The Prophet pondered. The Mississippi had taught him many lessons. He was beginning to look for the lesson in casual phenomena, and when he said so to Terabon, the writer stared at him with open mouth.
“Why—that explains!” Terabon gasped.
“Explains what?”
“The heathen who was awed by the myriad impressions of Nature, and who learned, by hard experience, that he must not neglect even the apparently trivial things lest he suffer disaster.”
Then Terabon fell to writing even more furiously in his day-by-day journal, for that was something of this moment, although he has just jotted down the renewed impression of coming into the bottoms at Cape Girardeau. Rasba took up the pages of the notes which Terabon was rewriting. Happily, Terabon’s writing was like copper-plate script, however fast he wrote, and the mountain man read:
Big hickory tree grove—Columbus Hickories—Largest cane in some bend down below Helena—Spanish Moss bend—famous river bend—Fisherman at Brickey’s Mill told of hoop nets, trammels, seines (stillwater bayous), jump, hand, snag, reef, lines––Jugging for catfish down the crossings, half pound pork, or meat, for bait, also called “blocking” for catfish.
“What will you do with all this?” Rasba asked.
“Why, I’ll––” Terabon hesitated, and then continued: “It’s like building a house. I gather all this material: lumber, stone, logs, cement, shingles, lathes, quick-lime, bricks, and everything. I store it all up in this notebook; that’s my lumber yard. Then when I dig the foundation, I’ll come in here and I’ll find the things I need to build my house, or mansion. Of 235 course, to start with, I’ll just build little shacks and cabins. See what I mean? I am going to write articles first and they’re kind of like barns and shacks, and even mere fences. But by and by I’ll write fiction stories, and they will be like the mansions, and the material will all fit in: all about a fisherman, all about a market hunter, all about a drifter, all about a river––”
“All about a river woman?” Rasba asked, as he hesitated.
“I wasn’t thinking that.” Terabon shook his head, his colour coming a little. “I had in mind, all about a River Prophet!”