“Me pray fo’ any man again,” he gasped. “Lawse! Lawse!”
He didn’t feel fit to pray for himself, let alone for any other sinner, but there came to his memory a picture of Mrs. Drones, a motherly little woman who had taken him home to a dinner at which seven kinds of preserved fruit were on the table, and where the family laughed around the fireplace—only to see Jock a fugitive the next night, and the terrors of a feud war upon them.
“And Jock’s getting bad down the Mississippi River!” Rasba repeated to himself, striving to grapple with that fact. He could not think clearly or coherently. 16 The widow’s voice, however, was as clearly speaking in his thoughts as though she stood there, instead of merely having written to him. He took to walking up and down the floor, back and forth, on one plank.
He had forgotten that there was such a thing for humans as sleep. The incongruity of his having been wide awake for two days and two nights did not occur to him till suddenly his eyes turned to the bed in the corner of the room and its purpose was recalled to his mind. He blinked at it. His eyes opened with difficulty. He threw chunks on the fire and went toward the bed, but as he stood by it the world grew black before his eyes and clutching about him, he sank to the floor.
CHAPTER IV
Nelia Carline would not return to that miserable little river-bottom cabin where she had grown up in unhappy privation. She had other plans. She drove the little automobile down to Chester, put it in the Star Garage, then walked to the river bank and gave the eddy a critical inspection.
For years she had lived between the floods of the river and the poverty of the uplands. Her life had often crossed that of river people, and although she had never been on the river, she had frequently gone visiting shanty-boaters who had landed in for a night or a week at the bank opposite her own shack home. She knew river men, and she had no illusions about river women. Best of all now, in her great emergency, she knew shanty-boats, and as she gazed at the eddy and saw the fleet of houseboats there her heart leaped exultantly.
No less than a score of boats were landed along the eddy bank, and instantly her eyes fell upon first one and then another that would serve her purpose. She walked down to the uppermost of the boats, and hailed from the bank: