THE TORNADO.
The Acadian stooped at once and with a quick splash launched his
canoe. A minute later he was in it, gliding along and just within the
edge of the forest where it swept around nearly at right angles to the
direction in which the steamboat was coming. Thus he could watch the
approaching steamer unseen, while every moment putting distance
between himself and the lugger.
The strange visitor came on. How many men there were on her lower
deck! Were they really negroes, or had they blackened their faces, as
men sometimes do when they are going to hang a poor devil in the
woods? On the upper deck are two others whose faces do not seem to be
blackened. But a moment later they are the most fearful sight of all;
for only too plainly does the fugitive see that they are the same two
men who stood before the doorway of his hut six days before. And see
how many canoes on the lower deck!
While the steamer is yet half a mile away from the hidden lugger, her
lamps and fires and their attendant images in the water beneath glow
softly in the fast deepening twilight, and the night comes swiftly
down. The air is motionless. Across the silent waste an engine bell
jangles; the puff of steam ceases; the one plashing paddle-wheel at
the stern is still; the lights glide more and more slowly; with a
great crash and rumble, that is answered by the echoing woods, the
anchor-chain runs out its short measure, and the steamer stops.
Gently the pot-hunter's paddle dipped again, and the pirogue moved
back towards the lugger. It may be that the flood was at last numbing
his fear, as it had so soon done that of all the brute-life around
him; it was in his mind to do something calling for more courage than
he had ever before commanded in his life, save on that one day in
Carancro, when, stung to madness by the taunts of a brave man, and
driven to the wall, he had grappled and slain his tormentor. He had
the thought now to return, and under cover of the swamp's deep outer
margin of shadow, silently lift into the canoe the bit of iron that
anchored the lugger, and as noiselessly draw her miles away to another
covert; or if the storm still held back, even at length to step the
mast, spread the sail, and put the horizon between him and the steamer
before daybreak. This he had now started to do, and would do, if only
courage would hold on and the storm hold off.
For a time his canoe moved swiftly; but as he drew near the lugger his
speed grew less and less, and eye and ear watched and hearkened with
their intensest might. He could hear talking on the steamer. There was
a dead calm. He had come to a spot just inside the wood, abreast of
the lugger. His canoe slowly turned and pointed towards her, and then
stood still. He sat there with his paddle in the water, longing like a
dumb brute; longing, and, without a motion, struggling for courage
enough to move forward. It would not come. His heart jarred his frame
with its beating. He could not stir.
As he looked out upon the sky a soft, faint tremor of light glimmered
for a moment over it, without disturbing a shadow below. The paddle
stirred gently, and the canoe slowly drew back; the storm was coming
to betray him with its lightnings. In the black forest's edge the
pot-hunter lingered trembling. Oh for the nerve to take a brave man's
chances! A little courage would have saved his life. He wiped the dew
from his brow with his sleeve; every nerve had let go. Again there
came across the water the very words of those who talked together on
the steamer. They were saying that the felling of trees would begin in
the morning; but they spoke in a tongue which Acadians of late years
had learned to understand, though many hated it, but of which he had
never known twenty words, and what he had known were now
forgotten--the English tongue. Even without courage, to have known a
little English would have made the difference between life and death.
Another glimmer spread dimly across the sky, and a faint murmur of
far-off thunder came to the ear. He turned the pirogue and fled.
Soon the stars are hidden. A light breeze seems rather to tremble and
hang poised than to blow. The rolling clouds, the dark wilderness, and
the watery waste shine out every moment in the wide gleam of
lightnings still hidden by the wood, and are wrapped again in
ever-thickening darkness over which thunders roll and jar, and answer
one another across the sky. Then, like a charge of ten thousand
lancers, come the wind and the rain, their onset covered by all the
artillery of heaven. The lightnings leap, hiss, and blaze; the
thunders crack and roar; the rain lashes; the waters writhe; the wind
smites and howls. For five, for ten, for twenty minutes,--for an hour,
for two hours,--the sky and the flood are never for an instant wholly
dark, or the thunder for one moment silent; but while the universal
roar sinks and swells, and the wide, vibrant illumination shows all
things in ghostly half-concealment, fresh floods of lightning every
moment rend the dim curtain and leap forth; the glare of day falls
upon the swaying wood, the reeling, bowing, tossing willows, the
seething waters, the whirling rain, and in the midst the small form of
the distressed steamer, her revolving paddle-wheels toiling behind to
lighten the strain upon her anchor-chains; then all are dim ghosts
again, while a peal, as if the heavens were rent, rolls off around the
sky, comes back in shocks and throbs, and sinks in a long roar that
before it can die is swallowed up in the next flash and peal.
The deserted lugger is riding out the tornado. Whirled one moment this
way and another that, now and again taking in water, her
forest-shelter breaks the force of many a gust that would have
destroyed her out in the open. But in the height of the storm her poor
substitute for an anchor lets go its defective hold on the rushy
bottom and drags, and the little vessel backs, backs, into the
willows. She escapes such entanglement as would capsize her, and by
and by, when the wind lulls for a moment and then comes with all its
wrath from the opposite direction, she swings clear again and drags
back nearly to her first mooring and lies there, swinging, tossing,
and surviving still,--a den of snakes.
The tempest was still fierce, though abating, and the lightning still
flashed, but less constantly, when at a point near the lugger the
pirogue came out of the forest, laboring against the wind and
half-filled with water. On the face of the storm-beaten man in it each
gleam of the lightning showed the pallid confession of mortal terror.
