DOWN THE RIVER
“Dodged ’em!” exclaimed Bob.
They could still hear the dipping paddles, and a faint mutter of
voices. In another minute the new-comers would perceive that the big
boat was gone. But for the present the boys were screened from sight,
and a stretch of fairly open water lay ahead. Joe stepped cautiously
out of the cabin and seized the great steering-oar, trying to hold the
houseboat straight down the channel. But she was clumsy to handle. She
banged against a tree-trunk, struck a snag with a terrific jar, and
then drifted sidewise around a bend. Bob came to help at the helm, but
their united efforts were incapable of holding the boat straight.
“You-all better git your guns ready,” Sam advised. “Dem fellers goin’
find out de boat’s gone, an’ be after us mighty sharp.”
Joe was extremely angry at Sam’s rash act in cutting the boat loose.
The heavy craft could never keep ahead of paddles, and at any moment
the channel might end in a log-jam or a lagoon. And, to intensify his
fears, there was a sudden shout of surprise and anger from behind. The
thieves had discovered the loss of the houseboat.
“If you hadn’t been such a fool we wouldn’t be in this scrape!” Joe
exclaimed. “Now I think we’d better turn this boat loose and take to
the woods.”
“Dey’re bound to cotch us anyways,” returned Sam pessimistically.
It was not so easy to take to the woods. The shores were flooded on
both sides. Water stood among the trees wherever they looked; there
was no place to land. To plunge into that snake-haunted lagoon, into
possible quicksands, was worse than to face the guns of the river-men.
In spite of their weight on the steering-oar, the heavy craft wallowed
from one side of the channel to the other, moving with maddening
slowness. Joe craned his head around to look forward; he thought he
saw drier ground ahead, and then the boat grounded heavily on a great
sunken log.
“Help me shove her off!” he exclaimed. “Run forward, Sam. Get that
other oar.”
There was another big sweep at the bow, which the negro hastened to
secure. The boat, pivoting round on the current, drove further on the
obstruction, and heeled so far over that the deck sloped at a sharp
angle. Joe and Bob shoved furiously. But the craft still stuck, and,
as they hung there helplessly, there was another shout behind, and
they saw a canoe just poking around the bend of the bayou.
By instinct they all dropped flat where they stood.
“Crawl back into the cabin,” Joe whispered. “They mustn’t see us.”
The two boys wormed back, flat on their faces. Looking through the
cabin they espied Sam also crawling toward them, his eyes rolling with
fright. He too had seen the coming canoe. Joe gestured at him, and he
lay down just inside the door leading to the “dog-trot.”
As yet they had evidently not been seen. Joe took a cautious peep at
the approaching canoe. It was their own canoe, as he had guessed, and
he was relieved to see that there were only two men in her. They were
coming on carelessly, talking as they paddled. It appeared that they
thought the houseboat had broken adrift by accident.
“Lucky she stuck here,” he heard one of them say. “I done told you-all
that rope wouldn’t hold, noways.”
The canoe came up alongside, and both the boys saw it plainly. In the
bow was the sallow-faced man with whom Joe had spoken up the river. At
the stern was a tall, heavily-built man, with long black hair, and a
cruel, brutal face. Across his brow, exposed by the pushed-back hat,
was a great blue-black mark or stain, probably made by the
powder-marks of a gun fired too close to his face. It was the relic of
some deadly brawl, no doubt, and Joe guessed that this must be the
redoubtable Blue Bob himself. Both men had guns laid back against the
seats, and both carried sheath-knives.
Bob looked at his cousin questioningly, and touched his rifle. Joe
hesitated, lying with the powerful little rifle cuddled against his
face and his finger on the trigger. He could easily have picked off
both the men as they came up, but a boat-load of rosin did not seem
worth two men’s lives. But more than that was at stake. It was a
question of saving their own lives. In a fight their only chance would
lie in shooting first.
He put his head close to his cousin’s ear and whispered:
“We’ll let them come aboard. The moment they’re on the deck we’ll draw
a bead on them and make them drop their guns.”
The canoe ran alongside the houseboat, touching her at the end of the
“dog-trot,” which now slanted so steeply that the lower rail almost
dipped under water. Blue Bob stood up carefully in the canoe, gun in
hand, and prepared to step aboard.
Bob and Joe had their sights on him. The river-man had one foot on the
deck and the other still in the canoe, when Sam leaped up with a yell
of absolute desperation, and seized the barrel of rosin that stood in
the passage. With a violent swing he half hurled it, half rolled it.
It went like an avalanche down the steep slope. It caught the pirate
on the legs before he could dodge it. The flimsy rail crashed under
the three-hundred pound weight. There was a yell, a curse, and canoe,
barrel, and men collapsed into wreckage together.
