CHAPTER XV
The Mississippi River brings people from the most distant places to close proximity; Pittsburg and even Salamanca meet Fort Benton and St. Paul at the Forks of the Ohio. On the other hand, with uncanny certainty, those most eager to meet are kept apart and thrown to the ends of the world.
Parson Rasba saw Nelia Crele’s boat drift out into the current and drop down the Chute of Wolf Island, and impelled by solitude and imagination he followed her. She had awakened sensations in his heart which he had never before known, so he acted with primitive directness and moved out into the Mississippi.
The river carried him swiftly toward a town whose electric lights sparkled on a high bluff, Hickman, and he saw the cabin-boat of the young and venturesome woman clearly outlined between him and the town. For nearly an hour he was conscious of the assistance of the river in carrying him along at an even pace, permitting him to remain as guardian of the woman. He felt that she needed him, that he must help her, and there grew in his heart an emotion which strangely made him desire to sing and to shout.
He watched the cabin-boat drift down right into the pathway of reflections that fell from the lights on Hickman bluffs. His eyes were apparently fixed upon the boat, and he could not lose sight of it. The river carried him right into the same glare, and for a few minutes he looked up at the arcs, and shaded his eyes to get some view of the town whose sounds consisted of the mournful howling of a dog.
Rasba looked back at the town, and felt the awe 90 which a sleeping village inspires in the thoughts of a passer-by. He thought perhaps he would never again see that town. He wondered if there was a lost soul there whose slumberings he could disturb and bring it to salvation. He looked down the river, and the next instant his boat was seized as by a strong hand and whirled around and around, and flung far from its course. He remembered the phenomenon at the Forks of the Ohio, and again at Columbus bluff’s. With difficulty he found his bearings.
He looked around and saw to his surprise that he was drifting up stream. He looked about him in amazement. He searched the blackness of the river, and stared at the blinding lights of the town. He began to row with his sweeps, and look down stream whither had disappeared the cabin-boat whose occupant he had felt called upon to guard and protect.
That boat was gone. In the few minutes it had disappeared from his view. He surmised, at last, that he had been thrust into an eddy, for the current was carrying him up stream, and he rowed against it in vain. Only when he had floated hundreds of yards in the leisurely reverse current below the great bar of Island No. 6 and had drifted out into the main current again, almost under the Hickman lights once more, was he able in his ignorance to escape from the time-trap into which he had fallen.
Standing at his oars, and rowing down stream, he tried to overtake the young woman whose good looks, bright eyes, sympathetic understanding, and need of his spiritual tutoring had caught his mind and made it captive.
Dawn, following false dawn, saw him passing New Madrid, still rowing impatiently, his eyes staring down the wild current, past a graveyard poised ready to 91 plunge on the left bank, and then down the baffling crossing at Point Pleasant and through the sunny breadths up to Tiptonville, half sunk in the river, only to fall away toward Little Cypress—and still no sight of the lost cabin-boat.