“A remarkable woman!”
“Yes, sir—I—I’ve got some photographs,” and Carline turned to a writing desk built into the motorboat. He brought out fifteen or twenty photographs. Terabon looked at them eagerly. He could not associate the girl of the pictures with the island shack, with this weakling man, nor yet with the Mississippi River—at least not at that moment.
“She’s beautiful,” he exclaimed, sincerely.
“Yes, sir.” Carline packed the pictures away.
He started the motor, straightened the boat out and steered into mid-stream, looking uncertainly from side to side.
“There’s no telling,” he said, “not about anything.”
“On the river no one can tell much about anything!” Terabon assented.
“You’re just coming down, I suppose, looking for hist’ries to write?”
“That’s about it. I just sit in the skiff, there, and I write what I see, on the machine: A big sandbar, a flock of geese, a big oak tree just on the brink of the bank half the roots exposed and going to fall in a minute or a day—everything like that!”
“I bet some of these shanty-boaters could tell you histories,” Carline said. “I tell you, some of them are bad. Why, they’d murder a man for ten dollars—those river pirates would.”