gout had changed
insensibly to darting motorboats and to huge, red-wheeled, white-castled
monsters, whose passage in the midst of vast waters was attended by the
sighs of toiling engines and the tossing of troubled seas.

Except for that one sure demand upon him, Elijah Rasba long since would
have been lost in the confusion and doubts of his transition from narrow
wooded ridges and trembling streamlets to this succession of visions.
But his soul retained its composure, his eyes their quickness to seize
the essential detail, and he rode the Tug River freshet into the Ohio
flood tide bent upon his mission of redeeming one mountain youth who had
strayed down into this far land, of which the shores were washed by the
unimaginable sea of a river.

When at the end of a day he arrived in a way-side eddy and moored his
poplar-bottom craft against a steep bank and the last twilight had faded
from his vision, he would eat some simple thing for supper, and then, by
lamp-light, try to read his exotic life into the Bible which accompanied
him on his travels. He knew the Book by heart, almost; he knew all the
rivers told about in it; he knew the storms of the various biblical
seas; he knew the Jordan, in imagination, and the Nile, the Euphrates,
the Jabbok, and the Brook of Egypt, but they did not conform in his
imagination with this living tide which was carrying him down its
course, over shoal, around bend and from vale to vale of a size and
grandeur beyond expression.

Elijah was speechless with amazement; the spies who had gone into
Canaan, holding their tongues, and befriended by women whose character
Elijah Rasba could not identify, were less surprised by the riches which
they discovered than Rasba by the panorama which he saw rolled out for
his inspection day by day.

Other shanty-boaters were dropping down before the approach of winter.
Sometimes one or another would drift near to Rasba's boat and there
would be an exchange of commonplaces.

"How fur mout hit be, strangeh?" he would ask each man. "'Low hit's a
hundred mile yet to the Mississippi?"

A hundred miles! They could not understand that this term in the
mountain man's mind meant "a long ways," if need be a thousand or ten
thousand miles. When one answered that the Mississippi was 670 miles,
and another said it was a "month's floating," their replies were equally
without meaning to his mind. Rasba could not understand them when they
talked of reaches, crossings