She read the paragraph with interest and then with care; she did not know whether to be pleased or not by that brutally frank statement that he was afraid of her--suppose he hadn't been afraid? Then, of what was he really afraid--not of her pistol! She read on through the pages of notes. The description of the walk with her up the sandbar and back, there at Island No. 10, thrilled her, for it told the apparently trifling details--the different kinds of sands, the sounds, the night gloom, the quick sense of the river presence, the glow of distant New Madrid. He had lived it, and he wrote it in terms that she realized were the words she might have used to describe her own observations and sensations. She searched through his notes in vain for any suggestion of the emotions which she had felt. She shrugged her shoulders, because he had not written anything to indicate that he had discovered her allurement. He had written in bald words the fact of her sending him on the errand of rescue, to save her husband--and she was obliged to digest in her mind the bare but significant phrase: And, because she has sent me, I am glad to go! His notes made her understand him better, but they did not reveal all his own feelings. He wrote her down as an object of curiosity, as he spoke of the sour face and similitude of good humour in the whiskey boater's expression. In the same painstaking way he described her own friendliness for a passing skiff boater. The impersonality of his remarks about himself surprised while it perplexed her. The mass of material which he had gathered for making articles and stories amazed her. The stack of pages, closely typewritten, was more than two inches thick. A few pages disclosed consecutive paragraphs with subjects, predicates, and complete sense, but other pages showed only disjointed phrases, words, and flashes of ideas. The changing notes, the questioning, the observations, the minute recording were fascinating to her. It revealed a phase of writers' lives of which she had known nothing--the gathering of myriads of details, in order to free the mind for accurate rendering of pictures and conditions. She wished she could see some of the finished product of Terabon's use of these notes, and the wish revealed a chasm, an abyss that confronted her. She felt deserted, as though she had need of Terabon to give her a view of his own life, that she might be diverted into something not sordid, and decidedly not according to Augustus Carline's ideals! After a time, seeing that Carline's boat had disappeared down river, she threw over her anchor, and rested in the eddy. It was on the west side, with a chute entrance through a sandbar and willow-grown island points opposite. She brought out her map book to see if she could learn where she was anchored, but the printed map, with the bright red lines of recent surveys, helped her not at all. She turned from sheet to sheet down to Memphis, without finding what she wanted to know.