THE FOG
Back in the bayou was an uproar. Fat pine torches were flaming, so
that the whole foggy place seemed a great glow; and then he heard the
splash of paddles and saw something like a spot of lighted haze coming
out. It was the canoe. He stopped swimming and floated soundlessly. He
struck something—a half-submerged snag, and clung to it. The canoe
dashed nearer, without outlines, a moving blur of light; and he ducked
completely under, holding his breath.
It passed so close that the glare of the torches shone on his eyes
through the water. But for the fog he would certainly have been
detected. The blur faded. He put his eyes and nose up. The boat was
circling away downstream, and a shot blazed suddenly from it, probably
at a drifting log. The pirates were taking a chance at anything.
Lockwood let go and floated again. The canoe came about and sped
upriver. He could hear the talking, clear through the thick, wet air.
“I’m sure he’s hit. I saw him plain one minute.”
“Ef he ain’t drowned or dead, we’ll find him wounded on the bank
somewhere in the mornin’.”
“Not a particle of use lookin’ in this yere fog.”
They kept on searching, however, going some distance up, and then down
again close to the shore. Lockwood risked swimming again, heading out
into mid-river. The twist and shift of the currents bothered him. They
seemed to set in all directions, and he lost track of which way he was
going.
The canoe went some distance downstream and then came back, reëntering
the bayou mouth. He lost sight of the torch glare. Both shores were
invisible, and there was nothing around him but the gray wall of fog
and the suck and gurgle of the treacherous currents.
To his surprise he felt bottom suddenly. He thought he must have been
carried shoreward, but it proved to be a sand bar, with about three
feet of water over it. He stood up gladly to rest. He was an excellent
and strong swimmer, but the weight of the gold belt was coming at last
to make itself felt.
He meant to gain the shore some way downstream where he could lie in
the woods till daylight. Then he could find his way to a road, a
house, where he could hire a horse, a mule, or a car to take him
either to Craig’s camp or a railway station. But he was puzzled by the
currents, which seemed to set in opposite directions at the ends of
the sand bar. He knew how treacherous are the shifts and eddies of the
Alabama; but, selecting his direction at last, he waded deep and swam
again.
For perhaps half an hour he struggled with the river, floating,
swimming, once clinging to a floating log and drifting for some way.
Darkness and fog made him feel lost in an illimitable ocean, but at
last he touched bottom again, and detected the faint loom of trees
against the dark sky. He waded forward, stumbled against a cypress
trunk. The river was high, and a foot of water was running over the
roots of the shore growths.
He felt his way ahead, splashing among the trees. The water grew
shallow, gave place to mud, and he ran into a dense thicket of tough
shrubs, tangled together with bamboo vines, spiky with thorns, and
growing right out of the deep ooze. It was perfectly impenetrable. He
had to sheer away to the right till he seemed to discern a break in
the barrier. The ground was soft and full of bog-holes. Now and again
he went to his knees, once to his hips, and he remembered tales he had
heard of bottomless pits in these river swamps, where stray hogs and
men had disappeared.
But after escaping the human wolves of the house boat, he could not
believe that he was destined to fall into a death-trap in the swamp.
But it was impossible to keep any straight course. He zigzagged and
turned where he felt footing, picking a route by instinct and feeling.
The whole swamp resounded with the croaking and piping and thrumming
of frogs; they fell silent at his splashing steps, and started again
when he had gone by; and all the treetops were streaked and starred
with the greenish-yellow flicker of innumerable fireflies.
Huge rotten logs collapsed in a welter of wet slush as he trod on
them. He blundered into a wide slough of liquid mud, and floundered
out again. Most of all he was afraid of the moccasin snakes that must
swarm in such a place; but he comforted himself with the thought that
the moccasin is not a fighter like the rattlesnake, but makes for
water at any disturbance.
He was bound to come to dry land if he kept straight ahead. But it was
impossible to keep straight ahead. Turned back at one place by a dense
jungle of massed titi and palmetto, he was checked at another by a
belt of mud so deep that he dared not try to wade. He stumbled through
a screen of clinging vines and fell into water to his waist, and,
pulling himself out, he discerned a broad lagoon, its extent uncertain
in the darkness.
He dared not try to cross it. It occurred to him that he had best make
his way back to the river shore and swim downstream till he came to a
higher landing place. As he thought of it, he discovered that he had
no longer any idea in which direction the river lay.
He had made so many turnings that he had turned himself around. All
ways looked alike now, in that gloom and tangle. He might be going
parallel with the river, and the shore swamps would never end.
But he could not stop where he was. The ground seemed slowly sinking
under him. He plunged on blindly again, hoping that luck would bring
him to some spot solid enough to wait there till daylight.
But that noisome lagoon seemed somehow to have surrounded him. Water
covered the ground, from an inch to a foot deep, with knobby cypress
“knees” sticking up everywhere. Splashing through he came to a growth
of sharp palmetto. It might mean firmer ground. Indeed, the earth
seemed to harden, as the growth grew thicker. Clumps of bear-grass and
bay-trees loomed faintly. He trod on really firm ground, hammock-land,
he thought, above high-river mark. Next to this might come the pine
belt.
Much encouraged, he stumbled ahead through tall, coarse grasses to his
hips. Dense timber loomed somewhere ahead. He was trying to make out
pinecrests, when a sharp, startling “biz-z-z!” crackled from the
darkness at his feet.
