The Way of the Mississippi/Chapter 7

WO days one another after becoming acquainted with one another Toskin and Maiton landed in the Free Bend eddy and convinced Jim Taken and Date Imsal that neither was a ghost, and that the murder boat was harmless, as yet, at least. Nevertheless, none of the river pirates would venture on board the craft, and were for a time doubtful about welcoming Maiton and Toskin on their own shaggy, questionable and faded launches and shanties.

Shortly they were going over the affairs of the river, and Maiton heard that Rillard was coming down with the Voanes. The fact made him snarl with anger; an up-the-bank softpaw had fouled him! That was his viewpoint, and he promised to shoot the man on sight—no boast, but a promise!

To make sure he began to shoot often with a revolver and an automatic, taking marks as they came in lonely bends and over sand bars. He had long practiced with firearms, and he remarked on the value of practice as exemplified by the work of Dona Voane with her weapons. Dona had shown her skill often enough for the river people to know that she could, if she dared, shoot with accurate menace.

"Shucks!" Maiton had said to the evidence of his own eyes. "She'd neveh shoot a man—a woman 'd be afeared to shoot a man. Dona shoot me? Not in a thousand years!"

Jim Taken ventured to offer a tentative warning against his easy confidence in his belief. To this Mad Tom made angry retort, and the pal subsided. They all talked freely before Toskin, and having learned what he was down the Mississippi to do, they took delight in having him draw sketches of them; some posed, and many as natural and easy as their habit at the steering wheel or sweep of a launch or scow.

There they were, six as bad and mean rascals as the river afforded, taking him in with them, knowing that he was honest—but a good fellow; glad to accommodate him with their looks and gestures, willing that he should sketch them when they knew it or not. One thing they emphatically refused, however, was to let him take their photographs. He could sketch them, in detail and all together, as they were, leaning over their tables in thieving scheme or debonair in wild fowl hunting—but they shied from photographs, which would serve to advertise their characteristics should any detective or police force know the need of capturing them.

But they enjoyed the photographs he took of other shanty boats, of other river people, of detail and general river scenery, snag, sand bar or lumping bank. In his river studies he found the river rats of irreplacable [sic] value as advisers, for they showed him the niceties of river features, the white streak of a fisherman's new jump line on a snag, the oar pinheads of shanty boats, the service of a long handy line in throwing Young's big storeboat out of the main current into an eddy, the old-fashioned stern oar, the pretty work of a tripper who used an outboard motor to drive his shanty boat from the dead water of an eddy out into the running channel. Every one of these suggestions which they made rang true with the completeness of their piratical river knowledge, and Toskin ended each day with his questionable friends, a dead-tired man, but with his brain full of data which his subconsciousness, working all night, had hardly time to sort, file away and tabulate for future reference.

For one thing, he trusted to his eyes and ears, not his tongue, to satisfy his curiosity. If he spoke it was never with a question on his lips—he talked of all affairs but those of his associates. For this reason, as well as for his remarkable indifference to spectral possibilities in his shanty boat, he was welcome to the men about him. He quite won the hearts of the two terrible women who cared for the piratical craft, the cooking and cleaning and often the navigating, while the men attended to their sundry affairs.

It seemed to Toskin that he had never in bis life seen such female humans. Their faces had lost all trace of sex, and were wrinkled, fixed of expression and sullen of countenance: when they it was with the vibrant tang of frogs, low, grunting and ventriloquial. Finding Toskin a willing listener, they told him, when the men were not near, stories of their own lives on the rivers, from above Pittsburgh to Fort Benton, from Shreveport to away up the Yazoo, from down Chaffelli to the dark corners of the Arkansaw and St. Francis.

He sketched them, to their delight, for somehow he was able to give their hard, sullen faces a certain expression the source of which he did not know himself. His pencil, chalk, and even his oils laid over the sketched outlines on a canvas, all displayed that something which he studied to learn its meaning—and one day when he sketched a snag from a photograph which he had taken, he saw a likeness, a vanishing line of ripple below the snag that trailed away in an odd, convoluting, twisting incurving. It was like the long, pitifully thin rat tail of braided hair down the back of Comanche, as one of the women was called.

