at him with open mouth.

"Why--that explains!" Terabon gasped.

"Explains what?"

"The heathen who was awed by the myriad impressions of Nature, and who
learned, by hard experience, that he must not neglect even the
apparently trivial things lest he suffer disaster."

Then Terabon fell to writing even more furiously in his day-by-day
journal, for that was something of this moment, although he has just
jotted down the renewed impression of coming into the bottoms at Cape
Girardeau. Rasba took up the pages of the notes which Terabon was
rewriting. Happily, Terabon's writing was like copper-plate script,
however fast he wrote, and the mountain man read:

Big hickory tree grove--Columbus Hickories--Largest cane in some
bend down below Helena--Spanish Moss bend--famous river
bend--Fisherman at Brickey's Mill told of hoop nets, trammels,
seines (stillwater bayous), jump, hand, snag, reef, lines----Jugging
for catfish down the crossings, half pound pork, or meat, for bait,
also called "blocking" for catfish.

"What will you do with all this?" Rasba asked.

"Why, I'll----" Terabon hesitated, and then continued: "It's like
building a house. I gather all this material: lumber, stone, logs,
cement, shingles, lathes, quick-lime, bricks, and everything. I store it
all up in this notebook; that's my lumber yard. Then when I dig the
foundation, I'll come in here and I'll find the things I need to build
my house, or mansion. Of course, to start with, I'll just build little
shacks and cabins. See what I mean? I am going to write articles first
and they're kind of like barns and shacks, and even mere fences. But by
and by I'll write fiction stories, and they will be like the mansions,
and the material will all fit in: all about a fisherman, all about a
market hunter, all about a drifter, all about a river----"

"All about a river woman?" Rasba asked, as he hesitated.

"I wasn't thinking that." Terabon shook his head, his colour coming a
little. "I had in mind, all about a River Prophet!"

"Sho!" Rasba exclaimed. "What could you all find to write about a Riveh
Prophet?"

Terabon looked at the stern, kindly, friendly, picturesque mountaineer
who had come so far to find one man, for that man's mother, and he
rejoiced in his heart to think that the parson did not know, could never
know, because of the honest simplicity of his heart, how extraordinarily
interesting he was.

So they drifted with the current, absorbe