Other shanty-boaters were dropping down before the approach of winter. Sometimes one or another would drift near to Rasba’s boat and there would be an exchange of commonplaces.
“How fur mout hit be, strangeh?” he would ask each man. “’Low hit’s a hundred mile yet to the Mississippi?”
A hundred miles! They could not understand that this term in the mountain man’s mind meant “a long ways,” if need be a thousand or ten thousand miles. When one answered that the Mississippi was 670 miles, and another said it was a “month’s floating,” their replies were equally without meaning to his mind. Rasba could not understand them when they talked of reaches, crossings, wing dams, government works, and chutes and islands, but he would not offend any of them by showing that he did not in the least understand what they were talking about. He must never again hurt the feelings of any man or woman, and he must perform the one service which the Deity had left for him to perform.
Little by little he began to understand that he was 27 approaching the Mississippi River. He saw the Cumberland one day, and two hours later, he was witness to the Tennessee, and that long, wonderful bridge which a railroad has flung from shore to shore of the great river. The current carried him down to it, and his face turned up and up till he was swept beneath that monument to man’s inspiration and the industry of countless hands.
Rasba had seen cities and railroads and steamboats, but all in a kind of confusion and tumult. They had meant but incidents down the river; this bridge, however, a structure of huge proportions, was clearly one piece, one great idea fixed in steel and stone.
“How big was the man who built that bridge?” he asked himself.
While yet the question echoed in his expanding soul he hailed a passing skiff:
“Strangeh! How fur now is it to the Mississippi River?”
“Theh ’tis!” the man cried, pointing down the current. “Down by that air willer point!”