The River Prophet Part 16

"I don't reckon any one'll drap down to-day," Slip muttered, looking up the river.

"We'll keep our eyes open," Buck replied. "You needn't to worry, you're plumb worn out, Slip. Git to bed, now, an' I'll slick up around."

It was a cold, dry gale. From sharp gusts with near calms between the wind grew till it was a steady, driving storm that flattened against the shanty-boat sides, and whistled and roared through the trees up the bank. And instead of dying down at dusk, it increased so much that the big acetylene light was not hung out, and if any one came down to the opposite sh.o.r.e he saw that there would be no game that night.

Buck went in and sat down by the wounded man's bed, giving him the medicines Doctor Grell had left. For the attentions Prebol, in lucid intervals, showed wondering looks of grat.i.tude, like an ugly dog which has been trapped and then set free. What he had suffered during the night even he could hardly recall in the enfeebled condition of his mind, but the spoonfuls of broth, the medicine that thrilled his body, the man's very companionship, lending strength, took away the feeling of despair which a man in the extremities of anguish and alone in the world finds hardest to resist.

Buck, sitting there, gazed at the wan countenance, studying it. Prebol had forgotten, but when Buck first arrived on the river, the pirate, a much younger man then, had carelessly and perhaps for display told the stranger and softpaw many things about the river which were useful. It occurred to Buck that he was now paying back a debt of grat.i.tude.

Something boiled up in his thoughts, and he swore to himself that he owed nothing, that the world owed him, and he bridged the years of his disappointment and desolation back to the hour when he had stormed out of the life he had known, to come down the Mississippi to be a gambler. Prebol, in his lapses into delirium, called a woman's name, Sadie--always Sadie! And if he would have cursed that name in his consciousness, out of the depths of his soul it came with softness and gentleness of affection.

Buck wondered what Jest Prebol had done to Sadie that she had driven him down there, and he cursed with his own lips, while he stifled in the depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of memories and reflections. He wondered what had become of the woman for love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this heartless occupation of common gambler?

True to Slip, he had watched the river for the stranger whose inquiries had been carried down in fair warning to all the river people--and Buck, suddenly conscious of his own part in that river system, laughed in surprise.

"Why," he said to himself, "humans are faithful to one another! It's what they live for, to be faithful to one another!"

It was an incredible, but undeniable theory. In spite of his own wilful disbelief in the faith of mankind, here he was sitting by one poor devil's bed while he kept his weather eye out upon the rough river in the interests of another--a murderer! He pondered on the question of whether any one kept faith with him. His mind cried out angrily, "No!"

but on second thought, in spite of himself, he realized distinctly that he had let one person's faithlessness overcome his trust of all others.

No day on the Mississippi is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an early spring.

Steamboats are driven into the refuge of landing or eddy, and if the power craft cannot stand the buffetings, much less are the exposed little houseboats, toys of current and breeze, able to escape the resistless blasts. So the wind possesses itself of the whole river breadth and living creatures are driven to shelter.

Prebol, shot through and conscious of the reward of his manner of living; Slip, a fugitive under the menace of a murderer's fate; and Buck, given over to melancholy, were but types on the lengths and tributaries of the indifferent flood.

Nothing happened, nothing could happen. The arrival of Slip from his restless bunk relieved Buck of his vigil, and he went to bed and slept into the dawn of another day--a day like the previous one, and fit to drive him up the bank, into the woods, and among the fallen branches of rotten trees seeking in physical activity to check the mourning and tauntings of a mind over which he found, as often before, that he had no control.

And yet, when the storm suddenly blew itself out with a light puff and a sudden flood of sunshine, just as the sun went down, Prebol's condition took a sudden turn for the better, Slip forgot his fears, and Buck burst into a gay little whistled tune, which he could never whistle except when he was absurdly and inexplicably merry.

CHAPTER XVII

Terabon's notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long, lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood itself.

His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump under the term of "histories," but now, after his hundreds of miles of a.s.sociation with the river, his thought took but brief note of those trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as "river towns." He had pa.s.sed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!--bound but wearing away its bonds.

Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed, in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the Mississippi River "spirit"--as he always quoted it in his calm and dispa.s.sionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions--had encompa.s.sed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been called a "compromising position."

That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a drunken stupor, and now in the late evening the fugitive wife was taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat--and he had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home--he thought the phrase with difficulty--and he remembered the word "chaperon" as from a foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.

