with unexpected swiftness.
"I have been shouting for you not fifty feet away," said Deal; "how is
it that you did not hear?" Then in the same breath, in a soft undertone,
he added, "Ah-h-h-h!" and without stirring a hair's breadth from where
he stood, or making an unnecessary motion, he slowly drew forth his
pistol, took careful aim, and fired. He was behind his brother, who lay
with closed eyes, not noticing the action.
"What have you killed?" asked Carl languidly. "I've seen nothing but
birds; and the most beautiful ones, too."
"A moccasin, that's all," said Deal, kicking the dead creature into the
pool. He did not add that the snake was coiled for a spring. "Let us get
back to the little knoll where I was, Carl; it's drier there."
"I don't think I can walk, old man. I fell from the vines up there, and
something's the matter with my ankles."
"Well, I can carry you that distance," said Deal. "Put your arms around
my neck, and raise yourself as I lift you--so."
The burning flambeau on the knoll served as a guide, and, after one or
two pauses, owing to the treacherous footing, the elder brother
succeeded in carrying the other thither. He then took off the light
woolen coat he had put on before entering the swamp, spread it over the
driest part of the little knoll, and laid Carl upon it.
"If you can not walk," he said, "we shall have to wait here until
daylight. I could not carry you and the torch also; and the footing is
bad--there are twenty pools to cross, or go around. Fortunately, we have
light-wood enough to burn all night."
He lit fresh torches and arranged them at the four corners of their
little knoll; then he began to pace slowly to and fro, like a picket
walking his beat.
"What were you doing up among those vines?" he asked. He knew that it
would be better for them both if they could keep themselves awake; those
who fell asleep in the night air of South Devil generally awoke the next
morning in another world.
"I climbed up a ladder of vines to gather some of the great red blossoms
swinging in the air; and, once up, I went along on the mat to see what I
could find. It's beautiful there--fairy-land. You can't see anything
down below, but above the long moss hangs in fine, silvery lines like
spray from ever so high up, and mixed with it air-plants, sheafs, and
bells of scarlet and cream-colored blossoms. I sat there a long time
looking, and I suppose I must have dozed; for I don't know when I fell."
"You did not hear me shout?"
"No. The first consciousness I had was the odor of brandy."
"The odor reached you, and the sound did not; that is one of the tricks
of such air as this! You must have climbed up, I suppose, at the place
where I lost the trail. What time did you come in?"
"I don't know," murmured Carl drowsily.
"Look here! you _must_ keep awake!"
"I can't," answered the other.
Deal shook him, but could not rouse him even to anger. He only opened
his blue eyes and looked reproachfully at his brother, but as though he
was a long distance off. Then Deal lifted him up, uncorked the flask,
and put it to his lips.
"Drink!" he said, loudly and sternly; and mechanically Carl obeyed. Once
or twice his head moved aside, as if refusing more; but Deal again said,
"Drink!" and without pity made the sleeper swallow every drop the flask
contained. Then he laid him down upon the coat again, and covered his
face and head with his own broad-brimmed palmetto hat, Carl's hat having
been lost. He had done all he could--changed the lethargy of the South
Devil into the sleep of drunkenness, the last named at least a human
slumber. He was now left to keep the watch alone.
During the first half hour a dozen red and green things, of the
centipede and scorpion kind, stupefied by the glare of the torches, fell
from the trees; and he dispatched them. Next, enormous grayish-white
spiders, in color exactly like the bark, moved slowly one furred leg
into view, and then another, on the trunks of the cypresses near by,
gradually coming wholly into the light--creatures covering a
circumference as large as that of a plate. At length the cypresses all
around the knoll were covered with them; and they all seemed to be
watching him. He was not watching the spiders, however; he cared very
little for the spiders. His eyes were upon the ground all the time,
moving along the borders of his little knoll-fort. It was bounded on two
sides by pools, in whose dark depths he knew moccasins were awake,
watching the light, too, with whatever of curiosity belongs to a snake's
cold brain. His torches aroused them; and yet darkness would have been
worse. In the light he could at least see them, if they glided forth and
tried to ascend the brilliant knoll. After a while they began to rise to
the surface; he could distinguish portions of their bodies in waving
lines, moving noiselessly hither and thither, appearing and disappearing
suddenly, until the pools around seemed alive with them. There was not a
sound; the soaked forest stood motionless. The absolute stillness made
the quick gliding motions of the moccasins even more horrible. Yet Deal
had no instinctive dread of snakes. The terrible "coach-whip," the
deadly and grotesque spread-adder, the rattlesnake of the barrens, and
these great moccasins of the pools were endowed with no imaginary
horrors in his eyes. He accepted them as nature made them, and not as
man's fancy painted them; it was only their poison-fangs he feared.