With that startling hint Toskin made studies of the women with his little vest-pocket camera, risking their wrath if they should discover his efforts, but knowing that none of them, save Mad Tom, would visit his own boat because of the murder on it.

And thus Toskin, with a reading glass, ransacked the profiles and full faces of the women, till he knew that their faces were not, as he had at first supposed, devoid of all but sullen expression; they were crinkled and wrinkled, sun-tanned and wind-creased, squinted by bright light and dark night tripping, and curved with an odd humor, toughened by an age of indifference to all pangs but those of chill and hunger. He marveled at what he was discovering, and taking one of the profiles, that of Caprice—what a name!—he patiently plucked out of sketches and photograph tiny and nearly hidden lines and flickers of faintest expression, putting them on a card with water colors.

Working with tiny details, bent only on catching those elusive lines, and areas so small that on the camera prints they were nearly microscopic in size, he hardly noticed what result in toto he was obtaining. Then, happening to look at the portrait from a little distance, all the fine touches and tiny copied strokes blended into one, and he stood amazed by the thing that he had done—the portrait of a young, beautiful and wise—far too knowing!—young woman.

"Why, gracious!" he cried to himself. "What have I done?"

That was Caprice—a woman of one name, a pirate drudge and a bent-down river woman. He sat back and looked at the portrait for an hour. It was this that his artistic second sight had seen, and compelled him by minute and painful toil to steal from all his collection of note pictures and sketch lines. He wondered if his eyes had played him false? He could hardly believe that any such person was mingled with all the other characters in that old and squudgy [sic] woman.

Without comment he held it up in a little drift pile wood frame, and the pirates and women looked at it from their dinner table, to which be was late in coming. For a minute they gazed, and then a ribald grin stole across the features of Mad Tom; Jim Taken shrugged his shoulders and made a sneering remark; Comanche straightened up and uttered a cry of astonished recognition:

"Why, Caprice—"

Caprice stood half erect and leaned, with heavy-jowled face to see with eyes growing a bit dim, stared for a full minute up and down and across that picture; as she scrutinized it, her face softened, and the blank toughness seemed to recede, leaving a better rounded face.

"Sho, sho!" she said, and then throwing up her hands, turned and waddled down the cabin and into the narrow little stateroom of the main craft of the little pirate fleet, bellowing aloud with an emphasis that must have been comic, had it not been the wail of a heartbroken old hag who had recognized a picture of the girl that she had once been.

Toskin. as long as he lived, would remember that woman's sudden realization of her life. At the same time he could never again look into a human countenance without divining from its hidden lines of spiritual growth, or moral decay, secrets that must disturb his own satisfaction in human companionship; for old Mississip' had lavished on him a faculty, a power and a curse of understanding, the inspiration of discovering the endurance of humanity through trifling with virtue and taking as serious the minor things of life.

Mad Tom, next of Toskin's studies, displayed another phase. Caprice had been willful, and had chosen that name in the days when it meant something besides a river past. Mad Tom, little by little, gave to Toskin the more pitiful fact of his physical weakness, his mental lack of balance, his heart always sore with disappointment because nature had given him a bit of pride in looking well—and he was a horrid little wretch. In his desperation and indignation against his own fate, he had stormed off down the Mississippi, become crook, criminal, scoundrel and brute creator of wretched violence.

Toskin knew better than to show him, or any of his, the picture that revealed the hopeful and unconscious youth—too weak, too ignorant, too mean-souled, too contemptible ever to become anything remarkable to gratify his pride, yet always enduring the wish and crumbling under the desire, a homely little nobody with an appetite for bigger things. And Tom Maiton had raged and strived and grown reckless—and down old Mississip' he had found a leadership among the miserable of his own type, and gained a notoriety that helped him evade the pain of his lack of fame. A good little boy, a true youth, a cringing, browbeaten little man—till that day he fell upon a bigger, handsome, fine-favored youth and cut his heart out, because of a girl's sneer and cruel contempt. The analytical portrait and the old women's gossip gave Toskin the truth—to use when he should, if ever, be permitted to paint his way with inspired discoveries.