His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the occasion. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook," she had said, and while he followed her on board the boat, with the two big black ducks to help prepare, he wondered and remembered and, in spite of his life-long avoidance of all appearance of evil, submitted to this irresistible circ.u.mstance, wherever it might lead.

So he built the fire in her kitchen stove. She mixed up dressing and seasoned the birds, made biscuit batter for hot-bread, brought out stacks and stores of things to eat, or to eat with, and they set the table, ground the coffee, and got the oven hot for the roasting and baking.

One thing took the curse off their position: They had to have all the windows and doors wide open so that they seemed fairly to be cooking on an open sandbar at the edge of the river. Terabon took an inward satisfaction in that fact. It is not possible to feel exceedingly wicked or depraved when there is a mile-wide Mississippi on the one hand and a mile-wide sandbar on the other side, and the sun is shining calmly upon the bright and innocent waters.

As the ducks were young and tender, their cooking took but an hour, or a little more, and the interim was occupied in the countless things that must be done to prepare even a shanty-boat feast. He stirred some cranberry sauce, and she had to baste the ducks, get the flour stirred with water, and condensed cream for gravy, besides setting the table and raising the biscuits, to have them ready for the ducks. She must needs wonder if she'd forgotten the salt, and for ten minutes she was almost in a panic at the thought, while he watched her in breathless wonderment, and took covert glances up the Mississippi River, fearful of, and yet almost wishing to see, that pursuing motorboat come into view.

When at last the smoking viands were on the ample table and they sat with their knees under it, and he began to carve the ducks and dish out the unblessed meal, he glanced up stream through the cabin window on his right. He caught a glimpse of a window pane flashing miles distant in the light of the setting sun--the whiskey boat without doubt. He saw a flock of ducks coming like a great serpent just above the river surface, then a shadow lifted as out of the river, swept up the trees in the lost section of Kentucky opposite, and from spattering gold the scene turned to blue which rapidly became purple, darkening visibly.

Through the open doors and windows swept the chill of twilight, and while she lighted the big lamp he did her bidding and closed the doors and windows. Those shelves of books, cla.s.sics and famous, time-tried fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of t.i.tles, the blues and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all those master minds warn the young against evil?

But they talked over the ducks of what a pity it was that all towns could not engage themselves in thought the way Athens used to do, and they wondered to each other when the hurrying pa.s.sion of greed and its varying phenomena would become reconciled to a modest competence and the simplicity which they, for example, were enjoying down the Mississippi.

When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful, though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden, risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position.

Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty.

"I think I'd better put up my canvas top," he blurted out, and she a.s.sented.

"And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of dishes," she added.

"Oh, of course!" he exclaimed.

"I'll help with the canvas," she said, and he dared not look at her.

By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the bar, and the river in the dark, running by.

They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power, its resistlessness.

"It's overwhelming," he whispered. "When you can't see it you hear it, or you feel it!"

"And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so perfectly negligible," she added, consciously, and then with vivacity: "I'll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me for a walk up this sandbar!"

"Gladly," he laughed, "but I'll help with the dishes as well!"

She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber, not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different, wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle--they remembered Th.o.r.eau's "Cape Cod" and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had acc.u.mulated a vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the simple superst.i.tions with which the river people beguile themselves and add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.

"An old river man can look at the river and tell when a headrise is coming," he told her. "He knows by the looks of the water when the river is due to fall again. When he dreams, he says he knows what is going to happen, and where to find buried treasure, and if there is going to be an earthquake or a bad storm."

"They get queer living alone!" she said, thoughtfully. "Lots of them used to stop in at our slough on Kaw River. I was afraid of them!"

"You afraid of anything!" he exclaimed. "Of any one!"

"Oh, that was a long time ago--ages ago!" She laughed, and then gave voice to that most tragic riverside thought. "But now--nothing at all matters now!"

She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing, that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin's most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring tears.

He knew in that very moment, as by revelation, that he had caught from her lips one of the bitterest phrases which the human mind is capable of forming. He was glad of the favour which fate had bestowed upon him, and he thrilled, while he regretted, that in that hour he could not forget that he was a seeker of facts, a gatherer of information.

To match her mood was beyond his own power. By a simple statement of fact she had given herself a place in his thought comparable to--he went at making ideas again, despite himself--comparable to one of those wonderful widows which are the delight, while they rend to tatters the ambitions of delvers into the mysteries of Olympian lore. This bright, pretty, vivacious young woman had suffered till she had arrived at a Helen's recklessness--nothing mattered!

There was a pause.

"I think you are in a fair way to become unforgetable in connection with the Mississippi River," he suggested, with even voice.