The Way of the Mississippi/Chapter 6

ENTON RILLARD felt his grip on affairs slipping sensibly as he regarded the situation in which he now found himself. Old Mississip' had captivated him, and he asked himself the most fatal of all questions to consider:

"Who'd know anything about it?"

His surface thoughts were innocent enough, but away down underneath was what they call a hankering for adventure—affected, considerably, by the fear of people misunderstanding him, if he happened to be caught at it. He could not quite regard the gay and questionable incidents of the big concert boat river dance with complete regret. He had kissed Dona with considerable enthusiasm, he admitted to himself, but with such an indifference that no one should object to it—even Corilla, if she would only understand it as well as he did, the surprise, unexpectedness and naturalness of it.

At the same time, thinking of the river desperado's indignant charge and his prompt and scientific bafflement and expulsion, Rillard wondered if he had killed a man? Certainly that practiced thumbing of Mad Tom's neck had crippled the river rat, and numbed men in water have little chance of escape from drowning.

The vicious jealousy of the man had been, of course, perfectly foolish; Rillard was merely a spectator, and all that, as he assured himself, but there was one deep satisfaction for him: nobody ever paid any attention to what shanty boaters did, or what happened to people down the Mississippi River. One might read a thousand newspapers and never learn anything about the Mississippi except that sometimes it had some awful floods, and sometimes it needed a hundred millions to make it navigable. Since coming below Cairo, out of the Ohio, Rillard had heard forty stories, at least, which would have made good news yarns, if any reporter had heard them, but apparently the only reports of the Mississippi were issued by waterway conventions and the Weather Bureau.

He thrilled with dismay as he thought of what a newspaper man would do with the story of Hon. Denton Rillard's feud with pirates, undertaken to save a pretty river girl from their attentions. That phase of the matter was fit to make him reel with excitement. Over and over again he reassured himself that what happened on the Mississippi was a closed book as regards up-the-bank knowledge.

Accordingly, without many misgivings, he dropped out of the eddy with the Voane boat, made it fast to down the crossing and thus  saved the women on board it with the necessity of steering or pulling it with their sweeps; the power of his own motor would  take the big house boat upstream, if need be.

Worst of all, perhaps, he assented to dining on board their boat, where the naturalness and ease with which the women acted greatly assisted him in maintaining a strictly decorous attitude of distant friendliness. There was not the least deceit on his part; when he landed at Cypress, he explained his necessity by saying that he expected letters from his wife and business associates. Neither of the women showed the least sign of surprise or feeling on learning that he was married. In fact, they had known it right along.

There was never lack for something to talk about. Mrs. Voane had lived on the Mississippi for nearly twenty years, and previous to that had been a Montana prospector's daughter, living from camp to camp, and she was now a woman of some little property, and asked Rillard's advice about investing several hundred dollars of income from mine stock dividends that happened to come to her at Memphis, where they ran down Ash Slough.

Two days later they landed in at St. Francis Towhead, near the St. Francis River mouth. A flock of wild geese came flying by, low down, and Dona stepped outside with a long-barreled thirty-eight caliber revolver. As they began to climb she threw the weapon up and fired six times. The range was from twenty yards to about eighty yards, and four of the great birds came flopping end over end to the rippled sand. It was wonderful shooting. Rillard had never seen anything like it.

As he saw how the bullets had center-plumbed the unhappy birds, he was startled by thought—this girl was perfectly competent to take care of herself. He turned and looked at her with some little alarm, and was just in time to see the quiet smile, and the uprolling eyes of a young woman knew that, she had amazed and shaken a man beyond any idea that he had previously expressed. She was laughing at him, and worst of all, he rather enjoyed the discovery that she was so much more capable than he had supposed possible.

Right then, however, was the ending of his legitimate guardianship—with his own discovery of its needlessness. Till that moment he could have shown a proof of indifferent gallantry to any court to which his conscience might appeal, barring perhaps Corilla herself, who would have been rather biased, in all probability. Now, stripped of any ignorance he might have pieced, he stiffened his neck with the observation that nobody would ever know that he had accompanied two shanty boaters, widow and daughter, some two or three hundred miles down the lonely Mississippi.

Nobody—that is, except shanty boaters. Apparently, the Voanes knew about everybody down the Mississippi. They stopped in eddies, reaches, and bends. They visited fishermen's tents up the bank, commissaries over the levees, and remained three days at a logging camp, because they knew the foreman—an old friend of Voane.

Where the coon hunting was good, Dona brought out her own and her father's powerful headlights, adjusted the latter to Rillard's yachting cap, and took him out upon the wooded bottoms, to initiate him in the mysteries of fire hunting.

