In all riparian estimation the grotesque plight of a craft stranded is
more or less a catastrophe. Even in this sequestered nook spectators
were not slow to mark, at a distance, the grounding of the _Cherokee
Rose_ in the afternoon and to discuss the magnitude and the management
of the mishap.
The earliest of these were two men summoned from the swamper’s shack
situated in the “no man’s land,” thrown out between the levee and the
high precipitous bank of the river. It was mounted on four pillars some
twelve feet in height, and was entered by means of a ladder placed at
the door. These supports not long before had been stanch cotton-wood
trees, and their roots still held fast in the ground despite its
frequent submergence. Having been sawn off at a height that lifted the
little domicile to a level with the crest of the levee beyond, they
served so far to render the hearth-stone safe from the dangers of flood.
If the river should rise above this limit, why then was the deluge,
indeed, and the swamper’s hut must needs share with the more opulent and
protected holdings the common disaster of the overflow.
The two men were standing on the brink of the high bank, using
alternately a binocle of elaborate finish and great power. The swamper,
however, presently relinquished the glass altogether to his companion,
who was evidently a stranger and of a much higher condition in life. He
seemed to develop an inexplicable agitation as he continued to gaze
through the lenses across the tawny expanse of the river at the big,
white bulk of the steamer stranded on the bar, and the groups of
passengers on the decks, easily differentiated as they loitered to and
fro. His breath was coming in quick gasps,--he was suddenly a-quiver in
every fiber. All at once he broke forth as if involuntarily: “Colonel
Kenwynton, by God!”
There was a sort of frenzy of recognition in the tense bated tones, yet
incredulity too, as one might doubt the reality of a vision, though
incontestably perceived. The swamper watched in silence, patient,
curious, sinister, this manifestation of emotion. It seemed to surprise
him when the stranger spoke to him with a certain unthinking openness.
“Did you notice,--could you distinguish--a gentleman there on the
hurricane deck walking to and fro,--his hair is white,--oh, how
strange!--his hair is white!”
He asked the question in an eager, excited way, his dark, distended eyes
wildly agaze.
“Yes, sir,--oh, yes, sir,--I seen him plain,” the swamper replied
casually, but he did not relax the keenness of his inquisitive
observation of the stranger beside him, nor even again glance at the
boat.
“Did you ever before see him?” The question was less a gasp than a
convulsive snap,--it was articulated in such a paroxysm of excitement.
“Yes, sir,--oh, yes, sir.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Yes, sir,--oh, yes, sir.”
The swamper’s replies were as mechanical as the ticking of a clock.
The stranger turned, lowered the binocle and glanced at him with an odd
blending of animosity and contempt. The swamper was of an aspect queerly
disheveled, water-soaked and damaged, collapsed almost out of all
semblance of humanity. He suggested some distorted bit of unclassified
and worthless flotsam of the great river, washed ashore in one of its
stupendous floods and left high and dry with other foul detritus when
the annual shrinkage regained once more low water mark. He was an
elderly man with a pallid, pasty face, large, pouch-like cheeks and a
sharp rodential nose. His small, bright eyes were so furtive of
expression that they added to his rat-like intimations and he had a long
bedraggled grizzled beard. He wore trousers of muddy corduroy, and a
ragged old gray sweater. His sodden, diluvian, pulpy aspect would
justify the illusion that he had been drowned a time or two,
resuscitated and dried out, each immersion leaving traces in slime, and
ooze, and water-stains on his garments and character. He must have
seemed incongruous, indeed, with the acquaintance he claimed, for it was
a most commanding and memorable figure focused by the lenses.
“Who is he, then,--what is his name?” the stranger asked with sudden
heat, as if he fancied some deception was practiced upon him, and
evidently all unaware that he had himself, in the surprise of the first
glimpse, pronounced aloud the name he sought. His interlocutor discerned
his incredulity and replied with a flout.
“Who? him?--that old blow-hard? Why ever’ body all up an’ down the ruver
knows old Cunnel Kenwynton.”
