Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/81

 the Fredonia's readers—to expand and bloom according to its nature and without let or hindrance.

The young man was rebellious against cutting his genius to fit any of the cut-and-dried literary courses open to him. He wanted the privilege of writing a short-story idea into 24,000 words, and to cram the form and action of a hundred-thousand-word novel into 5,000 words. He felt himself superior to many things regarded with satisfaction by most people afflicted, as he was, with a wayward soul.

He was very indignant about the way the world was permitted to run, and he set forth, hotfoot.

Murdong cared not whither he went, so be it that there could be no return. He went by train, on foot, and at Davenport, Iowa, he took to the Mississippi in a skiff to row down stream to the very end of things. He had read there was a jumping-off place somewhere down the Mississippi.

He, too, was bound for the jumping-off place; he, too, had his reasons for leaving the closed, hide-bound world for the wide open and the undistraught; and he, too, in record skiff time, passed the Forks of the Ohio floating with the current and resting on his oars. Now the upper Mississippi River is not like the lower river. The change is at Cape Girardeau, or below the Tower at any rate. Murdong rowed with savage energy for days and days, minding neither the