Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/231

 was one hiatus which he could not account for, though he recalled it very well. He was at his ease down the Mississippi in a comfortable little cabin-boat. He remembered that he was in Ozark Bend, just below Arkansaw Old Mouth, and some of the boys had been joshing him about the widow Jellson who lived at Bohvar Landing, and who would have made him an admirable wife, as he considered. That was along in November.

Then, right at that very moment, a spell seized him, and the next he knew, he was sitting in a leaky old skiff just below Davenport, Iowa, floating down a very trifling kind of Mississippi River, with a raw, cold spring wind blowing and snow banks unthawed in the shade of the woods along the banks. This was early in May.

He had lost at least six months, and when he managed to beat his way down to the lower Mississippi he had been gone two years! He had lost not less than eighteen months of his life, where he did not know. Worse yet, he had lost his cabin-boat, and he was reduced to a hog pen on a raft, which he had managed to find and steal and construct little by little.

But in spite of these aberrations, he never forgot one thing. That was the thing which started him on these strange peregrinations, and which always prevented him from struggling up out of his lowly estate.