# Diamond Tolls/Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII
MURDONG slept steadily and deeply under his flat arch canvas canopy. He had slept for a long time, he felt, when something awakened him suddenly from his slumbers. His eyes opened as consciousness returned—with his senses appeared a feeling of startled and subdued excitement. Something was different, something was wrong.
For a man of poetic temperament he was a well-found river tripper. His hand crept down his side and seized a pistol butt. There he let it rest, having made certain that nothing had hooked over the receiver and that the muzzle was free.
Outside of his skiff he heard a steady if subdued paddling. He knew the sound well, for he had jacked for deer in northern Michigan ponds, for the excitement of violating the game law, as much as anything else. A paddle was cutting the water, and through the skiff were occasional bumps, as craft struck craft—slight shocks, but perfectly apparent to the skiff man, though his pneumatic mattress was a shock absorber.
Soon Murdong divined what had happened. One ​of the river sneak thieves had slipped into the stern of Mrs. Haney's boat and cut loose the dangling skiff, thinking it was unoccupied. The pirate had no idea any one was in the skiff. The situation struck Murdong as humorous. Yet it had its serious side, too. A river pirate, no less than one of the bounding main, dislikes being cheated of his loot, and kills on slight provocation.
Murdong, with infinite caution, divested himself of his blankets, and buckled his belt. He listened for sounds to help him discover the exact location of the craft alongside. Little by little, the pirate lengthened his stroke and put noisier vigour into it.
This helped Murdong in his own scheme, now rapidly forming in his mind. He imitated a worm as nearly as possible, crawling toward the stern, glad of the counterbalance of his luggage in the bow of the skiff. The canoe was on the starboard side, and occasional jerks on the canvas indicated that the canoe was lashed bow and stern to the skiff by twine or hooks.
Murdong cautiously raised the overhang of the canvas, covered the back of the pirate with his automatic, and then pulled the slip nooses to throw the canvas forward, leaving him sitting in the stern seat, in the open air. When Murdong was all ready, he carefully pushed the canvas covering clear, and turning on his electric flash, remarked:
​"Good evening, sir!"
"Ah-ah-ah!" the pirate choked, freezing where he sat, his paddle pattering in and out of the water, his hands shaken by the cold that turned his spine to ice.
The flash made a circle of radiance in a fog that accumulated over the river, and in this circle the shrunken little figure of a river rat made a gigantic silhouette of a preposterous, insect-like figure.
"Where would you rather I'd shoot you?" Murdong asked, pleasantly. "In the head, or through your heart?"
"Oh, Gawd! Don't kill me!" the man found voice to wail, and a bank answered by echo.
"No? A gentleman hates to have his sleep disturbed by being stolen!" Murdong exclaimed. "You murdered my sleep, and the punishment is death, you know that!"
"I nevah meant no harm! This cunnar—I was sairt of hit! I got a lil gal—my wife's dead—down to Vicksburg. I'm dropping down to see her. Old Mississip's so big I was scared of the canoe. I hadn't no money to buy a skiff—an' so—an' so——"
"So you paddled me down here to cut my throat and steal my skiff!"
"'Fore Gawd, I didn't know a man was into hit! ​I 'lowed hit were a gasolene skiff. Don't kill me, Mister!"
"Shucks!" Murdong exclaimed, impatiently. "You wouldn't feel it a bit. Just a big bump, and you'd be dead——"
"My Gawd! Don't kill me!" the man begged. "Don't kill me!"
"But it won't hurt. Hold still——"
"Ah—ah—ah," gasped the little wretch, like a man sinking slowly in cold water.
"Don't you want to be put out of your misery?" Murdong asked, in polite surprise. "Why, I thought people like you were so unhappy they would rather die than live."
"Oh, Gawd!" choked the captured pirate. "Ain't you got no mercy?"
