The River Prophet

Elijah Rasba lived alone in a log cabin on Temple Run. He was a long, lank, blue-eyed young man, with curly brown hair and a pale, almost livid complexion. His eye-brows were he...

Virtue had not been rewarded. This much was clear and plain to the consciousness of Nelia Carline. Looking at herself in the glass disclosed no special reason why she should be...

Elijah Rasba stalked homeward from the still in the dark, grimly and expectantly erect. Now he was going to have that period of happiness which he knew was the chief reason for...

Nelia Carline would not return to that miserable little river-bottom cabin where she had grown up in unhappy privation. She had other plans. She drove the little automobile down...

In mid-afternoon, the man who had so desperately and as a last resource tested the efficiency of moonshine whiskey as a palliative for mental misery awaked gradually, in confusi...

Those first free days on the Mississippi River revealed to Nelia Crele a woman she had never known before. Daring, fearless, making no reckoning, she despised the past and tripp...

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 a...

Having rid herself of the leering river rat, Nelia Crele trembled for a time in weak dismay, the reaction from her tense and fiery determination to protect herself at all costs....

A whisper, that became a rumour, which became a report, reached Gage and found the ears of Augustus Carline, whose wife had disappeared sometime previously. After two wild days...

For a minute Elijah Rasba, as the Mississippi revealed itself to him, contemplated a greater field for service than he had ever dreamed of. Then, humbled in his pride at the tho...

Jest Prebol, sore and sick with his bullet wound, but more alarmed on account of having sworn so much while a parson was dressing his injury, could not sleep, and as he thought...

Augustus Carline instinctively slowed down his motorboat and took to looking at the wide river, its quivering, palpitating surface; its vistas at which he had to "look twice to...

"And he says he's a sinner himself," Nelia repeated, when she returned on board her cabin-boat in the sheltering safety of Wolf Island chute, with Mamie Caope, Parson Rasba, and...

"That's it. I'm not what you'd call a hard drinker; I like to take a cocktail, or a whiskey, the same as any man. I like to go out around and see folks, talk to 'em, dance--you...

The Mississippi River brings people from the most distant places to close proximity; Pittsburg and even Salamanca meet Fort Benton and St. Paul at the Forks of the Ohio. On the...

Jock, _alias_ "Slip," Drones, was discovering how small the world really is. Like many another man, he had figured that no one would know him, no one could possibly find him, do...

Terabon's notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long, lonely bends, and he had surprised a fl...

Augustus Carline was a long time recovering even his consciousness. A thousand dreams, a thousand nightmares tormented his thoughts while the mangling grip of unnumbered vises a...

For long hours Parson Rasba endured the drifting sand and the biting wind which penetrated the weather-cracks in his poplar shanty-boat. It was not until near nightfall that it...

Terabon possessed a newspaper man's feeling of aloofness and detachment. When he went afloat on the Mississippi at St. Louis he had no intention of becoming a part of the river...

Pirates have infested the Mississippi from the earliest days. The stranger on the river cannot possibly know a pirate when he sees one, and even shanty-boaters of long experienc...

Fortune, or rather the Father of Waters, had favoured Parson Elijah Rasba in the accomplishment of his errand. It might not have happened in a decade that he locate a fugitive w...

Lester Terabon rowed down the rolling river waters in the dark night. He had, of course, looked out into the Mississippi shades from the security of landing, anchorage, and sand...

The flow of the Mississippi River is down stream--a perfectly absurd and trite statement at first thought. On second thought, one reverts to the people who are always trying to...

Renn Doss, the false friend, saw the danger of the recognition of the firearms by Carline. The savage swing of a half pound of fine shot braided up in a rawhide bag, and a good...

Parson Rasba piled the books on the crap table in his cabin and stood them in rows with their lettered backs up. He read their titles, which were fascinating: "Arabian Nights,"...

Carline ascended into the world again. It was a painful ascent, and when he looked around him, he recognized the interior of his motorboat cabin, heard and felt the throbbing of...

Nelia Crele had laughed in her heart at Elijah Rasba as he sat there listening to her reading. She knew what she was doing to the mountain parson! She played with his feelings,...

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...

Carline had discovered his wife in the excitement at Palura's, and with the cunning of a drunken man had shadowed her. He followed her down to Mousa Bayou, and saw her go on boa...

Parson Rasba and Terabon floated out into the main river current and ran with the stream. They were passing through the famous, changeable channels among the great sandbars from...