There was no choice. Desmond had scant interest in this tumultuous sport
of coursing deer with hounds, but he was fain to follow. He could not
have retraced his way for his life, and to be lost in the wilderness—for
every horseman had disappeared—was taking all the jeopardy of disaster
and even of death. He congratulated himself that the excellent brute he
bestrode seemed to know more about the matter than he. Suddenly Regnan,
who had been for a few minutes lost to him, appeared in glimpses through
the redundant vegetation about the lagoon, which could be characterized
as neither water nor land, consisting now of one and now of the other,
and again of a treacherous combination of both, that afforded neither
footing nor the medium for swimming. The young sportsman was thrashing
through brake and slough at a breakneck speed that presently carried him
out of the reach of vision.
The glimpse was sufficient for the powerful red roan that Desmond rode,
and he needed no prompting. He sprang instantly into the water in the
essay to follow, swimming with great spirit, now and then stretching his
legs to gain a firm footing, and, with a splashing flounder that nearly
shook Desmond out of the saddle, striking out again to swim with alert
vigilance and stalwart strength. Desmond was used to equestrian exercise
in milder form and found a need for all the principles of equitation
that he had been taught, for the most progressive of mounts can hardly
act on his own initiative throughout the incidents of such a drive as
this promised to be. Desmond gave the horse his head as to direction,
but checked him according to his own judgment at impassable obstacles,
and held him up firmly when he threatened to go to his knees. A little
later, in a deep quagmire, where he showed signs of sinking, and, losing
courage, began to snort in fright, Desmond used bit and heel to such
effect as to reinstate his confidence and bring him leaping lightly out
of his floundering instabilities to good dry ground.
When the wild, disordered turmoils of the alluvial wilderness gave way
on the borders of a fine bit of water, Desmond was surprised himself to
note how reassured he felt to perceive Regnan on his swimming horse
nearly in the centre of the lakelet. In the swift transit he had
scarcely had time to speculate if he were on the right track, but
confirmation was welcome. Regnan had evidently felt a doubt, for he was
looking over his shoulder; and as Desmond and the red roan galloped down
to the margin, the horse sending forth a gleeful whinny at the sight of
his swimming comrade in advance, Regnan waved his hand and pressed on to
the opposite shore, where the dense shadows of a great stretch of forest
gloomed. Here there was good going. Desmond pressed his horse to added
speed to overhaul his precursor, and side by side they galloped at their
utmost capacity, with scarcely a word exchanged, through miles of level
woods, at last reaching the almost impenetrable densities of a
cane-brake, skirting the growth rather than striking across it; this was
the outpost of sluggish bayous and cypress sloughs, almost impassable,
seeming impracticable, till suddenly they stood on a fair sheet of
water. The blue sky looked down suavely upon it, and so serene it was
that one might have thought the wild tangles through which the way
hither had lain were some vision of a distraught imagination. All around
the dense woods were silent, primeval. Something of the redundant swamp
growths were about its margin and cloaked the approach to its placid
waters, but beyond stretched the endless forests.
Regnan was dismounting. “It is too wide to swim with a horse,” he said.
“I suppose that is the reason the deer take to it. And once get this
body of water between them and the dogs, and the scent is lost.”
He was hitching his horse among the tangled growths at a little
distance, where he would be invisible, and cautioned Desmond to follow
his example.
“See that deer path?” he said. A narrow line threaded the luxuriant
marshy grasses about the margin,—scarcely a path,—yet a keen eye might
discern the imprint of a cleft hoof in the moist ground at the water’s
edge. “I have shot deer here before,” added Regnan.
With the butt of his gun he beat down the boughs of evergreen shrubs to
afford an elastic couch; and here they lay them down and rested and
talked spasmodically and dully drowsed, while they awaited the sound of
hound and horn.
“He’s giving them a good run for the money,” opined Regnan, as time wore
on and brought no change. The placid lake gleamed serene; the dark
forest gloomed. But for their own languid voices they heard naught, and
sometimes long pauses intervened in the desultory talk.
“Fond of this sort of thing?” asked Regnan.
