A MISFIRE
He could not place the recollection; it was lost somewhere in the
shadowy past. But the sight of his enemy in the clear light of day had
stirred up all the bitterest depths of his memory and his hate.
McGibbon—or Hanna, as he must now call him—seemed to have changed
little; he looked as handsome, as suave, as dignified as ever, and
Lockwood imagined what an imposing presence he must appear to this
pretty girl of the backwoods.
The riders were out of sight now, but he continued down the road
almost unconsciously, deep in plans. He took no notice of how far he
had walked, until he felt planks resounding hollowly under his feet.
He had come to a bridge, an immensely long bridge of timber, crossing
a small creek bordered by dense swamp. He crossed the bridge and
peceived a road, apparently not greatly in use, that led away to the
left into the woods.
He remembered Mr. Ferrell’s directions. This must be the trail to the
turpentine camp, and now that he had come so far he determined to go
on and interview Charley Craig. A job in the pine woods would exactly
suit his purposes in every way just then, and he needed the wages it
would earn. This was no moment to break in on his gold reserve.
He turned down the road to the left, which curved off uncertainly
among the pines. The ground was marked here and there by the ruts of
heavy wagons; he detected also the corrugated imprint of a motor’s
tire, and within a few rods he began to see traces of the turpentine
industry.
The ground was rising from the creek swamp into pine land, grown with
pines of all sizes, from bushy shrubs to immense trunks rising
arrow-straight and without a branch to the feathery, palmlike crest a
hundred feet from the earth. Nearly every pine of more than eight
inches in diameter had a great slash of bark chipped from one side,
showing the bare wood smeared and frosted with drops of gum, oozing,
dripping, or crystallized into solid white or bluish masses, looking
livid and diseased. At the lower edge of this slash a tin gutter was
fixed, collecting the slow ooze of the gum, and leading it into a
large tin cup that hung from a hook.
All this was very familiar to Lockwood, and he regarded it with
something of an expert eye. Under the stimulus of the hot weather the
gum was flowing freely. Many of the cups were nearly full of the
intensely sticky, whitish mass that exhaled a sharp, wholesome odor.
Everywhere he looked the trees had been turpentined; the camp was
evidently running at full blast; and a little way farther he came upon
a negro “chipper” who was taking off a fresh slice of the bark with
his razor-edged tool like a light adze.
The road wound about through the pines and crossed a gallberry flat.
He heard voices and came out into the clearing where the camp itself
was built.
There were thirty or forty negro families living in the camp, and
women and children swarmed about the cabins, staring at the stranger.
Lockwood approached the still—a huge brick furnace with a built-in
copper retort, sheltered by a corrugated iron roof and topped by a
tall chimney. Lumps of rosin littered the earth; empty and full rosin
barrels stood everywhere; there was a powerful smell of pine and tar
and turpentine, but the still was not working that day.
No white man was in sight, but he picked out a house of superior
quality, painted green and with curtained windows, which must be the
quarters either of Craig himself or of the foreman. Close to it stood
a long, low building, much resembling the Atha post office, which was
undoubtedly the commissary store. This place is always the real center
of a turpentine camp, and Lockwood went in to make inquiries.
A young man without coat or vest, smoking a cigarette, greeted the
visitor with lazy affability. Lockwood inquired for the chief.
“He’s just now come in,” said the clerk, and he knocked at the door of
the inner office, and then opened it.
A tall, spare, oldish man sat within, writing at a plain table.
Charley Craig was a well-known figure in central Alabama, and is so
still. All his life had been spent in contact with the long-leaf pine;
he had turpentined the trees, lumbered them, run sawmills. The rosin
of the gum must have preserved his youth, for he was past sixty, but
still able to ride, run, or fight with almost any of the young fellows
he employed.
“I understand you want a woods rider, Mr. Craig,” Lockwood explained
himself.
Craig searched him up and down with piercing gray eyes.
“You understand the turpentine business? Come in and take a seat,” he
said. “I may need another man for a while. One of my men got hurt.
You’ve done this job before?”
“No, I never rode the woods,” Lockwood admitted, “but I think I
understand what the job is. I’ve worked in camp in west Florida. I
know something about the still, and how to run a charge——”
“Can you ride?”
