Desmond’s conviction that the matter of the bicycle was eminently fit
for report to the authorities was shared by the party who was most
intimately concerned, the flatboat-man himself. The jovial pose which
Jedidiah Knoxton conserved that afternoon while he sat on a coil of rope
on the deck and sawed on the fiddle, as the friendly current carried him
farther and farther toward the centre of the stream, had no relation to
the attitude of his mind. It was dismayed, intimidated, as he now
reflected upon the episode and its possible consequences. He did not
welcome the realization that his thought was shared by his wife, as he
noted that she was standing with the child in her arms, staring with a
sort of dull, apprehensive, quelled contemplation at the receding scene,
for it seemed to move instead of the craft,—the bight of the great river
bend, where the roiled water gave token of the path of the boat; the
strip of level territory outside the levee; the immense, green,
serpentine embankment where the group of “quality folks” stood dwindling
till they seemed but a bunch of bright-hued fabric; the heavy, tangled
growths of a stretch of swamp country to the north, and to the south,
with no apparent limits to their extent, the seigneurial groves of Great
Oaks.
And here could be seen the mansion itself, with its score of red
chimneys, its long, low white façade, each remove showing its many
appanages,—now a wing and then, swinging into view, an ell, and
straggling away the kitchen and offices, and dove-cote, and dairy and
bell-tower, and stables, and orchards and vineyards; farther still was
the village-like cluster of buildings for hired hands and tenants,
formerly the “quarter” for slaves; and yet beyond appeared the
steam-gin, the saw-and-grist mill, the potato-houses, the sheds for
cows, and the work animals, mules, and horses; then thousands of acres
of cotton-fields, orderly and neat as a flower border, already ploughed
and bedded up, ready for the planting of the great staple,—a
principality indeed, the realm of the rich and powerful and learned;—and
was it wise to excite the just wrath, and the dangerous suspicion, or
even to court the notice of those whose stake in the country was so
large, whose hand was so heavy, whose ascendency was so complete!
“Mighty fine folks, Jedidiah,” she said at length, still staring at the
moving landscape. Her voice reached him even amidst the discordant
sawings and scrapings of the horsehair and catgut. His hat was thrust
back; his red forelock tossed to and fro as his head wagged in unison
with his raucous performance. He did not speak, and presently, still
eyeing the receding scene, she said, “Mighty rich folks, Jedidiah!” Her
voice was pitched high, and its penetrating quality made itself
insistent throughout the hubbub of the “hot time in the old town.” The
discordant strain ceased suddenly. The bow, still held after the
fiddler’s fashion, was shaken at her in emphasis as he drawled
malignantly:—
“Ye-es,—an’ if this fallin’ weather in the upper country holds a week
longer, I can take a cool thirty thousand dollars outer that sucker’s
pocket with three strokes of a spade; an’ by gum, I’ll do it, too!—if I
gits a chanst.”
He lifted his hand to the abrasions of his bruised and swollen face,
which he had hitherto disregarded with an assumption of hardihood as
naught. The last building of the “quarter” was disappearing in the
distance, glistening with whitewash,—it was said on the river that the
manager at Great Oaks whitewashed all creation when he was informed that
Mrs. Faurie was returning from abroad, _even the under side of the
horse-block_!—but the flatboat-man’s wife still stood staring, some
vague premonition of trouble in her mind. Jedidiah, the frog-like
suggestions of his face emphasized as he crouched his body forward, his
legs doubled up among the coils of rope, stared, too, blinkingly. The
light in the sky was a keen saffron gleam now; it dazzled his eyes; he
was thinking hard, eagerly, fearfully, maliciously.
The next moment the whole world seemed resonant and rocking with a wild,
pervasive turbulence,—a steamer was rounding the point, and the little
helpless, drifting leaf of a boat lay directly in her course. How he
should not have heard the respiration of her engines, like that of an
immense breathing creature which she resembled, he never knew, or how he
had not felt the vibrations of the water pouring like a cataract over
the great wheel at her stern,—for formidable as she moved upon the
currents, loftily as she towered in her white, glistening presence, her
chimneys seeming to vie with the forest heights of Great Oaks, she was
not one of the fine packets plying between the cities. She was destined
for one of the smaller tributaries, and the Mississippi made only a part
of her course. But she looked to the flatboat-man like the scourge of
God. She was materialized Fate! She was Terror, Doom, and Death in one
to the wretched man whom momently she threatened to run down. He could
never have described what he felt as now and again she lifted anew her
frightful voice and spoke to him,—he could only feel,—spoke of warning,
of smug and exact compliance with the law, of due notification of the
death that she must presently mete out to him. He seemed all apart from
the straining wretches that toiled, one at the pole and two at the
rowlocks, as the two men and the woman strove against the current to
bring the raft aside from the path of the domineering monster that bore
straight down upon them,—for as far as consciousness was concerned, he
could not have moved a muscle. It was a matter of instinct which
controlled his labor, a mechanical effort, with which heart and brain
had no part. He began to tremble when he perceived that the steamboat
was slightly sheering to the left. Then for the first time he was
sufficiently in command of his faculties to realize that the pilot’s
bell was continually jangling, that the throbs of the engines were
disjointed, feebler, that there was a desperate effort making to back,
to sheer, to change the course.
It was all useless,—too late! He saw as his frenzied muscles still
strove against the impossible that the guards were filled with people,
passengers, calling out undistinguished words of commiseration, of
encouragement; the roustabouts stood on the lower deck, scarcely higher
out of the river than himself in his humble craft level with the
surface, and roared out advice.
Suddenly with a wild scream the woman despaired. She rose, dropping her
oar, and held up the child at arm’s length, with a gesture of appeal,
toward the captain, who was standing on the hurricane deck. He waved his
hand in encouraging response, and then the sheer was sufficient for
Jedidiah to see that the yawl was unslung and sliding from the davits,
and that the Flora F. Mayberry proposed to have the credit of humanely
picking up their carcasses, after she had sent to the bottom their
floating home and all their pitiful store of goods and chattels.
For this was the aspect the episode took to his mind when, almost within
the suction of the steamer, the flatboat struck a swift swirl of
current, made, heaven only knows how. Some obstruction on the bottom may
have caused it,—the smokestack of an old sunken boat, long since
forgotten; a tree of former swamp growths, too deeply whelmed to be
known to snag-boats or river charts, barely sufficient to turn a ripple.
With the vast strength of the Mississippi River currents the deflecting
ripple swung the flatboat around like a leaf in an eddy, and, as safe as
if he had miles of sea-room, Jedidiah Knoxton stood on his raft, with
his face corrugated and lined with rage, and his mouth stretched wide
and distorted, and shook his fist at the towering steamer, and called
out frenzied curses upon the craft and her captain, and passengers, and
crew, and consigned them all to hell, a deep and fiery hole in his
version. Meantime the passengers, their sympathy reacting, laughed and
sneered; the deck-hands yelled out gibes of derision and responsive
defiance; the captain shrugged his shoulders in silent contempt and
ordered the yawl once more to its place.
The woman, her arms akimbo, the baby, wailing unheeded now on the
dancing, teetering floor, looked bitterly after the greater craft as she
passed, the water playing in cascades of white foam over the wheel at
her stern, her moving chimneys seeming to describe scrolls of mystic
import among the clouds, punctuated here and there by the faint spark of
a star.
“It is allus the way, Jedidiah,” she said. She could scarcely get her
breath as yet, and her voice had a catch like a sob. “It is allus the
way! The big folks is safe, an’ high, an’ dry, while us pore folks take
water, an’ skim the edge of hell.”
His pride, if he might have claimed such an endowment, his
self-sufficiency, had been grievously cut down by the incident; but
since it had not culminated in death or disaster, it had seemed to
resolve itself into a flout, an injury, a wanton insult. This view was
confirmed in an illogical sort by the evident revulsion of the sentiment
of the passengers and crew, their sympathy naturally enough checked,
however, by his rage and futile venom as he volleyed his curses at them.
