IN THE GLADES
"What the devil is the matter with you, Carl?" demanded Dick Sherrill
irritably. "If I'd known you were going to moon under a tree and
whistle through that infernal flute half the time, I'd never have
suggested camping. Are you coming along to-night or not?"
"No. I've murdered enough wild turkeys now."
Sherrill plunged off swampwards with the guides.
Left to himself Carl laid aside his flute and sat very quiet, staring
at the cloud-haunted moon which hung above the Glades. He had been
drinking and gaming heavily for weeks. Now floundering deeper and
deeper into the mire of debt and dissipation, forced to a fevered
alertness by distrust of all about him, he found the weird gloom of the
Everglades of a piece with the blackness of his mood. For days he had
taken wild chances that horrified Sherrill inexpressibly; drinking
clear whiskey in the burning white tropical sunlight, tramping off into
trackless wilds without a guide, conducting himself, as Sherrill
aggrievedly put it, with the general irrationality of a drunken madman.
"The climate or a moccasin will get you yet!" exclaimed Sherrill
heatedly. "And it will serve you right. Or you'll get lost. And to
lose your way in this infernal swamp is sure death. They used to enter
runaway niggers who came here, on the undertaker's list. I swear I
won't tell your aunt if you do disappear. That's a job for a deaf
mute. And only yesterday I saw you corner a moccasin and tantalize him
until the chances were a hundred to one that he'd get you, and then you
blazed your gun down his throat and walked away laughing. Faugh!"
With the perversity of reckless madmen, however, Carl went his
foolhardy way unharmed. But his nights were fevered and sleepless and
haunted by a face which never left him, and the locked hieroglyphics on
Themar's cuff danced dizzily before his eyes.
Carl presently lighted a lantern, seated himself at the camp table and
fell moodily to poring over the tormenting hieroglyphics which had
haunted him for days.
The night was cloudy. Only at infrequent intervals the moon soared
turbulently out from the somber cloud-hills and glinted brightly
through the live oaks overhead.
Carl had been drinking heavily since the morning, with vicious recourse
to the flute when his mood was darkest. Now he felt strung to a
curious electric tension, with pulse and head throbbing powerfully like
a racing engine. Still there was satanic keenness in his mind
to-night, a capacity for concentration that surprised him. Somewhere
in his head, taut like an overstrung ligament or the string of a great
violin, something sinister droned and hummed and subtly threatened.
For the hundredth time he made a systematic list of recurrent symbols,
noting again the puzzling similarity of the twisted signs, but no sign
appeared frequently enough to do vowel work.
To-night somehow the cipher mocked and gibed and goaded him to frenzy.
The mad angles pointing up and down and right and left--it was
impossible to sort them. They danced and blurred and crept
irresistibly into the wrong list.
And in error came solution. Carl glanced intently at the jumbled list
and fell feverishly to working from a different viewpoint. From the
cryptic snarl came presently the single English word in the cipher--his
name. The keen suspicion of his hot brain had, at last, been right.
For every letter in the alphabet, four symbols had been used
interchangeably but whether they pointed up or down or right or left,
their significance was the same. There were no word divisions.
When at last Ronador's frantic message to the Baron lay before him,
Carl was grateful for the quiet monastery days in Houdania with Father
Joda. They had given him an inkling of the language.
Some of the message, to be sure, was missing--for Themar had been
interrupted--and some of it unintelligible. But clear and cold before
his fevered eyes lay the words which marked him irrevocably for the
knife of a hired assassin. There was no suggestion of sealing his lips
with gold, as in a drunken moment he had suggested in his letter. The
seal of death was safer than the seal of gold. Seeing the sinister
command there before him, even though the knowledge was not new, Carl
felt a nameless fury rise in his reeling brain. He must
live--live--live! he told himself fiercely. With the vivid, lovely
face of Keela tormenting him to sensual conquest, he must live no
matter what the price! How safeguard his life from the men who were
hunting him?
What if Diane were to--_die_? Carl shuddered. Then the sirocco of
fear and hate centering about her, would blow itself out forever and
his own life would be safe, for the secret would be worthless. These
men--Tregar, Ronador, Themar--scrupled for vastly different reasons to
take the life of a woman.