“Yes, after I get over some saddle soreness.”
“Know how to handle the men? The turpentine nigger is a special sort,
you know—tough devils, and hard to manage.”
“I’ve lived among niggers all my life, and I reckon I can handle most
of ’em.”
“What wages do you want?” Craig asked, after a little thought.
“Well, I don’t claim to be a first-class turpentine man,” said
Lockwood, “but I want to learn to be one. It’s possible that I may go
into the business myself next year with a partner. Wages aren’t the
main point with me. I’d like, though, to be able to get a day off now
and again, when things aren’t too busy.”
“I dunno. I’d rather get an experienced man,” said Craig. “Stay and
eat dinner with us, anyway, and then we’ll look over the camp.”
Lockwood ate a large, hot, and homely dinner at the house of the camp
foreman, in company with the foreman, Craig, and store clerk and the
“stiller”—the principal white employees. Afterward Craig took him out,
smoking innumerable cigarettes which he rolled up with a single deft
twist, and conducted him over the camp, about the still, the
storehouse, the cooperage workshop, the grindery where hundreds of
axes and “hacks” were kept keen, the mule stables, the quarters of the
negroes. Apparently pointing out these details, Craig shrewdly
elicited all Lockwood knew of the turpentine process. Afterward they
walked into the woods, observed the run of the gum, and the work of
the chippers. Craig looked at his watch.
“I’ve got to be on horseback,” he said. “How about two dollars a day
and board, until my man gets out of the infirmary?”
Lockwood accepted instantly. In fact, he would almost have worked for
a week for his board alone—his board, and the local standing which the
regular job would furnish.
He was to start work the next day, and meanwhile he had to bring up
his suit case from the landing, where he had dropped it in the
warehouse the night before. He loitered at the commissary for some
time, cementing his friendship with the store clerk, and it was past
the middle of the afternoon when he started to walk back to the
landing.
The Power boys had come back. He saw their big car standing by the
front door when he passed the house, but no one was in sight. He
hurried past; the great, white, dilapidated old mansion seemed already
intensely familiar to him, and intensely significant—the theater of a
coming crisis.
He went past the post office without stopping to speak to Mr. Ferrell,
who nodded from the gallery. He retraced the road that he had traveled
in the night; the creek rushed swirling over glittering pebbles, shut
in by thickets of titi, glossy-green bay leaves, cypress and gum,
lighted up by huge, blazing-red, trumpet-shaped flowers that hung in
clusters from tangling vines. Beyond the swamp the road rose into pine
woods again. Then he came to the crossing road, and turned toward the
river.
Far in the distance he caught a glimpse of the Alabama River, like a
pinkish streak through the brilliant pine foliage. It was still more
than a mile away, and the corduroyed road ran through depths of swamp
for the most part, skirted lagoons of stagnant black water, crossed
sluggish-brown bayous, went over a higher and dryer ridge of “hammock
land,” and came down at last to the landing.
The warehouse was open, and there were a few men about it. A couple of
buggies were hitched to a tree, and a wagon was loading with cases of
freight. It was a wagon from the turpentine camp, he discovered, and
he had his suit case put aboard, glad to be saved the trouble of its
weight.
The river was high, carrying planks and rails and drift of all sorts
on its flood. Wisps of mist clung to its surface, and the water boiled
strangely brown and pink and muddy strawberry. On the other shore rose
the clay bluff, crowned with pine, striped with that bizarre and
brilliant coloring that must have given the landing its name.
Lockwood turned back slowly up the swamp road, in no hurry to return
to the turpentine camp. The air in the swamp was hot and heavy and
enervating, and at the top of the ridge he turned aside into a trail
that seemed to run parallel with the river.
Pine woods bordered it, high and dry, and he walked aimlessly for some
distance. Through rifts he occasionally caught glimpses of the river
rolling greenish-pink between its highly colored shores. The trail
turned slightly down the slope and came out into a field of perhaps
twenty acres, running almost to the river. It was a piece of rich,
black bottom land, one of the gambles of Southern farming, capable of
growing an immense crop of cotton or cane, but running an even chance
of being flooded out by high water. This year no one was gambling on
it, nor did it seem to have been plowed the year before, for it
carried weeds and bushes that must have been the growth of more than
one season.