Murdong considered. He smiled grimly. He knew what the wretch was thinking. The pirate believed that Murdong was one of those heartless feline types of men who delight in torturing before they kill. Murdong had been slashed and wretched mentally by that kind of persons who despised poetic temperaments. Gurley, of the Fredonia, a star reporter and a savage toward office boys and cub reporters, was that kind.
"Well, you lied about your wife in Vicksburg," Murdong declared. "I don't think a man ought to ​die with a lie on his conscience. You'd better tell the truth, you know. You're just a cheap pirate and sneak thief, aren't you? What's your name?"
"Yas, suh. Storit, suh. You'll hear. I was rich, but a feller belted me——"
"You have a boat of your own somewhere along here?"
"Yas, suh."
"Where's your partner?"
"I—they ketched him to Cairo."
"Oh, chain gang, eh?"
"Yes, suh. He'll be down in three months."
"From when?"
"October 10."
"Where'll you meet him?"
"Mendova."
"What kind of a boat do you live in?"
"Tar house, suh."
"Slide that revolver, holster, and your belt under my canvas there. Careful you don't get the revolver out of the holster, and don't drop it!"
The man did as bidden.
"Well, I guess I won't kill you till morning, now," Murdong remarked, meditatively, and then with decision, "I think I'll kill you down below, somewhere, if I should happen to meet you anywhere. Let me see that face of yours!"
​The fellow turned and displayed a face with little, frightened, stone-coloured eyes; bristling, unshaven countenance; long, shaggy gray hair; narrow, crooked shoulders, and long bony hands.
"Yes, I'll know you when I meet you; I'll know your voice at night and your face by day," Murdong decided. "Cut loose!"
The man gave two twitches at two pieces of trot line, and the canoe—a hollowed log canoe—drifted free from the skiff.
"Now paddle for your life!" Murdong ordered.
The river man slapped his paddle into the current, like a scared and diving muskrat, gave a quick thrust, then another thrust, and where he had been the fog swirled in and the thief was gone. Murdong heard him paddling swiftly away with receding sounds when the appalling silence of a Mississippi river fog in the midnight settled upon him.
Not a sound, not a motion, except wreathing wisps and rags of fog, and coiling surface waters, broke the dark and gloom. When he doused the flash Murdong felt as though the skies might fall down upon him. A more awesome gloom he had never felt before in his life. It fairly seemed to smother—it even gave him a sensation of being crushed.
There did not seem to be anything he could do to escape. He could not tell which was up, down, or ​toward the banks. Now that he had disposed of his pirate he felt a chill gathering upon him, prickling his skin with goose pimples. He missed the warmth of his blankets. He dared not return to them, however, for it was unthinkable to leave his boat floating in mid-river while he turned in to sleep.
So he floated down for what seemed an age, a blanket drawn tightly around his shoulders. He listened for sounds that would help him know where he was in relation to the bank. He heard nothing for a long time. Then a voice suddenly burst out of the fog, a few yards distant:
"Ain't I a dangblasted old fool! I cayn't find the bank! Where in dangnation's the bank? I neveh ought to have touched that danged skiff. That soft-paw'd killed me, sure as I'm borned, if he hadn't been a danged fool! I'd ought to be killed, danged old numb-skull! Now I got to paddle up this old river forty-fifty mile, back to my shantyboat. Damblast this Old Mississip'! Well, I'll try goin' thataway. I don't want float all night! I'll be clear to New Madrid 'fore mornin'!"
The lost river rat began to paddle angrily. When he had taken a dozen strokes Murdong cupped his hands over his mouth, turned his face toward the interior of his canvas-topped boat, and laughed slowly, deeply, and with rollicking cadence:
​"Haw—haw. Haw-w-w!"
The paddling ceased.
"Jee-Gawd!" a voice gasped, and then the paddle slapped into the water and Murdong could hear the water hissing under the bow of the canoe.
"Ha-a-a!" Murdong laughed.
Counting the paddle strokes, Murdong found that the man was making about fifty-four a minute—a rate that rapidly took the canoe out of hearing.
