“Whut made you lock me out, elder?” she demanded.
“Dude done it,” Hitch mourned, sitting upon the floor and feeling much
better after learning what had caused his pipe to explode. “Dude is
went!”
“Oh, Lawdy!” Dainty exclaimed. “Go an’ fotch him back, elder! He’ll be
so drunk in no time dat he won’t know whut end of hisse’f is straight
up! Go!”
Hitch went. His intentions were good. He really desired to find Dude,
because Dude had the jug. He purposed to hunt for him. But a man who
has had fourteen swallows out of a jug of free whisky twenty minutes
before cannot be expected to maintain a given purpose very long.
By the time Hitch had crossed the pasture, he needed all the woods
along the river for walking room. The entire width of the levee was not
too much to accommodate his devious journey back toward Sawtown.
On the edge of the town, near the commissary store of the big sawmill,
he found a most interesting ditch. It was about ten feet wide and
fifteen feet deep, and was hard and dry at the bottom.
He leaned over to examine that ditch with great care. He seemed to want
to remember it, to impress it on his mind. It may fairly be presumed
that he did impress it on his mind. He fell into it on his head.
At midnight he was sleeping in it undisturbed. A little after midnight
something happened. A man walking down the deep gulley stepped on Hitch
Diamond and woke him up.
V
AMONG THIEVES.
Hitch did not know how long he lay in the ditch after he had been
awakened. He tried to remember where he was and how he got there, but
he was half asleep and wholly confused, and the task was too great for
him.
What woke him up completely was a long, shrill whistle, followed by
four pistol-shots in rapid succession.
Hitch sprang to his feet and started running down the gulley, but he
stumbled in the dark and fell headlong.
Three more pistol-shots cracked in the still night air, a man screamed,
and Hitch sprang up and started again. He stumbled and fell a second
time.
Over in the far end of the big lumber yard a second whistle shrilled,
the call of a night watchman, followed by the _crack! crack! crack!_
of an automatic pistol. Then the big mill whistle roared its warning
through the town and reverberated down the river and echoed from the
woods, and deafened and terrified Hitch Diamond by its sinister call to
the people of Sawtown to rouse themselves.
From the great number of little houses where the employees of the mill
lived men issued forth, brandishing firearms and calling to each other
as they ran. The electric lights in the mill flashed up, and in a brief
time an immense crowd had congregated.
Hitch could hear their excited questions and answers.
“What’s the matter?”
“Commissary store has been robbed and night watchman killed!”
“Who did it?”
“A nigger!”
“No! Two niggers!”
There was a moment of silence while the crowd considered this. Then a
roar:
“Find them niggers and mob ’em! Come on!”
“Spread out, men! Cover the yard! Look everywhere!”
Hitch Diamond turned his back on that crowd and started in the opposite
direction at full speed, running in the dark, with no notion where he
was going. He got an idea when he plunged into the mill-pond up to his
neck.
“Dis here is sloppy wuck!” he grunted as he climbed out of there.
He began to skirt the edge of the pond, and found to his alarm that
he was following the curve which led him back to the lighted mill. He
heard the sound of running feet; a flash-light shot its rays across the
mill-pond, and Hitch departed from the water’s edge with all possible
speed.
He found one of the long alleys between the lumber piles in the yard
and sprinted down the sawdust trail at a lively gait.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he found the entrance of the alley
filled with men who were coming toward him with incredible swiftness.
The employees of the mill were familiar with all the main thoroughfares
and by-paths of the yard, while Hitch had to feel his way to some
extent, and his progress was necessarily slow.
A revolver spat fire and lead at him, a fusillade followed, a big
lumber-stack rose like a mountain before the frightened negro, and he
fell against it with both hands outspread.
He found something that he had never noticed in a lumber yard
before--that strips of wood were thrust between the layers of lumber to
give a circulation of air and prevent the lumber from rotting.
These little gaps made it possible for him to climb, and he scrambled
up the pile like a big baboon and lay on the top, panting like the
exhaust of an engine.
His pursuers passed the pile on the path below, and Hitch began to
breathe easier.
In a moment a light flashed from a big lumber-pile fifty feet away and
several feet higher than the pile he was on. A watchman was whipping
about him with a dark lantern, searching the top of the lumber.
Hitch Diamond dropped over the side and hit the sawdust trail again.
He ran down a little by-path, skinning his elbows upon the projecting
planks and stubbing his bare toes against all kinds of obstacles, until
he fell over something and tumbled onto something with a clatter like
the roll of a snare-drum.
