decided
against all these.

Boldly she pulled into an eddy just before sunset, and had made fast to
a snag and a live root when the little boat came dropping down in the
edge of the current hardly forty feet distant, with the man leaning on
his sweeps, watching her every motion, especially fastening his gaze
upon her trim figure.

As he came opposite she turned and faced him; her jaws set.

"Hello, girlie!" he called, leaning upon his sweeps to carry his
skiff-like boat into the same eddy.

On the instant she snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom and,
dropping the muzzle, fired. The man stumbled back with a cry. He stood
grabbing at his shoulder, his florid face turning white, his eyes
starting with terror and pain. She saw him reel and fall through the
open hatch of his cabin and his boat go drifting on into the crossing
below. It occurred to her numbed brain that she was delivered from that
peril, but as dusk fell she hated the misery of her loneliness.

CHAPTER VII

The Ohio had the Mississippi eddied. The rains that had fallen over the
valleys of Kentucky and southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had brought
a tide down the big branch and as there was not much water running out
of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi, the flood had backed up the
Mississippi for a little while, stopping the current almost dead.

Elijah Rasba, running full tilt in the mid Ohio current, looked ahead
that afternoon, and he had a full view of the thing to which he had
come, seeking the wandering son of Mrs. Drones.

He arrived at the moment when the Mississippi, having been banked up
long enough, began to feel the restraint of the Ohio and resent it. The
gathered waters moved down against the Ohio flood and pressed them back
against the Kentucky side. Once more the Mississippi River resumed its
sway. On the loosed waters was a little cigar-box of a shanty-boat, and
Rasba rowed toward it across the saucer-like sucks and depressions where
the two currents of different speeds dragged by each other.

He pulled alongside, hailed, and, for answer, heard a groan, a weak
cry:

"Help!"

He carried a line across to the stranger's deck and made it fast. Then
he saw, stretched upon the floor, a stricken man, from whose side a pool
of blood had run. Working rapidly, Elijah discovered the wound and as
gunshot injuries were only too familiar in his mountain experience he
well knew what he should do. Examination showed that it