ELBOW-CROOK SWAMP.
Without notice Hedson had appeared on the scene; he was hospitably
received by Colonel Floyd, and asked Lance to show him over the ground
in which the as yet unborn syndicate was expected to invest.
Accompanied by Sylv they were occupied in a general survey of the swamp,
from the outside, at the time when Dennie was talking with Adela in
Newbern. "Yes, yes; fine country for a cemetery," said the hale but
sceptical Hedson. "To come down to bed-rock on this thing," he added,
turning to Lance, "the expense of paring off the natural growth and
filling in here would be enormous, to say nothing of what the lawyers
call 'supplementary proceedings.' You know what that means, don't you,
Mr. De Vine?" Here he included Sylv in the favored list of those for
whom his remarks were intended.
The upshot of the exploratory drive was that Hedson gave a semi-adverse
judgment; notwithstanding which he began to consult with himself
inaudibly as to the best mode of going to work to buy some of the waste
land in question on his private account.
Sylv showed an unmistakable eagerness to begin his task of investigating
the interior of the swamp, and before he parted from Lance for the day
he took him aside and told him that he should be in the swamp by
daylight of the next morning.
Hedson and the colonel found plenty to talk about that evening, and
Lance was left alone with Jessie.
The conversation that passed between these two was somewhat ruffled.
Jessie found fault with her lover because he had gone to Newbern against
her will, and Lance assured her that his eccentric interest in Adela
Reefe was now appeased: he had done all that he wished to, in disclosing
to her the probable relationship with the Floyds, and would henceforth
leave her affairs, for the most part, alone. But Jessie was not content
with that declaration.
"If she comes back here to live, as you say she is about to do," she
asked, "what do you expect?"
"Simply that we shall receive her as one of us," said Lance. "I have
befriended her and the De Vine boys, and I intend to keep on. They are
inevitably a part of my system and my plans now."
"Then you are going to overturn everything," Jessie asserted.
In short, silly though it was, they quarrelled more seriously than they
had done hitherto.
Jessie, there is reason to believe, was very unhappy in consequence, and
passed a wretched night. And Lance scarcely slept a wink. He lay
restless on his bed, turning and tossing, until it seemed to him that he
veered this way or that with the varying gusts of the tempestuous wind
that hourly grew more turbulent, until Fairleigh Manor shook in its
angry clutch.
"How the wind roars!" he growled aloud, starting from a half doze; and
after vainly waiting a while longer for repose he got up, dressed
himself, and went out.
The earliest gray of daybreak was visible in the eastern sky, but the
atmosphere was so surcharged with storm that he fancied he could hear
the seething of the angry ocean in the blasts that whirled around him,
though he was not within ten miles of the open sea.
An hour after he had left the manor a worn-out wagon from Beaufort drew
up in front of the door, and Dennie alighted. Dennie raised such a
clamor at the door that at last the inmates began to arouse themselves.
Jessie was the first to respond to the summons. She gathered hastily
from Dennie the object of his untimely call, and learned that Adela was
with him in the wagon. They were looking for Sylv; had been detained at
Beaufort, and were only just arrived; so they had come at once to the
manor to ask Lance if he knew anything of Sylv's whereabouts, since
Lance had been mentioned in the letter of farewell. But, a servant being
sent to Lance's room, it was discovered that he was not at home; and
Dennie forthwith started to drive to the shore, hoping that he might get
some clew from Aunty Losh.
Imagine Jessie's wonder and anxiety when she found that Lance had
disappeared! Her conscience had already stung her for the absurdity of
her quarrel with him; but now that he was out of reach, and that Dennie
had brought to her the apprehension of something tragic impending over
Sylvester, her excitement rose to fever-height. Daylight broadened while
she sat up, nervous and speculating, amid the noises of the disturbed
household; and the wind-storm increased in violence every moment,
keeping pace with her terror and her perplexity. Filled with
forebodings, and finding it impossible to remain inactive, she completed
her toilet, had one of the stable-hands called, and, leaving word for
her father that she had gone to the headland in quest of Lance, she
started to drive through the plantations.
Hunting Quarters being the nearer point, Dennie dropped the reins when
the jaded team which he drove brought him to a fork in the roadway, and
told Adela to drive to her father's house. He himself set out on a full
run for Aunty Losh's, and never paused until he reached the cabin-door.
Aunty Losh reported that Sylv had risen before dawn and gone toward
Elbow-Crook Swamp, saying that he had something to do there for Mr.
Lance.
The storm raged more furiously than ever. The ocean could be heard
thundering at the outer bulwarks of the coast irresistibly. The great
billows were actually at that moment surging far beyond their wonted
limits and shaking the very roots of the low hills out by Hatteras,
though Dennie could not see them there. He could guess the tumult that
was in progress at Ocracoke and lower; the air was full of mist and
flying spray; the sea was literally pulling down the outer sand-heaps,
eating into them, doing its best to tear open a new inlet; and the
waters of the Sound were furrowed, foaming, and uncontrollable. Yet
Dennie could not delay. He began at once to retrace his course, heading
for the swamp, for he had several miles to go. It was only for an
instant, as he crossed the planks over the ditch he had so recently
made, that he observed how the water from the Sound was boiling through
the artificial channel.