Where that frail shell had been, or how often it had cast its occupant
out, no one can ever know. He was bareheaded and barefooted. One
cannot swim in boots; without them, even one who has never dared learn
how may hope to swim a little.
In the darkness he drew alongside the lugger, rose, balanced
skilfully, seized his moment, and stepped safely across her gunwale. A
slight lurch caused him to throw his arms out to regain his poise; the
line by which he still held the canoe straightened out its length and
slipped from his grasp. In an instant the pirogue was gone. A glimmer
of lightning showed her driving off sidewise before the wind. But it
revealed another sight also. It was dark again, black; but the outcast
stood freezing with horror and fright, gazing just in advance of his
feet and waiting for the next gleam. It came, brighter than the last;
and scarcely a step before him he saw three great serpents moving
towards the spot that gave him already such slender footing. He
recoiled a step--another; but instantly as he made the second a cold,
living form was under his foot, its folds flew round his ankle, and
once! twice! it struck! With a frantic effort he spurned it from him;
all in the same instant a blaze of lightning discovered the maimed
form and black and red markings of a "bastard hornsnake," and with one
piercing wail of despair, that was drowned in the shriek of the wind
and roar of the thunder, he fell.
A few hours later the winds were still, the stars were out, a sweet
silence had fallen upon water and wood, and from her deck the watchmen
on the steamer could see in the north-eastern sky a broad, soft,
illumination, and knew it was the lights of slumbering New Orleans,
eighteen miles away.
By and by, farther to the east, another brightness began to grow and
gather this light into its outstretched wings. In the nearest wood a
soft twitter came from a single tiny bird. Another voice answered it.
A different note came from a third quarter; there were three or four
replies; the sky turned to blue, and began to flush; a mocking-bird
flew out of the woods on her earliest quest for family provision; a
thrush began to sing; and in a moment more the whole forest was one
choir.
What wonderful purity was in the fragrant air; what color was on the
calm waters and in the deep sky; how beautiful, how gentle was Nature
after her transport of passion! Shall we ever subdue her and make her
always submissive and compliant? Who knows? Who knows what man may do
with her when once he has got self, the universal self, under perfect
mastery? See yonder huge bull-alligator swimming hitherward out of the
swamp. Even as you point he turns again in alarm and is gone. Once he
was man's terror, Leviathan. The very lions of Africa and the
grizzlies of the Rockies, so they tell us, are no longer the bold
enemies of man they once were. "Subdue the earth"--it is being done.
Science and art, commerce and exploration, are but parts of religion.
Help us, brothers all, with every possible discovery and invention to
complete the conquest begun in that lost garden whence man and woman
first came forth, not for vengeance but for love, to bruise the
serpent's head. But as yet, both within us and without us, what
terrible revolts doth Nature make! what awful victories doth she have
over us, and then turn and bless and serve us again!
As the sun was rising, one of the timber-cutters from the steamer
stood up in his canoe about half a mile away, near the wood and beside
some willows, and halloed and beckoned. And when those on the steamer
hearkened he called again, bidding them tell "de boss" that he had
found a canoe adrift, an anchored boat, and a white man in her, dead.
Tarbox and St. Pierre came in a skiff.
"Is he drowned?" asked Mr. Tarbox, while still some distance off.
"Been struck by lightnin' sim like," replied the negro who had found
the body.--"Watch out, Mistoo Tah-bawx!" he added, as the skiff drew
near; "dat boat dess lousy wid snake'!"
Tarbox stood up in the skiff and looked sadly upon the dead face.
"It's our man," he said to St. Pierre.
"Dass what I say!" exclaimed the negro. "Yes, seh, so soon I see him I
say, mos' sholy dass de same man what Mistoo Tah-bawx lookin' faw to
show him 'roun' 'bout de swamp! Yes, seh, not-instandin' I never see
him befo'! No, seh.--Lawd! look yondeh! look dat big bahsta'd
hawn-snake! He kyant git away: he's hu't! Lawd! dass what kill dat
man! Dat man trawmp on him in de dark, and he strack him wid his hawny
tail! Look at dem fo' li'l' spot' on de man' foot! Now, Mistoo
Tah-bawx! You been talk' 'bout dem ah bahsta'd hawn-snake not pizen!
Well, mos' sholy dey _bite_ ain't pizen; but if dat hawn on de een of
his tail dess on'y tetch you, you' gone! Look at dat man! Kill' him so
quick dey wa'n't time for de place to swell whah he was hit!" But
Tarbox quietly pointed out to St. Pierre that the tiny wounds were
made by the reptile's teeth.
"The coroner's verdict will probably be 'privation and exposure,'"
said he softly; "but it ought to be, 'killed by fright and the bite of
a harmless snake.'"
On his murmured suggestion, St. Pierre gave orders that, with one
exception, every woodsman go to his tree-felling, and that the lugger
and canoe, with the dead man lying untouched, be towed by skiff and a
single pair of oars to the head of the canal for inquest and burial.
"I'll go with him," said Tarbox softly to St. Pierre. "We owe him all
we're going to get out of these woods, and I owe him a great deal
more." When a little later he was left for a moment without a hearer,
he said to the prostrate form, "Poor fellow! And to think I had her
message to you to come out of this swamp and begin to live the life of
a live man!"
The rude funeral moved away, and soon the woods were ringing with the
blow of axes and the shout and song of black timber-men as gayly as
though there never had been or was to be a storm or a death.