“Whoop-ee! Dere dey go!” yelled Sam, wild with triumph.
Joe raised himself and caught a glimpse of the smashed canoe, of the
men’s heads struggling in a seething mass of muddy water. And at that
moment the houseboat floated clear, whether by the jar of the fracas
or by the lightening of the barrel cast overboard. She ground slowly
off the log, swung about and began to drift again.
“Lie down!” said Joe under his breath, pulling Bob back as he was
about to jump to his feet.
It occurred to him that the river-men had seen only Sam, and would
attribute the whole affair to negroes. He had expected the pirates to
clamber aboard out of the water but a cautious peep showed them
crawling ashore, dripping, only one of them still with a gun. Climbing
out in the mud of the bank they both shook their fists toward the
retreating houseboat, shouting threats and curses whose words were
hardly distinguishable.
It was impossible to stop the boat or to give them any help, and
neither of the boys had any sort of inclination to do so. These woods
were familiar to the river-men; they would make their way to some
accustomed spot, and there were almost certainly more of the gang
somewhere about, who would give them assistance.
It was not till the clumsy craft sagged around another wooded bend
that the boys ventured to stand on the deck. Sam approached them, all
one broad grin of triumph.
“Reckon I put dem fellers out ’er bizness dat time! What you say, Mr.
Joe?” he exclaimed.
“You surely did, Sam. You did nobly,” Joe admitted. “It was just the
thing. But now you’ve got to steer us out of this bayou.”
For the present nobody could do anything but steer right ahead. The
stream widened a little; the shores became higher and drier. Joe
thought by the direction that they must be approaching the main
channel of the Alabama, when Bob seized his shoulder and pointed
ashore.
The ground went up in a slope, overgrown with blackberries, small
pines, and oaks, and through the thickets he caught a glimpse of the
gray planking of a cabin surrounded by blackberry-thickets.
“Gracious! Old Dick’s place!” he gasped.
“That’s what it surely is,” said Bob. “If we’d just waited here we
might have seen the houseboat come right down past us before long.”
“I declare!” said Joe, still in amazement. “I never dreamed that it
was the same bayou. Well, we know where we are at last. We don’t want
to go ashore here, do we?”
“No, I guess not,” returned Bob, looking longingly up at the home of
the bees. “I guess we’d better get out of this River Island as soon as
we can. But where are we going in this boat, and what are we going to
do with her?”
“Float her down into the river,” said Joe. “Of course we don’t want to
steal their boat, and we’ll tie her up and leave her at the first
landing we come to. They’ll be sure to come looking for her down the
river, and they’ll find her all right. I’m going to confiscate these
four barrels of rosin, though. They’re worth thirty or forty dollars.
We’ll either get the boat up to Magnolia or get somebody to drive us
over to the railroad. I suppose I’ll go back to the plantation with
you. I’ve got nowhere else to go now.”
The consciousness of his unfortunate position came upon the
woods-rider with extreme gloom. He had made up his mind that nothing
was to be expected from Burnam, and he had counted on this rosin to
recoup his loss. This had turned out an utter failure, and he no
longer had his job.
“I suppose I might get another place as woods-rider somewhere,” he
said. “To tell you the truth, I’d thought quite seriously of going
into the bee business with you, if this rosin mine had only panned
out.”
“I wish you could, Joe,” said his cousin earnestly. “We’d like to have
you, and you’d find it’d pay better than turpentining.”
Sam, who had been listening, burst into a peal of laughter at this.
“Bees pays better’n turpentinin’!” he shouted. “Hi-yi! Dat shorely is
a joke!”
“You don’t know anything about bees, Sam,” said Bob severely. “Up
North we owned close to ten million bees and two hundred queen bees.
Every queen would lay ten thousand eggs a week, and every egg would
hatch into a new bee. We’ve had pretty near a car-load of honey at
once. One hive will make more honey than you could carry. I’ve seen
nearly one of those rosin-barrels full of honey taken off of one
hive—worth fifteen cents a pound. These gums down here aren’t big
enough to hold a crop, and the bees swarm and go away. Our hives are
made so that they can be enlarged as the bees fill them up. They grow
higher and higher, till they’re higher than your head, all full of
bees and honey and wax from top to bottom. There are men who made ten
thousand dollars out of their honey in one summer. I’ll bet Burnam
never made as much as that.”
Sam’s face had grown sober under this lesson in apiculture. He looked
very doubtfully at the Canadian, uncertain whether it was a joke.
“Is all dat so, Mr. Joe?” he enquired dubiously.
“I reckon it is,” Joe returned.