He went on in headlong haste.
Before he had been twenty minutes out of sight Jessie drove up to within
a few rods of the ditch, and sped across the intervening space. Her
coachman warned her not to go thither. "You'll be blown away, missy," he
cried, despairingly. "Dis yer am a hurricane, and de hosses can't stan'
it much longer."
But, if she heard him, she paid no attention. In a few moments she had
crossed the narrow planks, which, bedded though they were in the earth,
trembled at the assaults of the wind. She had no more than vanished
among the trees around the cabin when the tide, rushing in renewed
volumes through the ditch, swept away the frail bridge as if it had been
straw. The banks began to crumble; and the coachman, barely able to
guide his horses, whipped up and drove away as well as he could, in
search of aid.
Dennie got over the ground with marvellous rapidity, taking the shortest
line for the swamp. The wind was blowing inland, and bore him along with
it; so, when he had gone two thirds of the way, it seemed to him that
but a few minutes had elapsed. He was on the regular road, now; but it
was providential, nevertheless, that he should encounter in that spot
another man. He hailed him loudly, amid the howling of the wind; and the
man, turning round, proved to be Lance! He, too, was on his way to the
swamp. Going forth aimlessly, he had made up his mind to join Sylv, if
he could find him, in the proposed expedition. Alarmed by the prodigious
force of the tempest, however, he would have turned back and endeavored
to regain the manor, if he had not met Dennie.
A few hasty words gave him knowledge of the threatened catastrophe; and
the two men joined forces in the forlorn attempt to find Sylv and
prevent his self-destruction.
Dennie knew where a boat could be had to launch upon the devious river
that ran through the swamp; and, fortunately, it turned out that Sylv
had not taken this boat for himself.
Together they entered the gloomy jungle. They not only plunged into the
desperate undertaking of trying to save the life of another man, who had
resorted to this convenient cover with the evident purpose of never
emerging thence, but they also engaged in a struggle which, for
themselves, was very like a life-and-death matter.
For some time they could not use their boat. They were obliged to drag
it through a tangled mass of roots and vines and treacherous brake,
until they could reach the stream. The exertion they made was almost
super-human, and would have been impossible to them except under the
terrible incentive that drew them on. Only when they were afloat, and
paddling warily along the dubious and unfamiliar current, did they
understand how their labor had sapped their strength. And only then,
also, did they perceive that they had passed from a world of uproar and
elemental upheaving into a realm as secluded and quiet as a tomb.
The mighty winds, it is true, rumbled through the tops of the trees
under which they were buried; but the dense mass of boughs and springing
verdure that walled in the secret places of the swamp, as with a hundred
separate walls, would not permit that wild commotion of the outer air to
reach them. Birds had fled hither from the hurricane, and even dared to
chirp in the lonely and forsaken thickets of this uncouth wilderness.
Day was spreading above the thick canopy of boughs, and was pouring its
light all round the vast area of the swamp at its edges; but here,
within, there reigned a perpetual and awful twilight. The slow, brown
stream ran on ahead, turning here and there, opening into blind creeks,
sprawling through the dusk like some great snaky thing with a hundred
sinuous arms and feelers; but it was rather by instinct and touch than
by any other means that the two men in the canoe traced the main body of
the slimy current. No landmarks were to be counted on there: the points
of the compass were obliterated.
The swamp was the home of oblivion. They moved through it as through a
place set apart for those who are condemned to a death in life.
From time to time they shouted aloud. Having no weapons with them, they
could make no other signal. They called to Sylv, with a hope that he
might answer to them from the next bend in the stream, or from some
adjoining depth of bough and bramble. Yet always the same dead silence
swallowed up the sound of their voices, and no human response came back.
The raw air, the shade, the moisture of the oozing current, gradually
invaded them with a chill that seemed to run through their very bones;
but it was with a more deadly chill that they gazed into one another's
eyes, and thought, without saying it, that perhaps they were even then
pushing their way over the liquid grave in which Sylv might have sought
relief.
How long they urged that ghostly chase it would not be easy to say: they
could form no judgment of the time. But at last Dennie caught sight of
what appeared to be a ruddy flame on a low island in the muddy flood,
some distance in advance. Neither of the paddlers was quite positive
that it was a real flame, but they put new vigor into their strokes, and
hallooed again. Once more, no answer.
Still, the flame grew more distinct. The canoe swept rapidly forward and
rubbed against the roots and sediment of the tiny island. No other boat
was moored there, but the fire flickered and spurted up more vividly.
Beside it they beheld Sylv, haggard, inert, and seemingly unconscious of
their approach.
"Sylv! Sylv!" cried Dennie.