It was rare sport; he shot three coons in one dark corner brake above St. Francis Towhead, and when they were turned around in the cane, his wrist compass enabled them to find their way back to the river bank. He would not have missed the roast two-year-old coon which Dona baked—not for money, anyhow.

Returning to the big shanty boat and cruiser in their little skiff, driven by an outboard motor, they found another boat floating down the midstream, with doors open and deaf to any hail. Turning their headlights on it, they saw that the bunk in the cabin was empty, and that no one was on board.

They ran alongside, dropped a line on one of the oar pinheads and swung it into the towhead eddy, and anchored it there. Going up to the young woman's boat, Rillard helped her to the stern deck, and himself sprang up lightly. They stood there in the gray darkness of 2 It was just as natural to go hunting coons at night, down the Mississippi, as hunting grouse on an afternoon from an Adirondack camp or Pennsylvania clubhouse.

"You're teaching me a lot about living down the Mississippi," he said with sudden realization.

"There's a lot to learn yet," she chuckled. "I'd better tell you—Mad Tom isn't dead. He floated down about twenty miles, and a softpaw artist from down East, somewhere, picked him up. They're all waiting for us, down by White River, or Arkansaw Old Mouth, Mad Tom an' his pirate crew."

"Waiting for us?"

"Yas, suh—passed us by, and didn't know hit."

"Why—why—"

It's fair warnin'; they're mean, that pirate crew; they'll shoot yo' if they can. I'm all right They come round this boat, an' I'll shoot fustest an' ask questions, if necessary, afterward. But I'm powerful worried about you, suh. Likely yo'd betteh quit the riveh—the farther down yo' go, the worse off yo' be, till yo' go down Chaffeli, where yo' don't come back."

There it was again—the challenge of old Mississip'! Rillard rose on his tiptoes, almost unconsciously, and he turned to look down the river where Helena's lights were sparkling and shining nine or ten miles distant. Just that way a crisis had come to him—and he just couldn't resist the circumstances. Returning on board his boat be tried to give the situation serious and sensible consideration. He knew there was only a dilemma for choice—he must stay with the river, and all its strangely fascinating attractions and dangers, or he must make haste back up-the-bank to his own country and his own people.

He hesitated, dallied with the various considerations, asked himself if a real man could, with honor, permit a gang of river desperadoes to drive him from the navigable highway. He allowed himself to remember the cunning and attractive Dona only as an interesting young river woman of a discreetly friendly type—but he knew, down in his heart, that there was, really only one thing to do—quit!

For a minute he determined to do so but recalled that he still had Dona's beautiful revolver, the Cheyenne belt and quick-draw holster. He could not go away with that, and it was too late to hand it aboard in passing out of the eddy, and accordingly he turned in and tossed uneasily in his little stateroom bunk long before he could sleep. But, sleeping at last, he slept late, and was only awakened when, from alongside, came the hail of Dona, telling him breakfast was ready—pork sage sausage, hot bread and pan-browned milk gravy, drip coffee and buckwheat cakes, wild honey and the like, all cooked in river fashion.

It was a quiet breakfast; the two watched him covertly, wondering what he would do, whether he would succumb to the gravity of his danger, and leave the river, or whether he would go down and confront the river wretches, taking their challenge.

He did not enlighten them. After breakfast he and Dona went to the little shanty boat which they had salvaged the previous night, as it floated lost down the mid-current. It gave evidence of another mystery. Whoever had lived on board had thrown his clothes over a chair, and gone to bed. The bed had been slept in. It was a single iron bedstead, with everything clean and neat. Cold cooked meat and raised buckwheat batter cakes were ready for breakfast; even coffee was in the percolator; hanging over the head of the bed was a money belt containing eight hundred and fifty dollars, but no name and no address. On the wall beside the pillow was a heavy army automatic, loaded, and the safety on, showing that it was ready for instant use. In a corner were two firearms, a twenty gauge repeater and a twenty-five-thirty-five automatic rifle.

What was the answer?

Dona said:

"His lines are all coiled up, but his anchor is wet and muddy; what that man did was walk up in his sleep, hoist his anchor and then—fall overboard! Perhaps he couldn't swim, and drowned; perhaps the shock of frosty upper Mississippi water cramped him; perhaps he reached the bank, and don't know what had happened to him! Many a man walks in his sleep down this shanty boatin' riveh—and to that kind, things happen—sho! I neveh saw this boat before, and it's riveh built, twenty-two foot long, six and a half foot wide, low cabin, deep hull. Who knows what happened on hit?"

"What 'll we do with it?"

