must needs inquire of those he finds in the wilderness, and he heard a groan and a weak cry for help.

"I cyard for him, and he thanked me kindly; he said a woman had shot him when he was trying to be friendly; a pretty woman, young and alone.

Co'rse, I washed his wound and I linimented it, and I cut the bullet out of his back; law me, but that man swore! Come night, an' he heard say I was a parson, he apologized because he cursed, and this mo'nin' he'd done lit out, yas, suh! Neveh no good-bye. Scairt, likely, hearin' me pray theh because I needed he'p, an' 'count of me being glad of the chanct to he'p any man in trouble."

"Sho! Who all mout that man be, Parson?"

"He said his name were Jest Prebol----"

"Ho law! Somebody done plugged Jest Prebol!" one of the women cried out, laughing. "That scoundrel's be'n layin' off to git shot this long time, an' so he's got hit. I bet he won't think he's so winnin' of purty women no more! He's bad, that man, gamblin' an' shootin' c.r.a.ps an' workin' the banks. Served him right, yes, indeedy. But he'd sh.o.r.e hate to know a parson hearn him cussin' an' swearin' around. Hit don't bring a gambler any luck, bein' heard swearin', no."

"Nor if any one else hears him; not if he thinks swearin' in hisn's heart!" Rasba shook his head gravely. "How come hit yo' know that man?"

"He's used down this riveh ten-fifteen years; besides, he married my sister what's Mrs. Dollis now. Hit were a long time ago, though, 'fore anybody knowed he wa'n't no good. I bet we hearn yo' was comin', Parson. Whiskey Williams said they was a Hallelujah Singer comin' down the Ohio--said he could hear him a mile. I bet yo' sing out loud sometimes?"

"Hit's so," Rasba admitted. "I sung right smart comin' down the Ohio.

Seems like I jest wanted to sing, like birds in the posey time."

"Prebol sh.o.r.e should git to a doctor, shot up thataway. He didn't say which lady shot him, Parson?" a woman asked.

"No; jes' a lady into an eddy into a lonesome bend." Rasba shook his head. "A purty woman, livin' alone on this riveh. Do many do that?"

"Riveh ladies all do, sometimes. I tripped from Cairo to Vicksburg into a skift once," a tall, angular woman said. "My man that use to be had stoled the shanty-boat what I'd bought an' paid for with my own money. I went up the bank at Columbus Hickories, gettin' nuts; I come back, an'

my boat was gone. Wa'n't I tearin' an' rearin'! Well, I hoofed hit down to Columbus, an' I bought me a skift, count of me always havin' some money saved up."