uence of the constantly
varying features of the night, beginning with the curtain of the
shanty-boat which flicked its good luck after him, passing the bright,
clear lights of New Madrid. After leaving far behind their glow against
the thin haze in the night he "made" the scattered shoals of Point
Pleasant, and hugged down vanishing Ruddles Point, taking a glimpse of
Tiptonville--which withdraws year by year from the fatal caving brink of
its site--wishing as he passed that he might return to that strange
place and visit Reelfoot Lake three or four miles beyond, where the New
Madrid earthquakes drowned a forest whose dead stubs rise as monuments
to the tragedy.

In Little Cypress Bend, twenty-five miles below where he had left the
young woman, he heard the splash and thud of a caving bank, and felt the
big rollers from the falling earth twisting and tumbling him about for a
third of a mile.

It was after 1 o'clock when he looked at his watch. He was beginning to
feel the pull on his shoulders, and the crick which constantly looking
over his shoulder to see the lights ahead caused him. The dulness of
his vision, due to inevitable fatigue, compelled him constantly to sit
more alert and dash away the fine spray which whipped up from the waves.
A feeling of listlessness overpowered him. He could not row on forever,
without resting at all. Taking advantage of a moment of calm in the
wind, he pulled the bow around and drifted down stern first.

He had lost track of his position; he had not counted the lights, and
now for many miles there was no town distinguishable. He had felt the
loneliness of a mile-breadth; now he wondered whether he was in Missouri
or Arkansas, whether he had come forty miles or eighty, and after a
little he began to worry for fear he might have gone more than a
hundred.

With the wind astern or nearly astern, he knew that he had pulled four
or five miles an hour, and he did not know how fast the current of the
river ran; it might be four miles or eight miles. In ten hours he might
leave more than a hundred miles of river bank behind him.

A new sensation began to possess him: the feeling that he was not alone.
He looked around, while he rested trying to find what proximity thus
affected him. The wind? Those dull banks, seemingly so distant? Perhaps
some fellow traveller? It was none of those things.

It was the river! The "feel" of the flood was that of a person. He could
not shake off the sensat