“Not _allus_ so safe an’ sound,” he protested, “the rich folks ain’t.
Them galoots up there at Whippoorwill Landing didn’t skim the edge of
hell,—that’s true; they went teetotally in,—kerplunk!”
The woman had been wringing out her hair and shaking out her skirts, all
damp with the spray of the stern wheel of the steamer and the churning
wake of her passage in which the raft yet rocked. An awed stillness
though fearful delight came over her face at his words, and she softly
drew near, and sat down on a coil of the ropes with the baby in her
arms. The child had ceased to cry aloud bewailing his desertion, but as
if silence were too great a boon to accord, he kept up a sort of
absent-minded whimpering or crooning, reciting in some sort a theme of
woe, learned by rote, the significance of which had been forgotten or
was uncomprehended.
“Yes, sir!” Jed Knoxton exclaimed with hearty satisfaction, “_they_ got
the butt end of the club, sure! Providence was right after them at a
two-forty clip!” He sneered as he laughed. “I tell you the way it was
meted out to _them_, you might have thought they was pore folks, fur
sure.”
“I never could make out how ’t was they never suspicioned nothing,—how
it was so easy done,” she speculated.
There was not a soul within a mile of the boat, yet he glanced fearfully
over his shoulder before he answered. His brother, the idiot, had gone
back into the cabin, and now and again a long-drawn snore and at times a
sputtering gasp told that he had sought his bunk for the night. The
broad Mississippi stretched silent and deep, vacant on either hand, so
broad that they could only see the line of the hither shore a mile away
as they drifted along on the swift current. There was no other craft in
view; no motion save the long, elastic undulations of the waves, here
and there crisping into ripples when a flaw of the chill night breeze
struck the water. Sometimes they were tipped with a shifting
scintillation, the reflection of a star, and again only a sense of a
dark, transparent lustre betokened the depths. A world, it was, and all
to themselves; yet he looked over his shoulder, fearfully.
“They got into the store by purtendin’ to be customers,—that’s how.”
“But stores don’t keep open past midnight,” she remonstrated.
He ducked his red head and chuckled into the bosom of his checked
hickory shirt. It seemed so funny,—so very funny! “Of course ’twas outer
business hours; but they was ailin’—oh, my, how ailin’ they was! Becburn
give out that he had ptomaine pizenin’;—when they landed in the skiff,
an’ came up the bank, Danvelt told me that they hallooed the store bold
as brass, same as if they was in earnest. An’ them two, the proprietor
of the store and his clerk, they took it all in, for gospel sure.
Becburn _had_ swallowed something mighty nigh as bad,—a power o’
ipecac,—and he was jus’ a-vomitin’ an’ retchin’ as he come,—an’ sure
enough them suckers opened the door, to give him something to ease him
off!” He paused again to laugh silently, holding his head down. “That
light-haired, slim fellow, Oscar Patton, the clerk, he said that common
kitchen sody was the antidote; an’ all bar’foot as he was, he run into
the back room to git a box,—they dealt with him there.”
The child still crooned its plaint, though forgetting its sorrow; the
woman’s face was illumined by the light of the moon, only a mere segment
of pearl, but all else was so dark,—the silent river running like the
stream of Time, the glooms of the forest crowning the nearer banks
towering dimly into the night, the opposite shore lost in distance,—that
its lineaments were easily discerned by one familiar with them. Even one
not accustomed might have noted the peculiar slant of the eyes, the
snake-like contour of the countenance, the long, serpentine curve of the
throat,—she seemed not out of place clinging to the slimy timbers of a
raft in the midst of the murky Mississippi. She listened in cold-blooded
interest to this tale of a deed of dread, but now and again she
shuddered.