"If the sea-crab could sting, how hideous we should think him! If the
lobster had a deadly venom, how devilish his shape would seem to us!" he
said.
But now no imagination was required to make the moccasins terrible. His
revolver carried six balls; and he had already used one of them. Four
hours must pass before dawn; there could be no unnecessary shooting. The
creatures might even come out and move along the edge of his knoll; only
when they showed an intention of coming up the slope must their gliding
life be ended. The moccasin is not a timorous or quick-nerved snake; in
a place like the South Devil, when a human foot or boat approaches,
generally he does not stir. His great body, sometimes over six feet in
length, and thick and fat in the middle, lies on a log or at the edge of
a pool, seemingly too lazy to move. But none the less, when roused, is
his coil sudden and his long spring sure; his venom is deadly. After a
time one of the creatures did come out and glide along the edge of the
knoll. He went back into the water; but a second came out on the other
side. During the night Deal killed three; he was an excellent marksman,
and picked them off easily as they crossed his dead-line.
"Fortunately they come one by one," he said to himself. "If there was
any concert of action among them, I couldn't hold the place a minute."
As the last hour began, the long hour before dawn, he felt the swamp
lethargy stealing into his own brain; he saw the trees and torches
doubled. He walked to and fro more quickly, and sang to keep himself
awake. He knew only a few old-fashioned songs, and the South Devil
heard that night, probably for the first time in its tropical life, the
ancient Northern strains of "Gayly the Troubadour touched his Guitar."
Deal was no troubadour, and he had no guitar. But he sang on bravely,
touching that stringed instrument, vocally at least, and bringing
himself "home from the war" over and over again, until at last faint
dawn penetrated from above down to the knoll where the four torches were
burning. They were the last torches, and Deal was going through his
sixtieth rehearsal of the "Troubadour"; but, instead of "Lady-love,
lady-lo-o-o-ve," whom he apostrophized, a large moccasin rose from the
pool, as if in answer. She might have been the queen of the moccasins,
and beautiful--to moccasin eyes; but to Deal she was simply the largest
and most hideous of all the snake-visions of the night. He gave her his
fifth ball, full in her mistaken brain; and, if she had admired him (or
the "Troubadour"), she paid for it with her life.
This was the last. Daylight appeared. The watchman put out his torches
and roused the sleeper. "Carl! Carl! It's daylight. Let us get out of
this confounded crawling hole, and have a breath of fresh air."
Carl stirred, and opened his eyes; they were heavy and dull. His brother
lifted him, told him to hold on tightly, and started with his burden
toward home. The snakes had disappeared, the gray spiders had vanished;
he could see his way now, and he followed his own trail, which he had
taken care to make distinct when he came in the night before. But,
loaded down as he was, and obliged to rest frequently, and also to go
around all the pools, hours passed before he reached the last cypresses
and came out on the old causeway across the sugar-waste.
It was Christmas morning; the thermometer stood at eighty-eight.
Carl slept off his enforced drunkenness in his hammock. Mark, having
bandaged his brother's strained ankles, threw himself upon his rude
couch, and fell into a heavy slumber also. He slept until sunset; then
he rose, plunged his head into a tub of the limpid, pure, but never cold
water of Florida, drawn from his shallow well, and went out to the
chimney to see about dinner. The chimney was doing finely: a fiery plume
of sparks waved from its white top, a red bed of coals glowed below.
Scip moved about with as much equanimity as though he had a row of
kitchen-tables upon which to arrange his pans and dishes, instead of
ruined blocks of stone, under the open sky. The dinner was good. Carl,
awake at last, was carried out to the table to enjoy it, and then
brought back to his chair in front of the house to smoke his evening
pipe.
"I must make you a pair of crutches," said Deal.
"One will do; my right ankle is not much hurt, I think."
The fall, the air of the swamp, and the inward drenching of brandy had
left Carl looking much as usual; the tenacious disease that held him
swallowed the lesser ills. But for the time, at least, his wandering
footsteps were staid.