Money! Money! He must have money! And if Diane were to _die_, the
great estate of Norman Westfall would revert to him of course; there
was no other heir. Why had he not thought of that before? In that
instant he knew that barely a year ago the treacherous thought would
have been for him impossible, that slowly, insistently he had been
sliding deeper and deeper into the dark abyss of degradation where all
things are possible.
There had been intrigue and dishonor of a sort in the letter to
Houdania, but not this--Oh, God! not this horrible, beckoning Circe
with infamous eyes and scarlet robes luring him to the uttermost pit of
the black Inferno.
But Diane had flashed and mocked him as a child when he was sensitive
and lonely. She had always mocked the memory of his mother. Brown and
lovely his cousin's face rose before him in a willful moment of
tenderness--and then from the shadows came again the flash of topaz and
Venetian lamps and the lovely face of Keela.
Something in Carl's haunted brain snapped. With a groan of horror and
suffering, he pitched forward upon the ground, breathing Philip
Poynter's name like an invocation against the things of evil crowding
horribly about him.
It was Dick Sherrill who at last found him.
"Nick!" he called in horror to one of the guides. "For God's sake
bring some brandy! No! he's had too much of that already. Water!
Water--can't somebody hurry!"
"Leave him to me, Mr. Sherrill!" said Nick with quiet authority. And
bending over the motionless figure under the oak, he gently loosened
the flannel shirt from the throat, laid a wet cloth upon the forehead
and fell to rubbing the rigid limbs.
Presently, with a long, shuddering sigh, Carl opened his eyes, stared
at the scared circle of faces about him and instantly tried to rise.
"Don't, don't, Carl," exploded Dick Sherrill solicitously. "Lie still,
man! I was afraid something would get you."
Carl fell back indifferently.
Presently with a slight smile he sat up again.
"I'm all right now, Dick," he insisted. "It's nothing at all. I've
had something like it once before. Don't mention it to my aunt. She'd
likely fuss."
Dick readily promised.
"Nevertheless," he insisted, "we're going to break camp in the morning.
This infernal bog's got on my nerves. There are more creepy, oozy
things in that cypress swamp over there than a man can afford to meet
in the dark. To the devil with your wild turkeys, Nick! Quail and
duck are good enough for me."
The camp wagons drove back to Palm Beach in the morning. Carl was very
quiet and evaded Sherrill's anxious eyes. He seemed to be brooding
morosely over some inner problem which frequently furrowed his forehead
and made him very restless.
"Cheer up!" exclaimed Dick reassuringly. "You'll feel better when you
get a shower and some other clothes. As for me, I'm going to hunt
field mice and ground doves from now on. Lord, Carl, I'll never forget
that beastly swamp. Did I tell you that last night, after all our
discomfort, I got nothing but a smelly buzzard? Ugh!" Dick's hunting
interest was steadily on the wane. He finally came down to birds and
humble bees, though when they started he had talked magnificently of
alligators and bears.
Carl laughed and relapsed into brooding silence.
A little later on the Sherrill porch he found himself listening with
tired patience to Aunt Agatha's opinion of camping in the Everglades.
"What with your Esquimaux," she puffed tearfully, "and the immigrant
who wasn't an immigrant--and I must say this once, Carl, for all I
promised to ask no further questions, that you never attempted to
explain that performance to my satisfaction--the young man with the
eye, you know, and the immigrant with his feet on the lace spread--to
say nothing at all of Diane's losing herself in the flat-woods over a
cart wheel of flame, I wonder I'm not crazy, I do indeed! And riding
off to Jacksonville with the Indian girl, for all I've lain awake night
after night seeing her scalp lying by the roadside! It was bad enough
to have you in those horrible Glades, but Diane--"
"Aunt Agatha," said Carl patiently, "what in thunder are you driving at
anyway?"
"Why," said Aunt Agatha in aggrieved distress, "Diane's gone and left
Johnny at some funny little hamlet and she's gone into the Everglades
to a Seminole village with the Indian girl. There's a letter in my
room. You can read for yourself."
Aunt Agatha burst into tears. Carl patiently essayed a comforting word
of advice and followed Dick indoors to seek relief in less calamitous
showers. Before he did so, however, he read his cousin's letter.
For that night and the night following Carl did not sleep. On the
morning of the third day, after a careless inquiry he went to West Palm
Beach and interviewed some traders who were reported to be on the eve
of an expedition into the Everglades with a wagonload of scarlet calico
and beads to trade for Indian products.
The fourth day he was missing.