nd registered. He
walked down to the river in the morning and noticed that the third
shanty-boat had dropped out into the river during the night, in spite of
the storm that was blowing up. He went down and ate breakfast with
Carline, and the two went up and got Doss's outfit at the hotel. They
returned to the motorboat, and, having laid in a supply of groceries,
cast off their lines and steered away down the river.

"Yes, sir, we'll find that girl if it takes all winter!" the fish-market
man heard Doss tell Carline in a loud voice.

That afternoon a man in a skiff came down the river and turned into the
dock. As he landed, the fish-market man said to him:

Yes.

"If you see any lady coming down, tell her a detector is below, lookin'
fo' her. He's a cheap skate, into a motorboat--but I don't expect he'll
be into hit long, 'count of some river fellers bein' with him. But he
mout be bad, that detector. If you should see a nice lady, tell her."

"You bet!" the skiff man, who was Lester Terabon, exclaimed.

CHAPTER XIX

For long hours Parson Rasba endured the drifting sand and the biting
wind which penetrated the weather-cracks in his poplar shanty-boat. It
was not until near nightfall that it dawned on him that he need not
remain there, that it was the simplest thing in the world to let go his
hold and blow before the wind till he was clear of the sandblast.

He did haul in his anchor and float away. As he rode the waves and
danced before the wind the clouds of sand were flung swiftly down upon
the water, where the surface was covered with a film and a sheet of
dust.

Standing at his sweeps, he saw that he was approaching the head of
another sandbar, and as he felt the water shoaling under the boat he
cast over the anchor and rode in clear air again. He was not quite
without a sense of humour.

Shaking the dust out of his long hair and combing it out of his
whiskers, he laughed at his ignorance and lack of resource. He swept the
decks and floor of his cabin, and scooped the sand up with an ash shovel
to throw overboard. A lesson learned on the Mississippi is part of the
education of the future--if there is anything in the pupil's head to
hold a memory of a fact or experience.

Even though he knew it was his own ignorance that had kept him a
prisoner in that storm, Parson Rasba did not fail to realize that his
ignorance had been sin, and that his punishment was due to his
absorption in the fate of a pre