LITMIR.BIZ

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mad?”

      A fluttering trepidation clutched his heart. The bells ringing in his ears fairly clanged the alarm. He hadn’t looked for anything else but joy from being drunk, and now suppose he should be stricken with a mad desire to fight—to kill someone!

      No deadlier fear ever clutched a man’s heart than the one that seized Elijah Rasba. Suppose that when the deferred hilarity arrived, he was made fighting drunk instead of joyous? The thought seized his soul and he looked about himself wondering how he could chain his hands and save his soul from murder, violence, fighting, and similar crimes! No feasible way appeared to his frightened mind.

      He dropped on his knees and began to pray for happiness, instead of for violence, when the drink that he 14 had had should seize him in its embrace. He prayed with a voice that roared like thunder and which made the charcoal fall from the log in the fireplace, and which alarmed the jays and inquisitive mockingbirds about the little clearing.

      He prayed while his voice grew huskier and huskier, and his head bowed lower and lower as he wrestled with this peril which he had not foreseen. All he asked was that when the moonshine began to operate, it make him laugh instead of mad, but terrible doubts smote him. A glance at his rifle on the wall made him fairly grovel on the floor, and he knew that in his hands the andirons, the axe, the very hot-bread rolling pin would be deadly weapons.

      He hoped that he would not be able to shoot straight, but this hope was instantly blasted, for a flock of wild turkeys came down into the cornfield about ninety yards from his cabin, and although he seldom shot anything in his own clearing, he now tried a shot at the turkey gobbler and shot it dead where it strutted. If he should be stricken with anger instead of with joy, no worse man could possibly live! There was no telling what he would do if the liquor would work “wrong” on him. He could kill men at two hundred yards!

      He determined that he would see no human beings that day. Few people ever visited him in his cabin, but he took no chances. He crept up the mountain and skulking through the woods found an immense patch of laurels. He crawled into it, and sat down there for hours and hours, so that no one should have an opportunity to speak to him and stir the latent devil of violence.

      He returned to his cabin long after dark, and raking some hot coals out of the ashes, whittled splinters and started a blaze. 15 He was assailed by hunger, and he baked corn pones and dry-salted pork, then added a great flapjack of delicious sage sausage to the meal. He brought out cans of fruit, whose juice assuaged his increasing thirst. Having eaten heartily he resumed his vigil before the fireplace, and then he noticed that some one had tied something on the stock of his rifle.

      It was a letter which a passer-by had brought up from the Ford Post Office, and when he opened it and looked at the writing, remorse assailed him:

      Dear Parsun:

      Ever senct you preched here I ben sufrin count of my boy JocK. You know Him for he set right thar, frade of no man, not the Tobblys, nor the Crents. When tha drawed DOWN to shoot, he stud right thar an shot back shoot fer shoot, an now he has goned awa down the Rivehs an I am worited abot his soul because he is a gud boy an neveh was no whars in all his borned days an an i hear now he is gettin bad down thataway on Misipy riveh where thas all Bad Peple an i wisht yud prey fer him so’s he wont get bad. Mrs. drones panted church on Clinch.

      Rasba read the letter for the words at first. Then he went back after the meaning, and the meaning struck him like a blow in the heart.

      “Me pray fo’ any man again,” he gasped. “Lawse! Lawse!”

      He didn’t feel fit to pray for himself, let alone for any other sinner, but there came to his memory a picture of Mrs. Drones, a motherly little woman who had taken him home to a dinner at which seven kinds of preserved fruit were on the table, and where the family laughed around the fireplace—only to see Jock a fugitive the next night, and the terrors of a feud war upon them.

      “And Jock’s getting bad down the Mississippi River!” Rasba repeated to himself, striving to grapple with that fact. He could not think clearly or coherently. 16 The widow’s voice, however, was as clearly speaking in his thoughts as though she stood there, instead of merely having written to him. He took to walking up and down the floor, back and forth, on one plank.

      He had forgotten that there was such a thing for humans as sleep. The incongruity of his having been wide awake for two days and two nights did not occur to him till suddenly his eyes turned to the bed in the corner of the room and its purpose was recalled to his mind. He blinked at it. His eyes opened with difficulty. He threw chunks on the fire and went toward the bed, but as he stood by it the world grew black before his eyes and clutching about him, he sank to the floor.

      17

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      Nelia Carline would not return to that miserable little river-bottom cabin where she had grown up in unhappy privation. She had other plans. She drove the little automobile down to Chester, put it in the Star Garage, then walked to the river bank and gave the eddy a critical inspection.

      For years she had lived between the floods of the river and the poverty of the uplands. Her life had often crossed that of river people, and although she had never been on the river, she had frequently gone visiting shanty-boaters who had landed in for a night or a week at the bank opposite her own shack home. She knew river men, and she had no illusions about river women. Best of all now, in her great emergency, she knew shanty-boats, and as she gazed at the eddy and saw the fleet of houseboats there her heart leaped exultantly.

      No less than a score of boats were landed along the eddy bank, and instantly her eyes fell upon first one and then another that would serve her purpose. She walked down to the uppermost of the boats, and hailed from the bank:

      “U-whoo!”

      A lank, stoop-shouldered woman emerged from the craft and fixed the well-favoured young woman with keen, bright eyes.

      “You-all know if there’s a shanty-boat here for sale—cheap?” Nelia asked, without eagerness.

      The woman looked at the bank, reflectively.

      “I expect,” she admitted at last. “This un yaint, but theh’s two spo’ts down b’low, that’s quittin’ the riveh, that blue boat theh, but theh’s spo’ts.” 18

      “I ’lowed they mout be,” Nelia dropped into her childhood vernacular as she looked down the bank, “Likely yo’ mout he’p me bargain, er somebody?”

      “I ’low I could!” the river woman replied. “Me an’ my ole man he’ped a feller up to St. Louis, awhile back, who was green on the river, but he let us kind of p’int out what he’d need fo’ a skift trip down this away. Real friendly feller, kind of city-like, an’ sort of out’n the country, too. ’Lowed he was a writin’ feller, fer magazines an’ books an’ histries an’ them kind of things. Lawsy! He could ask questions, four hundred kinds of questions, an’ writin’ hit all down into a writin’ machine onto paper. We shore told him a heap an’ a passel, an’ he writes mornin’ an’ nights. Lots of curius fellers on Ole Mississip’. We’ll sort of look aroun’. Co’se, yo’ got a man to go ’long?”

      “No.”

      “Wha-a-t! Yo’ ain’ goin’ to trip down alone?”

      “I might’s well.”

      “But, goodness, gracious sake, you’re pretty, pretty as a picture! I ’lowed yo’ had a man scoutin’ aroun’. Why somethin’ mout happen to a lady, if she didn’t have a man or know how to take cyar of herse’f.”

      Nelia shrugged her shoulders. Mrs. Tons, the river woman, gazed for a minute at the pretty, partly averted face. It was almost desperate, quite reckless, and by the expression, the river woman understood. She thought in silence, for a minute, and then looked

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