Daylight came, and sunshine penetrated the window under which she slept. The bright rays fell upon her closed eyes and stung her cheeks. She awakened with difficulty, and looked around wonderingly. She saw the sunlight move along the wall and then drift back again. She felt the boat teetering and swaggering. She looked out of the window and saw a distant wood across the familiar, glassy yellow surface of the Mississippi. With a low whisper of dismay she started out to look around, and found that she was really adrift in mid-river. On the opposite side of the boat she saw the blank side of a boat against her cabin window. As she stood there, she heard or felt a motion on the boat alongside. Someone stepped, or rather jumped heavily, onto the bow deck of her boat and flung the cabin door open. She sprang to get her pistol, and stood ready, as the figure of a man stumbled drunkenly into her presence. CHAPTER XXIX Parson Elijah Rasba, the River Prophet, could not think what he would say to these river people who had determined to have a sermon for their Sabbath entertainment. Neither his Bible nor his hurried glances from book to book which Nelia Crele had given him brought any suggestion which seemed feasible. His father had always declared that a sermon, to be effective, "must have one bullet fired straight." What bullet would reach the souls of these river people who sang ribald songs, danced to lively music, and lived clear of all laws except the one they called "The Law," a deadly, large-calibre revolver or automatic pistol? "I 'low I just got to talk to them like folks," he decided at last, and with that comforting decision went to sleep. The first thing, after dawn, when he looked out upon the river in all the glory of sunshine and soft atmosphere and young birds, he heard a hail: "Eh, Prophet! What time yo' all goin' to hold the meeting?" "Round 10 or 11 o'clock," he replied. Rasba went to one of the boats for breakfast, and he was surprised when Mamie Caope asked him to invoke a blessing on their humble meal of hot-bread, sorghum, fried pork chops, oatmeal, fried spuds, percolator coffee, condensed cream, nine-inch perch caught that morning, and some odds and ends of what she called "leavings." Then the women all went over on his big mission boat and cleaned things up, declaring that men folks didn't know how to keep their own faces clean, let alone houseboats. They scrubbed and mopped and re-arranged, and every time Rasba appeared they splashed so much that he was obliged to escape. When at last he was allowed to return he found the boat all cleaned up like a honey-comb. He found that the gambling apparatus had been taken away, except the heavy crap table, which was made over into a pulpit, and that chairs and benches had been arranged into seats for a congregation. A store-boat man climbed to the boat's roof at 10:30, with a Texas steer's horn nearly three feet long, and began to blow.