Desmond was more comfortable since he had taken off his high
riding-boots and poured the water from them, being advised by Regnan to
put them on immediately, lest they so stiffen in drying that their
resumption would be impossible. The amusement did not seem so
disagreeable to Desmond as he lay stretched out at his long length, his
soft hat over his eyes, and his gloves also dutifully drying into shape
on his hands. He was able to answer both veraciously and courteously.
“I am not used to it. I like the violent exercise well enough. But I
don’t want to kill anything. I am glad I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Oh, I never shot at anything in my life but with a handful of
bird-shot.”
Regnan, also recumbent, with his hat over his eyes to be rid of the
combined glare of lake and sky, lifted himself suddenly to look about
him.
“What a pity! We both have rifles! Kentopp ought to have given you a
shotgun. I wish I had mine. I don’t know why I should have brought this
thing.”
Then he lay back once more and shaded his eyes. A long silence ensued.
The glare on the lake had dulled; a network of clouds gathered
gradually, the meshes weaving continually until dense, dark, impervious
to any gleam, it hung unbroken above the lake. The woods had fallen into
deeper gloom; only the green of the saw-grass fringing the water-side
seemed lifted into an intenser chromatic grade by the lowering of a gray
sky. When a sound smote the mute quietude of the woods, it was a
muttering of thunder.
“Rain! We are going to have it in plenty,” suggested Regnan.
“It has been demonstrated to-day that we are neither sugar nor salt.”
“But it will disperse the scent; the hounds will run counter.”
“Hallo!” exclaimed Desmond, in sudden excitement, lifting himself on his
elbow. He could not have said why it should thrill him; but that sound
of a horn, elastically leaping along the distance, so signally clear, so
searchingly vibrant, so infinitely sweet, sought out every fibre of the
romantic in him. Then rose the melody of the dogs in full cry, rhythmic,
mellow, musical, softened by the distance, significant, unceasing,
echoing with the sentiment of the sylvan chase of all the days of eld.
It was not old Sloper’s “house-party” that Desmond heard, but every pack
of high degree that ever coursed through the realms of poesy or the
liberties of tradition. He was on his feet,—a light in his eyes, a flush
on his cheek, his hands trembling, his muscles alert.
“They are coming this way! They are heading for the lake!” he exclaimed.
Regnan listened for a moment. “Right you are!” he cried.
As they took up their position at the stand, ambushed beside the deer
path, Regnan insistently waived precedence.
“You fire first. _You_ are company! If you miss, I’ll fire. Buck ague?”
he whispered.
The undulating sound of the cry of the hounds, emitted rhythmically with
each bound, came ever nearer and nearer, and suddenly there was close at
hand a crashing through the bushes down the deer path. Desmond threw up
his rifle, conscious that he must catch the aim as quick as light. To
his own surprise he was singularly cool and steady. A flash, the sharp
report rang out; something clouded white and brown and gray leaped high
into the air, issuing from the brush, and fell dead at the water’s
edge,—a gigantic wildcat.
“A crack shot you are!” Regnan exclaimed, amazed. The ball had taken the
creature just beneath the ear and pierced the brain. “And this cat is
the finest ever!”
He bent over the magnificent specimen. “I didn’t know such a fellow as
this was left in the country. But oh, how old Sloper will swear!”
“Why?” asked Desmond, the excitement cooling only gradually.
“His hounds are to run only deer and bear, no matter what’s the purpose
of their creation and previous education. He lets them chase a fox, now
and then, with a great palaver of explanation, and keeping right up with
them. But a cat! He’ll be worth hearing!”
When the pack came presently, swiftly loping through the brake, and
beheld their prey, it was difficult indeed to reduce them to order; and
as old Sloper raged, and fumed, and indignantly rebuked them, their air
suggested contradiction as they whisked about their prostrate foe, their
gait as if they could not keep feet to ground—lifting them as if it were
hot—in the flutter and excitement, and they noisily yelped with delight
every time he spoke to them. It would seem that the subtle current of
comprehension, the medium of communication, was broken. They so
valiantly protested that they had done a fine thing, and piqued
themselves so pridefully on their prowess, that he was fain to end the
discussion in his own interest in the prey.
“Git out’n my way, or I’ll punch the nose off’n ye,” he roughly adjured
them, as he dismounted to lay out at length the savage beast, in order
to take its measure from its muzzle to the tip of the tail. “Thar! I’ve
stepped on your foot, and I’m glad of it!” as a piercing squeak split
the ears of the party. But the sufferer was game and hopped joyously
about on three legs, participating in the event, despite his plaintive
disabilities.
