Alternately, he read his Bible and prayed. Late in the day he dropped out of the eddy and floated on down.
“I ’low I can keep on huntin’ for Jock Drones,” he told himself. “I shore can do that, yes, indeed!”
CHAPTER VIII
Having rid herself of the leering river rat, Nelia Crele trembled for a time in weak dismay, the reaction from her tense and fiery determination to protect herself at all costs. But she quickly gathered her strength and, having brewed a pot of strong coffee, thrown together a light supper, and settled back in her small, but ample, rocking chair, she reviewed the incidents of her adventure; the flight from her worthless husband and her assumption of the right to protect herself.
After all, shooting a man was less than running away from her husband. She could regard the matter with a rather calm spirit and even a laughing scorn of the man who had thought to impose himself on her, against her own will.
“That’s it!” she said, half aloud, “I needn’t to allow any man to be mean to me!”
She had given her future but little thought; now she wondered, and she pondered. She was free, she was independent, and she was assured of her living. She had even been more shrewd than old Attorney Menard had suspected; the money she had left with him was hardly half of her resources. She had another plan, by which she would escape the remote possibility of Menard’s proving faithless to his trust, as attorneys with his opportunities sometimes have proved.
Nelia Crele could not possibly be regarded as an ordinary woman, as a mere commonplace, shack-bred, pretty girl. Down through the years had come a strain of effectiveness which she inherited in its full strength; she was as inexplicable as Abraham Lincoln. Her stress of mind relieved, she regarded the shooting 38 of the man with increasing satisfaction, since by such things a woman could be assured of respect.