of them to look at it.

"Why," he shouted, "this is my shot gu----"

No more. His light went out on the instant and he felt that he was
suspended in mid-air, poised between the abyss and the heavens.

CHAPTER XXII

Fortune, or rather the Father of Waters, had favoured Parson Elijah
Rasba in the accomplishment of his errand. It might not have happened in
a decade that he locate a fugitive within a hundred miles of Cairo,
where the Forks of the Ohio is the jumping-off place of the stream of
people from a million square miles.

Rasba knew it. The fervour of the prophets was in his heart, and the
light of understanding was brightening in his mind. Something seemed to
have caught the doors of his intelligence and thrown them wide open.

In the pent-up valleys of the mountains, with their little streams,
their little trails, their dull and hopeless inhabitants, their wars
begun in disputes over pigs and abandoned peach orchards, their
moonshine and hate of government revenues, there had been no chance for
Parson Rasba to get things together in his mind.

The days and nights on the rivers had opened his eyes. When he asked
himself: "If this is the Mississippi, what must the Jordan be?" he found
a perspective.

Sitting there beside the wounded Jest Prebol, by the light of a big
table lamp, he "wrestled" with his Bible the obscurities of which had
long tormented his ignorance and baffled his mental bondage.

The noises of the witches' hours were in the air. Wavelets splashed
along the side and under the bow of the Prebol shanty-boat. The mooring
ropes stretched audibly, and the timber heads to which they were
fastened squeaked and strained; the wind slapped and hissed and whined
on all sides, crackling through the heavy timber up the bank. The great
river pouring by seemed to have a low, deep growl while the wind in the
skies rumbled among the clouds.

No wonder Rasba could understand! He could imagine anything if he did
not hold fast to that great Book which rested on his knees, but holding
fast to it, the whisperings and chucklings and hissings which filled the
river wilderness, and the deep tone of the flood, the hollow roar of the
passing storm, were but signs of the necessity of faith in the presence
of the mysteries.

So Rasba wrestled; so he grappled with the things he must know, in the
light of the things he did know. And a kind of understanding which was
also peace comforted him. He closed the Book