. He wondered what had become of the woman for
love of whom he had let go all holds and degenerated to this heartless
occupation of common gambler?

True to Slip, he had watched the river for the stranger whose inquiries
had been carried down in fair warning to all the river people--and Buck,
suddenly conscious of his own part in that river system, laughed in
surprise.

"Why," he said to himself, "humans are faithful to one another! It's
what they live for, to be faithful to one another!"

It was an incredible, but undeniable theory. In spite of his own wilful
disbelief in the faith of mankind, here he was sitting by one poor
devil's bed while he kept his weather eye out upon the rough river in
the interests of another--a murderer! He pondered on the question of
whether any one kept faith with him. His mind cried out angrily, "No!"
but on second thought, in spite of himself, he realized distinctly that
he had let one person's faithlessness overcome his trust of all others.

No day on the Mississippi is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a
dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which
depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling
wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry
gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an early spring.
Steamboats are driven into the refuge of landing or eddy, and if the
power craft cannot stand the buffetings, much less are the exposed
little houseboats, toys of current and breeze, able to escape the
resistless blasts. So the wind possesses itself of the whole river
breadth and living creatures are driven to shelter.

Prebol, shot through and conscious of the reward of his manner of
living; Slip, a fugitive under the menace of a murderer's fate; and
Buck, given over to melancholy, were but types on the lengths and
tributaries of the indifferent flood.

Nothing happened, nothing could happen. The arrival of Slip from his
restless bunk relieved Buck of his vigil, and he went to bed and slept
into the dawn of another day--a day like the previous one, and fit to
drive him up the bank, into the woods, and among the fallen branches of
rotten trees seeking in physical activity to check the mourning and
tauntings of a mind over which he found, as often before, that he had no
control.

And yet, when the storm suddenly blew itself out with a light puff and a
sudden flood of sunshine, just as the sun went down, Prebol'