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What's his game? Coming up here and talking to us? Asking us all about the river and things writin' it for the newspapers?" "That woman's this Carline's wife!" Jet sneered. "Sure! An' here's Terabon an' here's Carline. Terabon don't talk none about that woman nor about Carline," Dock grumbled. "I bet Terabon would be sorry none if Carline hyar dropped out. Y' know she's Old Crele's gal," Jet said.
They've floated down all night!" Through his glasses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.
He's a fool, and they'll kill him like a rat! What can I do?" Obviously there was nothing that she could do, but Lester Terabon rose instantly. "I'd better drop down and see if I can't help him do something. I know that crew." "You'll do that for me!" her voice lifted in a cry of thankfulness. "Oh, if you would, if you would. I couldn't think of his being his being killed, trying to find me.
For an hour he babbled and then, as precipitately as he had arrived, he took his departure. When he was gone, Nelia Crele turned to Terabon with helpless dismay. Augustus Carline was worthless; he had been faithless to her; he had inflicted sufferings beyond her power of punishment or forgiveness. "But he's looking for me!" she recapitulated, "and he doesn't know.
Terabon, having put up the hoops of his skiff and stretched the canvas over them, retired to his own boat and spent two hours writing. In the morning, when he stirred out, he found Carline lying in the engine pit, oblivious to the night air that had fallen upon him, protected as he was by his absorption of the sure preventive of night air getting him first.
"There's no telling," he said, "not about anything." "On the river no one can tell much about anything!" Terabon assented. "You're just coming down, I suppose, looking for hist'ries to write?" "That's about it.
Nelia, having plagued the soul of the River Prophet, Rasba, now with equal zest turned to seize Terabon, careless of where the game ended if only she could begin it and carry it on to her own music and in her own measure.
She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing, that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin's most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring tears.
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.
Terabon was sorry when his cool, calculating mind refused to believe his eyes, which saw shapes; his flesh, which felt creeps; his ears, which heard voices; and his nostrils, which caught a whiff of a faint, sweet perfume more exquisite than any which he remembered.
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