“What you goin’ to do with this here cat, Mr. Desmond?” he asked, an
added respect for so fine a shot unmistakable in every line of his face
and every inflection of his voice. “Better git it off the ground—the
dogs mought tear it; they air so durned sassy over it, I can’t govern
’em none. And ’tis the finest thing I ever see. My! how handsome that
fur is!”
“Why,” exclaimed Desmond, suddenly roused to the possibilities of his
possession, “I’ll have it stuffed and present it to Mrs. Kentopp as an
ornament to the armory and a memento of the occasion.” He had not eaten
much of her bread, but he distrusted the motive of her hospitality, and
his pride welcomed the opportunity to make a requital so promptly and in
a guise which he knew would be so acceptable. He began to take an
interest in the exceptional beauty of the specimen.
“Then it ought to be skun right now, before the critter stiffens. An’
I’ll do it fur ye and send the pelt to ye.”
Down old Sloper went on his hands and knees to the work _con amore_, his
sharp hunting-knife gingerly tracing the lines where the cuticle and fur
could be separated with least injury to the appearance of the
integument. It was a long job and a careful one, but none of the other
sportsmen had put in an appearance when it was finished. He straightened
up and looked about him doubtfully.
“They all lost out somehows,” he said. “Mighty rough ridin’ in them
slashes. I reckon they’ve all rid off to camp, mightily interested in
that thar barbecued shoat fur dinner.”
The mention elicited a responsive interest and a desire to minimize the
distance between the hunters and this dainty, time-honored of the _al
fresco_ feast. The hounds, old Sloper, and the huntsman set out by way
of the deer path, as they had come.
“I’ll try a short cut,” suggested Regnan, “if you don’t mind a bit more
wading and swimming.”
Desmond protested his indifference to a renewal of their amphibious
experience, and, mounting their horses, the two rode off through the
saw-grass, which fringed the borders of the lake. Suddenly the
slate-tinted clouds, darkening and still sinking lower, were cleft by a
vivid forked flash; the thunder crashed with an appalling clangor; the
horses were snorting in fright and plunging wildly, and the floodgates
were unloosed. The rain descended in sheets; there was not a breath of
wind, and the torrents fell vertically. It seemed for a time as if they
were menaced by a cloud-burst. The quantity of water liberated was
incalculable. The swamp which they now threaded was inundated so swiftly
that Regnan more than once paused and looked back as if he canvassed the
possibility of retracing their way to the solid earth they had quitted.
But the rainfall was no translucent medium. He could distinguish naught
beyond its opaque curtain. In serried lines in undiscriminated myriads
the torrents fell, yet seemed always stationary. It hardly mattered
which course they adopted, for each was soaked to the very bones. On and
on they plodded, the horses dully drudging in the progress, making
special exertion when they needs must, but obviously showing that they
were of opinion the fun was at an end, and that there could be too much
of a good thing. Like human beings, they found a vastly different animus
in going forth full of expectation and coming back exhausted with the
day’s run. They held down their heads in meek endurance as the rain beat
upon them, and when they stumbled in the shifty, marshy soil, there was
great danger both to the animal and his rider in the lack of that
alertness of muscle to recover a footing or bound with his burdened
saddle beyond the limits of the quagmire. Once or twice this recovery
was so precarious, so clumsy a floundering, and sinking was so imminent,
that both horsemen were alarmed and prescient of disaster.
“We have done this thing once too often, I am afraid,” said Regnan.
Desmond, too, had been looking over his shoulder, though not in the
forlorn hope that they might be able to see the point from which they
had started, for they had pressed the horses forward, against their
will, with such energy that they had made it as impossible to retrace
their way as to reach satisfactory footing in going on. Some injutting
point of land in the irregular outline of the swamp, or one of the
ridges of higher ground whereon switch cane grew luxuriantly, and which
here and there traversed it, might yet afford them rescue, but if he
could have discovered such opportunity in ordinary weather, the
tumultuous, blinding downpour rendered it invisible now.