"The gentleman seemed to be alarmed," Murdong remarked, with surprise. "I wonder why?"
Murdong accepted his predicament with philosophical alertness. The sensation of being carried into the jaws of doom was novel, entertaining, but of questionable pleasure. Murdong could not be certain that he was really being rushed along by the mid-river current, except for the wifts of fog dragging past his countenance. The pressure of the fog was the only physical fact of motion apparent, and it was a slight one, which he could see with his eyes when he shot the light of his electric flash into the night.
"So this is the lower river," Murdong mused. "Pirates and silences, gloom of fogs, and the rush to doom—ugh!"
Murdong was afraid the boat might be sucked into a caving bank somewhere, or strike a snag in a crossing shoals, or be run down by a steamer. He did not ​know that a steamer could not run in the fog on the river. He was not yet familiar enough with river life to know that shantyboaters often cut loose when the wind goes down at sunset and sleep most of the night, fog or no fog, with a running light on the cabin to warn steamers to keep clear. He must needs sit awake when he might have been sleeping.
Morning began at last to diffuse light through the fog. The surface of the water became visible, and the dawn swept by, followed almost instantly by sunshine skipping across the top of the bank, light raining down through mist in white sheets.
Murdong, now hungry after his adventure and his vigil, rolled back the canvas covering his boat, took down the hickory hoops, and brought out his two little pump-jet blue-flame oil stoves. Putting them on the footboard, he lighted one and put on his coffee percolator. Then he sliced a round leaf from a smoked ham and put it into a frying pan over the other stove. Shortly the sizzle filled the air with fragrance. Around the slice of ham he placed coins of cold boiled potato to fry them. When they were browned on the bottom he turned them over. Having cooked a plenty, he broke two fresh eggs into the pan beside the meat, turned them quickly, and then his breakfast was ready.
A board eighteen inches wide with a cleat on the ​bottom, and just long enough to reach the width of the boat, and rest on the gunwales, served as a table. On this he served his breakfast, eating on paper plates, which reduced nauseating dishwashing to the minimum. He dined at his leisure, and while he dined the warm sunshine dissipated the fog, which broke into gray floating islands upon the surface of the river, finally lifting and bursting into thin air.
G. Alexander Murdong sighed in a comforting frame of mind. He had fled from the turmoil and hurry and excitement of crowded, unresting humanity—beaten and hating himself more than he hated the people whose standards he could not satisfy.
"Well, I'm all right down here!" he nodded with genuine satisfaction. "This is where I belong; I can be a river rat if I can't be anything else—a superior kind of a rat, at that. Say, a muskrat."
So he continued on his way down the mid-current which carried him in near one caving bank on the right, and then down a crossing close to the bank on the left, each swing being a matter of five or ten miles and an hour or so of floating for it takes time for a mile-wide flood to swagger even a little bit.
Murdong felt that the ambitions and hopes, the aspirations and the desires of his life of old were rather dwarfed and ridiculous in the presence of so real a power and consequence as the river. What did it ​matter if a little insect like himself did splash around and flutter and become prey for large emotions?
"Nothing seems to be of much consequence down here," he mused. "I'm real funny with all my puny temper and pride!"
He laughed, not without a sigh, however. The magnificence which he had discovered in his mad flight—beautiful, wonderful, satisfying as it was—quite in course rendered his own thoughts conspicuously trivial. If he could bring his soul to humbleness, contented with inconsequence, here was contentment for him.
Other river people were tripping down that day. Ahead of him, two or three miles distant, barely visible on the vast, glowing surface, was one shantyboat; astern a mile or two was another one, hardly more conspicuous. No one touched an oar, and the eddyings swung the boats around and around, and carried them first toward one shore, then toward the other.
Not a breath of wind was stirring, and the sun shone down with caressing warmth. Hardly ever did a sound fret the silence, but at noon far and wide shrieked the whistles of cotton gins back on the bottoms, and somewhere in the distance—miles and miles away—rumbled the hoarse voice of some great sawmill with a battery of boilers feeding the growling horn.
