“But where would she go?” the frantic husband demanded. “Did she never talk about going anywhere?”
“Well-l,” Old Crele meditated, “peahs like she used to go down an’ watch Ole Mississip’ a heap. What’d she use to say, Old Woman? I disremember, I ’clar I do.”
“Why, she was always wishing she knowed where all that river come from an’ where all it’d be goin’ to,” Mrs. Crele at last recollected.
“But she wouldn’t dare—She wouldn’t go alone?” Carline choked.
“Prob’ly not, a gal favoured like her,” Old Crele admitted, without shame. “I ’low if she was a-picking, she’d ’a’ had the pick.”
Cold rage alternated with hot fear in the mind of Gus Carline. If she had gone alone, he might yet overtake her; on the other hand, if she had gone with some man, he was in honour bound to kill that man. He was sensitive, now, on points of honour. The Widow Plosell, having succeeded in creating a favourable condition, from her viewpoint, sought to take advantage of it. 47 She was, however, obliged to go seeking her recent admirer, only to discover that he blamed her—as men do—for his trouble. She consulted a lawyer to see if she could not obtain financial redress for her unhappy position, only to learn of her own financial danger should Mrs. Carline determine upon legal revenge.
Carline, between trying to convince himself that he was the victim of fate and the innocent sufferer from a domestic tragedy brought upon himself by events over which he had no control, fell to hating liquor as the chief cause of his discomfiture.
Then a whisper that became a rumour, which at last seemed to be a fact, said that Nelia Carline was somewhere down Old Mississip’. Someone who knew her by sight was reported to have seen her in Cape Girardeau, and the husband raced down there in his automobile to see if he could not learn something about the missing woman, whose absence now proved what a place she had filled in his heart.
There was no doubt of it. Nelia had been there, but no one had happened to think to tell Carline about it. She had landed in a pretty shanty-boat, the wharf-master said, and had pulled out just before a river man in a brick-red cabin-boat of small size had left the eddy. The river man had dropped in just behind her, and, according to the wharf-master:
“I shore kept my eyes on that man, for he was a riveh rat!”