“Well, den,” said Sam thoughtfully. “Don’t you reckon we-all’d better
leave off turpentinin’ an’ go into de bee bizness? I knows where
dere’s heaps of bee trees. Only,” he added, “I’s afraid dese here
swamp bees ain’t never learned to do no such stunts as you-all talk
’bout.”
“Sam’s right,” said Bob. “These swamp bees are a pretty scrub lot, I
expect. Breed counts as much in bees as it does in horses. But all we
have to do is to give these bees an Italian queen-mother. All the new
bees hatching out then would be pure Italians, and in a few weeks the
whole swarm would be through-bred.”
“Well, it sounds mighty interesting,” said Joe, “and I’d like to go
into it, if I could only raise some capital. I’m sorry now I left
Burnam in such a hurry. I think I’ll see him when we get back, and
find out what he’s going to do.”
“Hi!” shouted Sam suddenly. “Dere’s de river!”
So it was. The bayou had opened out, and just ahead they saw the wide
flood of the Alabama.
“Thank goodness! We’re out of the swamps at last!” Bob exclaimed with
great feeling.
But as the houseboat came into the current of the big stream, turning
southward, her bottom grounded. She swung off a little, turned half
about, and stuck solidly.
“Stuck on a sand-bar at the last minute!” Joe groaned in disgust.
Sounding with a stick, they found scarcely three feet of water over
the side. The boat was hard and fast, and the current was pushing her
more into the shoal at every moment. The boys stripped off the greater
part of their clothing and got overboard. They heaved and hauled at
the boat, tried to scrape away the sand, labored in the water for more
than an hour, and finally gave it up temporarily and returned on board
to rest. Then they attacked it again, but it was late in the afternoon
when they finally got her afloat again, by the use of enormous levers
brought from the woods.
Pushing out into the full current of the river, they let her drift,
feeling at last tolerably sure that the adventure was almost over.
They got out the provisions and ate them on the foreward deck-space.
The sun went down; the dusk fell fast, but they saw no light ashore
that would indicate any landing where they could put up the houseboat
and find transportation for themselves.
Dark had completely fallen when they heard a tremendous roar,
reverberating and reëchoing over the forest far ahead. It was the
steamboat coming from Mobile, but she was still miles away. They heard
her powerful whistle again and again, and at last beheld a shaft of
white light playing on the trees, shooting into the sky, like a small,
brilliant aurora. It was the boat’s searchlight, picking out the
intricate land-marks of the channel, but the steamer was still far
distant, and it was not for almost an hour that she really came in
sight around a curve a mile below.
For half an hour they had seen her as a pale luminosity reflected on
the sky through the trees, and she was an imposing spectacle as she
swept around the curve, looking like a great white glow on the water,
with the long dazzling shaft of the search-light shooting ahead. As
she came closer they made out the red glare of her furnaces on the
lower deck, the rows of lighted cabin windows, the glass pilot-house
high over all where the steersman manipulated the searchlight. Her
tall chimneys rolled out black smoke and sparks, and they heard the
pounding of her engines and the “crash-crash” of her stern
paddle-wheel.
“She isn’t going to run us down, is she?” exclaimed Bob.
The houseboat was certainly a big enough object for the pilot to see.
For an instant the searchlight rested on them blindingly, then
flickered away. The boat came on, blazing and roaring; she was going
to pass several yards to the west, and would have paid no further
attention to the houseboat, but Joe snatched up Bob’s rifle, fired
three shots in the air, and shouted.
The search-light turned on them again, dazzling, questioningly. The
steamboat slowed, and somebody hailed them roughly.
“We want a tow!” Joe yelled.
He knew that these river boats would carry anything or tow anything
that they were paid for. There was a little delay, and then the
steamer sheered over toward them. They could see the black, interested
faces of the roustabouts along the rail, and somebody threw a heavy
rope. The houseboat jarred against the steamer’s side, and the hawser
was pulled tight. On account of the stern-wheel, towing had to be done
alongside and not astern.
Joe stepped aboard the steamer, edged through piles of freight on the
lower deck, and made his way to the forward stairway, intending to
interview the captain. There were very few passengers aboard, and at
the top of the stairway almost the first face he saw was a most
familiar one.
“Mr. Burnam!” he exclaimed.
“Why, Joe Marshall!” returned the turpentine operator, in equal
surprise. “What on earth are you doing here? Taken to house-boating?
And whatever have you been doing to yourself?” gazing at Joe’s
tattered and muddy clothing.
“This isn’t my houseboat,” said Joe. “I want to get towed to the next
landing and leave it there.”
He looked at his late employer with some doubt, remembering their most
recent encounters, but Burnam’s face expressed the greatest
friendliness.