“There is nothing for it but to go on,” he said in a depressed cadence,
for his heart had a sensation of sinking. He was growing desperate. The
rain had in its midst great shifting clouds of thin vapor. Now it so
inclosed them that they lost sight of each other. Yet when they called
out in alarm, fearful of the disaster of unwittingly parting company,
the changing mist gave a vision of the head of the other horse close at
hand, though a moment earlier it could not be discerned.
Suddenly as Desmond shifted his position in the saddle, looking straight
over his horse’s ears, he gave a start and an abrupt exclamation,
staring as if he doubted his senses; for before him, in the pallid,
hovering mists, half revealed and half concealed by the immaterial
investitures of the curtaining rain and the cloaking cloud, like the
travesty of a ship under full sail which tantalizes the desperate hope
of wrecked or castaway mariners, he beheld as if suspended in the air
between heaven and earth the outline of a river craft, a boat of some
humble sort, a refuge.
“Look, Regnan, what is that in the sky?” he exclaimed hastily.
Regnan lifted his head and put up his hand to hold away the flapping
brim of his drenched hat. His voice suddenly rang out with a thrill of
good cheer: “In the sky? Why, it’s in the bayou, thank God!”
“It is a flatboat?” Desmond hesitated.
“A flatboat it is!”
Regnan’s face had not regained its florid tint; the chill of the fog and
the rain, that had not left a dry thread on his body, and the effluvia
of the swamp, penetrating his lungs, had turned his lips blue. But he
laughed out gayly, although as his lineaments moved he swallowed the
rills of rain that ran down his face. “It is rescue, my boy! That’s what
it is! The boat is half a mile off, and we can just about make it.”
“Half a mile! A flatboat!” Even yet Desmond was hardly convinced that it
was not a delusion. “What makes it so high!”
“What makes us so low!” laughed Regnan. “Because we are away down in the
swamp, and the flatboat is away up in the bayou.”
“I should think the bayou would overflow and convert this swamp into a
lake.”
“And so it would but for the conformation of its banks. And so it will
if this cloud-burst keeps on a bit longer and swells the waters of the
bayou.”
They shifted their direction and pushed on with a good heart, despite
the difficulties that increased at every step; and though the horses,
with their bent heads and drenched coats and drudging plod, had not seen
the craft so high above their own level, now indeed obliterated from all
view by the encircling cloud, they obviously felt the recruited hopes
and energy of their riders. The revived spirits of the men were subtly
imparted to the steeds, and the improved progress caused the distance to
seem less than Regnan’s estimate when again the cloud lifted so much as
to disclose the mirage-like craft, now lower on the limited horizon by
reason of the nearer approach.
“To tell you the truth, Desmond,” said Regnan,—the two had become
chummy, despite the tutor’s sensitive reserve and repellent dignity, for
there was no justification in holding Regnan at arm’s length,—“I thought
our hour had come. I thought we were destined to leave our bones in the
bayou with the caitiff of the shirt of mail.”
Desmond shuddered. “Oh, give me better company!” he cried. “Death is a
leveler, but it can never lay me so low as that.”
Now and then each looked up from beneath his sodden hat-brim to discern
if their approach had been noticed from the craft, but as yet she gave
no sign of observation. There was no one on deck, as they soon
perceived. The rain beat down heavily upon it, and the water washed over
its low gunwales as if it were the waves of the bayou. The stream,
however, showed even yet no motion, no current; it was covered by a
myriad of tiny bosses, so to speak, the rain being so persistent, the
fall so regular, as to make the drops seem to stand stationary on its
surface. It had risen several feet, as was evinced by the half submerged
vegetation along the banks, the tips fresh and green, with no token of
having been long under water. Beneath that black cloud, with the
sinister effect of the white trunks of the cypress trees on either hand,
deadened by repeated overflows, their weird reflections in the trembling
black water, the funereal aspect of the pendent Spanish moss hanging
from the high limbs and even festooning the trees from one side of the
stream to the other,—the world, the past, life itself, annihilated by
the clouds,—the dark and gloomy watercourse might have suggested the
river Styx, and the shadowy, visionary, ill-defined boat the craft of
Charon. They both felt an averse curiosity as they approached still
nearer, striving to disintegrate from the rain and the cloud some
individual characteristic or sign of occupation of the phantom craft.