“The t’other fellow, Ackworth, was harder to kill, they say. He got his
chanst and fit. He got on to the game, whenst he heard Patton yell out
‘Oh, my God!’ an’ drap to the floor. Ackworth made a break for the
drawer of the counter then,—he had just been pourin’ out a glass of
whiskey for the sufferer from ptomaine; Becburn declares now he ain’t
responsible for nothin’ ’bout it all, for he done nothin’ but turn
himself wrong side out with that ipecac!—an’ when Ackworth laid holt of
the knob of the drawer, they knowed there was a pistol in it, an’ they
jumped on him. Ben Danvelt jes’ held him by the nape o’ the neck, an’
though he got the drawer open, they pushed him down an’ shut his head up
in it. He couldn’t git a purchase on himself to pull his head outer it.
Tom Turfin stabbed him twicet, while the t’others held him thar with his
head in the drawer,—stabbed him twicet in the back just under the
shoulder-blade. He wasn’t dead, though, when they let the drawer loost
an’ he drapped,—he died hard. Tom say that he wriggled an’ writhed on
the floor like a wum. He only spoke once; he lifted up his voice an’ he
says, says he, ‘My blood shall be a testimony against you.’ An’ his
mouth was full of it, then. But Ben Danvelt he spoke up,’ Incompetent
testimony in this court.’ He’s a funny feller, full of his jokes! Then
he let Ackworth have the knife agin,—right in the throat, this time. An’
they got no more o’ his jaw then. A slick job, it was,— done right.”
The progress was swift down the great, pulsing river; they could see the
dark forests upon the bank all a-journeying northward as so elastically,
so noiselessly, they swung along toward the south. Now and again the
braided currents carried the craft close in shore, and they could smell
the dank, rich vernal odor of the earth, the pungent tang of herb and
tree; once in a deep, oozy tangle where a bayou went sluggishly forth
into the woods, an outlet from the Mississippi, they heard a sudden
resounding splash in the water. The woman started nervously, and with a
sharp exclamation let her snuff-brush drop from her mouth into her lap.
“Shucks, Jocelinda,” the man sneered, “don’t you know a ’gator takin’ to
water yit?”
The ripples of the great saurian’s stir as he swam along the marge were
perceptible now in the moonlight as the boat shot past, down and down
the stream, and they seemed far away and faint the sound when they heard
the alligator’s resonant call to his mate in the lagoon, and presently
another roar hardly more than some dull blast of a distant horn, so fast
the river swept them on.
“It ain’t seemin’ no slick job to me,” Jocelinda commented at length,
“else it would never have been found out.”
“Oh, _you_’d have done it mighty different, wouldn’t you, now?” he
sneered. “_You_ are up to all sorts o’ tricks.”
“I can kindle a fire that won’t go out,” Jocelinda declared.
“But the fire didn’t go out; ’twas _put out_,—that’s whut! The light gin
the alarm so denied quick. That old hussy, the Swamp Lily, came scootin’
down the river a full day behind time; an’ headin’ for the landin’, the
pilot seen the store afire. He sounded the whistle fit to wake the
dead,—waked all the swamp country for miles around. The old boat jes’
sot there on the water a-pipin’ an’ a-blowin’ as if she’d bust. Then all
the galoots round about got inter their breeches an’ boots an’ run to
the landing to help put it out. The Swamp Lily sent out all the
deck-hands, an’ the Mississippi River had a leetle water to spare,—no
reason why they couldn’t throw the water on the fire an’ put it out.
_You_ couldn’t kindle a fire that the Mississippi River can’t squench,
hey, ‘smart Aleck’?”
“But then the folks found the bodies right there,” she objected.
“Ye-es,” he drawled. “They had their own reasons for not having walked
off.”
“An’ so the folks found the bodies fresh killed, an’ seen that the store
had been stripped of mighty nigh all the goods an’ all the money in the
cash drawer.”
“Ye-es, the boys loaded up all they could kerry on the steam-launch an’
set the shebang afire. But for the accident of the Swamp Lily comin’
along out of turn, the whole caboodle would have been ashes and cinders
before the sun had riz. They would have thought the proprietor an’ his
clerk was burned by accident, or in tryin’ to save something, or was
drunk an’ didn’t wake. I ‘member Danvelt said he thought that Ackworth
had the name of takin’ a glass too much once in a while.”
