e floated out of the eddy in his
shack-boat and began his journey down the rivers to the Mississippi,
where he would perform the one task that remained for him to do in the
service of God. He would find Jock, give him his mother's message, and
after that expiate his own sins in the deserved misery of an exiled
penitent.

Tug River was in flood, a heavy storm having cast nearly two inches of
rainfall upon part of the watershed. On the crest of the flood it was
fast running and there was no delay, no stopping between dawn and dusk.
Standing all day at the sweeps Rasba cleared the shore in sharp bends,
avoided the obstacles in mid stream, and outran the wave crests and the
racing drift, entering the Big Sandy and emerging into the unimaginable
breadths of the Ohio.

He had no time to waste on the Ohio. The object of his search was on the
Mississippi, hundreds of miles farther down, and he could not go fast
enough to suit him. But at that, pulling nervously at his sweeps and
riding down the channel line, he "gain-speeded," till his eyes were
smarting with the fury of the changing shores, and his arms were aching
with the pulling and pushing of his great oars, and he neither
recognized the miles that he floated nor the repeated days that ensued.

Long since he had escaped from his own mountain environment. The trees
no longer overhung his course; railroad trains screamed along endless
shores, bridges overhung his path like menacing deadfalls, and the
rolling thunder of summer storms was mingled with the black smoke of ten
thousand undreamed-of industries. The simplicity of the mountain
cornfields of his youth had become a mystery of production, of activity,
of passing phenomena which he neither knew nor understood. In his
thoughts there was but one beacon.

His purpose was to reach the Mississippi, take the young man in hand,
and redeem him from the evils into which he had fallen. His object was
no more than that, nor any less. From the confusion of his experiences,
efforts, and humiliations, he held fast to one fact: the necessity of
finding Jock Drones. All things else had melted into that.

The river banks fell apart along his course; the river ridges withdrew
to wide distances, even blue at times; mere V-gullies or U-gorges,
widened into vast corn fields. A post-office store-house at a rippling
ford gave way to smoking cities, rumbling bridges, paved streets, and
hurrying throngs. The lone fisherman in an 18-foot du