But as he discovered his new powers, Toskin felt in his soul the terrible dread that he should never be able to draw what he saw with his mind's eye; cultured critics could never overcome their repugnance against the crude color and the careless sweep of his brush—that fear smote him, and Toskin spent a sleepless night of foreboding, wretched because probably by the time he was through with his best work, he would still be one of the host and horde of—say, the undiscovered, disillusioned and disappointed.

Really, he was never so confident as when he was asking himself the question of whether his life was worth living or not. He was among low and degraded people; he was living in a kind of squalor amid a darkness of moral obloquy. He listened, without a qualm, to schemes of robbing commissaries—stores—up the bank; he heard Mad Tom tell about a bank, he knew, with millions in its vaults, guarded by a lock that would succumb to a little soup, if only the night marshal could be rendered helpless. Really, too, Toskin was particeps criminis, to the extent that he ate delicious beef, pork, chickens, and a dozen vegetable products. He knew the animals were killed in the brakes, the chickens snatched from their roosts, the vegetables filched—and yet he ate with good appetite!

"What's the river doing to me?" he wondered.

Oid Mississip' was doing to him apace, and opening the channel wide for undreamable things! A nice, innocent, ambitious and competent artist with some few refined and cultured feelings left, despite his several weeks down old Misassip', he sat in the river pirate council, pencil and sketch pad in hand, hardly conscious of what his ears recorded, he was so engrossed in fixing with lead the flashes and contortions of the faces before him.

Mad Tom had picked up a bit of news. He was indignant clear through. His weeks of talk had been to cheer his own sadness, but now he was desperate.

"Dona Voane's drappin' down the Mississip' with Dent Rillard!" Mad Tom said. "The Voane boat's tore up, they claim; Mrs. Voane's done drowned—an', boys, Rillard cain't marry that gal! No, suh! He's a scoundrel hisse'f! They didn't stop—he ain't got no seventeen dollars 'n' fifty cent 'vorce, an' that gal's—gal's—boys! I lost my fustest gal, 'count of a han'some city-bred scoundrel, an' I cut hisn heart out! Dona'd married me, if he hadn't come along. You know how 'tis?"

His voice broke into a whine, the shrill, shivering, whistling whine of a whipped man of the world, one conscious of his own inferiority in every way, and mad with anger because he had nothing in him with which to build up a personal competence in physical equality—what he might have done, carefully trained, given a real, rather than a common school education, none need try to surmise, Toskin reflected.

"I'm goin' to kill that scoundrel Rillard! He caught me foul, an' s'prised me wunst!" Mad Tom said, hoarsely. "Now hit's my turn—wunst for all! Wunst for all!"

His turn at last—time for him to stand up, with his weapons against another man with his, and exercising the guile and beguilements available to an undersized, crooked and stunted river rat.

Toskin, knowing only river rats on the river, speculated on this projected crime of murder to recover a woman. Somehow, the talk that must have amazed and alarmed him in any of his old haunts back home seemed here to be perfectly natural—and certainly none of his business—till he was asleep alone on his own boat, Mad Tom having joined his river pals on theirs.

Then he saw himself in the light of his old standards of morality, justice and standard laws. And when, the following day, lurking hidden in the brush of Half Moon Lake Island, he saw the Jungle, Denton Rillard's boat, go floating down, and heard Mad Tom chortling with angry delight at the near prospect of doing murder, he thought that he could not permit this crime. He must, in some way, prevent it, and when, after dark, the pirates and he went floating downstream looking for the sport's landing in eddy or against bank, he planned to give Rillard fair warning.