“’Twas a big fire,” she remarked, as if making a concession. “It lighted
up the whole country. The river shone like a stream of flames in the
fog,—just seemed to split the world in two.”
“_’Twas_ a big fire—an’ a slick job, too,” he protested. “They got away
with the goods an’ some cash,—consid’ble spondulix,—an’ nobody ain’t
’spicioned ’em yit. ’Twas way last fall, too.”
“Them bodies ought not to have been found,” she argued dolorously. She
felt that it was the one disparagement to the artistic achievement.
He did not reply. They were now passing between a small island and the
shore. The water, thus compressed in volume, ran with still more
turbulent rapidity. He was not sure how their voices might carry on the
still air and the transmitting medium of the silent river. They were too
near the land on either hand to risk such words as might phrase the
thoughts of their dark hearts. The island was in progress of swift
building. At no distant day it would be the shore. The great, restless
river—now sweeping away hundreds of acres, that melted into nothingness
in the floods; now cutting channels through points of land in an
inconceivably short time, transmogrifying them into islands far from
their ancient affiliations—was here filling up with silt the shallows
and rifts and chasms into solid continuity with the bank. This island
was what is locally called “a towhead,” a spit of white sand, sparsely
covered with brush; and one might imagine so desolate a loneliness could
shield no human being who could lend the ear of comprehension to a
chance word floating over the water. But Jedidiah Knoxton and his wife
Jocelinda kept their dubious counsels, till once more they swung along
between distant banks of the deep and lonely river below and the
unpeopled skies above.
“Jed, warn’t that bicycle one of the Ackworth stock?” she queried, in a
mere whisper.
“Ax me no questions an’ I’ll tell you no lies,” he retorted gruffly.
“I allus believed them was ’spensive things,—heap mo’ ’spensive than you
knowed. I b’lieve Danvelt let you have ’em jus’ to let you git tracked
by ’em,” she suggested, “ter keep s’picion off ’n him.”
“Shet yer mouth, Jocelinda,” he vociferated furiously, “else I’ll break
it in.”
“Why, _you_ had nothin’ to do with thar trick,” she expostulated. “I
ain’t taxin’ _you_ with nothink.”
She was quiescent for a time, as if knowing that her silence would
stimulate him to speech. The surest way to reopen the discussion was
paradoxically to close it. The child was sleeping now, and once and
again she patted its back, as it lay on her breast, with a fragmentary
“Bye-oh, Bye-oh.”
“Them things ain’t labeled,” Knoxton recommenced, as if there had been
no cessation of the discussion. “They are as common as crayfish. Folks
are wheelin’ all over the country.”
“Not at no five dollars, Jed,—nor yit ten. I tole you that I priced them
jiggermarees whenst I was in Vicksburg, an’ some was as high as fifty
dollars.”
“An’ I tole you that the store folks was stuffin’ you,” he cried, with a
sort of turbulence that was akin both to rage and woe. “A tacky body
like you to go pricin’ wheels an’ such fixin’s!—they was makin’ game of
you.”
“Mebbe so, mebbe so,”—she yielded a facile acquiescence, apparently
without sensitive vanity; “but I _did_ see this evening that ten dollars
was a power too low. That man wouldn’t let Mrs. Faurie risk herself with
it,—rich as she is! He knowed it war new and stole.”
“Well, damn Mr. Faurie,—that is all I have got to say,” the flatboat-man
cried, his hand going up to his bruised face tingling with pain as his
rancor roused at the recollection of the incident. Then tremulous with a
nervous rage, that yet contended with a cold chill of fear, “But if this
wheel was to be tracked to me, what would ail me not to split on Danvelt
and Turfin and the others?”
“I reckon they are too far by this time to be caught; it all happened
last October, and here it is nigh the spring o’ the year agin. I reckon
they think that nobody would believe you. The law would have you safe by
the laig, an’ the goods found on your boat. ’Twas only a blind if
anybody took after them.”
