The Pensacola journal. (Pensacola, Fla.) 1898-1985, 1920-07-12
CHAPT I.

The Iron Gray Woman.
A young man stood on the after
deck of a small and very dingy house
boat filing fish spear. Riding at
the end of a -blackened rope
| strung from a cleat at the bow to a
tree on shore, the boat rose and fell
with the pulse of the river, lazy and
languid under the beat of the hot aft
! ernoon sun. A narrow gangplank
| sawed back and forth, and worked
itself into the gravelly shore margin.
He was so TALL with such a spread
of shoulder, that he seemed half out
of place upon SO small deck. Wind
season and Weather-wear had worked
their will upon him. But there are
forces that grave deeper than wind
weather. Youth can hold wind and
weather at bay. 1t is powerless
against those forces,-those inner
forces that grave the soul. Under the
chafe of them his face had become the
face of a man who had looked upon
life and found it not to his liking
"A certain bitterness seemed to have
permanently frightened the line of his
lips. His eyes held the keen, quick
hardness that comes to eyes that see
only life's sterner 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 house boat was oc-
cupied by a kind of cabin, with a
curtain 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
toward this cabin. A woman was
coughing. Leaning the spear against
the hand rail of the boat and drop
ping the file by it. he crossed the mar
row deck at a stride, showed aside
the soiled and rumpled curtain and en-
tered. A dark, iron gray woman sat
bumped forward in a rickety old rock
ing chair by the window on the shore
side. AS if conscious of his inability
to help, possibly calloused by long ia
miliarity with similar scenes, he stood
looking down upon her, with no ex-
preston of sympathy other than a
vince of pity in his eyes.
She Strengthened after a time, and
lay back against the bed quilt spread
in the chair spent and quivering
the trembling shell of what had once
been a very beautiful woman. The
man crossed the cabin, dipped up a
tinful of water out of a bucket by
the cook stove and offered it to her.
She waved, it away.
TITS so warm-and. flat 1t has
been long from the spring :"
Without a word he sat the lineup
back on the bench, picked up the buc-
ket, 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.
In the very shaved of these cliffs
at considerable elevation above the
river and half hidden by the trees,
stood an old ca bin of notched, unhewn
logs and now much fallen into decay.
The man paused an instant in what
might be styled, for want of a better
term, the dooryard of this cabin, be-
guiled by the compelling charm of
the place into allowing his eye to
stray over the teasing landscape half
concealed, like "a bashful maid.
To such a man as the Pearlhunter
the view was worth coming far to
see: The river slipping along at the
foot of the slope and winking up and
down the dim. green rows; the Sblue
haze Of the hills beyond. The spot
was known the length of the Wabash,
for who has not heard of Fallen Rock,
with the broad. thin waterfall pitching
over the sharp edge shelf between its
two breasts and tapping the stone
strewn pool at its base ? And the
Sbring breaking out from under the
shale lodges of the cliff near the west
end of the old cabin and trickling its
waters down a little sulphur stained
gutter into the pool-who has not
heard of it ? Not to have drunk of
its waters was considered misfor-
tune, in the Flatwoods, just as in an
Gent Greece it was considered a ca
lamity 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 its summit; in the late for |
ties, two: Buckeye, a mile up the river, |
and the City twenty miles farther on. |
underbrush cluttered the |
trees on the slope all the way from |
the cliff down to within a few yards |
OF the shore line. There the under
brush had been killed out probably by |
some tribe of a age long gone, and on |
that small clean strip the blue grass i
grew green and thrifty right down to
the waters edge. The place had been