He walked down to the end of the field, almost to the belt of willows
and cottonwoods that screened the margin of the river. This was the
worst country for his projects, he thought, that he had ever seen. It
was settled just enough to make a stranger conspicuous; it was wild
enough to be hard to get out of. He had no idea how the roads ran, nor
whither; and he fancied himself hiding in the swamps, bitten by
snakes, devoured by insects, hunted by bloodhounds. He would have
found more secrecy and cover in a great city.
Another trail went wandering down the river bank, and he turned into
it from a reluctance to go back by the way he had come. It was a mere
footpath, worn probably by the tread of negroes, cutting through
thickets of titi, opening into glades of vivid green, and crossing
creeks on fallen logs. He followed it until his absorbed meditations
were suddenly broken by a whiff of smoke and the sound of a voice.
With a criminal’s instinct of caution he stopped short. There was a
wide opening on the shore just before him, and he caught the loom of a
whitish mass through the willows. He edged forward till he could see
clearly.
It was a large house boat of much the usual model, a mere cabin built
upon a scow, the rusty and squalid floating house used by the river
vagrants that hang upon all the great waterways of the South. But this
boat was a little superior in quality; she was painted, though the
paint was gray and weatherworn; there was a considerable deck space at
each end; and, most important of all, she carried power. There was a
small gasoline engine and propeller.
Half tramp, half criminal, Lockwood knew these river dwellers to be,
devoured by malaria and hookworms, too tired to work, living on
nothing, by a little stealing, a good deal of fishing, and some
begging. The three men he saw looked true to type, sallow and
malarial-looking, sprawling on the ground as they smoked and spat. Two
of them were young fellows, one a mere boy, but the third was a
heavily built man of middle age with a tangle of brown beard and a
stupid, savage face. They all wore “pin-check” cotton trousers, loose
shirts, sleeves rolled up, and dirty canvas shoes. They were watching
a very light-yellow negro who was cooking something in a frying pan
over a small fire.
Lockwood was armed, and not in the least afraid of them; but he did
not want to be seen. He wormed his way into the jungle and edged
slowly past the camp, tearing himself on thorns and stepping into
deep, black mud, till he was safely past. He got through without being
observed, as far as he knew, came out into the path and started more
briskly down the river again.
The sun was almost down. In another half hour the sudden, Southern
darkness would be deep in the woods, and he made haste, walking
soundlessly on the soft, damp earth. But within a quarter of a mile,
as a long vista opened before him, he caught a glimpse of some one
else coming toward him up the twilight path.
His first thought was that it was a fourth of the river men returning
to camp, and he did not wish to seem to have been spying. He stepped
instantly into the thickets, behind a screen of bamboo vines, to let
the man go past. But as he came nearer, Lockwood saw that it was
Hanna.
He still wore the gray suit and the leggings of his morning ride, and
he walked carelessly, whistling between his teeth, looking ahead as if
he expected to meet some one. Evidently he was going to the house
boat. In a moment the whole possibilities of the situation flashed
upon Lockwood.
From where he stood he could drop Hanna with a single shot, and the
slight, sharp crack of the smokeless cartridge would be heard by
nobody. His death would certainly be credited to the river men, and
their record and reputation would probably make the charge plausible.
Almost without knowing it, he drew the little automatic he had carried
so long, and pushed back the safety. Hanna was coming on carelessly,
still whistling. Through the leaves Lockwood had the bead drawn
unwaveringly on his chest, when he found that he could not shoot. A
mighty force seemed to stay his finger on the trigger. The great
moment he had desired for years had come, was passing, and he could
not use it! He did not hate Hanna less, but he did not want to drop
him dead in his tracks. Hanna went by unconsciously, within a yard of
the blue muzzle.
Lockwood lowered the pistol, and found himself shaking and sweating.
He looked helplessly after his enemy’s back, watched till Hanna was
out of sight, and then turned on his own way. He swore under his
breath; he felt as if he had failed in an imperative duty; he was full
of disappointment and disgust. It was not till he had almost reached
the turpentine camp that he thought to wonder why Hanna should be
going to visit the river pirates. But when he thought of the problem
it seemed full of perplexity and interest.