Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/83

 them; he ceased to fetch his leather oar collars against the locks with snappy stroke.

His stroke was longer, slower, and growing silent. When he recovered, his blades feathered without the savage hiss of hard and angry swing. His eyes were conscious of a different atmosphere; he felt his chest expanding, his breath coming deep, his mind enjoying a strange and novel contentment.

"What the hell!" he said in so many contemptuous words. A poetic temperament dislikes being sunned out of its tantrums.

Just that was happening. The sunshine was softened by diffusing sky; great stone cliffs receded from the river edge far back and at last out of sight across the Bottoms; a bewilderment of woods, waters, and low, far-away banks replaced the uncompromising stones of much of the banks; there were no jagged lines of spiles sunk across sandbars to hold them against the wear and tear of the waters. The river seemed to be meandering as it wished, unhampered!

The banks no longer dominated the scene. Instead, the river, the Mississippi flood was supreme. The transition may have been gradual or it may have been at some certain point, as at Cape Girardeau, or the Grand Tower, or even at the mouth of the Missouri—but the fact now was, Old Mississip' had come into his own, and the low shore line hardly