was a painful
and dangerous shoulder shot. He cleared away the stains, washed the
hole, plucked the threads of cloth out of it, turned the man on his face
and, with two quick slashes of a razor, cut out the missile which had
done the injury.

Healing liniment, the inevitable concoction of a mountaineer's cabin,
soothed while it dressed the wound. Pads of cotton, and a bandage
supplied the final need, and Rasba stretched his patient upon the
cabin-boat bunk, then looked out upon the world to which he had
drifted.

It was still a vast river, coming from the unknown and departing into
the unknown. He knew it must be the Mississippi, but he acknowledged it
with difficulty.

He did not ask the man about the bullet. Born and bred in the mountains,
he knew that that would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette. But the
wounded man was uneasy, and when he was eased of his pain, he began to
talk:

"I wa'nt doin' nothing!" he explained, "I were jes' drappin' down, up
above Buffalo Island, an' b'low Commerce, an' a lady shot me--bang! Ho
law! She jes' shot me thataway. No 'count for hit at all."

"A lady you knowed?" Rasba asked.

"No suh! But she's onto the riveh, into a shanty-boat, purty, too, an'
jes' drappin' down, like she wa'nt goin' no wheres, an' like she mout of
be'n jes' moseyin'. I jes 'lowed I'd drap in, an' say howdy like, an'
she drawed down an' shot--bang!"

"Was she frightened?"

"Hit were a lonesome reach, along of Powerses Island," the man admitted,
whining and reluctant. "She didn't own that there riveh. Hain't a man no
right to land in anywheres? She shot me jes' like I was a dawg, an' she
hadn't no feelin's nohow. Jes' like a dawg!"

"Did you know her?"

"No, suh. We'd be'n drappin' down, an' drappin' down--come down below
Chester, an' sometimes she'd be ahead, an' sometimes me, an' how'd I
know she wouldn't be friendly? Ain't riveh women always friendly? An'
theh she ups an' shoots me like a dawg. She's mean, that woman, mean an'
pretty, too, like some women is!"

Rasba wondered. He had been long enough on the Ohio to get the feeling
of a great river. He saw the specious pleading of the wounded wretch,
and his quick imagination pictured the woman alone in a vast, wild wood,
at the edge of that running mile-wide flood.

"Of co'rse!" he said, half aloud, "of co'rse!"

"Co'rse what?" the man demanded, querulously.

"Co'rse she shot," Rasba answered, tartly. "Sometimes a lady jes'
naturaly h