Regnan began to think it a derelict, an old abandoned hulk; but he soon
saw that it sat the water much too jauntily, a stout, dry hull, tight
and serviceable. Presently their keen young eyes discriminated a curl of
smoke amidst the vapors that lay on the roof of the cabin. This was
little more than a shed of upright boards, very flimsily put together,
and a tiny square window along the eaves promised little for light. It
served the purpose of a lookout, however. A pale face appeared there. It
seemed to scan disconsolately the rain-lost world without, the
encroaching cloud, the swamp with its sinking aspect; and suddenly, with
transfixed attention, to become aware of the approaching sportsmen, the
horse of the one up to the girth as he plodded through the half
submerged morass, that of the other out of his depth and beginning to
swim.
For one spectral moment the face stared as if confronted by doom. Then
the door of the cabin opened, and disregarding the downpour, with skirts
lashing about her, with long hair loose and flying, a tall, sinuous
young woman appeared, sprang from the deck upon the marshy bank, cast
loose the line about a tree, leaped back upon the deck in a moment,
caught up a pole, and with a stalwart effort had pushed off an oar’s
length or two before the man whom her shrill cries had summoned stumbled
out of the cabin and stood staring at the newcomers, with little
apparent inclination to lend a hand to the effort of clearing the
harbor.
It was vain. The horsemen were too close upon them. Such motive power as
kept the sluggish bayou on its course from the Mississippi River was too
slight to aid the pole to evade the speed of a swimming horse. Desmond,
indeed, had boarded the craft while the imbecile face of the boat-hand
was still bent upon him.
“What do you mean by this behavior?” he demanded angrily, not as yet
recognizing either the man or the woman. “Tie up the boat again, and
show us your bar.”
“Jocelindy! Jocelindy! ye fool, ye!” cried the boat-hand, striking the
struggling woman on the shoulder with his heavy hand. But for this
repulsive brutality it might have been pathetic to hear him tax another
with his own obvious infirmity. “Don’t ye see the gentleman’s goin’ ter
spen’ money with us!”
He busied himself in tying up the boat in quick order, and found a place
where the two horses could stand on pretty staunch ground under the
interlacing boughs of cottonwood, so thick as to afford some shelter
from the rain. He had fodder aboard, too, he said.
“Some fodder we had to pack a lot o’ chany,” interposed the woman,
suddenly and shrilly, “becase there wasn’t no straw convenient.”
Desmond had no mind to linger on ceremony. Without waiting for an
invitation, he turned toward the cabin door. The woman, still standing
in the torrents, a secret thought in her face, her head askew, her
draggled attire dripping with rain, her mouth bent down upon her
clenched fist, suddenly asked:—
“Tell me one word,—is your name Faurie?”
“No,” said Desmond, frowning at the identification with his employers as
if he were of no importance in himself; “my name is Desmond.”
“Thar now, Jocelindy, ye told Jed that very word,” exclaimed the
boat-hand, mowing and laughing with imbecile and extravagant glee. “Ye
told him that this very mornin’ before he set out with his spade.”
There was an incongruity in any mutual utilities between a boat and a
spade, but Desmond was new to the river country and did not appreciate
this fact. It struck Regnan at once, but he had no reason to place
inimical construction upon the acts of the boat’s company, and it passed
without comment.
Though what is called “not right bright,” Ethan Knoxton was
discriminating enough to preside very acceptably at a bar when two
storm-drenched wights stood before it, and he ranged the glasses with an
extra polish and tipped a decanter. It was a dull, squalid little hole,
with a permanent aroma of the greasy fumes of many breakfasts fried on
the monkey stove at the farther end of the cabin, and the heavy, oily
flavor of the untrimmed wick of a kerosene lamp swinging above the bar.
The water dripped dismally from their coats and riding-breeches into the
already well-filled legs of their high boots, that gave a squashing
sound at every step. From their hats chilly little streams trickled into
their collapsed shirt collars and down their shivering spines; and as
the first drop of liquor touched their palates, the surprise to find
that instead of rank, coarse whiskey it was good French brandy was so
grateful that they could but look at each other with glistening eyes
over the rims of their glasses as they drank.
The boat-hand watched them expectantly.
“My! Ain’t that fine!” Then as they set the glasses down, he whooped out
his vicarious joy and smote his leg with the palm of his open hand.
