Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/101

 bottom, and just long enough to reach the width of the boat, and rest on the gunwales, served as a table. On this he served his breakfast, eating on paper plates, which reduced nauseating dishwashing to the minimum. He dined at his leisure, and while he dined the warm sunshine dissipated the fog, which broke into gray floating islands upon the surface of the river, finally lifting and bursting into thin air.

G. Alexander Murdong sighed in a comforting frame of mind. He had fled from the turmoil and hurry and excitement of crowded, unresting humanity—beaten and hating himself more than he hated the people whose standards he could not satisfy.

"Well, I'm all right down here!" he nodded with genuine satisfaction. "This is where I belong; I can be a river rat if I can't be anything else—a superior kind of a rat, at that. Say, a muskrat."

So he continued on his way down the mid-current which carried him in near one caving bank on the right, and then down a crossing close to the bank on the left, each swing being a matter of five or ten miles and an hour or so of floating for it takes time for a mile-wide flood to swagger even a little bit.

Murdong felt that the ambitions and hopes, the aspirations and the desires of his life of old were rather dwarfed and ridiculous in the presence of so real a power and consequence as the river. What did it