River Laughter/Chapter 2

OLUMBIANA MUSCATINE O’BINE dropped down the Ohio in a little white cabin-boat with a red hull; she had a twenty-foot gasoline-launch beside her boat, covered with a half-cabin on the bow and a canvas over the engine-pit to prevent rains from sinking it. A pair of long, light sweeps on the twenty-four-foot flatboat saved gasoline in making landings and showed river-wisdom as well as river-thrift.

As she floated down the edge of Putney Bend eddy, where several boats were tied in, her gaze discovered a number of children and a man of perhaps thirty years playing down on the sand-bar. He was an agile, square-shouldered man, tanned by sun and wind, smooth-shaven and with the smooth action of what is called a “city man” down the river. His glance was quick and keen, and he amused the youngsters and enjoyed himself on the firm, floor-like sand.

With the snag roots and limbs for safeties, the children and man were playing Puss in the Corner; men and women in the other shanty-boats regarded the adult among the children with amusement a little tinged with contempt.

The man was oblivious, however, till the voice of Columbiana crossed the eddy in a sharp hail—

“Don’t teach them Puss in the Corner!”

“Why not?” the man demanded resentfully, gazing at her through horn-bow spectacles with wide eyes.

“Because Puss in the Corner is just getting there first and grabbing safety from the others. Teach them Prisoner’s Base. Prisoner’s Base teaches sacrifice, heroism and rescuing at personal risk! Can’t you see?”

The man gazed at the young woman with scowling expression and puzzled eyes. A number of the adult spectators chuckled. The children looked from one to the other, wondering. The game stopped while the shanty-boat went drifting on down, and the woman pulled clear of the shoal and began to make the crossing below.

“That’s right, kids!” the man said at last. “I hadn’t thought of that; we’ll play Prisoner’s Base!”

“I never played hit!” one of the children wailed. “I wanta”

“I’ll show you how,” the man declared. “First, we must find two long lines—there! That pole-sycamore snag’s good for one base, and I’ll draw a line between that ship timber and the broken barrel for the other base. Now we’ll line up; I choose Timmy. Who do you choose, Myra?”

So they began to play Prisoner’s Base, with its racing, romping and daring rescues of caught companions. But there was an odd number, and so the man was referee and told them how. When they were engrossed in playing and had caught the idea, he turned and looked away down the crossing—where a glimmer and a reflection of the sunshine on a cabin-boat window cast darts of light over the river surface and showed whither the young woman was traveling.

When it was time for supper, the children were called to the boat, and they were happy, laughing and full of the delight they had had, playing with the big man, whose name was Caroost. Mrs. Cramell called the big man in to supper with her and her little girl and her own man, for she was grateful to have him so friendly to the little ones, teaching them games that were good to play.

At the table the big man was silent and even diffident. His smooth-shaven face, his bright, blue eyes and his quick smile were attractive, especially to children, whom he seemed to understand better than grown folks. They got nothing from him at the table, not even whether he was out of the Ohio or the Upper Mississippi. Clean, mannerly and a listener; Mrs. Cramell liked him better than ever, for he made talking so easy for her—and she had so much to say!

After supper he took down Cramell’s banjo and began to pick it to the immense delight of the little girl, not to mention Cramell and Mrs. Cramell, who loved music. He played fast music and slow, loud music and soft, good dance-tunes and sweet things to think by. When he went out on the gangplank, he tiptoed so as not to wake the little girl up, and he did not light the lamp on his own cabin-boat. He made it easy for the Cramells to sleep that night.

CAROOST put together all the gossip he had heard down the Ohio and Mississippi, but there was nothing in it for him so far as he could tell. Apparently, Mr. Barklow Waldin had been swallowed up by the Mississippi; at the same time, duty is duty!

He looked from the deck of his red shanty-boat out across the river and recognized it as one of the interesting moments of his life. Adventure had come to him in satisfactory frequency. This was another adventure, hunting for a lost human straw in ten thousand miles of navigable waters and fifty thousand miles of canoe waters—Kismet—Selah—so be it! In the years since Prof. Barklow Waldin had dropped out of sight, he might have disintegrated and flowed into the Gulf, or he might have moved up the bank somewhere and become respectable, or he might, on a one-hundred-to-one bet, still be on the Mississippi. But shanty-boaters, knowing everybody in a way, had never heard of him that they knew.

James M. Caroost just loved the idea of having been adventurous, although in the critical moment of superlative incident he might endure rather more than he enjoyed. At the same time nervous anticipation never prevented him from having jubilant retrospection. He had what he fondly called a dual personality.

He sat for an hour on the stern-deck of his boat, looking down the Mississippi in the dark night. Away down the bend a Government light wavered and flickered, looking him in the eyes with a challenge. He accepted it. He went ashore and cast off his bow-line. He pulled in his stern line rapidly and thus backed his boat out into the eddy current. He floated noiselessly up the eddy, around into the main current and down the crossing, pulling a pair of sweeps that carried his boat into the channel.

He sat in the comfortable wicker chair, but not at his ease. At intervals he groaned; then he cursed under his breath; once he said:

“I can’t learn from my own heart! Somebody else always has to tell me!”

He made his calculations; in two hours he rowed into the west side and threw over his anchor in the dead water at Typer’s Plantation. He turned in to sleep and was up at first dawn. As soon as he could see, he was searching the river with his binoculars. Every few minutes he was out to look, but in the intervals he cooked his breakfast of ham, fried eggs, fried potato, coffee and milk kept sweet with boracic acid—he was reckless.

