That would unquestionably have been the end of Bob Yancy when he was shot out into the muddy waters of the Elk River, had not Mr. Richard Keppel Cavendish, variously known as Long-Legged Dick, and Chills-and-Fever Cavendish, of Lincoln County, in the state of Tennessee, some months previously and after unprecedented mental effort on his part, decided that Lincoln County was no place for him.  When he had established this idea firmly in his own mind and in the mind of Polly, his wife, he set about solving the problem of transportation.

Mr. Cavendish’s paternal grandparent had drifted down the Holston and Tennessee; and Mr. Cavendish’s father, in his son’s youth, had poled up the Elk.  Mr. Cavendish now determined to float down the Elk to its juncture with the Tennessee, down the Tennessee to the Ohio, and if need be, down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and keep drifting until he found some spot exactly suited to his taste.  Temperamentally, he was well adapted to drifting.  No conception of vicarious activity could have been more congenial.

With this end in view he had toiled through late winter and early spring, building himself a raft on which to transport his few belongings and his numerous family; there were six little Cavendishes, and they ranged in years from four to eleven; there was in addition the baby, who was always enumerated separately.  This particular infant Mr. Cavendish said he wouldn’t take a million dollars for.  He usually added feelingly that he wouldn’t give a piece of chalk for another one.

June found him aboard his raft with all his earthly possessions bestowed about him, awaiting the rains and freshets that were to waft him effortless into a newer country where he should have a white man’s chance.  At last the rains came, and he cast off from the bank at that unsalubrious spot where his father had elected to build his cabin on a strip of level bottom subject to periodic inundation.  Wishing fully to profit by the floods and reach the big water without delay, Cavendish ran the raft twenty-four hours at a stretch, sleeping by day while Polly managed the great sweep, only calling him when some dangerous bit of the river was to be navigated.  Thus it happened that as Murrell and Slosson were dragging Yancy down the lane, Cavendish was just rounding a bend in the Elk, a quarter of a mile distant.  Leaning loosely against the long handle of his sweep, he was watching the lane of bright water that ran between the black shadows cast by the trees on either bank.  He was in shirt and trousers, barefoot and bareheaded, and his face, mild and contemplative, wore an expression of dreamy contentment.

Suddenly its expression changed.  He became alert and watchful.  He had heard a dull splash.  Thinking that some tree had been swept into the flood, he sought to pierce the darkness that lay along the shore.  Five or six minutes passed as the raft glided along without sound.  He was about to relapse into his former attitude of listless ease when he caught sight of some object in the eddy that swept alongside.  Mr. Cavendish promptly detached himself from the handle of the sweep and ran to the edge of the raft.