Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/69

 town, or sawmill, working for some company, but living on the river because it is cheap. Every fall a fleet of sports drift down the river in shantyboats or gasolene boats, hunting, fishing, roistering down for the fun of it, and some are always sports, but some few cease to be soft-paws with no river sense—incapable of learning anything—and falling into river ways, attaining to river society of up or down class.

The river people heard that a pretty girl going by the name of "Delia" had drifted out of the Ohio. The whisky gasolenes carried the gossip about Delia up and down. Within a month, old timers in Little Oklahoma above Eads Bridge were talking about her, and "Junker" Frest, with three tons of heavy copper, which he had salvaged from an old still house on the Lower Ohio, ceased his hurry to the Mendova market to make the acquaintance of Delia.

That copper was worth twenty cents anyhow, and maybe twenty-one at the Mendova Landing, and Frest estimated that when any river girl saw that copper, and learned that it hadn't cost a cent, she would sure be interested in so successful a grafter.

"I'll get twelve hundred dollars for it!" Frest figured to himself. "I got money in the Mendova Bank, and if that Delia girl's got any sense, she'll see I'm just the man she's lookin' for, even if she ain't going to stay on the river but a little while. I'll show