Negligent and thoughtless, he could now feel some things which had never occurred to him before: his loneliness, his doubts, his very helplessness and indecision. His wife had been like an island around which he sailed and cruised, sure in his consciousness that he could return at any time to that safe mooring. He had returned to find the island gone, himself adrift on a boundless ocean, and he did not know which way to turn. The cays and islets, the interesting rocks and the questionable coral reefs supplied him with not the slightest semblance of shelter, support, or safety.
He did not even know which side of the river to go to, nor where to begin his search. He was wistful for human companionship, but as he looked at the distant shanty-boats, and passed a river town or two, he found himself diffident and shamed.
He saw a woman in a blue mother-hubbard dress leaning against the cabin of her low, yellow shanty-boat, a cap a-rake on her head, one elbow resting on her palm, and in the other a long-stemmed Missouri meerschaum. Her face was as hard as a man’s, her eyes were as blue and level as a deputy sheriff’s in the Bad Lands, and her lips were straight and thin. How could a man ask her if she had seen his wife going down that way?
He stopped his motor and let his boat drift. He wondered what he could or would say when he overtook 66 Nelia. There struck across his imagination the figure of a man, the Unknown who had, perhaps, promised her the care he had never given her, the affection which she had almost never had from him. Having won her, this Unknown would likely defy him down there in that awful openness and carelessness of the river.
He found a feeling of insignificance making its way into his mind. He had been vain of his looks, but what did looks amount to down there? He had been proud of his money, but what privilege did money give him on that flood? He had rejoiced in his popularity and the attention women paid him, but the indifferent gaze of that smoking Amazon chilled his self-satisfaction. He cringed as he seemed to see Nelia’s pretty eyes glancing at him, her puzzled face as she apparently tried to remember where she had seen him. The river wilted the crumpling flower of his pride.
As his boat turned like a compass needle in the surface eddies he saw a speck far up stream. He brought out his binoculars and looked at it, thinking that it was some toy boat, but to his astonishment it turned out to be a man in a skiff.
It occurred to Carline that he wished he could talk to someone, to any one, about anything. He had no resources of his own to draw on. He had always been obliged to be with people, talk to people, enjoy people; the silences of his wife’s tongue had been more difficult for him to bear than her edged words. The skiff traveller, leisurely floating in that block of river, drew him irresistibly. He kicked over the flywheel and steered up stream, but only enough partly to overcome the speed of the current. The sensation of being carried down in spite of the motor power, complicated with the rapid approach of the stranger in his skiff, was novel and amusing. When he stopped the motor, the rowboat 67 was within a hundred feet of him, and the two men regarded each other with interest and caution.
The traveller was unusual, in a way. On his lap was a portable typewriter, in the stern of the boat a bundle of brown canvas; a brass oil stove was on the bottom at the man’s feet; behind him in the bow were a number of tins, cans, and boxes.
Neither spoke for some time, and then Carline hailed:
“Nice, pretty day on the river!”