A man loomed up before him not twenty feet away and said “Ho!” in a
frightened voice.
Hitch got up and went away from that place with astonishing speed.
Then the watchman on the lumber-pile threw the rays of his dark lantern
down into the runway just as Hitch passed, and the terrified negro ran
full into the glare.
Three pistol-shots splintered the wood around him as he ran on; the
watchman’s sharp voice called to the man-hunters, and in a second,
hundreds of men had turned and were converging toward the spot where
Hitch Diamond was running around a lumber-pile like a trapped rabbit.
“Guard the runways, men!” the watchman’s voice ordered sharply. “I’ll
flash the light into the alleys for you!”
The watchman began to leap from pile to pile, throwing the rays of his
dark lantern down into each corridor, and coming constantly closer to
where Hitch Diamond was hiding.
“My Gawd!” Hitch chattered as he looked up at the fantastic,
mountainous pile beside which he was crouched.
Salvation came with the thought that the pile he stood beside was
higher than the one on which the watchman stood. He began to climb,
hand over hand, praying that the light would not reach him before he
could attain the summit.
By the mercy of Heaven he rolled onto the top of the lumber just as the
watchman, on a pile twenty feet below him, flashed the glare into the
corridor where Hitch had stood a moment before.
Hitch was blowing like a bellows, streams of perspiration poured down
his body, and his giant frame shook like the body of a man with an ague.
Days of dissipation in New Orleans, a drunken spree just a few hours
before, nothing to eat since breakfast, half an hour of violent
exercise running and climbing lumber, and a fright which clutched at
his heart, weakening and almost suffocating him--all of these things
were handicaps for Hitch Diamond in the effort he was making to escape.
He knew that capture meant certain death. Capture was not even
necessary--a flash of light, a well-directed pistol-shot, and his
career was ended.
Suddenly his soul was filled with terror.
Twenty men had mounted the lumber-piles and were moving across the
tops, lashing the lumber with their lights, driving everything before
them as a woman shoos a lot of chickens. Below him, on the ground, men
were standing at the end of each main thoroughfare, and were lashing
them with light, while one man was walking down each by-path!
The searching party had organized, and was moving with perfect
precision to cover the entire yard.
“Good-by, fair worl’!” Hitch Diamond mourned as he crawled to the edge
of the lumber and looked down. “’Tain’t no hope fer pore old Hitchie
onless I kin hop offen dis lumber atter dat man is done passed down in
de alley.”
But the men on the ground had foreseen that possibility, and were
measuring their progress down the by-paths by the progress of the men
on the lumber-piles.
Seeing this, Hitch Diamond’s heart turned to lead, his blood to water,
and his giant frame seemed to crumble like chalk. Already he felt
himself mortally stricken and dying.
He caught himself trying to speak, to utter words of encouragement
to himself, but his teeth clicked together like castanets, and his
whispered words fell upon terror-deafened ears.
He sprang to his feet and stood glaring at the approaching lights like
some great beast trapped in a jungle. Unconsciously he shut his fingers
tight, his hands forming two immense iron fists.
That unconscious action made a man of him again! Those iron fists
were the fists of a prize-fighter--Hitch Diamond, the Tickfall Tiger!
Courage flowed through his veins like some magic liquor.
“Hitch never th’ows up de sponge!” he growled. “I fights to de eend!”
VI
THE TICKFALL TIGER STRIKES.
Hitch sat down upon the lumber-pile and slipped quietly over the edge,
preparing to descend.
He hung the seat of his trousers upon a splinter and lunged forward in
a sudden panic, tearing the garment almost off his body.
As he climbed quietly down the side of the pile, he hung the leg of his
trousers upon a projecting stick and ripped the leg almost up to the
waistband. Dropping down upon the sawdust path, he took a step or two
and found that his torn pantaloons hindered his progress, and might
afford his pursuers a hand-hold for his capture.
Sorrowfully he took the garment off and stood in his giant strength,
panoplied in his red underclothes!
“There he goes!” a voice called in the dark.
Clenching his iron fists, Hitch started at full speed. Ten men blocked
the entrance before him. He went through them like an express-train,
rolling some of them heels over head.
A man ran out of a by-path, and his head collided with Hitch’s fist
like a punching-bag. As the negro ran another, another, and another
came out of the little pathways, and each one went down like a bag of
salt. Thus Hitch arrived at the main passageway.
