right alongside o' me? If old farmer Snider, that owns
this land, hadn't gone to town I'd have the law on ye. Me payin' my
money in and gettin' no protection. Fishin's rotten, too!"

I now perceived that we had encountered one of those half-nomad
characters, a fresh-water pearl fisherman, such as those who, for some
years, with varying fortune, have combed the sand-bars of our inland
river for the fresh-water mussels which sometimes, like oysters,
secrete valuable pearls or nacreous bits known as slugs. This
explained much to me.

"I know the law," said I. "Farmer Snider can not lease the highway of
yonder river where the _Sea Rover_ passes. But I know also the law of
the wilderness. One trapper does not intrude on another who has first
located his country. We will pass on to-morrow. Meantime, if you don't
mind, we will go with you to your camp and see how you do your work.
Please forget that we have had any trouble. Had you but spoken thus at
first, and not borne war against these bold pirates, all would have
been well."

He looked at me oddly, evidently thinking my mind touched.

"Come!" I said, wiping the blood from my face, and passing him also a
basin of water, "you fought well and the wonder is you did not kill me
with one of those swings or swipes of yours. They were crooked and
awkward, but they came hard."

He grinned and saved his face further by saying: "Well, you was three
to one ag'in me." I smiled and let it stand so: and after a while, he
arose stiffly and we all passed back into the wood.

We found that we were upon a little island, between two shallow arms
of the stream. The camp of the pearl fisher lay at the lower end; and
never have I seen or smelled so foul a place for human habitation. The
one large tent served as shelter, and a rude awning sheltered the
ruder table in the open air. But directly about the tent, and all
around it in every direction, lay heaps of clam shells, most of them
opened, some not yet ready for opening. I had smelled the same
odor--and had not learned to like it--in far-off Ceylon, at the great
pearl fisheries of the Orient. The "clammer" seemed immune.

Presently, he introduced to us a woman, very old, extraordinarily
forbidding of visage, and unspeakably profane of speech, who emerged
from the tent; his mother, he said. It seemed that they made their
living in this way, clamming, as they called it, all the way from
Arkansas to the upper waters of the Mississippi. T