t he must save
her from herself; he must seek and rescue her. He hoisted in his anchor
and starting the motor, turned into the chute and ran down before the
wind into the river. Never had he seen the Mississippi in such a dark
and repellent mood.

When he had cleared the partial shelter of Island No. 8, he felt the
wind and current at the stern of his boat, driving it first one way then
the other. Steering was difficult, and fear began to clutch at his
heart. He felt his helplessness and the hopelessness of his search down
that wide river with its hundred thousand hiding places. He knew nothing
of the gossiping river people except that he despised them. He could not
dream that his ignorance of things five or ten miles from his home was
not typical of the shanty-boaters; he could not know that where he was a
stranger in the next township to his own home, a shanty-boater would
know the landing place of his friends a thousand miles or so down
stream.

Without maps, without knowledge, without instinct, he might almost as
well have been blind. His careless, ignorant glance swept the eight or
nine miles of shoreline of sandbar from above Island No. 10 clear down
to the fresh sloughing above Hotchkiss's Landing, opposite the dry
Winchester Chute--in which deep-draft gun-barges had been moored fifty
years or so before. He did not even know it was Island No. 10,
Donaldson's Point; he didn't know that he was leaving Kentucky to skirt
Tennessee; much less did he dream that he was passing Kentucky again. He
looked at a shanty-boat moored at the foot of a mile-long sandbar; saw,
without observing, a skiff against the bar just above the cabined scow.
His gaze discovered smoke, houses, signs of settlement miles below, and
he quickened the beat of his motor to get down there.

He longed for people, for humanity, for towns and cities; and that was a
big sawmill and cotton-gin town ahead of him, silhouetted along the top
of a high bank. He headed straight for it, and found his boat
inexplicably slowed up and rebuffed. Strangers on the river always do
find themselves baffled by the big New Madrid eddy, which even power
boats engage with difficulty of management. He landed at last against a
floating dock, and found that it was a fish market.

Having made fast, he went up town and spent hours, till long after dark,
buying supplies, talking to people, getting the lonesomeness out of his
system, and making veiled inquiries to learn if any