WELL HIDDEN.
Of all the teeming multitudes of the human world, the pot-hunter knows
not one soul who is on his side; not one whom he dare let see his face
or come between him and a hiding-place. The water is rising fast. He
dare not guess how high it will come; but rise as it may, linger at
its height as it may, he will not be driven out. In his belief a
hundred men are ready, at every possible point where his foot could
overstep the line of this vast inundation, to seize him and drag him
to the gallows. Ah, the gallows! Not being dead--not God's anger--not
eternal burnings; but simply facing death! The gallows! The tree above
his head--the rope around his neck--the signal about to be spoken--the
one wild moment after it! These keep him here.
He has taken down sail and mast. The rushes are twelve feet high. They
hide him well. With oars, mast, and the like, he has contrived
something by which he can look out over their tops. He has powder and
shot, coffee, salt, and rice; he will not be driven out! At night he
spreads his sail and seeks the open waters of the lake, where he can
sleep, by littles, without being overrun by serpents; but when day
breaks, there is no visible sign of his presence. Yet he is where he
can see his cabin. It is now deep in the water, and the flood is still
rising. He is quite sure no one has entered it since he left it.
But--the strain of perpetual watching!
When at dawn of the fifth day he again looked for cover in the
prairie, the water was too high to allow him concealment, and he
sought the screen of some willows that fringed the edge of the swamp
forest, anchoring in a few rods' width of open water between them and
the woods. He did not fear to make, on the small hearth of mud and
ashes he had improvised in his lugger, the meagre fire needed to
prepare his food. Its slender smoke quickly mingled with the hazy
vapors and shadows of the swamp. As he cast his eye abroad, he found
nowhere any sign of human approach. Here and there the tops of the
round rushes still stood three feet above the water, but their slender
needles were scarcely noticeable. Far and near, over prairie as over
lake, lay the unbroken yellow flood. There was no flutter of wings, no
whistle of feathered mate to mate, no call of nestlings from the
ruined nests. Except the hawk and vulture, the birds were gone. Untold
thousands of dumb creatures had clung to life for a time, but now were
devoured by birds of prey and by alligators, or were drowned.
Thousands still lived on. Behind him in the swamp the wood-birds
remained, the gray squirrel still barked and leaped from tree to tree,
the raccoon came down to fish, the plundering owl still hid himself
through the bright hours, and the chilled snake curled close in the
warm folds of the hanging moss. Nine feet of water below. In earlier
days, to the northward through the forest, many old timbers rejected
in railway construction or repair, with dead logs and limbs, had been
drifted together by heavy rains, and had gathered a covering of soil;
canebrake, luxurious willow-bushes, and tough grasses had sprung up on
them and bound them with their roots. These floating islands the
flood, now covering the dense underbrush of the swamp, lifted on its
free surface, and, in its slow creep southward, bore through the
pillared arcades of the cypress wood and out over the submerged
prairies. Many a cowering deer in those last few days that had made
some one of these green fragments of the drowned land a haven of
despair, the human castaway left unharmed.
Of all sentient creatures in that deluge he was suffering most. He
was gaunt and haggard with watching. The thought of pursuit bursting
suddenly around him now fastened permanently upon his imagination. He
feared to sleep. From the direction of the open water surprise seemed
impossible; but from the forest! what instant might it not ring with
the whoop of discovery, the many-voiced halting challenge, and the
glint of loaded Winchester? And another fear had come. Many a man not
a coward, and as used to the sight of serpents as this man, has never
been able to be other than a coward concerning them. The pot-hunter
held them in terror. It was from fear of them that he had lighted his
torch the night of his bivouac in the swamp. Only a knowledge of their
ordinary haunts and habits and the art of avoiding them had made the
swamp and prairie life bearable. Now all was changed. They were driven
from their dens. In the forest one dared not stretch forth the hand to
lay it upon any tangible thing until a searching glance had failed to
find the glittering eye and forked tongue that meant "Beware!" In the
flooded prairie the willow-trees were loaded with the knotted folds of
the moccasin, the rattlesnake, and I know not how many other sorts of
deadly or only loathsome serpents. Some little creatures at the bottom
of the water, feeding on the soft white part of the round rush near
its root, every now and then cut a stem free from its base, and let it
spring to the surface and float away. Often a snake had wrapped
himself about the end above the water, and when this refuge gave way
and drifted abroad he would cling for a time, until some less forlorn
hope came in sight, and then swim for it. Thus scarce a minute of the
day passed, it seemed, but one, two, or three of these creatures,
making for their fellow-castaway's boat, were turned away by nervous
waving of arms. The nights had proved that they could not climb the
lugger's side, and when he was in her the canoe was laid athwart her
gunwales; but at night he had to drop the bit of old iron that served
for an anchor, and the very first night a large moccasin--not of the
dusky kind described in books, but of that yet deadlier black sort, an
ell in length, which the swampers call the Congo--came up the
anchor-rope. The castaway killed it with an oar; but after that who
would have slept?
About sunset of the fifth day, though it was bright and beautiful, the
hunter's cunning detected the first subtle signs of a coming storm. He
looked about him to see what provision was needed to meet and weather
its onset. On the swamp side the loftiest cypresses, should the wind
bring any of them down, would not more than cast the spray of their
fall as far as his anchorage. The mass of willows on the prairie side
was nearer, but its trees stood low,--already here and there the
branches touched the water; the hurricane might tear away some boughs,
but could do no more. He shortened the anchor-rope, and tried the hold
of the anchor on the bottom to make sure the lugger might not swing
into the willows, for in every fork of every bough was a huge dark
mass of serpents plaited and piled one upon another, and ready at any
moment to glide apart towards any new shelter that might be reached.
While eye and hand were thus engaged, the hunter's ear was attentive
to sounds that he had been hearing for more than an hour. These were
the puff of 'scape-pipes and plash of a paddle-wheel, evidently from a
small steamer in the Company Canal. She was coming down it; that is,
from the direction of the river and the city.
Whither was she bound? To some one of the hundred or more plantations
and plantation homes that the far-reaching crevasse had desolated?
Likely enough. In such event she would not come into view, although
for some time now he had seen faint shreds of smoke in the sky over a
distant line of woods. But it filled him with inward tremors to know
that if she chose to leave the usual haunts of navigation on her left,
and steam out over the submerged prairies and the lake, and into the
very shadow of these cypresses, she could do it without fear of a snag
or a shallow. He watched anxiously as the faint smoke reached a
certain point. If the next thin curl should rise farther on, it would
mean safety. But when it came it seemed to be in the same place as the
last; and another the same, and yet another the same: she was making
almost a straight line for the spot where he stood. Only a small low
point of forest broke the line, and presently, far away, she slowly
came out from behind it.