_A tale of the Southern swamps, and voodoo
brought from blackest Africa--a spine-freezing,
blood-chilling story of a beautiful
quadroon girl who wielded bitter magic._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales June 1936.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_1. Call From Canaan_
"Trouble on Tularoosa Creek!" A warning to send cold fear along the
spine of any man who was raised in that isolated back-country, called
Canaan, that lies between Tularoosa and Black River--to send him racing
back to that swamp-bordered region, wherever the word might reach him.
It was only a whisper from the withered lips of a shuffling black
crone, who vanished among the throng before I could seize her; but
it was enough. No need to seek confirmation; no need to inquire by
what mysterious, black-folk way the word had come to her. No need to
inquire what obscure forces worked to unseal those wrinkled lips to a
Black River man. It was enough that the warning had been given--and
understood.
Understood? How could any Black River man fail to understand that
warning? It could have but one meaning--old hates seething again in
the jungle-deeps of the swamplands, dark shadows slipping through the
cypress, and massacre stalking out of the black, mysterious village
that broods on the moss-festooned shore of sullen Tularoosa.
Within an hour New Orleans was falling further behind me with every
turn of the churning wheel. To every man born in Canaan, there is
always an invisible tie that draws him back whenever his homeland is
imperiled by the murky shadow that has lurked in its jungled recesses
for more than half a century.
The fastest boats I could get seemed maddeningly slow for that race up
the big river, and up the smaller, more turbulent stream. I was burning
with impatience when I stepped off on the Sharpsville landing, with the
last fifteen miles of my journey yet to make. It was past midnight, but
I hurried to the livery stable where, by tradition half a century old,
there is always a Buckner horse, day or night.
As a sleepy black boy fastened the cinches, I turned to the owner of
the stable, Joe Lafely, yawning and gaping in the light of the lantern
he upheld. "There are rumors of trouble on Tularoosa?"
He paled in the lantern-light.
"I don't know. I've heard talk. But you people in Canaan are a
shut-mouthed clan. No one _outside_ knows what goes on in there----"
The night swallowed his lantern and his stammering voice as I headed
west along the pike.
* * * * *
The moon set red through the black pines. Owls hooted away off in the
woods, and somewhere a hound howled his ancient wistfulness to the
night. In the darkness that foreruns dawn I crossed Nigger Head Creek,
a streak of shining black fringed by walls of solid shadows. My horse's
hoofs splashed through the shallow water and clinked on the wet stones,
startlingly loud in the stillness. Beyond Nigger Head Creek began the
country men called Canaan.
Heading in the same swamp, miles to the north, that gives birth to
Tularoosa, Nigger Head flows due south to join Black River a few miles
west of Sharpsville, while the Tularoosa runs westward to meet the same
river at a higher point. The trend of Black River is from northwest to
southeast; so these three streams form the great irregular triangle
known as Canaan.
In Canaan lived the sons and daughters of the white frontiersmen who
first settled the country, and the sons and daughters of their slaves.
Joe Lafely was right; we were an isolated, shut-mouthed breed,
self-sufficient, jealous of our seclusion and independence.
Beyond Nigger Head the woods thickened, the road narrowed, winding
through unfenced pinelands, broken by live-oaks and cypresses. There
was no sound except the soft clop-clop of hoofs in the thin dust, the
creak of the saddle. Then someone laughed throatily in the shadows.
I drew up and peered into the trees. The moon had set and dawn was not
yet come, but a faint glow quivered among the trees, and by it I made
out a dim figure under the moss-hung branches. My hand instinctively
sought the butt of one of the dueling-pistols I wore, and the action
brought another low, musical laugh, mocking yet seductive. I glimpsed
a brown face, a pair of scintillant eyes, white teeth displayed in an
insolent smile.
"Who the devil are you?" I demanded.
"Why do you ride so late, Kirby Buckner?" Taunting laughter bubbled in
the voice. The accent was foreign and unfamiliar; a faintly negroid
twang was there, but it was rich and sensuous as the rounded body of
its owner. In the lustrous pile of dusky hair a great white blossom
glimmered palely in the darkness.
"What are you doing here?" I demanded. "You're a long way from any
darky cabin. And you're a stranger to me."
"I came to Canaan since you went away," she answered. "My cabin is on
the Tularoosa. But now I've lost my way. And my poor brother has hurt
his leg and cannot walk."
"Where is your brother?" I asked, uneasily. Her perfect English was
disquieting to me, accustomed as I was to the dialect of the black-folk.
"Back in the woods, there--far back!" She indicated the black depths
with a swaying motion of her supple body rather than a gesture of her
hand, smiling audaciously as she did so.
I knew there was no injured brother, and she knew I knew it, and
laughed at me. But a strange turmoil of conflicting emotions stirred
in me. I had never before paid any attention to a black or brown
woman. But this quadroon girl was different from any I had ever seen.
Her features were regular as a white woman's, and her speech was not
that of a common wench. Yet she was barbaric, in the open lure of her
smile, in the gleam of her eyes, in the shameless posturing of her
voluptuous body. Every gesture, every motion she made set her apart
from the ordinary run of women; her beauty was untamed and lawless,
meant to madden rather than to soothe, to make a man blind and dizzy,
to rouse in him all the unreined passions that are his heritage from
his ape ancestors.