Desmond had insisted on paying by right of his discovery of the bar, and
he laid down the price of three drinks. “You will oblige me,” he said
politely to the boat-hand, struggling with his distaste and disgust. One
should not despise the poor, and the uncouth, and the deprived, who may
have more value in their Maker’s eyes than one wots of. Therefore,
because the semblance of humanity was not always disdained, he sought to
have a regard to the mere image.
“For me?” The protuberant, grotesque eyes of the boat-hand were
stretched. “For _me_!” He could hardly realize the rich opportunity.
“For ME!” And at last convinced, he exclaimed, “Lord love ye! Lord bless
ye! Lord save ye!” and gulped down the French brandy, casting up the
gloating eyes of extreme ecstasy at every swallow. He smacked his lips
again and again, to be heard in the remotest corner of the cabin, then
stood comfortably smelling the glass while the others turned toward the
stove.
“Isn’t that queer—French brandy?” Desmond suggested.
“Smuggled, I suppose,” said Regnan.
“Stolen, I’m afraid,” said Desmond, _sotto voce_, mopping the rain from
his cold face and shaking the rills from his drenched hat. The jeopardy,
the confusion, the exhaustion attendant on the moment of rescue from the
sinister menace of the swamp and the cloud-burst engrossed his
faculties, but he was vaguely recollecting that he had recently heard of
the dispensing of this choice liquor among a class of swampers to whom
its market price rendered it unaccustomed and unattainable.
“Well, I was not _particeps criminis_ till it was halfway down,—too far
to catch it. And it feels just as good where it is as if it was honestly
come by,” Regnan laughed.
The woman had utilized the interval while their backs were turned, and
perhaps the shelter of a curtained bunk, to slip into a dry gown and a
clean apron, and she, too, seemed to have determined on a change of
tactics. She would fry for the gentlemen some rashers of bacon and eggs,
if they liked; and set on a strong pot of coffee, she said.
“Are you afraid of spoiling your appetite for that barbecued shoat?”
Regnan asked Desmond, with a rallying eye.
“No; are you?” For the day was wearing on into the afternoon. There were
already dulling intimations in the clouds, as if the limits of light in
their midst were curtailed. The woman listened intently as she set forth
her poor and humble board with its best; and when they were seated on
either side and she whisked about serving them, her strange, snake-like
face had a more propitiatory and pleasing expression than seemed
possible, with her high cheek-bones, her eyes aslant, her long,
serpentine neck.
She suddenly addressed Desmond. “You see he ain’t quit suckin’ his thumb
yit,” she said, as an infantine babbling caused Desmond to turn his head
to perceive sitting bolt upright in a bunk behind him an infant in a red
gown with his thumb in his mouth, regarding the feasting with slobbering
admiration, but making no effort to partake and no demand to be served.
Desmond recognized her now for the first time. He had given her but
little notice since coming aboard, and on the occasion of his previous
visit to the shanty-boat, partly because of the dimness of the light in
the little cabin, partly because of the sensational development of the
interview, he had not sufficiently observed the subsidiary members of
the crew—the woman, the child, and the boat-hand—to remember their
faces. If Jedidiah Knoxton had been present, there would have been no
delay in recalling the personnel of the whole party.
“That lady, Mrs. Faurie,” continued the woman, speaking in a very
propitiatory manner, “told me how to break him of it, too. She’s
powerful handsome, sure, ain’t she?”
“Yes,” said Desmond to this direct appeal. “And she is a very kind
lady.”
“Sure! She told me she’d gin little Ikey some baby clothes.”
“But you left very suddenly,” said Desmond, significantly.
Regnan continued to eat silently, surprised at the evidence of previous
acquaintance, but comfortable enough that it made no conversational
demands upon him, so keen an appetite had the vicissitudes of the day
given him.
“I want to tell you about that,” said the woman, winningly. “Jed’s a
mighty techy kind o’ man an’ he got sorter nettled ’bout that thar
wheel. He ’lowed you b’lieved it was stole. An’ truth was, he knowed he
didn’t come by it right straight. A young boy nigh Ring-fence Plantation
traded it to him fur mighty little money. His dad had give it to him fur
Chris’mas, an’ the chile had got tired of it an’ had ruther have a few
dollars. I begged Jed not to humor him; ’twas wuth mo’. But Jed said a
plaything a boy is tired of ain’t wuth nothin’. ’Twas a good bargain fur
him, an’ he gits a heap o’ trade ’mongst the young fry. But he oughtn’t
ter helped the boy sell his wheel unbeknownst to his folks.”