There was a long silence. The boat was again approaching the shore of
its own accord, it seemed, yielded as it was to the whim of the current.
The dark forests were coming down to the verge of the stream with
beckoning, sheltering suggestions in their wild, tangled glooms. Her
breath was short, so ardently she hoped what she dared not say. He
divined her hope, but with that perverse sense of domination, so
characteristic of the domestic tyrant, he would say naught to encourage
it. He pursued the subject. “If I believed that, I’d sink the wheels in
the river without more ado,” he declared.
“They are too light,” she protested. “I dunno how them cur’ous
injer-rubber rims might make ’em float.”
Again there were no words between them for a time, while the river clove
through the night as silent as the stars vibrating above in the sky. The
moon was sinking toward the western bank. A vague sense of yearning, of
wistful sadness, pervaded the lunar light that began to suffuse the
summits of the great, gloomy, primeval forests. This glister seemed to
respond to the slow down-dropping of the weary one who had finished her
course through the skies,—no joyous welcome this, but replete with
solemnity, with weird silence, with aloof suggestions such as might
typify the down-dropping into a grave. The wind had grown more chill.
Jocelinda wrapped closer a ragged petticoat of red flannel, which the
baby wore about its shoulders like a mantle. The touch of the fabric
reminded her of the infant’s wardrobe which Mrs. Faurie had promised
her,—not that she cared for such comforts and means of tidy array; it
would have been far too much trouble to keep the child clothed and
tended in many whole and clean garments. The recollection merely brought
to her mind a collocation of ideas that had earlier occurred to her. “I
don’t believe that man was Mr. Faurie!” she said suddenly.
It was an unlucky topic. The very name roused Knoxton’s rancor. “What
for no?” he exclaimed, in a sudden gust of anger. His knowledge that the
bicycle had been instantly recognized as stolen goods; the possibility
that his possession of the machine might connect his identity with the
miscreants who had plundered the store at Whippoorwill Landing, and
murdered the proprietor and clerk; the fear that this was their
nefarious intention in shunting off on him these costly wares so easily
detected, so rare among the humbler population among whom his trade lay,
so incongruous with his stock of goods and character of custom, filled
him with a bewildered dismay. His was not a trained mind to think
consecutively, to deduce correct conclusions; he blundered upon his
convictions; his plans were founded on impulse, inclination. Ignorance
is not compatible with a just and accurate foresight. His resolves,
taken in a tumult of angry volition, he would seek to execute without
due regard to feasibility or perception of sequences, and he had no
sense of justice and could maintain no poise of temper. “What for no?”
he reiterated, striking at his wife with the rope’s end.
Thong-like it curled around her body, the end lashing her arm, bare to
the elbow, with force enough to raise a welt. Experience had ripened
such wisdom as she possessed, and in self-defense she forbore to
exasperate further her brutal husband. She said naught of the smart of
the lash, but recanted hastily. “I just took up the idee that he was
somebody else. I thought that old man Faurie was dead. Ain’t this his
widder?”
“Widder?—rats! old Faurie’s widder? That slim, handsome, high-steppin’
gal! She is his son’s wife,—she ’lowed to you that her name was Mrs.
Faurie.”
“Mebbe so; they hev been gone to Europe so long I lost the run of ’em,”
the woman meekly admitted.
“Naw, that ain’t it,” Jedidiah sneered. “Ye are grudgin’ her them good
looks an’ brash, high-handed ways; draggle-tailed vixens like you can’t
stand for other women to be young an’ sniptious.” He spat moodily into
the Mississippi. “That was young Faurie an’ his brand-new wife—the old
man is dead long ago. I’m thinkin’ the brat mus’ be his leetle brother.
I remember that there was a new baby at Great Oaks mansion about ten
year ago; I noticed it ’cause the old plantation bell was rung like mad
for rejoicing, like it had an ager fit, an’ the Swamp Lily an’ other
boats whistled a salute when they passed, though such is agin the
regulations.”
