Word: conviction
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...river, the Old Man, is on a rampage, when levees are broken, the country flooded, the waters flowing the wrong way, and barns, mules, chicken coops and people bobbing around in a drenched and bewildering world. One of the bewildered people is a tall, lean, 25-year-old hillbilly convict who has never seen much water before. Given a boat which he does not know how to manage, he is sent to rescue a woman perched on an old cypress snag and a man clinging to the ridgepole of a cotton house...
...boat is soon completely out of the convict's control. It races downstream, hits an eddy, drifts back, finally carries the convict, stunned and incredulous, to the tree where the woman perches on the branch like a bird. "It's taken you a while," she says...
...pregnant - a quiet, pale girl dressed in a calico wrapper, a sunbonnet and part of an old army uniform. He gets her into the boat, pushes off. From this point on it is the convict against the Mississippi-he trying to get the boat and the woman back to the guards, the Mississippi plunging him through thickets, over cotton fields, up past Vicksburg and down past Baton Rouge, past dead cows, bobbing outhouses; and leaving him the exhausted, hungry, indignant victim of nature on the loose...
When he tries to land at Baton Rouge, soldiers guarding the levee see his convict uniform, open fire. Out in the current again, the boat whirls downstream. Miles from nowhere, on an old Indian mound crowded with snakes, the baby is born. After six days the convict gets so he thinks, "It ain't nothing but another moccasin," when he steps on a snake...
...last week it was opened and closed for good. Governor Olson brought Tom Mooney, dressed in a neat striped prison-made suit, from San Quentin to Sacramento. The grey-haired convict stepped up beside the grey-haired Governor before an audience of 500 in the Assembly chamber. He listened to a speech in which Culbert Olson simply stated his conviction that the Preparedness Day bombing was not the work of Tom Mooney. The Governor waited 30 seconds for someone to contradict him before he handed over an unconditional pardon...