Then he found every by-path pouring forth its quota of men, every
thoroughfare contributed its number, and every man upon the
lumber-piles ran toward one spot to illumine the passage with their
dark lanterns.
“Lawdymussy!” Hitch sighed. “Ef I don’t mix wid ’em, dey’ll shoot me!”
To the end of their lives, those powerful, husky sawmill men told with
awe-stricken voices of the fight of that giant black in the lumber
yard. Hitch mixed with them. No man dared to use his pistol for fear of
killing a friend. It was a hand-to-hand battle, one negro against forty
mill-hands.
With a wild, insane bellow Hitch hurled himself upon that mob of
cursing, shrieking, clambering, clutching men, and they set upon him
like ravening wolves.
The confusion was terrible, the noise was deafening, the shout and the
tumult of the battle echoing back from the mountains of lumber. Hitch
alone seemed to have a clear idea of his battle--he knew that every man
was against him. The others hindered each other, but Hitch knew that he
was free to knock any nose and pound any head and butt any stomach.
The proximity of the lumber on each side of the thoroughfare was an aid
to Hitch. When he hurled his mighty body into a crowd of his opponents,
and they reeled back from the impact and struck the backs of their
heads against the wood, it took them a few minutes to recover from the
shock, while Hitch gave his attention to others.
His giant fists pounded heads as though they were egg-shells; his
ponderous bare feet landed with mighty kicks in the stomachs and the
backs of men; his long, iron arms whirled like the wings of a windmill,
mowing them down, every man who was touched falling unconscious or
helpless.
Four men clung to him like cockleburs to a sheep’s wool, trying to drag
him down by their weight. Hitch scooped them up in his mighty arms and
fell with their combined weight against a pile of lumber, crushing them
and breaking their holds.
An excited watchman on a lumber-pile above him sought to contribute a
share to the battle by dropping upon Hitch’s head a girder or joist
such as is used in constructing the framework of houses. The piece of
timber fell ten feet from Hitch’s struggling body, and he set his hand
upon it with a bellow of joy.
In that moment Hitch became another Goliath, the staff of whose spear
was like a weaver’s beam, and whose spear’s head weighed six hundred
shekels of iron.
When Hitch began to lay about him with that joist the battle was won.
The foolish watchman who had contributed such a mighty weapon to the
enemy was so astonished that he fell, clattering, off the lumber-pile
and broke his arm.
The men charged him once more, but Hitch waved his big piece of timber
from side to side, mowing them down. A pistol-shot from the top of the
lumber warned Hitch that it was time to leave.
A loud, disappointed wail sounded from the top of the lumber, where the
men were operating the dark lanterns, and instantly began the crack,
crack, crack of the pistols, shooting at Hitch as he ran down the
corridor.
Men still arriving, coming in from other by-paths and avenues between
the lumber, scrambled out of Hitch’s way, fearful of being shot from
above.
Hitch found a clear path and took it. In a little while he was out of
range of the bullets and out of the glare of the lights. He scrambled
over a low fence, and found himself in a side street outside of the
lumber yard.
“Hey, men!” a triumphant voice shrieked. “Here he is! We’ve got him!
Come on! We’ve caught him!”
Shriek after shriek arose from the middle of the lumber yard,
accompanied by the triumphant voices repeating:
“We’ve got him!”
“Dey ain’t got me!” Hitch grinned as he looked over his shoulder at the
flashing lights which were converging at another point on top of the
lumber. “I’s gwine drap down an’ rest a minute; den I’s gwine take dis
red suit of underclothes to Tickfall, an’ git some pants an’ a coat to
put on over it.”
He dropped down in a thicket of plum-trees, completely exhausted. While
he rested he listened.
“Kill him!”
“Befo’ Gawd, white folks, I ain’t done nothin’, nothin’!”
“Knock him over the head with that jug and make him shut up!”
A loud scream and silence!
“I wonder whut road goes back to Tickfall?” Hitch whispered with
fear-stiffened lips. “One dead nigger is more’n a plenty!”
Skirting the edge of the town to be out of the electric lights, Hitch
Diamond sought the way to the river. With him every place was either up
or down that great stream, and he remembered that Tickfall was up the
river.
When he found the levee and stood looking out upon the dark water so
great was his confusion that he was unable to tell which way the stream
was flowing.
He heard behind him the shouts of the approaching mob, punctuated now
and then by the terrible screams of a man being led out of the woods to
suffer death. He shuddered and wondered that any man could make as much
noise with his throat as did this terrified negro in the hands of the
mob.
