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Updated: June 27, 2025
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.
He went to his skiff, raised the cover, and crawled into his canvas hammock which was swung from both sides of his boat. Before going to sleep he looked under the canvas at the river, at the stars, at the dark cabin-boat forty feet distant in the eddy. At the same moment he saw a face against a window pane in the cabin. "What does it mean?" he asked himself, but there was no answer.
A little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling currents at the bend. The sun drew nearer the tree tops. The little cabin-boat was seeking a place to land or anchor for the night.
There was no doubt of it. Nelia had been there, but no one had happened to think to tell Carline about it. She had landed in a pretty shanty-boat, the wharf-master said, and had pulled out just before a river man in a brick-red cabin-boat of small size had left the eddy.
It still pleased his fancy to say that he was interviewing the Mississippi River as he might interview the President of the United States. But as Lester Terabon rowed his skiff back up the eddy above New Madrid, and breasted the current in the sweep of the reach to that little cabin-boat half a mile above the Island No. 10 light, his attitude was undergoing a conscious change.
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 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.
Leaning against the wall of the cabin-boat was a tall, slender young man with arms folded. "How's he comin' Doc'?" the young man was saying. "He'll be all right. How long has he been this way?" "Don't know, Doc; he come down the riveh an' drifted into this eddy. I see his lips movin', so I jes' towed 'im in an' sent fo' yo'!" "Just as well, for that wound sure needed dressing.
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.
His cabin-boat, but a rectangular shade amidst the river shadows, drifted like a leaf or chip, with no sound except when a coiling jet from the bottom suckled around the corners or rippled along the sides. The current carried him nearly six miles an hour, but two or three times his boat ran out of the channel and circled around in an eddy, and then dropped on down again.
I don't want to forget this; got to put this down. Poor devil!" "And he says he's a sinner himself," Nelia repeated, when she returned on board her cabin-boat in the sheltering safety of Wolf Island chute, with Mamie Caope, Parson Rasba, and the other shanty-boaters within a stone's toss of her.
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