Soon after eight o’clock he saw a little white shanty-boat moving down out of the sand-bar almost opposite him. He grinned to himself. He took a book labeled “Mississippi River Maps,” and turned to Sheet No. 1.

“She’s traveling by these same charts or how’d she know that little bay behind those willows?” he asked himself.

The shanty-boat made the water flicker for a time and then fell into the quivering reflection of the morning sunshine. When it was about a third of a mile below him, he hoisted his anchor and, with two pulls of his sweeps, entered the river current. The two boats moved down into Columbus Bend, and, as they came into the Iron Bank, they were hardly a hundred yards apart. He sat in his cabin, however, out of sight, reading one of a shelf of books with the word “Essays” over it. Under that shelf were several other shelves, each with a label.

The two boats were carried past Columbus within two hundred yards, and the house-boat floated toward the Chalk Bluff, after swirling in the Hickman Bluff current toward Wolf Island Chute. The man’s boat went down the long chute and out of sight behind the sand-bar. When it was out of sight, the man turned up the outboard motor and steered at seven miles an hour around the long loop and floated down behind Wolf Island Towhead into Beckwith Bend current just as the little white shanty-boat swung to Lower Lees Landing.

Columbiana came out on the bow deck and stared at the motor-boat with a calculating gaze. She looked up the long dead water of Wolf Island Chute and then looked up the short, swift, current of the main river down which she had floated. There was no sign of life on the house-boat; but how could a boat float five miles in a six-mile current and a boat float eight miles in a three-mile current and both arrive at the same point at the same time? Columbiana’s expression was one of anxious, or at least grave, suspicion.

All day long the two boats floated down, almost within a toss. The river was falling, and they held to the trough near the mid-current. It was a navigable river, public and free. Any one in a craft had a right anywhere by living up to the rules. Columbiana, however, was doubtful. Nearly an hour before dusk she pulled into the dead water above Donaldson’s Point about three miles. When she looked across the river, she saw the red cabin-boat floating around in the eddy at the foot of the filled-in Island No. 9. The boat made a complete circle around and then bumped into the bank for the night.

Columbiana shot a wild goose from a flock that came down within a hundred yards, killing it with a fight rifle and retrieving it with a skiff. She hoped that scoundrel on yon side was watching her shoot, for that would be fair warning. In the morning she dropped out again about eight o’clock and then discovered that the swift peninsula current carried her right down to the motor-boat, which had started forty minutes before in a dragging current. So, as they passed the Slough Landing whisky-boat, they weren’t two hundred yards apart, and at Gates Landing, two miles down, they were only a hundred yards apart.

Columbiana was vexed. She gazed steadfastly at the red boat without seeing anyone. She had the feeling that in the cabin was a man watching her. She had that feeling for three hours, and then with her binoculars, as the stem of the boat swung around, she saw a man sitting inside the cabin, leaning back in a comfortable rocker with his feet on a bench, reading calmly and obliviously.

Then she was vexed to think that she had paid any attention to the horrid old thing. She landed in at New Madrid and went up town to buy supplies. When she dropped passed Tiptonville, fifteen miles below, she saw a man coming down the bank at the ferry with an arm full of bundles and packages, and half an hour later she was perturbed to observe a cabined motor-boat floating down in the caving bend less than half a mile behind her. And, when she pulled into the foot of Merriwether Bend sand-bar, the motor-boat anchored about a mile below at the head of Little Cypress Bend sand-bar.

But the following morning, when she floated out, the motor-boat was gone from its anchorage, and in vain she looked for it up and down the river. She studied the caving bend below Island No. 13, and, when she passed Reelfoot, she pulled over close to see if the scoundrel had stopped along there in the shanty-boat town.

All day long she looked for him up and down, and, when she landed in, she shrugged her shoulders. In the morning, when she dropped out and turned the bend of Needham’s Cut-off, a light song was choked in her throat by the discovery of a motor-boat a hundred yards from her port bow. Where it came from, and by what force, she could not tell. She would think of something else for a minute and then return with a start to the fact of the exasperating presence. She did not see the boat stir under any power. It drifted with the current—yet there it was!

That night she floated down the chute of Island No. 35, and anchored at the foot. Ten minutes later she saw the red boat anchored just over the sand-bar, practically just around the corner—and it had anchored there first! She couldn’t even think a word.

Fishermen for the Mendova market were down this stretch of the river. The sporting resort of Gumbo Bend was at hand. Islands and sand-bars seemed to promise a thousand picnics for all. A long, narrow shanty-boat floated by just at dusk, and four men looked across at the pretty girl on the boat. One of them hailed:

“Hello, gal! Lonesome?”

Without a word she reached behind the door, and, before the ribald crew could more than duck, she fired five .25-20s through their cabin. One bullet hit the dish-cupboard, and the still night resounded with the fall of caving crockery and the crash of glassware.

On the night air was borne a whine:

“Aw, Red. What’d yo’ want ’sult a riveh-lady fo’—yo’ danged fool! Yo’ mout of knowed yo’d git the wust of hit!"

A little later Columbiana saw the motorboat drifting down by her anchorage and turning into the main current.

“Now where’s he going?” she muttered.

The next instant there was a whiff of chill, and immediately there boiled up in the night a heaving, writhing, climbing gray mist, which rapidly assumed the proportions of a fog.

Columbiana shivered and entered the cabin, where, with the curtains pulled down, she tried to read a magazine essay. But she gave it up and turned to fiction, and so she read herself to sleep where she sat.

She was awakened by a loud, long laugh—

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

She blew the light and ran to look. She was adrift in the night with her anchor on the deck where she hadn’t left it; on all sides was a fog as gray as sin.