A moment later there was no question in Hitch’s mind which way the
Mississippi River was flowing, for Hitch was swimming noiselessly
across the current toward the opposite shore. But the Father of Waters
is no quiet mill-pond. The pressure of its mighty current is the push
of every drop of water falling between the Rockies and the Alleghanies
and the inflow of the rivers between. That current carried Hitch down
the stream, in spite of his most powerful efforts to resist it.
Several men ran out on the levee and threw their lantern rays across
the water.
Hitch promptly turned on his back and floated, riding the current as
motionless as a log. When the light left the water, Hitch struggled on,
fighting the dark, muddy stream.
Suddenly the water swept him against one of the immense cypress braces
of the revetment levee. He seized it, almost dead with weariness. He
realized that he was not twenty feet from the shore he had left, and
but a short distance from the mob. But this revetment offered a hiding
place, and he grasped it eagerly.
The voices of the mob came to him distinctly across the water.
“Befo’ Gawd, white folks, you-alls ain’t got me right!” the hopeless
captive wailed. “I ain’t done nothin’ a-tall! All you white mens
knows Dude Blackum--dat’s me! I lives in de cabin jest up ferninst de
mill-pond, an’ wucks on a farm fer my livin’!”
“Shut up!”
The crowd which had fought and been defeated by Hitch Diamond was in no
mood to listen to the explanations of another negro. A long, wailing
cry was Dude Blackum’s answer, and the mob moved on.
Suddenly there was a whoop, a clatter of pistol shots, a howling mob
swarming over the levee, a splash of water, and a number of voices:
“Catch him! Head him off there! Kill him!”
A number of flash-lights whipped the water, and one big lantern shot
a broad, blinding, dangerous streak. That flare of light caught the
round, black head, swimming, struggling in the current, and held it.
“Now, men!” a voice called. “There’s your mark--shoot straight!”
There was a fusillade--Hitch Diamond noted with elation that the black,
woolly head bobbed on.
“Fer Gawd’s sake!” Hitch murmured. “Why don’t dat coon dive an’ float?”
Suddenly an authoritative voice cried:
“Stop shooting, men! Get in your skiffs and row out there and catch
that negro! It’ll take him half an hour to swim the river!”
“My Lawd!” Hitch Diamond moaned. “Little Hitchie is shore up ag’in it
now!”
“Hurry, men!” the same authoritative voice called.
There was the sound of running feet along the levee, then a moment of
breathless silence while the flash-lights lashed the water.
Then far out into the stream there was a loud scream, a loud splash,
and silence!
“Dar now!” Hitch mourned. “De water cramps got him! He’s dead!”
The lights of the lanterns searched everywhere. No black object
floated, nothing at all was seen.
The same clear, authoritative voice spoke again, and a tone of sadness
softened it:
“I guess that’s all, men! We may as well go home now!”
“I’s gwine home, too!” Hitch Diamond whimpered piteously.
VII
GOING HOME.
He climbed down the levee, after battling his way across the river,
found a public highway on the other side, and stepped into the middle
of the road. Looking about him cautiously, he inflated his lungs with
air. After that he dropped his hands to his sides and began a steady
and persistent trot, his feet striking the sand with the monotonous
regularity of a ticking clock, each stride carrying him away from the
scene of his adventure.
Hour after hour, as persistent as a desert camel, Hitch moved ahead,
his breath like a husky bellows, his body pain-shot from his many
wounds.
By early dawn he was miles away, tortured by hunger and compelled to
face the fact that he could not go to a house and beg for food, nor
could he forage in the daylight for lack of clothes.
“Lawd,” Hitch mourned. “Ef I ever git back to Tickfall, I’s gwine git
on de water-wagon, an’ cut out de booze. I’ll cut out prize-fightin’,
cussin’, an’ trabelin’ aroun’. I’ll git me a good, easy job ’thout much
work to do, an’ rest my bones till I die!”
As the first faint streaks which marked the rising of the sun shot
across the sky, Hitch left the road and walked toward the river.
He entered some deep woods and crawled into a thicket of small trees
which were heavily draped with muscadine vines. Dragging these vines
down and packing them around him so that they made a complete covering,
he lay flat on the ground and slept like a dead man until darkness came
again.
When Hitch awoke he could see the dim outlines of the river levee, and
he started toward it, every muscle stiff and aching and crying for more
rest.
“I’s gwine git over on my own side of dis river befo’ I fergits whut
side I b’longs on,” he soliloquized. “Bad luck is hittin’ me too fast
fer me to take any chances!”
