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Carline recovered his equilibrium after a time. His nerves, long on the ragged edge, had given way, and he was ashamed of his display of emotion. "Seems as though some things are about all a man can stand," he said to Terabon, the newspaper man. "You know how it is!" "Oh, yes! I've had my troubles, too," Terabon admitted. "It isn't fair!" Carline exclaimed.
The other two stepped out to help enjoy the conversation and the scenery. "You know me?" she demanded. "Yessum, we shore do. My name's Despard Jet here and Cope." She acknowledged the introductions. "I've friends down here," she said, with a little catch of her breath. "I was wondering if you any of you gentlemen had seen them?" "Your man, Gus Carline an' that writin' feller, Terabon?"
Be'n runnin' my traps down the bank, yeah, an' along of the chute, gettin' rats. Yo' trappin'?" "No, just tripping," Terabon replied. "I was down to New Madrid this morning." "I'm just up from there. Ho law! Theh's one man I'd hate to be down below. I expect yo've hearn tell of them Despard riveh pirates? No!
Terabon was just a raw young man as regards women. He might flatter himself that he knew her sex, and that he could maintain a pose of writing her into his notebooks, but she knew.
Then Terabon fell to writing even more furiously in his day-by-day journal, for that was something of this moment, although he has just jotted down the renewed impression of coming into the bottoms at Cape Girardeau. Rasba took up the pages of the notes which Terabon was rewriting. "What will you do with all this?" Rasba asked.
Terabon looked at the stern, kindly, friendly, picturesque mountaineer who had come so far to find one man, for that man's mother, and he rejoiced in his heart to think that the parson did not know, could never know, because of the honest simplicity of his heart, how extraordinarily interesting he was. So they drifted with the current, absorbed in their immediate present.
Nelia and Terabon could not help but wish to keep closer in touch with the world. They picked up a copy of the Trade-Appealer, and then a copy of the Evening Battle Ax, just out. They read one headline: UNKNOWN DROWNS IN CRUISER
He stood there in his majesty while Terabon stooped unnoticed in the engine pit of the motorboat. Not till she had run down near enough to throw a line did she take her eyes off the mountain parson, and then she turned and looked into the eyes, dumb with misery, of the other man, Terabon. Her cheeks, red with her exertions, turned white.
"Say, boys, do you know if Terabon and Carline landed here to-night?" "We just landed in," one answered. "I don't know." "Going up town?" "Yes " "I want to know about them " "Hit's Nelia Crele!" one exclaimed. "That's right. Hello, boys Despard Jet Cope!" "Sure! When'd you land?" "Late this evening; I was up to Palura's when " "That ain't no place fo' a lady."
He said it over and over again, in a purring, jeering tone, and Terabon noticed that he was poised and tense. In the shadows on both sides of the policeman Terabon detected figures lurking and he was thrilled by the evident fact that one brave policeman had been sent alone into that deadly peril to confront a desperate gang of crooks, and that the lone policeman gloried to be there.
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