“I hedn’t never been hereabouts in them days,” she stipulated, by way of
excuse for her lack of readiness to confirm these vagrant and erratic
recollections of his wandering experiences as he floated down the river
with his store of goods, or poled his craft laboriously in and out of
the bogues and bayous. “I lived then over in the Arkansas.” She held her
head down for a moment. A scene had arisen before her mind best
discerned with eyes closed: a little cabin in a bit of clearing in the
dense, dark woods; a filthy, miry dooryard; the fowls and hogs and lean
old mule, all clustered about the rickety porch; a stationary home on
dry land,—all seemed paradise at this instant to the amphibious nomad,
for the rope’s end stung, and her indurated sensibilities had yet some
nerve a-tingle to the coarse taunt and the bitter fling.
“Why, any fool but _you_ would know. Didn’t _she_ say that she was Mrs.
Faurie? And didn’t he tell the brat he shouldn’t have the wheel at no
price? And didn’t he tell her she must take his word for it? And didn’t
he grab the woman by the elbow and the cub by the collar, like they
belonged to him, an’ start them off the boat, him looking as fierce as
Judgment Day? An’ ain’t that the Faurie plantation, Great Oaks, where we
was tied up? Answer me that,—answer me,—answer me,—ye tongue-tied
slut,—or I’ll cut yer tongue out.”
“Oh, laws, Jed,” said Jocelinda, her nerve shaken and very near to
tears. “I ’lowed that she was a widder lady. She spoke of her kids. I
’lowed that boy was one of ’em. I hearn her say that—”
“Ye _’lowed_ an’ ye _hearn_ like a dod-rotted fool. That man is Faurie
and owns Great Oaks! An’ ye can bet yer immortal soul I’ll give _him_
somethink to think about soon that’ll make him forgit he ever seen a
bike or a tradin’-boat, air one.”
He had risen from the coil of rope and was stepping about elastically on
the deck as if he intended to pole the craft in to the shore. She
silently followed his example, first placing the child in the centre of
the coil of rope, and taking her turn at the work with strength and
activity as muscular as if she were a man. Perhaps an infusion of
cheerfulness aided her exertions, for they were making for a bayou that
the river sent sluggishly wandering down with scant impetus from its
currents through the swamps and the heavy glooms of a cypress slough,
and she welcomed the sense of added safety in the deep seclusions of the
wilderness. Before the Faurie party, with the utmost expedition which
the isolated situation of Great Oaks Plantation permitted them, could
contrive to notify the authorities of any suspicion they might have
entertained, the shanty-boat would have quitted the thoroughfares of the
river, leaving not a trace. The story of the imminent danger of being
run down by the Flora P. Mayberry would suggest some similar disaster as
a reason for the disappearance of the flatboat-man and his craft. The
bicycles—there were only three—could be hidden, destroyed, buried in the
deep, murky, marshy tangles of the lagoons. Here it would be scarcely
possible that the fugitives should be seen or followed,—a succession of
cypress brakes, of swampy pools, a network of bayous and sloughs with
scarcely a dry acre for miles, the land of no value and impracticable,
the locality the deepest solitude, the aquatic growths of an
impenetrable density. She had not expected to sleep that night with so
grateful a sense of security, for it was not long before the boat was
tied up in a jungle of young cottonwood trees, awaiting the passing of
the hours till dawn should bring the light necessary for the navigation
of such tortuous ways. But she was up and ready at the first glimmer,
her energies recruited as much by the surcease of suspense as by the
physical rest.