I hardly remember dismounting and tying my horse. My blood pounded
suffocatingly through the veins in my temples as I scowled down at her,
suspicious yet fascinated.
"How do you know my name? Who _are_ you?"
With a provocative laugh, she seized my hand and drew me deeper into
the shadows. Fascinated by the lights gleaming in her dark eyes, I was
hardly aware of her action.
"Who does not know Kirby Buckner?" she laughed. "All the people of
Canaan speak of you, white or black. Come! My poor brother longs to
look upon you!" And she laughed with malicious triumph.
It was this brazen effrontery that brought me to my senses. Its cynical
mockery broke the almost hypnotic spell in which I had fallen.
I stopped short, throwing her hand aside, snarling: "What devil's game
are you up to, wench?"
Instantly the smiling siren was changed to a blood-mad jungle cat. Her
eyes flamed murderously, her red lips writhed in a snarl as she leaped
back, crying out shrilly. A rush of bare feet answered her call. The
first faint light of dawn struck through the branches, revealing my
assailants, three gaunt black giants. I saw the gleaming whites of
their eyes, their bare glistening teeth, the sheen of naked steel in
their hands.
My first bullet crashed through the head of the tallest man, knocking
him dead in full stride. My second pistol snapped--the cap had somehow
slipped from the nipple. I dashed it into a black face, and as the
man fell, half stunned, I whipped out my bowie knife and closed with
the other. I parried his stab and my counter-stroke ripped across his
belly-muscles. He screamed like a swamp-panther and made a wild grab
for my knife wrist, but I struck him in the mouth with my clenched left
fist, and felt his lips split and his teeth crumble under the impact
as he reeled backward, his knife waving wildly. Before he could regain
his balance I was after him, thrusting, and got home under his ribs. He
groaned and slipped to the ground in a puddle of his own blood.
I wheeled about, looking for the other. He was just rising, blood
streaming down his face and neck. As I started for him he sounded a
panicky yell and plunged into the underbrush. The crashing of his blind
flight came back to me, muffled with distance. The girl was gone.
_2. The Stranger on Tularoosa_
The curious glow that had first showed me the quadroon girl had
vanished. In my confusion I had forgotten it. But I did not waste
time on vain conjecture as to its source, as I groped my way back to
the road. Mystery had come to the pinelands and a ghostly light that
hovered among the trees was only part of it.
My horse snorted and pulled against his tether, frightened by the smell
of blood that hung in the heavy damp air. Hoofs clattered down the
road, forms bulked in the growing light. Voices challenged.
"Who's that? Step out and name yourself, before we shoot!"
"Hold on, Esau!" I called. "It's me--Kirby Buckner!"
"Kirby Buckner, by thunder!" ejaculated Esau McBride, lowering his
pistol. The tall rangy forms of the other riders loomed behind him.
"We heard a shot," said McBride. "We was ridin' patrol on the roads
around Grimesville like we've been ridin' every night for a week
now--ever since they killed Ridge Jackson."
"Who killed Ridge Jackson?"
"The swamp-niggers. That's all we know. Ridge come out of the woods
early one mornin' and knocked at Cap'n Sorley's door. Cap'n says he was
the color of ashes. He hollered for the Cap'n for God's sake to let him
in, he had somethin' awful to tell him. Well, the Cap'n started down to
open the door, but before he'd got down the stairs he heard an awful
row among the dogs outside, and a man screamed he reckoned was Ridge.
And when he got to the door, there wasn't nothin' but a dead dog layin'
in the yard with his head knocked in, and the others all goin' crazy.
They found Ridge later, out in the pines a few hundred yards from the
house. From the way the ground and the bushes was tore up, he'd been
dragged that far by four or five men. Maybe they got tired of haulin'
him along. Anyway, they beat his head into a pulp and left him layin'
there."
"I'll be damned!" I muttered. "Well, there's a couple of niggers lying
back there in the brush. I want to see if you know them. I don't."
* * * * *
A moment later we were standing in the tiny glade, now white in the
growing dawn. A black shape sprawled on the matted pine needles, his
head in a pool of blood and brains. There were wide smears of blood on
the ground and bushes on the other side of the little clearing, but
the wounded black was gone.
McBride turned the carcass with his foot.
"One of them niggers that came in with Saul Stark," he muttered.
"Who the devil's that?" I demanded.
"Strange nigger that moved in since you went down the river last time.
Come from South Carolina, he says. Lives in that old cabin in the
Neck--you know, the shack where Colonel Reynolds' niggers used to live."
"Suppose you ride on to Grimesville with me, Esau," I said, "and tell
me about this business as we ride. The rest of you might scout around
and see if you can find a wounded nigger in the brush."
They agreed without question; the Buckners have always been tacitly
considered leaders in Canaan, and it came natural for me to offer
suggestions. Nobody gives _orders_ to white men in Canaan.
"I reckoned you'd be showin' up soon," opined McBride, as we rode
along the whitening road. "You usually manage to keep up with what's
happenin' in Canaan."