Somehow, in the river gloom, spurts of current separated the little fleet, or perhaps the pirates just decided to be shut of their softpaw associates for the time being. Toskin was carried down close to a caving bank, fought the current, and was suddenly swirled into an eddy only a rod wide and three or four rods long. He threw a line over a caved-down snag, deciding to wait for morning before venturing out into the swift, sawing current

He turned in to sleep the rest of the night. He was awakened by the hail of a huntress in the morning; she had been hunting, for she carried a wild gobbler.

"Howdy, on board, theh?" she hailed.

Looking out he saw a very comely, a very attractive young woman looking down at him.

"Did yo' see Mad Tom, or hisn's fleet lately?"

"Why, they went down last night—I lost them—"

"Lost you? Oh, yes. You're that painting and drawing fellow. I heard tell of you—yes. You say they went on down?"

"Yes—"

"How far?"

"Why, all night, unless they found um-m—"

"Oh, thank you! I know—you're a softpaw. Better let me help you out of this eddy with your boat—you might be tore up on some snags, just below. I lost my boat—and my mother"—she choked a little—"in a bend like this."

She came down, cast off the lines and took the sweeps, and Toskin, from in the cabin with his camera, stole picture after picture of this lithe and splendid figure as she swung the little shanty boat out into the current and with beautiful strokes carried it clear of the eddy edges and the swishing, pounding sawyers of trees that had caved off the wooded bank along that bend.

She took him down into Montgomery Chute, and around the bend, by Arkansaw New Mouth, where the Arkansaw flows with the waters of White River, landed him alongside the Jungle.

"Mr. Rillard!" she called. "Here is Mr. Toskin, the artist that's been with Mad Tom's pirates. They're looking for us, just as we've heard. They'll do murder—Mad Tom will. I cain't let yo'-all be killed on my account!"

Rillard stood in the engine pit of his cruiser and looked at Toskin with the tall, handsome, self-confident aloofness of a successful business man who is contemplating a dreaming genius.

"So you are Mr. Toskin?" Rillard smiled. "Haven't I heard of you—somewhere?

"Yes, sir; I think perhaps, yes, sir—" Toskin hesitated. "You see-partly—you helped pay for my art course!"

"Eh—what? How was that? Oh um-m—"

"Advertisements for your products—"

"That's so—I've been wondering; well—well, the world is small, isn't it? Um-m—yes!"

Rillard gave an alarmed glance in the direction of Dona Voane, and then an equally sidelong glance at Toskin—a glance the artist treasured long afterward, though at the moment he was far from pleased, and was asking himself a number of questions without showing his thoughts in his blank expression.

"Miss Voane's boat was sunk by a sawyer just below Helena," Rillard said, by way of explaining. "Her mother lost her life and she escaped by a very narrow margin. It was my fault. I was a fool—"

As he looked across the river, biting his lower lip, Toskin saw that Dona regarded him with an expression of utter contempt, though she veiled her expression on the instant. Whatever might be in Rillard's mind, Dona utterly despised him, and Toskin wondered at the exultant leap in his own heart that this was true.

"That's the murder boat, isn't it?" Dona inquired. "Seen any ghosts?"

Toskin admitted his night of panic, and described the coming of Mad Tom, like a water-logged spirit out of the river eddy. Dona smiled, and Rillard nodded with satisfaction.

"One of Colonel Sibley's people said you were up there and probably couldn't get out," Dona explained as they all three ate breakfast together on the motor boat. "And we wanted to know about Mad Tom; he's been talking all the way down about killing Mr. Rillard, here."

"Probably he'll stop in at the mouth of old Arkansaw," Toskin suggested. "He said you'd always stop there a while, Miss Voane."

"Not this trip. I'm going to Arkansaw City. I've friends in the eddy, there, and money 'll come from—from our property. Mother and I held it in joint accounts, so if one—one passed out—the other could draw it. You never know what 'll happen on old Mississip'!"

"You can take my boat," Toskin suggested in an aside, wondering at his prescience; "I'll wait at Arkansaw City."

"Lawsy—white man!" she whispered. "How'd you know what was in my heart?"