Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/139

 by the mishap that had come upon him so unexpected, and from such unwonted hands. He fell into a fitful sleep almost immediately, and Urleigh went out to look at the dark flood, which so little resembled the Ohio River with which he was famihar along the water-front of the city.

A man may know a river where the steamboats land against the bank, within a stone-throw of the warehouses and junk yards of a great city; may know it from the flow of cubic feet per second to the passing of tows, shantyboats, driftwood, government boats, and the fatalities that cause coroners' juries to bring in "Unknown cause" verdicts. But at the same time he may not know what is down around the second bend, much less what a lonesome bend or long reach has to offer. Urleigh had imagined the Mississippi River to be like the Ohio, with towns every little way along the banks and steamers and bridges and a thousand civilized things to fret any tendency toward rurality. Now he was in a section of river where only one light was visible, and that a dim, quivering spark that seemed to be miles distant. He knew the feeling of a black street in a desolation of waterfront dives; he had not the least acquaintance with a desert sandbar or a wooded wilderness river bend.

Just that few minutes that he stood alone looking