The old, familiar, sharp division between right and wrong was presented to her gaze as if the river itself were calling her attention to it. She could not escape the necessity of a choice, with evil so persuasive and delightful and virtue so depressing and necessary.
She investigated Terabon’s outfit with curiosity and questioning. His typewriter, his maps, his few books, his stack of notes neatly compiled in loose-leaf files, were the materials which caught and held her fancy. She took them on board her shanty-boat and read the record which he had made, from day to day, from his inspection of Commission records at St. Louis to the purchase of his boat in shanty-boat town, and his departure down the river.
His words were intimate and revealing: 226
Oct. 5; In mid-stream among a lot of islands; rafts of ducks; a dull, blue day, still those great limestone hills, with hollows through which the wind comes when opposite—coolies?––; in the far distance a rowboat. On the Missouri side, the hills; on the other the flats, with landing sheds. Ducks in great flocks—look like sea serpents when flying close to the water; like islands on it—wary birds.
That was above the part of the river which she knew; she turned to Kaskaskia, and read facts familiar to her:
I met Crele, an old hunter-trapper, in a slough below St. Genevieve. He was talkative, and said he had the prettiest girl on a hundred miles of river. She had married a man of the name of Carline, real rich and a big bug. “But my gal’s got the looks, yes, indeed!” If I find her, I must be sure and tell her to write to her folks—river romance!
Nelia’s face warmed as she read those phrases as well it might. She wondered what other things he had written in his book of notes, and her eye caught a page:
House boatmen are a bad lot. Once a young man came to work for a farmer back on the hills. He’d been there a month, when one night he disappeared; a set of double harness went with him. Another man hung around a week, and raided a grocery store, filling washtubs with groceries, cloth, and shoes—went away in a skiff.
She turned to where he travelled down the Mississippi with her husband and read the description of Gus Carline’s whiskey skiff man, his purchase of a gallon of whiskey; the result, which her imagination needed but few words to visualize; then Terabon’s drifting away down stream, leaving the sot to his own insensibilities.
Breathlessly she read his snatching sentences from bend to shoal, from reach to reach, until he described her red-hull, white cabin-boat, described the “young 227 river woman” who occupied it; and then, page after page of memoranda, telling almost her own words, and his own words, as he had remembered them. What he wrote here had not been intended for her eyes.