LITMIR.BIZ

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      Chapter 4

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER IV

      DELIA floated down the crossing and sat on the bow of her little shantyboat, with her elbows on her knees and her knuckles under her chin. Her face, so far as the passing birds could have seen, was expressionless. Her eyes looked frankly at the swirling eddies and watched ahead to see that the boat kept in midcurrent.

      "So this is Old Mississippi," she told herself. "This is where people come when they really want to forget and be forgotten? This is where you make your own law, and where you don't just give a—give a damn for anything! Well, it looks it."

      She smiled whimsically. She sat up straight, and filled a good pair of lungs with sweet air. She raised her chin with a pert, saucy toss of her head. She looked at her palms, and saw there the little roughening, inevitable accompaniment of pulling fourteen-foot shantyboat oars. She looked at the backs of her hands.

      "My hands are bare!" she smiled to herself with satisfaction. "And I'm free! I've nothing to bother about, now—just my own thinking!"

      ​So she floated along, and eyed the river banks curiously. There were dark banks, covered with tall trees along which the current pulled, cutting with the suggestion of a saw's teeth. There were miles-wide sandbars opposite these long, curving, dark banks—beautiful golden sandbars on which the sunshine reflected as the moon reflects upon water. Between woods were openings and clearings, and back on some of these west side clearings she saw long, level dirt embankments, which she knew were levees. On the east side were hills and ridges, but no levees.

      Here and there she saw little houseboats moored in eddies, and at intervals she saw gasolene ferryboats crossing the river. She saw occasional buildings on the banks, and passed a little settlement or two. But all these signs of humanity were far away, and they but added to the immensity of the Mississippi River upon whose flood she was floating down. It was of an overwhelming size, that old river! It spread out till it was a mile wide, and when she looked up or down stream, she looked into miles distance where the river turned around a bend under a dancing haze of sheen; down stream, the grade was visibly down, and the plane of the surface sloped and gave the voyager the feeling that she was sliding into oblivion, a mere fleck on a vast, living torrent.

      ​"It's that I am here to feel and enjoy," she told herself.

      Up stream, the plane sloped up and miles back she could see the waters coming down toward her, a wave that rose surely to a crest a thousand miles away and a thousand feet in the air—such a wave as the sea never dreams of throwing, but which the imagination pictures as one floats in a low shantyboat somewhere down the face of that whelming swell. Suppose that wave should heave up and break? Fancy swinging under the crest of a wave breaking a thousand feet higher than one's head!

      Delia, feeling that wave, shuddered a little. That wave, in fact, for her was swelling up and swinging over and breaking down upon her—not the Mississippi tide wave, but another wave, a spiritual wave which she believed and hoped would engulf her. It pleased her fancy to recall the river woman's quaint statement that the forks of the Ohio was the jumping-off place for some.

      But while she enjoyed the sensation of the oblivion, and while she gazed with pleasure at the miles up stream and the miles down stream, and the great breadth of protecting torrent between her and the far shantyboats and the occasional ferries, she became conscious of a menace. A cold chill swept along her back. She looked up and down and around, ​trying to discover the source of that menace, but it was a long time before she saw anything that suggested a reason for the sudden change from friendly solitude to dreaded company.

      Something seemed to warn her that she was under observation—that something was watching her. She looked around impatiently, and she stepped into her boat to get her binoculars to scrutinize the surroundings. As she started back on to the bow deck she paused within the doorway.

      "Don't go outside to look!" something said to her, and accordingly, she obeyed the voice and began her scrutiny from under the shadow of her own cabin.

      She looked ahead to port and to starboard, and astern. She looked up and down and then away astern. Miles and miles up the river, across the low edge of a wide sandbar, she picked up a spot upon the water, and when she had found the exact focus for her glasses, that spot resolved itself into a boat, into a gasolene cruiser.

      Delia felt a little thrill at discovering that craft. It was not a pleasurable thrill, nor yet a distinctly unpleasant one. It seemed to answer the feeling of menace which had driven her from comfort.

      "There!" her mind seemed to say.

      Instead of going out to sit on the deck, she prepared a meal on the three-burner oil stove in her ​cabin. It was a dainty meal—a luncheon that included salad, tea, and bread ample for a fair appetite. The boat, swinging and swaying in the mid-channel swirls, hung broadside to the current. As she ate, she could distinguish the gasolene boat far astern, floating in her wake, but not approaching nearer that she could see.

      She

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