"I suppose there is no use in my asking, Carl, _why_ you went in there?"
said Deal, after a while.
"No, there isn't. I'm haunted--that's all."
"But what is it that haunts you?"
"Sounds. _You_ couldn't understand, though, if I was to talk all night."
"Perhaps I could; perhaps I can understand more than you imagine. I'll
tell you a story presently; but first you must explain to me, at least
as well as you can, what it is that attracts you in South Devil."
"Oh--well," said Carl, with a long, impatient sigh, closing his eyes
wearily. "I am a musician, you know, a musician _manqué_; a musician who
can't play. Something's the matter; I _hear_ music, but can not bring it
out. And I know so well what it ought to be, ought to be and isn't, that
I've broken my violin in pieces a dozen times in my rages about it. Now,
other fellows in orchestras, who _don't_ know, get along very well. But
I couldn't. I've thought at times that, although I can not sound what I
hear with my own hands, perhaps I could _write_ it out so that other men
could sound it. The idea has never come to anything definite yet--that
is, what _you_ would call definite; but it haunts me persistently, and
_now_ it has got into that swamp. The wish," here Carl laid down his
great pipe, and pressed his hand eagerly upon his brother's knee--"the
wish that haunts me--drives me--is to write out the beautiful music of
the South Devil, the sounds one hears in there"--
"But there are no sounds."
"No sounds? You must be deaf! The air fairly reeks with sounds, with
harmonies. But there--I told you you couldn't understand." He leaned
back against the wall again, and took up the great pipe, which looked as
though it must consume whatever small store of strength remained to him.
"Is it what is called an opera you want to write, like--like the
'Creation,' for instance?" asked Deal. The "Creation" was the only long
piece of music he had ever heard.
Carl groaned. "Oh, _don't_ talk of it!" he said; then added, irritably,
"It's a song, that's all--the song of a Southern swamp."
"Call it by it's real name, Devil," said the elder brother, grimly.
"I would, if I was rich enough to have a picture painted--the Spirit of
the Swamp--a beautiful woman, falsely called a devil by cowards, dark,
languorous, mystical, sleeping among the vines I saw up there, with the
great red blossoms dropping around her."
"And the great mottled snakes coiling over her?"
"I didn't see any snakes."
"Well," said Mark, refilling his pipe, "now I'm going to tell you _my_
story. When I met you on that windy pier at Exton, and proposed that you
should come down here with me, I was coming myself, in any case, wasn't
I? And why? I wanted to get to a place where I could be warm--warm, hot,
baked; warm through and through; warm all the time. I wanted to get to
a place where the very ground was warm. And _now_--I'll tell you why."
He rose from his seat, laid down his pipe, and, extending his hand,
spoke for about fifteen minutes without pause. Then he turned, went back
hastily to the old chimney, where red coals still lingered, and sat down
close to the glow, leaving Carl wonder-struck in his tilted chair. The
elder man leaned over the fire and held his hands close to the coals;
Carl watched him. It was nine o'clock, and the thermometer marked
eighty.
For nearly a month after Christmas, life on the old plantation went on
without event or disaster. Carl, with his crutch and cane, could not
walk far; his fancy now was to limp through the east orange-aisle to the
place of tombs, and sit there for hours, playing softly, what might be
called crooning, on his violin. The place of tombs was a small, circular
space surrounded by wild orange-trees in a close, even row, like a
hedge; here were four tombs, massive, oblong blocks of the white
conglomerate of the coast, too coarse-grained to hold inscription or
mark of any kind. Who the old Spaniards were whose bones lay beneath,
and what names they bore in the flesh, no one knew; all record was lost.
Outside in the wild thicket was a tomb still more ancient, and of
different construction: four slabs of stone, uncovered, about three feet
high, rudely but firmly placed, as though inclosing a coffin. In the
earth between these low walls grew a venerable cedar; but, old as it
was, it must have been planted by chance or by hand after the human body
beneath had been laid in its place.
"Why do you come here?" said Deal, pausing and looking into the place of
tombs, one morning, on his way to the orange-grove. "There are plenty of
pleasanter spots about."
"No; I like this better," answered Carl, without stopping the low chant
of his violin. "Besides, they like it too."
"Who?"
