The Holbrook news., 1920-12-24
CHAPTER |.
The Iron.eraY.woman.


 A young man. stood, on the after deck of small and very dingy house boat filing a fish spear. Riding at the end of a storm-blackened rope strung from cleat at the bow to tree on shore, the boat rose and fell with the pulse of the river, lazy and languid under the beat of the hot afternoon sun.
 He was so tall, with such a spread of shoulder, that he seemed out of place upon so small a deck. Wind season and weather wear had worked their will upon him. But there are forces that grave deeper than wind and weather. Youth can hold wind and weather at bay. It is powerless against those other -forces-those in ner forces that graVe the soul. Under the chafe of them his face had become the face of man who had looked upon life and found 1t not to his lik- ing. His eyes held the keen. quick hardness that comes to eyes that see only life's steruer side.
 The Pearlhunter, they called him, the river men, not that he had found his pearl, possibly because he had not found it. Failure names men, as well as success. in the wilderness.
 The space between the fore and after decks of the houseboat was occu- pied by a kind of cabin, with cur tained entrance fore and aft and a single small window on each side. The man suddenly stopped filing the fish spear and glanced with quick anxiety coughing. He crossed the narrow deck at a stride, showed aside the soiled and rumpled curtain and entered. A dark. iron-gray woman sat bumped forward in a rickety old rockingchair by the window on the shore side. As if con scious of his inability to help, possibly calloused by long familiarity with sim liar scenes, he stood looking down upon her, with no expression of sym pathy other than a vince of pity in his eyes.
 . She strengthened after Ia time, and lay back against the bed quilt spread in the chair, spent and duivering, the trembling shell of whatthad once been a very beautiful woman. The man crossed the cabin, dipped up tinful of water out of bucket by the cook stove and offered it to her. She waved it away.
 ''It's so warm-and flatI It has been long from the spring!'
 Without a word he set the cup back on the bench, picked up the bucket, passed out to the front deck, crossed the narrow gangplank, and hurried away up the slope toward the cliffs that rose above the trees a few rods back from the river shore.
 The spot was known the length of the Wabash, for who has not heard of Fallen Rock, with the broad, thin wa lerfaIl pitching over the sharp-edged shelf between it's two breasts and lap ping the stone-strewn pool at its base? And the spring breaking out from un- der the shale lodges of the cliff near the west end of the old cabin and trickling It's waters down a little sul- phur-stained gutter into the pOOl-who has not heard of it? Not to have drunk of it's waters was considered a in the Flatwoods, just as in ancient Greece 1t was considere1 n calamity to die without having seen the statue of Olympian Zeus.
 Fallen Rock is the highest front of naked stone along the Wabash. At the present day seven towns can be seen from it's summit; in the late for ties, two: Buckeye, mile up the river, and the City twenty miles farther on.
 When the man returned to the houseboat the Iron-Gray- Woman still lay back in the shaky rocking chair. Dipping the battered cup full of fresh water, the man stepped to her side.
 'Your cool drink, mother"
 The thin lids raised. The eyes she turned toward him must have been wonderfully beautiful in her day large and deep and lustrous. The cough that wasted her breast seemed to dim their luster.
 The man crossed the cabin and laid