e, his shattered nerves left him in a
panic of fears and remorse, and he hoped for nothing better than to beg
his wife and sweetheart for forgiveness. At all times dread of what he
might find at the end of the trail tormented him from terror to
despair.

His anguish overcame all his other sensations. It even overcame his lust
for liquor. He grew sturdier under his affliction, so that when he
arrived at Cairo, and swung his craft smartly up to the wharf-boat, his
eyes were clear and his skin was honestly coloured by sunshine and pure
winds. Here fortune favoured him with more news of his wife. The
engineer of the Cairo-Missouri ferryboat had seen a young and pretty
woman moored at the bank some distance from the landing. She had
remained there upward of a week, having no visitors, and making daily
visits over the levee into the little city.

"One day she stood there, I bet half an hour, looking back, like she was
waiting," the engineer said. "I seen her onto the levee top. Then she
come down, jumped aboard with her lines, an' pulled out to go on
trippin' down. I wondered then wouldn't some man be following of her."

When Carline passed below the sandbar point, at which the Ohio and
Mississippi mingle their waters, and the human flotsam from ten thousand
towns is caught by swirling eddies, he found himself subdued by a shadow
that fell athwart his course, dulling the fire of his own spirit with a
doubt and an awe which he had never before known.

His wife had gone past the Jumping Off Place; he had heard a thousand
jests about that fork of the rivers, without comprehending its deeper
meaning, till in his own experience he, too, was flung down the tide by
forces now beyond his control, though he himself had set them in motion.
His suffering was no less acute, his mind was no less active, but it
dawned slowly on him that, after all, the acute pain which was in his
heart was no greater than the sorrow, the suffering, the poisoned
deliriums of the thousands who had given themselves to this mighty
flood, which was so vast and powerful that it dwarfed the senses of
mortals to a feeling of the proper proportion of their affairs in the
workings of the universe.

Insensibly, but surely, his pride began to fade and his selfishness
began to give way to better understanding and kindlier counsels. That
much the River Spirit had done for him. He would not give up the search,
but rather would he increase its thoroughness, and redou