"The old fellows down below. The chap outside there, who must have been
an Aztec, I suppose, and the original proprietor, catches a little of
it; but I generally limp over and give him a tune to himself before
going home. I have to imagine the Aztec style."
Mark gave a short laugh, and went on to his work. But he knew the real
reason for Carl's fancy for the place; between the slim, clean trunks of
the orange-trees, the long green line of South Devil bounded the
horizon, the flat tops of the cypresses far above against the sky, and
the vines and silver moss filling the space below--a luxuriant wall
across the broad, thinly-treed expanses of the pine barrens.
One evening in January Deal came homeward as usual at sunset, and found
a visitor. Carl introduced him. "My friend Schwartz," he said. Schwartz
merited his name; he was dark in complexion, hair, and eyes, and if he
had any aims they were dark also. He was full of anecdotes and jests,
and Carl laughed heartily; Mark had never heard him laugh in that way
before. The elder brother ordered a good supper, and played the host as
well as he could; but, in spite of the anecdotes, he did not altogether
like friend Schwartz. Early the next morning, while the visitor was
still asleep, he called Carl outside, and asked in an undertone who he
was.
"Oh, I met him first in Berlin, and afterward I knew him in New York,"
said Carl. "All the orchestra fellows know Schwartz."
"Is he a musician, then?"
"Not exactly; but he used to be always around, you know."
"How comes he down here?"
"Just chance. He had an offer from a sort of a--of a restaurant, up in
San Miguel, a new place recently opened. The other day he happened to
find out that I was here, and so came down to see me."
"How did he find out?"
"I suppose you gave our names to the agent when you took the place,
didn't you?"
"I gave mine; and--yes, I think I mentioned you."
"If you didn't, I mentioned myself. I was at San Miguel, two weeks you
remember, while you were making ready down here; and I venture to say
almost everybody remembers Carl Brenner."
Mark smiled. Carl's fixed, assured self-conceit in the face of the utter
failure he had made of his life did not annoy, but rather amused him; it
seemed part of the lad's nature.
"I don't want to grudge you your amusement, Carl," he said; "but I don't
much like this Schwartz of yours."
"He won't stay; he has to go back to-day. He came in a cart with a man
from San Miguel, who, by some rare chance, had an errand down this
forgotten, God-forsaken, dead-alive old road. The man will pass by on
his way home this afternoon, and Schwartz is to meet him at the edge of
the barren."
"Have an early dinner, then; there are birds and venison, and there is
lettuce enough for a salad. Scip can make you some coffee."
But, although he thus proffered his best, none the less did the elder
brother take with him the key of the little chest which contained his
small store of brandy and the two or three bottles of orange wine which
he had brought down with him from San Miguel.
After he had gone, Schwartz and Carl strolled around the plantation in
the sunshine. Schwartz did not care to sit down among Carl's tombs; he
said they made him feel moldy. Carl argued the point with him in vain,
and then gave it up, and took him around to the causeway across the
sugar-waste, where they stretched themselves out in the shade cast by
the ruined wall of the old mill.
"What brought this brother of yours away down here?" asked the visitor,
watching a chameleon on the wall near by. "See that little beggar
swelling out his neck!"
"He's catching flies. In a storm they will come and hang themselves by
one paw on our windows, and the wind will blow them out like dead
leaves, and rattle them about, and they'll never move. But, when the
sun shines out, there they are all alive again."
"But about your brother?"
"He isn't my brother."
"What?"
"My mother, a widow, named Brenner, with one son, Carl, married his
father, a widower, named Deal, with one son, Mark. There you have the
whole."
"He is a great deal older than you. I suppose he has been in the habit
of assisting you?"
"Never saw him in my life until this last October, when, one windy day,
he found me coughing on the Exton pier; and, soon afterward, he brought
me down here."
"Came, then, on your account?"