Weak from hunger and weariness, with his strength bound by his stiff
and aching muscles, the current carried Hitch almost a mile down the
stream before he could battle his way across.
When he landed he lay for an hour upon the shore, hardly able to move.
At last he started, going away from the river until he found the
public road, then turned to the right and started forward on a steady
trot.
Daylight found him twenty-seven miles nearer Tickfall, and the third
day had begun for him without food. Hunger gnawed at his stomach with
the teeth of death.
As he approached the woods where he expected to hide for the day, he
noticed a thin column of smoke rising above the branches of the trees.
“Ef I kin find dat fire in de woods, an’ some nigger is watchin’ it, I
won’t hab no trouble,” Hitch muttered. “Dey’ll onderstan’ dat I’s done
had troubles an’ dey’ll git me some pants an’ somepin to eat.”
He crept into the timber and began to walk slowly and cautiously toward
the place where he thought he had located the smoke.
It was much farther than he had estimated, and he crawled and crept for
a long time before he reached it.
Some one had cooked food there, for an old tin can was still redolent
of boiled coffee; there were the feathers of a chicken, and the scales
of a fish, and the crumbs of bread.
Moaning to himself like a wounded animal, Hitch dropped upon all fours
and picked up every crumb of bread, and sucked the remaining sustenance
from every chicken and fish bone which had been cast aside, and drained
every drop of coffee from the empty can.
Then he heard a noise behind him and turned to gaze into the scarred,
black, masklike face of Dinner Gaze.
Hitch was not at all surprised to see some negro from Sawtown hiding
in the woods. In fact, he knew if the negro who built the fire was a
traveler he had very likely come from that mill town.
The proverb that the wicked flee when no man pursueth does not apply
to the negro in the South. However innocent he may be of crime, he
desires to depart from a place where there has been trouble between the
negroes and the whites. If he is a transient like Hitch Diamond, or his
occupation is rather questionable, like the gambling-house of Dinner
Gaze, he is sure to leave at the earliest opportunity and go where he
has friends or where the white people who know him will defend him from
harm.
“Hello, Dinner!” Hitch exclaimed.
Dinner’s black, beadlike eyes glowed unwinkingly.
“I thought they kilt you in de river, Revun,” he muttered in his soft,
easy voice.
“Naw, suh, dey wusn’t atter me,” Hitch said with difficulty, feeling a
great weakness and nausea come over him. “Dey kotch Dude Blackum an’
Dude escaped away. He sunk while he was swimmin’ in de river.”
“Did de mob tear all yo’ clothes off?” Dinner Gaze asked.
“Naw, suh; I had bad luck an’ loss all my clothes befo’ dat happened.
Dat’s how come I got to trabbel at night.”
“Is you hongry?” Gaze asked.
“Ain’t had nothin’ fer two days, an’ dis is de beginnin’ of de nex’
day,” Hitch told him.
Dinner Gaze picked up a small handsatchel which he had set down at his
feet and prepared to leave.
“I’s sorry you didn’t git here in time fer breakfast, Revun,” he said.
“Ef you’ll stay right here I’ll go git you some ole clothes an’ a
little vittles. I kin beg ’em from some white folks’s house.”
“I’s mighty nigh dead wid bein’ so hongry, Dinner,” Hitch pleaded. “Ef
you’ll he’p me outen dis scrape I’ll shore love you ferever.”
“Don’t be oneasy,” Dinner grinned. “I’ll he’p you as much as I kin.”
Dinner may have intended to aid Hitch, but that portion of Tickfall
Parish was scantily inhabited. He walked several miles before he came
to a human habitation, and there he was refused both food and clothes.
Furthermore, Hitch had said enough to cause any man to suspect that he
was implicated in the Sawtown murder, and negroes are afraid to render
aid and comfort to criminals, even of their own race.
Hitch waited for several hours, and finally fell asleep, dreaming of
all the things he had ever seen or heard of that were good to eat. He
awoke at nightfall, famished. Dinner Gaze had not returned.
“Dat nigger lied to me!” Hitch exclaimed desperately. “Ef I had him
here I’d kill him wid my bare hands. Ef I ever git de chance to even
up, I’ll do it ef I die!”
Cursing his misfortunes, he arose and stumbled weakly forward.
Two days later Hitch Diamond stumbled up the steps of the little
cabin at the Gaitskill hog-camp, seven miles from Tickfall. He fell
unconscious at the feet of old Isaiah Gaitskill, the negro overseer.