He stopped as if suddenly frozen. He dared not breathe nor move a
muscle. He could not locate the sound, which had ceased. The snake
might be within two feet, ready to strike at his slightest movement;
it might be six feet away. Motionless as death, he stood listening,
with crawling chills creeping down his spine. Nothing sounded but the
piping and grumbling of the frogs. He had to risk it, and he gathered
his forces and executed a desperate leap backward that carried him a
couple of yards.
He landed unbitten. The rattlesnake buzzed again, but it was plainly
at least five yards away. Lockwood continued to go backward, shivering
and hot all at once.
This was no place to prowl in the dark. These hammock lands are always
haunted by rattlers. He groped back almost to the edge of the wet
ground, discovered a great branching willow, and clambered into its
fork.
Here he settled himself, determined to travel no more in darkness. He
was tired and wet through. There was a deadly chill in the air,
smelling of fog and rotten water, and he felt the ache and shivering
that might mean incipient malaria. It could not be long till dawn, and
he huddled himself in the willow to wait with what stoicism he could
summon.
In spite of the cramped position he must have dozed, for all at once
he found the air full of pallid gray light, drifting and smeary with
fog. The swamp stood up intensely green, the treetops brilliant with
flowers, dripping with moisture, bearded with gray Spanish moss.
Stiff and weary he crawled down from the tree. By daylight he was
disappointed to see that this was not true hammock land. It was merely
a strip of higher ground in the swamp. Beyond it he perceived a
stagnant bayou, where cypresses and gum-trees stood knee deep in
water.
But the strip of high ground might lead somewhere. He broke a long
stick and thrashed it through the weeds as he walked, to drive away
snakes. The dry land rose to a small knoll, dipped to mud and water,
then rose again, and all at once he espied the river through the trees
ahead. But he was stupefied to find it running the wrong way.
It was veiled still in mist, and he thought it might be a backwater.
But the mist was lifting. He caught a glimpse of the opposite shore.
It was really Alabama, wallowing through its swamps—in the wrong
direction.
Then he realized the truth. He was on the other side. He had crossed
the river in the dark without knowing it. The twisting cross currents
had carried him clear across the stream, to the shore opposite Blue
Bob’s bayou.
All the better he thought, as he re-oriented himself. There was less
chance of the outlaws carrying their search so far as this. The sky
was turning pink, and he continued his way up the dry strip along the
shore.
Within a hundred yards he came to a trail that had evidently been cut
to reach the river at low water. Water was over the trail now, but it
was not deep, and by wading inland he got through the worst of the
swamp belt. The ground rose and became dry. A clearing opened ahead.
It was a field of growing corn, with a deserted negro cabin.
Beyond this rose the dry, resinous purity of the long-leaf pine woods.
The wet chill of the swamp was gone. Between the trees he felt the hot
assault of the early sun. He dropped on the pine needles, quite
exhausted, intending to rest only a few minutes, and fell into a heavy
sleep.
The sun was well up among the pine branches when he awoke, refreshed
and intensely hungry. He was on the west bank of the river; he was in
Clark County, probably some twenty miles below Rainbow Landing. There
was a ferry somewhere upstream, but he could not think where it was.
But the railway came down the west bank, not at any great distance
from the river, he thought. If he kept westwards he was bound to
strike it, and he could probably hire a buggy or a car at some farm.
He was in a terribly dilapidated condition, covered with half-dried
mud, shoeless, hatless, his clothing in rags from the swamp. He would
not dare board a train in that guise. After some reflection he opened
his belt, and broke into his gold reserve for the first time since
putting it away. Taking out five of the coins, he put them in his
pocket, cut off the remains of the cord loops on his wrists, cast
aside his tattered socks, and started barefoot along the sandy road.
Within an hour’s walking a ramshackle store presented itself, but it
was able to provide him with a meal, a suit, and hat and boots of the
coarse material worn by negroes. Lockwood clothed himself afresh,
discarding every stitch of his former muddy outfit, and set out again,
being told that a farmer two miles up the road had a car to hire.
Two hours later he was at the railway station at Jackson, where he had
time to be shaved and to improve his toilet a little further. Spirit
had come back into him with food and cleanness. It was a question of
getting back to Rainbow Landing as fast as possible. So far from
having lost the game, he had all the cards. He had all the evidence
against Hanna that could be desired by anybody. Better still, Hanna
doubtless believed him at the bottom of the river, and would be off
his guard.
He thought of confiding in Craig and enlisting his help. Craig had
shown every disposition to be friendly and had no love for Hanna, as
Lockwood knew well. Craig was a man of standing, a business man, whose
backing would mean much.
The first thing was to get to Craig. He caught the afternoon train for
Selma, and had to wait there overnight, for there was no train down
the other side of the river till next morning. In this quietest and
most charming of little Southern cities Lockwood elaborated his plans.
He bought a better hat; he bought another automatic pistol to replace
the one that Blue Bob now carried. He slept soundly at the hotel,
fortified with hope, and took the morning train for Bay Minette.
It rained in torrents during the night, and rained nearly all that
morning as the slow train wound down the line, through the hills and
pine woods, past scattered cotton and cornfields.
The rain had ceased when he reached Bay Minette, late in the
afternoon, but it threatened to recommence at any moment. There was a
motor repair shop that he knew, where a car could usually be hired,
and he made straight for it. He wanted desperately to make Craig’s
camp that night; and he had no more than entered the shop than he
perceived a mud-covered car that he knew well, being worked over in
the repair pit.