"Hit's worth, with that money, a thousand dollars; there may be more into it; we'd better search!"

They ransacked the boat from bow to stern, under decks, in the pump hole, through pockets and boxes and the trunk. The trunk, a square-cornered, iron-strapped container, contained packs of cards, all marked and new, except three: poker chips, several sets of dice, some square-cornered and some round—and as she remarked, after rolling them a few times, all were loaded or trimmed to win and lose. A dozen books, Hoyle's, draughts, chess, told of a gamester's studies. There was a book of river maps, and maps of Colorado, Arizona, Idaho and New York City's metropolitan district.

The boat itself had no gambling conveniences, merely a swing table and a small cook stove, a kitchen-galley well provided with grub, plenty of assorted ammunition for the firearms, and from end to end, not one line of writing, not a pen or pencil mark, and the markers had been ripped carefully from every garment on board. A gold watch, tied with a rawhide thong in the trousers, had the numbers scratched off case and works, but there was a picture of a girl in the hunting case face cover—and when Rillard looked at it he gasped with amazement.

"Why—Dona—it's your picture!" he cried.

"What!" she exclaimed, and examined the picture. It was a profile, taken with a small camera, showing her from her trim waist to her head, with a background of river bank out of focus.

"Why, I never saw that picture before!" she cried, and her mother verified her statement: neither one could remember when it was taken, but there was a corner of a cabin visible just beyond her and behind her. Studying this, they determined at last that the picture had been taken on board a shanty boat on the Yellowstone River about two years previous, but it was a local boat, on skids up the bank, and belonged to a trapper and his wife. Other people had been around there, but not this derelict boat.

"Some gambler—and he came down Missouri into old Mississip'," Dona mused. "I hadn't heard of him—to know him."

Thinking the man might come down during the next day or two, looking for his boat, they waited several days, and then they read in a Memphis newspaper that a man had been found drowned on President Island Towhead. He was dressed in a nightgown only, and there was no clew to his identity, except that he was five feet eight inches tall, weighed about one hundred and sixty-five pounds, had dark hair, brown eyes and dark complexion, with a brown mustache.

"Findings is keepings, then!" Dona remarked, wryly, and they divided the money, splitting it three ways; Rillard took the watch, a beautiful instrument that must have cost upward of two hundred dollars, and the two women took the boat and its contents, as fair an exchange as could be made, for it would, on sale, sell for about as much as the watch.

At Helena they sold the boat for one hundred and sixty dollars cash, with everything on board, except the firearms and ammunition. Thus closed a river incident with the marks of a typical Mississippi grimness. But the inside of the watch cover gave to Rillard a new slant on the river ways. He had not thought of possessing a picture of Dona Voane. The picture, however, caught and held his attention, and as he tripped down the current with his motor boat alongside the long house boat, he looked at the picture so much that he forgot that he was responsible for the safe guidance of the two craft—and a sudden cry brought him back to his senses, just too late!

They were floating down the long Red Town Bend when the current swung them whirling into the caving bank, and there a huge sawyer, jumping with all the power of a log in a white-water cascade, came up beneath the big house boat, struck the bottom with the force of an explosion and smashed it up, tore up through the stringers and the cabin floor and a long, jagged root pierced the very roof itself.

Just that way things happen down the Mississippi; a little day dreaming, a bit of neglect, a moment of delicious peace and lovely floating is changed into one of tragedy, or dire peril. No sooner had the sawyer, a tree snag more than a hundred feet long, sprang up through the house boat than it swung down again, tearing out the floor and bottom for fifteen or twenty feet and disappearing in the water depths before the flood fairly poured into the hull and cabin.

Mrs. Voane had been sitting in the cabin, peeling potatoes. She was not seen after her daughter turned to cover the bottom of a frying pan with squirrel meat. At the crash, Dona saw the snag clutching at her, but threw herself to the stern, and with a scream, sprang to the deck of the Jungle, Rillard's motor boat. Then seeing the house boat sinking, she cast off the line that held the Jungle's stern, and bounded forward and cast off the bow line before Rillard had moved in his paralysis of astounded horror.

The motor boat swung clear, bow upstream, and the house boat sank into the depths. A few splintered boards, a little section of the roof, a few bits of stove wood floated up out of the water, but that was all. The heavy kitchen range, the big cabin heater, the anchors, traps, and perhaps a ton or two of junk distributed around the shanty boat sank it to the bottom, perhaps in a hundred feet of water.

Dona fainted on the motor boat cabin. Rillard stumbled over it to her side, and crying in his remorse at the penalty of his carelessness, stooped over her and tried to revive her.