“Give this boat a tow to Dixie Landing, Captain Andrews,” he said to
the steamboat captain, who had come up behind them. “You can charge it
up to me. I’m mighty glad I ran across you, Joe,” he continued. “I
wanted to see you. Come with me into the clerk’s office, where we can
talk.”
There was no one in the little den which the boat clerk used for his
business, and the two established themselves there and shut the door.
The steamer got under way again, with the houseboat hitched alongside.
By looking out the window, Joe could see Bob and Sam in the electric
light, still aboard the captured craft.
“Morris told me all about your leaving,” Burnam began, with a smile.
“Reckon I don’t blame you much. But I don’t remember anything about
jumping on you and firing you the night of the fire. I do things like
that sometimes when I get excited, and I sure was excited that night.
I’d have fired anybody sooner than you. You’ll just have to forget
it.”
“Why, I—of course!” Joe stammered, taken aback by this frankness.
“Now I’ve just been down to Mobile to see about getting a new retort
for the still,” the turpentine man went on. “I find that I can’t get
one inside of a month, and it’s cost about double what it’s worth at
that. Nearly all my chippers have cleared out, too. The turpentine
camp’s going to shut down.
“But don’t you worry, Marshall!” he went on earnestly. “You haven’t
got stock in the business, you know. You’ve got my personal note for
your money, and none of Bill Burnam’s notes has ever been dishonored
yet. I’ve made a contract to sell the timber off the river orchard,
and I’m going to cut it next winter. That’ll clear all my liabilities
and leave a handsome profit.
“Now I wish you’d come back and help us close things up for a week. In
fact, I’ll be using some men all the rest of the summer in the woods,
and next winter you can help to manage the timber gangs, if you want
to. Same wages, and I can pay off your note next spring; or maybe I
could let you have a little sooner, if you needed any.”
“Why, Mr. Burnam,” said Joe, nervously. “I’ll come up for a week,
sure; but the fact is, I’ve been thinking of going into the bee
business.”
Burnam laughed.
“Along with your cousins from the North?” he inquired. “Well, that’s
all right, Joe. Hope you make a big hit, and if it doesn’t pan out you
can always come back and get a job with me, you know.”
“Look here, Mr. Burnam, I’ve got to tell you something,” burst out
Joe, whose conscience had been troubling him. “I’ve found—no, come
along with me, and I’ll show you.”
He hurried Burnam down the stairs again, and over the rail to the
houseboat, where the turpentine operator recognized Bob and Sam with
astonishment. In the cabin Joe pointed out the four barrels of rosin,
and rapidly told the story of his discovery of the “mine,” and its
removal.
“You’re a wonderful woods-rider, Joe,” Burnam commented with a laugh.
“It seems you can get rosin even out of the swamps. But I knew all
about that old still in the woods. I didn’t know exactly where it was,
but I’d always planned to prospect for it, and dig up the rosin. It
legally belongs to me, you know, the same as any other deposit in the
ground, even if your grandfather did put it there.”
“I was a little afraid it might be that way,” Joe admitted.
“But you boys certainly deserve to have it,” Burnam continued, “after
the wild chase you’ve gone through. You can have these four barrels,
anyway. They’re worth thirty dollars, and I’ll buy them off you now.
I’ll write you a check in the office. And if you can locate the rest
of the stuff, why,”—he hesitated a moment,—“we’ll go halves on it, and
you can hold my half until my note is paid in full.”
“Thanks,” said Joe. “But I’m afraid there’s not much chance of my ever
locating it. I expect it’s all sold in Mobile long ago.”
“Likely that’s so,” Burnam admitted. “We’re a few weeks too late, I
reckon. Well, come along and I’ll give you the check for this, anyway,
and there’s some wages due you, too, that you may as well have.”
Joe was richer by sixty-five dollars when the steamer reached Dixie
Landing, a few miles below the River Island. Here they left the
houseboat, tying it carefully to a tree, to wait till the owners
should reclaim it. That black houseboat, Joe found, was tolerably well
known along the lower river, and no one would dispute Blue Bob’s claim
when he should come after it.
The four barrels of rosin were transferred to the steamer, to go with
Burnam’s next consignment. The boys remained on the steamboat also,
Bob to get off at Magnolia Landing, and Joe and Sam to return to the
turpentine-camp for the closing up of the establishment.
“I’m going back to get Old Dick’s bees, you know,” said Bob with
determination.
“Of course,” Joe returned. “Wait for me, though. I’ll be able to go
with you in another ten days.”
“All right, and meanwhile we’ll get everything ready,” Bob agreed, as
the light at Magnolia Landing came in sight.