Her serpentine aspect was not altogether unjustified. As she charmed so
wisely, Desmond’s conviction was shaken. She laughed a little, as if
embarrassed, passing the hem of her apron back and forth in her hand.
“Truth is, he was mad ’cause it carried out my warnings; an’ sorter
skeered, too, ’cause he seen how it mought look to other folks. Jed’s
real helterskelter. He pulled loose and drapped down the river, but he
hadn’t gone a mile before he was sorry. That’s Jed.”
The boat-hand, listening, and now quite won to complaisance by the
unusual prosperity that had befallen the “trading-boat,” here in its
cache, echoed loudly, “That’s Jed!”
“So I didn’t git my duds the beautiful lady promised me.”
“Mrs. Faurie would no doubt send them to you if she knew where you would
be,” said Desmond, mechanically meditating on his suspicions. The story
was very glib. The shanty-boaters might have had no complicity with the
tragedy at Whippoorwill Landing and no culpability as the receivers of
stolen goods,—thus accessory after the fact. But the flavor of the
French brandy still lingered about his palate; evidently they did not
know its value as a beverage, and this was suspicious. Still, smuggling
was comparatively a venial matter, and he had a vague regret that he had
been so quick to direct the suspicion of the authorities upon so poor
and defenseless a group. But he had had no word how the information had
been received, or whether it was to be acted upon. Nevertheless, it
would be easy to prove the truth of her story, provided her story was
true.
“Just as well she is where she is to-day,” Regnan declared. He was
leaning back in his chair, having finished his meal with a good relish,
and feeling about in his cigar case to make sure that its contents had
escaped without injury in the general flood. “Try one of these,”—he held
it across the table to Desmond. “They seem to be all O. K.”
Desmond selected one, and, leaning over, struck a match on the lid of
the stove. “The luckiest thing imaginable for us,” he said in jerks, as
he held the light to the end and pulled hard to set it aglow, “that we
happened to see the boat when we did.”
“Fires up all right?” Regnan queried. Then—“You must charge us a good
round price for this dinner, madam. We are paying for not being at the
bottom of the bayou,”—he laughed. “We have a special reason for not
wanting to meet up with something we know is there.”
His face changed suddenly; he looked at her in consternation. Never had
he seen such an expression as settled upon her countenance. Fear it was
at first. “For God’s sake, what!” she gasped. Then—anger. “Ye’d better
mind yer tongue, now!” Her fingers closed on the handle of a great
butcher knife on the meat block in the corner. And now—venom. “Ye’re
jes’ two cowardly, lying rapscallions! Ye dunno _what’s_ in the bayou!
An’ ye ain’t got no call to know! An’ besides,”— with a realization of
self-betrayal,—“thar ain’t nuthin’ thar fur ye to know—ha! ha! ha!—te,
he, he!”
Regnan had risen, startled and wondering; but Desmond sat perfectly
still, looking steadily at her, convinced that, added to the unstoried
crimes and the unsavory detritus that the bayou hid under its black
waters and its deep, unstable mire, lay the stolen wheel, and heaven
knew what gear besides, from the looting of the store at Whippoorwill
Landing by the merciless murderers.
It was a painful moment. He was glad to walk to the door of the cabin
and look out once more at the steadily falling rain; at the spurious
palpitation that the drops set up on the surface of the immobile stream;
at the dark, encompassing forest, the water-side vegetation still in the
pallid green of spring, seeming to hold all the light and color of the
neutral-tinted landscape; at the slow circling of the vapors about the
deck of the shanty-boat. There was a projection above the door like the
shelter of eaves, and as he stood, only an occasional drop of water fell
upon his head. He was all unprescient; he was conscious merely of
distaste, the exhaustion from exertion, a sense of inexpressible
boredom, the discomfort of his half-dried garb, and an impatient desire
to be through with the whole episode. It met him like fate!—the muffled
boom of a distant bell!