As the gray day began to break, dim and clouded, it might seem to a
sophisticated sense a desolate scene, for even such symmetry as the
sluggish bayou possessed was obliterated; and now the boat was poled
along a stream-like channel, and now it threaded a series of lakelets
connected by narrow straits, full of half submerged growths, and again
it seemed almost aground in a slough where the medium was mud rather
than water. These lakelets were of an inky blackness, and in their midst
stood forlorn forests of gigantic cypress; upon the dark, mirror-like
surface of the water the white boles of the trees, long ago deadened by
a permanent inundation from some freak of the changeful river, were
reflected with weird distinctness and a spectral effect. The boat was as
if afloat in a world of dead vegetation, the duplication of the lifeless
trees below, the ghostly white forest towering above. Now and again a
sharp bit of steering became necessary to keep the craft clear of the
cypress-knees, as the conical, protruding excrescences of the roots are
called, rising considerably above the surface of the water. Hanging moss
depended in vast masses and heavy festoons from the bare white boughs
far, far above, and served to deepen the gloom of the eerie effect of
the scene. More than once the voyagers saw an alligator lying half
embedded in ooze and mud, looking as lifeless as the log it resembled;
but one had awakened apparently from the period of hibernation, and was
swimming down the centre of the black lake. Jedidiah Knoxton, watching
his approach, was dubious which course he might take, in meeting the
boat, in the narrow passage.
“He don’t understand the code of signals nohow,” he demurred.
“’Twouldn’t be no good to whistle if I could.”
The alligator solved the problem as far as he was concerned by diving
suddenly, and doubtless embedded himself in the refuge of the mud. The
question as to where he might come up again presented another doubt to
the mind of Jed Knoxton, but he prodded boldly with his pole, and
presently they had passed, the huge saurian still invisible.
There were other tokens of the spring besides the awakening of the
alligators from their wintry torpors. Birds were flitting through the
air; frogs were all a-croak about the logs; the slimy, nondescript
medley of vegetation and muck was here and there pierced by tender
spears of delicate yet intense green, the folded leaves and shoots of
the swamp lily. Suddenly the first ray of the sun struck upon a wide
expanse of silver sheen in the distance,—it was a lake evidently miles
in length, of the peculiar horseshoe contour characteristic of the
lacustrine waters of the region, surrounded by dense and gloomy forests,
and fringed with saw-grass. This thick, prickly growth, so heavily
notched as to suggest its name, caught Jed Knoxton’s attention. It was a
keen glint of green at this season, almost as intense as light itself.
Jed Knoxton stood still and held his hand above his eyes as he gazed;
then he turned to scan some landmark which he identified toward the
west, and again he shifted toward the east.
“I done los’ my bearin’s somehow in the swamp,” he muttered. “I been
polin’ todes the north ‘stead o’ south. An’ damn that old corkscrew of a
river. We drifted thirty miles las’ night to make five miles o’
distance.”
He still stood absorbed and pondering when his wife issued from the
little cabin on the deck. “What’s the matter, Jed?” she asked
apprehensively. Smoke was curling from the stove-pipe thrust through the
roof, and the sizzling of frying pork came with its pungent odor from
the open door. She held in her hand a long iron spoon coated with meal
batter while she fixed expectant and anxious eyes upon him.
“Jes’ as well, jes’ as well!” he muttered.
“What is it, Jed; what you studyin’ about?” she persisted.
“We made no distance las’ night scarcely on that twisted sarpient of a
river,” he said. “It is blamed like that old joke of the fool
drummers,—travel fifty mile down the Mississippi, an’ then take your
gripsack an’ walk half a mile back to where you started from.” He
grinned in surly mirth. “Then I done shortened it some more by missin’
my way in the swamp.” He looked about in dull speculation, as if he were
wondering anew how this mischance should have betided him, and she
dreaded lest he might fail, in considering this problem, to disclose the
intention evidently slowly forming in his mind. But for him its interest
was paramount. It struck her as a blow in the face might have done when
she heard it voiced anew, for she had hoped that time and distance had
combined to obliterate it, and it boded ill, she knew. “We ain’t more’n
five miles from the edge of Great Oaks Plantation,—I know it by the
earmarks o’ that old White Deer Lake. An’ it’s just as well,—_just as
well_—p’intedly convenient, in fac’. I’m goin’ to give Mr. Faurie of
Great Oaks Plantation something to study about that will make him forgit
there was ever sech a thing as a bike or a tradin’-boat, air one.”