The whistling quickened the appetite of the skiff ​traveller, and he prepared another meal with deliberation, and ate with calm gusto, leaning in his cane-bottom stern seat against the back, resting his elbows upon the arms. Following his cup of tea he smoked a cigarette, recklessly. It was the third smoke he had taken from a box which he had purchased in Chicago, vainly endeavouring to soothe his nerves with them. Three smokes in five or six weeks!
That night he drifted into a west side eddy, and dropped a light anchor into six feet of water. He let out a long line and put up his canvas, which gave him just headroom under the hoops when he sat in the seat at the oar locks. He spread down his bed, put a gas-light lantern on the oar seat, and lay down to read one of the magazines which he had included in his outfit at Davenport.
It had been days—weeks—since he had even thought of reading Now he read with interest, having no subcurrent of ambition to keep pace with the story; he was reading for amusement, not for study, for the first time in years. He went to sleep, reading, and then, awakening, he turned out the light and settled down for the night.
The next morning but one he pulled out into the current on a dull gray day, warm but gloomy. All day long he floated down, and he wondered off and on whether he was going south too fast, whether he ​would arrive in New Orleans too soon? He felt as though he had travelled so far down the lower river that he must be halfway to New Orleans, but when toward night his skiff swirled around a short, sharp bend, with a caving bank on the west and miles and miles of sandbars on the east, he saw ahead of him a bluff that loomed against the sky like a mountain. It rose, apparently, for hundreds of feet—a long ridge extended for miles back from the sheer, caving bluff.
Down the left turn of the bend was all caving bank, but opposite were sandbars and still waters. Looking that way, Murdong fell upon his oars and rowed across the current, and in the last light of day he anchored in the eddy. He put up his canvas, started his oil stoves, and cooked his dinner, the stoves giving the low shelter a comfortable and pleasing warmth for there had fallen a chill with the dark.
He read some more this night, but nothing he read compared with the fullness of the days. He was dazzled by the wonders of the lower river—the massy current, the ethereal sandbars and low, flimsy banks, the grim sky, and the absence of all the things to which he was used! He had seen but few people, had spoken to only eight or ten in weeks. He had dodged people on the upper river, and now there seemed to be hardly any people to dodge!
So he read till he could not hold his eyes ​open—which was for only half an hour or so—and then he went to sleep with such a feeling of rest and comfort as he had never known before. For years and years he had been struggling and fighting and grappling with questions and seeking for opportunities and wrestling with unseen difficulties, till his mind was in a whirl and his soul was sick and his heart was faint. In a madness of anger and despair he had quit, let go his old life, and fled—and a whimsy of chance had fixed in his mind the idea of tripping down the Mississippi on some indefinite point of which was a line known as the jumping-off place.
"I really found it," he told himself in wondering surprise. "I really found it—the jumping-off place! I thought it was absurd, but it's at the mouth of the Ohio River!"
The incredible had become a literal fact.
The following morning he slept late, making up for years and years of lost repose of mind. It was nearly nine o'clock when he prepared his breakfast, nearly noon when he took down the canvas and made ready for a short day of floating.
There was a light breeze blowing, and when he hoisted the anchor the breeze blew him against the eddy current, and he found himself obliged to resort to the oars. He rowed out into the edge of the river current, and floated down along the brim of the eddy. ​Looking down stream, the great ridge filled his vision, and he did not know what it was, or where he was, but his curiosity was aroused. He began to want to know about the reaches, bends, crossings—he wanted to know, especially, if that ridge was not a place.
So his gaze turned along the shore, and a mile down, against the bank across the great eddy below the sandbar island there, he discovered shantyboats.
"I'll go ask them," he told himself.
By just that arousing of his curiosity Old Mississip' added another diversion to the countless episodes of river life.