Oct. 5; In mid-stream among a lot of islands; rafts of ducks; a dull, blue day, still those great limestone hills, with hollows through which the wind comes when opposite--coolies?----; in the far distance a rowboat. On the Missouri side, the hills; on the other the flats, with landing sheds. Ducks in great flocks--look like sea serpents when flying close to the water; like islands on it--wary birds. That was above the part of the river which she knew; she turned to Kaskaskia, and read facts familiar to her: I met Crele, an old hunter-trapper, in a slough below St. Genevieve. He was talkative, and said he had the prettiest girl on a hundred miles of river. She had married a man of the name of Carline, real rich and a big bug. "But my gal's got the looks, yes, indeed!" If I find her, I must be sure and tell her to write to her folks--river romance! Nelia's face warmed as she read those phrases as well it might. She wondered what other things he had written in his book of notes, and her eye caught a page: House boatmen are a bad lot. Once a young man came to work for a farmer back on the hills. He'd been there a month, when one night he disappeared; a set of double harness went with him. Another man hung around a week, and raided a grocery store, filling washtubs with groceries, cloth, and shoes--went away in a skiff. She turned to where he travelled down the Mississippi with her husband and read the description of Gus Carline's whiskey skiff man, his purchase of a gallon of whiskey; the result, which her imagination needed but few words to visualize; then Terabon's drifting away down stream, leaving the sot to his own insensibilities. Breathlessly she read his snatching sentences from bend to shoal, from reach to reach, until he described her red-hull, white cabin-boat, described the "young river woman" who occupied it; and then, page after page of memoranda, telling almost her own words, and his own words, as he had remembered them. What he wrote here had not been intended for her eyes. She's dropping down this river all alone; pirates nor scoundrels nor river storms nor jeopardies seem to disturb her in the least. She even welcomes me, as an interesting sort of intellectual specimen, who can talk about books and birds and a multitude of things. She may well rest assured that none of us river rats have any designs, whatever, on a lady who shoots quick, shoots straight, and dropped Prebol at thirty yards off-hand with an automatic!