"What are you doing here?" Lance demanded.
Sylv shrank back, then started to his feet; the flame-light--looking so
garish in that gloomy place--thrown upward on to his wan checks in such
wise as to make them seem more hollow than they were in fact.
"I came here to die," he answered, without emotion. "Why did you follow
me? It would have been over before long."
They heard the booming of the storm-wind in the trees overhead, like the
groan of some remote unknown multitude of sufferers; and it chimed in
well with the lonely reverberation of his voice.
"It is over now!" Lance exclaimed. "Don't you see that we won't let you
die? It was mad of you to think of such a thing, Sylv!"
Dennie drew close to his brother swiftly, and put his arm around him, as
though to guard him from an unseen enemy.
"Sylv," he said, "it ar' all fixed and done. Deely loves ye--she have
told me--and I see that I ain't the one for her. I'm clean done with all
that ar foolishness, Sylv, and I told her she'd got to marry ye, anyhow.
Steady away now, Sylv. D'ye listen to me?"
The burly, red-bearded brother slid his hands down the arms of the
slender, dark-haired one, and held him as if he feared that he might
still break away and escape.
Lance, looking on, thought he had never seen anything more tender, more
brave and manly, than Dennie's expression and attitude. He had never, he
thought, heard finer sweetness in a man's voice than came from Dennie's
lips.
Sylv broke down. "Dennie, boy," he cried; and then paused, choking.
"Dear old Dennie!" (His brother winced at that unconscious repetition of
Adela's phrase.) "I never thought this would come! I was true when I
said I did not love her. I couldn't know what it would be like, then.
But, you see, I tried to get out of the way. Oh, why didn't you let me
die here!"
The morbid mood which had impelled him to the resource of slow suicide,
by starvation in the swamp, could not at once be dispelled; but by dint
of soothing words and of reminders that they must lose no time in
getting back to the outer world, the two allies prevailed over Sylv's
melancholy.
"Where's your boat?" asked Lance.
"I set it adrift," was the answer.
A fresh peril was thus intruded upon them; for the canoe would hold
three persons only with the greatest precautions.
"You uns go, and then one can come back for me," Dennie suggested.
But Lance would not risk leaving him alone. It was decided, therefore,
that they should all embark and make their way to safety, if possible.
The hazard and suspense of the situation, however, roused Sylv up
thoroughly. All his finer qualities reasserted themselves, and he became
the guiding spirit in the endeavor of the party to extricate itself. He
whom the others had come to recall to life was now eager to lead them
out of the dilemma in which they had placed themselves on his account.
But in the anxiety of the moment he forgot one thing. The flame which he
had kindled, like a torch in the gloomy vaults of death, was left
burning; and they had paddled some distance before they remembered their
neglect.
Meanwhile the lonely beacon, unwatched, had shot out an experimental
tongue to try sundry dry vine-stems hard by. The stems responded with a
brisk crackle. The flames scaled the side of a tree almost instantly,
and ran along the boughs. Thence they transferred themselves with ease
to another tree. Thus, in a few minutes, the blaze spread from the
island into the rest of the dense wood, and became a conflagration.
The smoke blew lazily toward the occupants of the canoe; then a lurid
glow shone along the murky water. They saw their danger, and paddled
with might and main; but the danger of upsetting the overloaded craft
handicapped them and retarded their progress.
Soon the glow came nearer and burst into actual fire. The whole swamp
seemed to be roofed with writhing flame. The heat was frightful: birds
flew away madly through the labyrinth; the shadowy shapes of wild
creatures scurried through the tangle, and scared serpents slipped out
from their lairs, trailing across the sluggish stream. All the while the
fire pursued the three human fugitives with what seemed a vindictive
intelligence: the long draperies of gray moss caught the sparks,
flashing them on in vivid festoons, and wrapping the forest in a
magnificent combustion.
Blinded, stifled, and dizzy, the canoeists were at last obliged to
abandon their narrow bark and push their way through the fearful maze on
shore. Luckily, however, when they were driven to this extreme they had
come nearly to the edge of the wilderness.
Each struggling for himself, Lance and Sylv suddenly achieved safety:
they set foot upon the solid ground, and felt the fierce wind from the
sea. But at that juncture Dennie, who was behind them, stumbled, and was
caught in the mire. The hissing mass of flame advanced upon him, and
Sylv, seeing his danger, turned to help him.
Lance tried to hold Sylv back. He fought with him, in his desire to
prevent what he thought a certain sacrifice of two lives instead of one.
But Sylv, nerved by an ecstatic force, sprang away from him and reached
his brother's side. How it was done neither Lance nor Sylv could say
afterward; but the attempt succeeded, and Sylv dragged Dennie out of
danger, though not unscathed. The intense heat had blistered their faces
and hands even in the few moments that it had to work upon them; and
Dennie, hurt by the fall of a heavy branch which had struck his leg, lay
in the road, unable to rise.