LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER II

      WHEN THE RIVER SEPARATES ITS PEOPLE

       Table of Contents

      MR. and Mrs. Carruth were in Cape Girardeau for some time. They had supplies to buy, besides being anxious to get news of the overflow. News was coming by telephone and telegraph every little while. In St. Louis there was a good deal of trouble, and East St. Louis was fighting the still rising flood. Soldiers were on guard to prevent any one cutting a levee in one place to ease the strain somewhere else. Thousands of men were working to fight the flood back, by placing bags of sand, layer upon layer, on the levee-top.

      Rumors were flying that Cairo, the St. Francis Bottoms, Kansas City, and a score of other towns had suffered disaster. It was said that the rescuers were going out into the bottoms and finding people in the extremities of peril and destitution. Little groups of spectators stood looking down the half-flooded streets of the town on the bluffs, at the dark drift that flowed by.

      "There’s a house! There’s a big barn!" some one cried.

      "Look’t! There’s a barge torn loose!" said another.

      Boxes and barrels, sections of fences squeezed upright into the drift, even a telegraph-pole, still erect, with wires dangling—went by without causing comment. In a gray gust of rain the watchers saw a shanty-boat drifting down, turning around and around.

      "Them shanty-boaters don’t care what they do, or where they go!" some one exclaimed. "They’d better keep a driftin’ by!"

      Everything seemed brought to a standstill by the passing of the terrible spring tide. That night people who lived on the high rocky bluffs did not envy the owners of the rich bottom-lands, who saw their wealth submerged, and who could not know what trick the waters would play upon them. Perhaps a wave of sand would wash down over the most fertile of fields, and make it useless; perhaps the swirling sucks would bore deep pits into the level ground, "blue holes" an acre across and a hundred feet deep; perhaps the banks would be caved in, and where there had been a wheat-field or a corn-field the river itself would be flowing in a new channel.

      "I remember the big flood that spring when Kaskaskia cut-off went across and the Mississippi took it down into the Kaw River instead of over on the west side, back in the old times!" somebody began, but people hadn’t the patience to listen to history when there was so much news at hand, and the narrator talked to deaf ears.

      A few whispers, low-voiced remarks, and then steady silence for minutes at a stretch. People were so insignificant and unimportant in the presence of that phenomenon that most of them knew it, and if any one pushed his hat upon the back of his head and opened wide his mouth, to talk loud in order to attract attention, he was immediately punished as those near him would draw away and leave him to his self-importance.

      The Carruths found themselves answering questions; they were river people, and when some one recognized them as such it was with curiosity and some irritation—the usual attitude of "bank folks" towards shanty-boaters.

      "Well, what’s she doin’ now?" one demanded.

      "Still rising," the river-man said.

      "Thought she’d quit makin’ for a while!"

      "It’s that bulge out of the Illinois coming down, ahead of the big upper-river wave," Mr. Carruth explained. "She’s past thirty feet now, and still going up! Lucky place to be here; that big flat across the river lets the current run by fast. At Cairo the water goes away above fifty feet, and here you don’t go past forty feet—never did, except in eighteen forty four when you got to forty-two and a half. That’s the record here. In nineteen hundred and three you went to thirty-six, but I see the current is faster this year, and probably it won’t go so high."

      Thus they talked in technical river phrase and compared the present with the past.

      Mrs. Carruth had bought her supplies, and after a time she and her husband went down to the skiff moored in the side street, and Mr. Carruth rowed up one street, and out into the dead water above town. The back-wash from the flood was calm and glassy between rain gusts. A little drift specked the surface, but there were neither current nor waves to interfere with them. Of course, they had to row between the fence posts and in one place they held down the barbed wire so the skiff could Slide over.

      Following along the shore, they rounded the point and started up the creek ravine, against the slight current. It was nearly dark. When they had gone some distance up the narrow waterway Mr. Carruth remarked:

      "Why, I didn’t know we were so far up the creek! We’ve come some distance, haven’t we?"

      "There are those trees—I thought—" Mrs. Carruth looked sharply around, but the place seemed strange.

      It was strange! They found that their shanty-boat had disappeared, and with their observation sharpened by anxiety they soon located the trees opposite which they had moored it, and then they found the very hole into which the stake had been driven.

      It was late candle-light by that time. The boat was gone, and the father and mother looked around in increasing fear and dismay. It had pulled loose, floated out with the current, and—Who could say what had happened to it?

      "I don’t see how it could have happened!" Mrs. Carruth declared. "Sib’s a good riverman—as good as anybody of his age!"

      "He may have gone ashore," the father suggested.

      "We’d have seen him," she said. "He wouldn’t have gone after dark!"

      "Perhaps he went to sleep, and—"

      "Went to sleep!" She shrugged her shoulders. "You couldn’t make him take a nap in the afternoon; not for anything! I don’t know—I’m worried. I wish—What can we do?"

      "We’ll drop down the edge of the current; he may have lodged or made fast somewhere down below, along the main current. You see, we came up inside, close to the bluffs. Perhaps he is tied to one of those trees."

      They went down in the edge of the drift, but they saw no house-boat moored anywhere along there. They rowed up one of the Cape Girardeau streets, and talked to other boatmen, and to people who had been watching the flood that afternoon.

      The hard rain had prevented any one’s having a clear view of the river, but two or three shanty~boats had been seen going down. They went to the River Tavern to await news.

      "I

Скачать книгу