up the head of Flower Island Bar
jes' drappin' in. They've floated down all night!"

Through his glasses Terabon saw two men walking a shanty-boat across the
dead water below Yankee Lower Bar to the mainland.

They were too far away for him to distinguish their personalities, but
one was a tall, active man, the other obviously chunky, and when they
ran their lines out and made fast to half-buried snags, it was with the
quick decision of men used to work against currents and to unison of
effort. There was something suggestive in their bearing, their scrutiny
up and down the river, their standing close to each other as they
talked. If Terabon had not suspected them of being pirates, their
attitude and actions would have betrayed them.

Terabon, after a little while, pulled up the eddy toward them; he was
willing to take a long chance. Few men resent a newspaper man's
presence. The worst of them like to put themselves, their ideas, right
with the world. Terabon risked their knavery to win their approbation.
Come what might, he would seek to save Augustus Carline from the
consequences of his ignorance, money, folly, and remorse.

CHAPTER XXIV

The flow of the Mississippi River is down stream--a perfectly absurd and
trite statement at first thought. On second thought, one reverts to the
people who are always trying to fight their way up that adverse current,
with the thrust of two miles perpendicular descent and the body of a
thousand storms in its rush.

There are steamers which endeavour to stem the current, but they make
scant headway; sometimes a fugitive afraid of the rails will pull up
stream; the birds do fly with the spring winds against the retreat of
winter; but all these things are trifles, and merely accentuate the fact
that everything goes down.

The sandbars are not fixed, they are literally rivers of sand flowing
down, tormenting the current, and keeping human beings speculating on
their probable course and the effect, when after a few years on a point,
they disappear under the water. Later they will lunge up and out into
the wind again, gallumphing along, some coarse gravel bars, some yellow
sand, some white sand, some fine quicksand, some gritty mud, and others
of mud almost fit to use in polishing silver.

Thousands of people in shanty-boats, skiff's, fancy little yachts, and
jon-boats, rag-shacks on rafts, and serviceable cruisers drift down with
the flood, and are a part of it.

Autumn