CHAPTER XVII
Terabon’s notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long, lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood itself.
His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump under the term of “histories,” but now, after his hundreds of miles of association with the river, his thought took but brief note of those trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as “river towns.” He had passed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!—bound but wearing away its bonds.
Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed, in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the Mississippi River “spirit”—as he always quoted it in his calm and dispassionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions—had encompassed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been called a “compromising position.”
That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a drunken stupor, and now in the late evening 103 the fugitive wife was taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat—and he had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home—he thought the phrase with difficulty—and he remembered the word “chaperon” as from a foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.
His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the occasion. “I’ll show you I’m a dandy cook,” she had said, and while he followed her on board the boat, with the two big black ducks to help prepare, he wondered and remembered and, in spite of his life-long avoidance of all appearance of evil, submitted to this irresistible circumstance, wherever it might lead.
So he built the fire in her kitchen stove. She mixed up dressing and seasoned the birds, made biscuit batter for hot-bread, brought out stacks and stores of things to eat, or to eat with, and they set the table, ground the coffee, and got the oven hot for the roasting and baking.
One thing took the curse off their position: They had to have all the windows and doors wide open so that they seemed fairly to be cooking on an open sandbar at the edge of the river. Terabon took an inward satisfaction in that fact. It is not possible to feel exceedingly wicked or depraved when there is a mile-wide Mississippi on the one hand and a mile-wide sandbar on the other side, and the sun is shining calmly upon the bright and innocent waters.