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Updated: June 1, 2025
The situation is thus quite romantic; just beside it is the old nunnery, with its dentated gables, and not far off the ruins, in whose depths the common people believe that there resides an evil being, "the river-man," who annually demands his human sacrifice, which he announces the night before. Behind this lie meadows, villas, and green woods.
This particular river, and this particular part of the river, were trying to the river-man and his clans. It needed a dam, and the great lumber-king was planning to make one not three hundred yards from where they were. The boy and the girl resting idly upon a great warm rock had their own business to consider. The boy kept looking at his boots with the brass- tipped toes. He hated them.
Indeed, the average Chinese river-man or agriculturist, the simple-hearted children of the water and the soil, seem to regard the Fankwae as a creature so remarkably comical, that the mere mention of him causes them to laugh. Near the end of the canon the boat is moored at a village for the day, and my knee feeling much better from the rest, I pursue my course up the bank of the river.
He wondered whether the current would swing it clear; and now watched it with interest since he had once heard a river-man declare that anything that surrendered itself completely to a current would clear obstructions.
In another moment he would have shouted Black Roger's name, but even as the words were on his lips, mingled with a gasp of pain, the giant river-man stopped where the forest seemed suddenly to end in a ghostly, smoke-filled space, and when David came up behind him, he was standing at the black edge of a cliff which leaped off into a smoldering valley below.
"Any one would think," said Compton, "that nothing had happened that we had not been lost, and that he had not brought us into this mess." "Steady," said Mr. Hume, with a smile. "Dick is right, sir. If it had not been for him, I should have been dead. I am a little bit excited now; but I will tell you all soon. Well, Muata?" "Wow!" exclaimed the chief, who had been talking with the river-man.
I'll come for that some other time if you'll be good enough to let me?" "Then you expect to remain in the neighborhood?" "I've given up the river, and I'm going to get hold of some land " "Land?" said Betty, with a rising inflection. "Yes, land." "I thought you were a river-man?" "I'm a river-man no longer. I am going to be a planter now. But I'll tell you why, and all about it some other day."
"Father says if we go we can take Alexander Pop along to do the cooking and dirty work. The houseboat is now in charge of an old river-man named Captain Starr, who knows the Ohio and Mississippi from end to end, and we can keep him on board." "It certainly looks inviting," mused Dick Rover.
"The brutes," muttered Compton, turning white. "I don't wonder," said Venning, in a whisper. "This place is enough to breed any horror." "It will be safe to land," said the chief, quietly. "But what of the arrow?" "That was not shot by a man-eater. It was the arrow of a river-man; maybe the same man loosened it as tied the fetish cloth to the pole, for one has been here since the man-eaters left."
The boys were uncomfortable. Their skins were clammy, their eyes were heavy, and their limbs languid. Mr. Hume was glad to sit down, and even Muata showed the effect of the muggy atmosphere in a dulling of his skin. The river-man, sullen and silent, was alone apparently unaffected; but they did not reckon him one of the party, for no one of them had broken through his apathy.
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