t. I'm not what you'd call a hard drinker; I like to take a
cocktail, or a whiskey, the same as any man. I like to go out around and
see folks, talk to 'em, dance--you know, have a good time!"

"Everybody does," Terabon admitted.

"And my wife, she wouldn't go around and she was--she was----"

"Jealous because you wanted to use your talents to entertain?"

"That's it, that's it. You understand! I'm a good fellow; I like to joke
around and have a good time. Take a man that don't go around, and he's a
dead one. It ain't as though she couldn't be a good sport--Lord! Why,
I'd just found out she was the best sport that ever lived. I thought
everything was all right. Next day she was gone--tricky as the devil!
Why, she got me to sign up a lot of papers, got all my spare cash,
stocks, bonds--everything handy. Oh, she's slick! Bright, too--bright's
anybody. Why, she could talk about books, or flowers, or birds--about
anything. I never took much interest in them."

"And brought up in that shack on Distiller's Island?"

"Stillhouse Island, yes, sir. What do you know about that?"

"A remarkable woman!"

"Yes, sir--I--I've got some photographs," and Carline turned to a
writing desk built into the motorboat. He brought out fifteen or twenty
photographs. Terabon looked at them eagerly. He could not associate the
girl of the pictures with the island shack, with this weakling man, nor
yet with the Mississippi River--at least not at that moment.

"She's beautiful," he exclaimed, sincerely.

"Yes, sir." Carline packed the pictures away.

He started the motor, straightened the boat out and steered into
mid-stream, looking uncertainly from side to side.

"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. I just sit in the skiff, there, and I write what I
see, on the machine: A big sandbar, a flock of geese, a big oak tree
just on the brink of the bank half the roots exposed and going to fall
in a minute or a day--everything like that!"

"I bet some of these shanty-boaters could tell you histories," Carline
said. "I tell you, some of them are bad. Why, they'd murder a man for
ten dollars--those river pirates would."

"No doubt about it!"

"But they wouldn't talk, 'course. It must be awful hard to make up them
stories in the magazines."

"Oh, if a man gets an