e looked at the face
of the sandbar reef against which the little red shanty-boat had been
moored. The boat was gone!

Rasba, studying the hard sand, soon found the prints of bare feet, and
he knew that Prebol had taken his departure precipitately, but the
reason why was not so apparent to the man who had read many a wild
turkey track, deer runway, and trails of other game.

From sun-up till nearly noon, while he made and ate his breakfast, and
while he turned to the Scriptures for some hint as to this river man's
mind, his thoughts turned again and again to the pictures which Prebol's
tales, boastings, whinings, and condition had inspired.

He felt his own isolation, strangeness, and ignorance. He could not
understand the man who had fled from assistance and succour; at the same
time the liveliness of his fancy reverted again and again to the woman
living alone in such a desolation, shooting whoever menaced.

That type was not new to him. Up in his own country he had known of
women who had stood at their rifles, returning shot for shot of feud
raiders. The pathetic courage of the woman who had shot Prebol appealed
to him.

The wounded man, wicked beyond measure, and the woman assailed, he
realized, were like hundreds of other men and women whose shanty-boats
he had seen down the Ohio River, and which lurked in bends and reaches
on both sides of the Mississippi.

"Give thyself no rest!" he read, and he obeyed. He believed that he had
a black sin to expiate, and he dared not begin what his soul was
hungering to do, because knowing wickedness, he had deliberately
sinned.

Alternately, he read his Bible and prayed. Late in the day he dropped
out of the eddy and floated on down.

"I 'low I can keep on huntin' for Jock Drones," he told himself. "I
shore can do that, yes, indeed!"

CHAPTER VIII

Having rid herself of the leering river rat, Nelia Crele trembled for a
time in weak dismay, the reaction from her tense and fiery determination
to protect herself at all costs. But she quickly gathered her strength
and, having brewed a pot of strong coffee, thrown together a light
supper, and settled back in her small, but ample, rocking chair, she
reviewed the incidents of her adventure; the flight from her worthless
husband and her assumption of the right to protect herself.

After all, shooting a man was less than running away from her husband.
She could regard the matter with a rather calm spirit and even a