idea, he can work it up into a story. It takes
work, of course, and time."

"I don't see how anybody can do it." Carline shook his head. "There's a
man up to Gage. He wants to write a book, but he ain't never been able
to find anything to write about. You see, Gage ain't much but a little
landing, you might say."

"Chester, and the big penitentiary is just below there, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes!"

"I'd think there might be at least one story for him to write there."

"Oh, he don't want to write about crooks; he wants to write about nice
people, society people, and that kind, and big cities. He says it's
awful hard to find anybody to write about."

"You've got to look to find heroes," Terabon admitted. "I came more than
a thousand miles to see a shanty-boat."

"You di-i-d? Just to see a shanty-boat!" Carline stared at Terabon in
amazement.

In spite of Terabon being such a queer duck he made a good companion. He
was a good cook, for one thing, and when they landed in below Hickman
Bend, he went ashore and killed three squirrels and two black ducks in
the woods and marsh beyond the new levee.

When he returned, he found a skiff landed near by on the sandbar.
Carline was talking to the man, who had just handed over a gallon jug.
The man pulled away swiftly and disappeared down the chute. Carline
explained:

"He's a whiskey pedlar; a man always needs to have whiskey on board;
malaria is bad down here, and a fellow might catch cold. You see how it
is if a man don't have some whiskey on board."

"I understand," Terabon admitted.

After supper Carline decided that there was a lot of night air around,
and that a man couldn't take too many precautions against that deadly
river miasma whose insidious menace so many people have ignored to their
great cost. As for himself, Carline didn't propose to be taken bad when
he had so universal a specific, to take or leave alone, just as he
wanted.

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. The jug was on the floor, and Terabon, after a
little thought, poured out about two and a half quarts which he replaced
with distilled water from the motorboat's drinking bottle