"What _is_ happening?" I inquired. "I don't know anything. An old
black woman dropped me the word in New Orleans that there was trouble.
Naturally I came home as fast as I could. Three strange niggers waylaid
me----" I was curiously disinclined to mention the woman. "And now you
tell me somebody killed Ridge Jackson. What's it all about?"
"The swamp-niggers killed Ridge to shut his mouth," announced McBride.
"That's the only way to figure it. They must have been close behind
him when he knocked on Cap'n Sorley's door. Ridge worked for Cap'n
Sorley most of his life; he thought a lot of the old man. Some kind of
deviltry's bein' brewed up in the swamps, and Ridge wanted to warn the
Cap'n. That's the way I figure it."
"Warn him about what?"
"We don't know," confessed McBride. "That's why we're all on edge. It
must be an uprisin'."
That word was enough to strike chill fear into the heart of any
Canaan-dweller. The blacks had risen in 1845, and the red terror of
that revolt was not forgotten, nor the three lesser rebellions before
it, when the slaves rose and spread fire and slaughter from Tularoosa
to the shores of Black River. The fear of a black uprising lurked for
ever in the depths of that forgotten back-country; the very children
absorbed it in their cradles.
"What makes you think it might be an uprising?" I asked.
"The niggers have all quit the fields, for one thing. They've all got
business in Goshen. I ain't seen a nigger nigh Grimesville for a week.
_The town-niggers have pulled out._"
In Canaan we still draw a distinction born in antebellum days.
"Town-niggers" are descendants of the house-servants of the old days,
and most of them live in or near Grimesville. There are not many,
compared to the mass of "swamp-niggers" who dwell on tiny farms along
the creeks and the edge of the swamps, or in the black village of
Goshen, on the Tularoosa. They are descendants of the field-hands of
other days, and, untouched by the mellow civilization which refined
the natures of the house-servants, they remain as primitive as their
African ancestors.
"Where have the town-niggers gone?" I asked.
"Nobody knows. They lit out a week ago. Probably hidin' down on Black
River. If we win, they'll come back. If we don't, they'll take refuge
in Sharpsville."
I found his matter-of-factness a bit ghastly, as if the actuality of
the uprising were an assured fact.
"Well, what have you done?" I demanded.
"Ain't much we could do," he confessed. "The niggers ain't made no open
move, outside of killin' Ridge Jackson; and we couldn't prove who done
that, or why they done it.
"They ain't done nothin' but clear out. But that's mighty suspicious.
We can't keep from thinkin' Saul Stark's behind it."
"Who is this fellow?" I asked.
"I told you all I know, already. He got permission to settle in that
old deserted cabin on the Neck; a great big black devil that talks
better English than I like to hear a nigger talk. But he was respectful
enough. He had three or four big South Carolina bucks with him, and a
brown wench which we don't know whether she's his daughter, sister,
wife or what. He ain't been in to Grimesville but that one time, and a
few weeks after he came to Canaan, the niggers begun actin' curious.
Some of the boys wanted to ride over to Goshen and have a showdown, but
that's takin' a desperate chance."
I knew he was thinking of a ghastly tale told us by our grandfathers
of how a punitive expedition from Grimesville was once ambushed
and butchered among the dense thickets that masked Goshen, then a
rendezvous for runaway slaves, while another red-handed band devastated
Grimesville, left defenseless by that reckless invasion.
"Might take all the men to get Saul Stark," said McBride. "And we don't
dare leave the town unprotected. But we'll soon have to--hello, what's
this?"
* * * * *
We had emerged from the trees and were just entering the village of
Grimesville, the community center of the white population of Canaan. It
was not pretentious. Log cabins, neat and white-washed, were plentiful
enough. Small cottages clustered about big, old-fashioned houses which
sheltered the rude aristocracy of that backwoods democracy. All the
"planter" families lived "in town". "The country" was occupied by their
tenants, and by the small independent farmers, white and black.
A small log cabin stood near the point where the road wound out of the
deep forest. Voices emanated from it, in accents of menace, and a tall
lanky figure, rifle in hand, stood at the door.
"Howdy, Esau!" this man hailed us. "By golly, if it ain't Kirby
Buckner! Glad to see you, Kirby."
"What's up, Dick?" asked McBride.
"Got a nigger in the shack, tryin' to make him talk. Bill Reynolds seen
him sneakin' past the edge of town about daylight, and nabbed him."
"Who is it?" I asked.
"Tope Sorley. John Willoughby's gone after a blacksnake."
With a smothered oath I swung off my horse and strode in, followed
by McBride. Half a dozen men in boots and gun-belts clustered about
a pathetic figure cowering on an old broken bunk. Tope Sorley (his
forebears had adopted the name of the family that owned them, in slave
days) was a pitiable sight just then. His skin was ashy, his teeth
chattered spasmodically, and his eyes seemed to be trying to roll back
into his head.
"Here's Kirby!" ejaculated one of the men as I pushed my way through
the group. "I'll bet he'll make this coon talk!"
"Here comes John with the blacksnake!" shouted someone, and a tremor
ran through Tope Sorley's shivering body.