might. She
wondered what other things he had written in his book of notes, and her
eye caught a page:

House boatmen are a bad lot. Once a young man came to work for a
farmer back on the hills. He'd been there a month, when one night he
disappeared; a set of double harness went with him. Another man hung
around a week, and raided a grocery store, filling washtubs with
groceries, cloth, and shoes--went away in a skiff.

She turned to where he travelled down the Mississippi with her husband
and read the description of Gus Carline's whiskey skiff man, his
purchase of a gallon of whiskey; the result, which her imagination
needed but few words to visualize; then Terabon's drifting away down
stream, leaving the sot to his own insensibilities.

Breathlessly she read his snatching sentences from bend to shoal, from
reach to reach, until he described her red-hull, white cabin-boat,
described the "young river woman" who occupied it; and then, page after
page of memoranda, telling almost her own words, and his own words, as
he had remembered them. What he wrote here had not been intended for her
eyes.

She's dropping down this river all alone; pirates nor scoundrels nor
river storms nor jeopardies seem to disturb her in the least. She
even welcomes me, as an interesting sort of intellectual specimen,
who can talk about books and birds and a multitude of things. She
may well rest assured that none of us river rats have any designs,
whatever, on a lady who shoots quick, shoots straight, and dropped
Prebol at thirty yards off-hand with an automatic!

She read the paragraph with interest and then with care; she did not
know whether to be pleased or not by that brutally frank statement that
he was afraid of her--suppose he hadn't been afraid? Then, of what was
he really afraid--not of her pistol! She read on through the pages of
notes. The description of the walk with her up the sandbar and back,
there at Island No. 10, thrilled her, for it told the apparently
trifling details--the different kinds of sands, the sounds, the night
gloom, the quick sense of the river presence, the glow of distant New
Madrid. He had lived it, and he wrote it in terms that she realized were
the words she might have used to describe her own observations and
sensations.

She searched through his notes in vain for any suggestion of the
emotions which she had felt. She shrugged her shoulders, because he had
not written anything t