"By no means; he was coming himself. It's a queer story; I'll tell it to
you. It seems he went with the Kenton Arctic expedition--you remember
it? Two of the ships were lost; his was one. But I'll have to get up and
say it as he did." Here Carl rose, put down his pipe, extended one hand
stiffly in a fixed position, and went on speaking, his very voice, by
force of the natural powers of mimicry he possessed, sounding like
Mark's:
"We were a company of eight when we started away from the frozen hulk,
which would never see clear water under her bows again. Once before we
had started, thirty-five strong, and had come back thirteen. Five had
died in the old ship, and now the last survivors were again starting
forth. We drew a sledge behind us, carrying our provisions and the
farcical records of the expedition which had ended in death, as they
must all end. We soon lose sight of the vessel. It was our only shelter,
and we look back; then, at each other. 'Cheer up!' says one. 'Take this
extra skin, Mark; I am stronger than you.' It's Proctor's voice that
speaks. Ten days go by. There are only five of us now, and we are
walking on doggedly across the ice, the numbing ice, the killing ice,
the never-ending, gleaming, taunting, devilish ice. We have left the
sledge behind. No trouble now for each to carry his share of food, it is
so light. Now we walk together for a while; now we separate, sick of
seeing one another's pinched faces, but we keep within call. On the
eleventh day a wind rises; bergs come sailing into view. One moves down
upon us. Its peak shining in the sunshine far above is nothing to the
great mass that moves on under the water. Our ice-field breaks into a
thousand pieces. We leap from block to block; we cry aloud in our
despair; we call to each other, and curse, and pray. But the strips of
dark water widen between us; our ice-islands grow smaller; and a current
bears us onward. We can no longer keep in motion, and freeze as we
stand. Two float near each other as darkness falls; 'Cheer up, Mark,
cheer up!' cries one, and throws his flask across the gap between. Again
it is Proctor's voice that speaks.
"In the morning only one is left alive. The others are blocks of ice,
and float around in the slow eddy, each solemnly staring, one foot
advanced, as if still keeping up the poor cramped steps with which he
had fought off death. The one who is still alive floats around and
around, with these dead men standing stiffly on their islands, all day,
sometimes so near them that the air about him is stirred by their icy
forms as they pass. At evening his cake drifts away through an opening
toward the south, and he sees them no more, save that after him follows
his dead friend, Proctor, at some distance behind. As night comes, the
figure seems to wave its rigid hand in the distance, and cry from its
icy throat, 'Cheer up, Mark, and good-by!'"
Here Carl stopped, rubbed his hands, shivered, and looked to see how his
visitor took the narrative.
"It's a pretty cold story," said Schwartz, "even in this broiling sun.
So he came down here to get a good, full warm, did he? He's got the
cash, I suppose, to pay for his fancies."
"I don't call that a fancy, exactly," said Carl, seating himself on the
hot white sand in the sunshine, with his thin hands clasped around his
knees. "As to cash--I don't know. He works very hard."
"He works because he likes it," said Schwartz, contemptuously; "he looks
like that sort of a man. But, at any rate, he don't make _you_ work
much!"
"He _is_ awfully good to me," admitted Carl.
"It isn't on account of your beauty."
"Oh, I'm good looking enough in my way," replied the youth. "I
acknowledge it isn't a common way; like yours, for instance." As he
spoke, he passed his hand through his thin light hair, drew the ends of
the long locks forward, and examined them admiringly.
"As he never saw you before, it couldn't have been brotherly love,"
pursued the other. "I suppose it was pity."
"No, it wasn't pity, either, you old blockhead," said Carl, laughing.
"He _likes_ to have me with him; he _likes_ me."
"I see that myself, and that's exactly the point. Why should he? You
haven't any inheritance to will to him, have you?"
"My violin, and the clothes on my back. I believe that's all," answered
Carl, lightly. He took off his palmetto hat, made a pillow of it, and
stretched himself out at full length, closing his eyes.
"Well, give _me_ a brother with cash, and I'll go to sleep, too," said
Schwartz. When Deal came home at sunset, the dark-skinned visitor was
gone.
But he came again; and this time stayed three days. Mark allowed it, for
Carl's sake. All he said was, "He can not be of much use in the
restaurant up there. What is he? Cook? Or waiter?"
"Oh, Schwartz isn't a servant, old fellow. He helps entertain the
guests."
"Sings, I suppose."
Carl did not reply, and Deal set Schwartz down as a lager-beer-hall
ballad-singer, borne southward on the tide of winter travel to Florida.
One advantage at least was gained--when Schwartz was there, Carl was
less tempted by the swamp.
And now, a third time, the guest came. During the first evening of this
third visit, he was so good-tempered, so frankly lazy and amusing, that
even Deal was disarmed. "He's a good-for-nothing, probably; but there's
no active harm in him," he said to himself.
The second evening was a repetition of the first.