, as soon as he was around the bend up the St. Francis, sank his paddle deep in the pale-green Stillwater and drove his sassafras-log canoe swiftly upstream. It was a long, beautiful canoe. The outside and bottom were as smooth as polished oak, and the inside was cut out as accurately and smoothly as it could be planed. There had been a bend in the log that enabled the adz-man and chiseler to give the bow and stern a pointed rise of beautiful shape.
From the head of Lake Nicormy to the foot of Crowley Ridge, at Helena, where the St. Francis empties into the Mississippi, there was not a prettier canoe than Lunmer Andrest's.
"Lunmer jes' natcherly has an eye for pretty tricks!" some one had said.
"No man ever was wuth shucks who run to posies an' red birds an' pretty tricks!" old Clinchell had growled in reply.
"Course some men that's real practical sets store by pretty women," Si Hed Jesnie suggested slyly.
"Sho!" grunted Clinchell angrily, and yet feeling a kind of compliment at that. Old Clinchell did have a hard time trying to keep all kinds of men from bothering his girl, Sue Belle.
A man with an eye for pretty tricks had no business with the daughter of an eminently practical citizen like old Durm Clinchell. If Andrest had only been able to see himself as other people saw him, he would have understood the condition; but he told himself that of all the pretty tricks in the Dark Bend bottoms, Sue Belle Clinchell was the finest. On her side, for reason or whimsy of her own. Sue Belle Clinchell seemed to favor the trapper and fisherman who lived in a little yellow shanty-boat in one of the long, half-moon eddies of the St. Francis River.
Andrest drove his fine canoe up-stream to his home stillwater. As he rounded the last turn on the way, he saw his little yellow house-boat resting under the huge, outswung branches of a monster gum-tree. The leaves of the gum were pale yellow, too. Fat red squirrels were romping in the neighboring trees, and back in the woods young wild gobblers were trying to give weight to their gobbling practise.
High overhead, a flock of wild geese lettered the sky as they flew southward. The tree-tops, the mid-height branches, the shrubs next to the ground, were alive with migrating birds—warblers, wrens, thrushes, and such like. A swarm of robins left a narrow sand-bar with a roar like a tornado, their wings beat the air so swiftly and there were so many thousands of them.
With his eye for beautiful things, Lunmer Andrest lost few details of the scene of his home eddy. He had dropped down Little River out of the back country of New Madrid several years before. He had floated with spring and winter tides till he found the Dark Bend swamps, and they satisfied his need for fish, game, and fur. He could find beauty anywhere, except in the great city country up on the Ohio, from which he had fled.
Now, having run his canoe to the stern of his cabin-boat, he walked the length of the craft, caught the trot-line at the bow, made it fast to a timber-head of the houseboat, and stepped upon the deck. The fact that he could walk fifteen feet along a polished bottom sassafras canoe without upsetting it, without even thinking that he was doing anything unusual, indicated his skill and long practise in such craft.
He stopped on the house-boat deck and looked at the scene for which he had such fond regard—the unspoiled swamp wilderness with its birds and beasts, the river with its limestone green, the sky with its soft radiance.
"If men would only leave a man alone!" Andrest sighed. "I'm peaceable; I mean harm to no one; but they just won't leave a man alone!"
With an angry gesture, he flung open the door of his cabin and entered. The day had been a trying one. He had looked forward to it for sixty hours or so with distaste amounting almost to dread; but old Clinchell had become unbearable, and it had been necessary to bring the questions at issue to a head.