all along the littoral. The passengers
picked their way down carefully, stepping into one another's tracks in
the effort not to ruin their shoes. The drummers grumbled. The youngish
man piloted the girl down, holding her hand, although both could have
managed better by themselves.

Following the passengers came the trunks and grips on a truck. A negro
deck-hand, the truck-driver, and the white master of the launch shoved
aboard the big sample trunks of the drummers with grunts, profanity, and
much stamping of mud. Presently, without the formality of bell or
whistle, the launch clacked away from the landing and stood up the wide,
muddy river.

The river itself was monotonous and depressing. It was perhaps half a
mile wide, with flat, willowed mud banks on one side and low shelves of
stratified limestone on the other.

Trading-points lay at ten- or fifteen-mile intervals along the great
waterway. The typical landing was a dilapidated shed of a store half
covered with tin tobacco signs and ancient circus posters. Usually, only
one man met the launch at each landing, the merchant, a democrat in his
shirt-sleeves and without a tie. His voice was always a flat, weary
drawl, but his eyes, wrinkled against the sun, usually held the
shrewdness of those who make their living out of two-penny trades.

At each place the red-headed peanut-buyer slogged up the muddy bank and
bargained for the merchant's peanuts, to be shipped on the down-river
trip of the first St. Louis packet. The loneliness of the scene embraced
the trading-points, the river, and the little gasolene launch struggling
against the muddy current. It permeated the passengers, and was a
finishing touch to Peter Siner's melancholy.

The launch clacked on and on interminably. Sometimes it seemed to make
no headway at all against the heavy, silty current. Tump Pack, the white
captain, and the negro engineer began a game of craps in the negro
cabin. Presently, two of the white drummers came in from the white cabin
and began betting on the throws. The game was listless. The master of
the launch pointed out places along the shores where wildcat stills were
located. The crap-shooters, negro and white, squatted in a circle on the
cabin floor, snapping their fingers and calling their points
monotonously. One of the negro girls in the negro cabin took an apple
out of her lunch sack and began eating it, holding it in her palm after
the fashion of negroes rather than in her f