in a blue mother-hubbard dress leaning against the cabin
of her low, yellow shanty-boat, a cap a-rake on her head, one elbow
resting on her palm, and in the other a long-stemmed Missouri
meerschaum. Her face was as hard as a man's, her eyes were as blue and
level as a deputy sheriff's in the Bad Lands, and her lips were straight
and thin. How could a man ask her if she had seen his wife going down
that way?

He stopped his motor and let his boat drift. He wondered what he could
or would say when he overtook Nelia. There struck across his
imagination the figure of a man, the Unknown who had, perhaps, promised
her the care he had never given her, the affection which she had almost
never had from him. Having won her, this Unknown would likely defy him
down there in that awful openness and carelessness of the river.

He found a feeling of insignificance making its way into his mind. He
had been vain of his looks, but what did looks amount to down there? He
had been proud of his money, but what privilege did money give him on
that flood? He had rejoiced in his popularity and the attention women
paid him, but the indifferent gaze of that smoking Amazon chilled his
self-satisfaction. He cringed as he seemed to see Nelia's pretty eyes
glancing at him, her puzzled face as she apparently tried to remember
where she had seen him. The river wilted the crumpling flower of his
pride.

As his boat turned like a compass needle in the surface eddies he saw a
speck far up stream. He brought out his binoculars and looked at it,
thinking that it was some toy boat, but to his astonishment it turned
out to be a man in a skiff.

It occurred to Carline that he wished he could talk to someone, to any
one, about anything. He had no resources of his own to draw on. He had
always been obliged to be with people, talk to people, enjoy people; the
silences of his wife's tongue had been more difficult for him to bear
than her edged words. The skiff traveller, leisurely floating in that
block of river, drew him irresistibly. He kicked over the flywheel and
steered up stream, but only enough partly to overcome the speed of the
current. The sensation of being carried down in spite of the motor
power, complicated with the rapid approach of the stranger in his skiff,
was novel and amusing. When he stopped the motor, the rowboat was
within a hundred feet of him, and the two men regarded each other with
interest and caution.

The traveller was unusual