s condition
took a sudden turn for the better, Slip forgot his fears, and Buck burst
into a gay little whistled tune, which he could never whistle except
when he was absurdly and inexplicably merry.

CHAPTER XVII

Terabon's notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the
Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long,
lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little
bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off
there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more
into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or
cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood
itself.

His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and
gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump
under the term of "histories," but now, after his hundreds of miles of
association with the river, his thought took but brief note of those
trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as "river towns." He had
passed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the
prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!--bound but wearing away
its bonds.

Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed,
in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a
young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the
Mississippi River "spirit"--as he always quoted it in his calm and
dispassionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions--had
encompassed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him
down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been
called a "compromising position."

That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a
drunken stupor, and now in the late evening the fugitive wife was
taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat--and he
had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which
could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a
vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home--he thought the
phrase with difficulty--and he remembered the word "chaperon" as from a
foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.

His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of
uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the
occasion. "I'll show you I'm a dandy coo