“God!” exclaimed the wild-eyed stranger, with a most poignant
intonation, “to doubt my own sight,--my own memory,--my”--he became
suddenly conscious of that sinister scrutiny, so much more
discriminating and intelligent than accorded with the status of the
water-rat that it had an inimical suggestion. He broke off with an
abrupt air of explanation. “I have been under treatment for--for--an
ocular difficulty, my eyes, you know.”
“Edzac’ly,” exclaimed the swamper, with a tone of bland acceptance of
the statement. “Well, now, Mister, I thought your eyes appeared queer.”
“Do they?” asked the stranger with an inexplicable eagerness. “Have they
an odd expression,--to your mind?”
“Why, I dunno ez I would have tooken notice of it, but my darter-in-law,
Jessy Jane, remarked it las’ night. She is mighty keen, though, Jessy
Jane is,--an’ spies out mos’ ever’ think.”
The stranger was a conventional, reputable looking person, not
remarkable in any respect save for that recurrent optical dilatation. He
was neatly dressed in one of the smart hand-me-down suits to be had
anywhere in these times and he wore a dark derby hat. He was himself an
elderly man, although he had a certain fresh pallor that bespeaks an
indoor life and that gave him an unworn aspect of youth. His
clean-shaven face was notably delicate, but the years were registered in
the fine script of wrinkles about the eyes and were obvious to the
careful observer. He had dark, straight, thin hair, and keen features,
and there was an intent look in his wild, dark eyes. He cast over his
shoulder so lowering a glance at the daughter-in-law under discussion, a
young woman who was sitting in the door of the cabin, that even at the
distance she marked the expression of disfavor, of suspicion, of
resentment that informed it. She could not divine the nature of their
communication but, justifying old Josh Berridge’s account of her powers
of discernment, she knew, in some subtle way, that she was its subject.
She tossed her head with a flirt of indifference and spat out on the
ground below her contempt for the stranger’s displeasure.
Her red calico dress and her tousled mass of copper red hair made a bit
of flare amidst the dull hues of the somber scene. As she sat on the
elevated threshold at the summit of the ladder that led to the door she
was dandling a muscular though small infant in her arms, who with his
blond, downy head almost inverted twisted here and there with motions so
sudden and agile that he might have been expected presently to twist
quite out of the negligent maternal clasp and fall to the earth below.
But, suddenly, she rose and, tossing the child to her shoulder, went
within the house.
So definite was the impression of something abnormal about the stranger
that she experienced a sentiment of relief when the swamper came in to
his supper alone. “Jessy Jane,” he said, pausing in the doorway and
jerking his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the subject of his
discourse, “that man is as queer a fish as ever war cotched. Says he is
waitin’ fur a boat an’ has hired my old dugout an’ is paddling out to
that air steamboat whut’s aground on the sand-bar.”
She gazed dully at him, a big spoon in her hand with which she had been
lifting a mass of cat-fish from a skillet on a red-hot monkey-stove.
“Nuthin’ queer in that as I kin see,--Hesh up!” she broke off in jocose
objurgation of the baby who was beaming upon the supper table from where
he was tied in one of the bunks and who lifted his voice vociferously,
apparently in pæans of praise of the great smoking cat-fish spread at
length on a dish. “You ain’t goin’ ter have none,--fish-bone git cotched
in yer gullet, an’ whar-r would Tadpole-Wheezie be then.” Resuming the
conversation in her former serious tone, “What’s queer in waitin’ fur a
boat? Plenty folks have waited fur boats, an’ cotch ’em an’ rid on ’em
too.”
“But this feller is goin’ ter cotch a boat what can’t go nowhar. He is
right now paddlin’ fur dear life out to the _Cher’kee Rose_, old
stick-in-the-mud, out thar on the sand-bar.”
Josh Berridge flung himself down in a chair at the half prepared table,
and awaited there in place the completion of the “dishing up” of supper.
She stood eyeing him doubtfully, the big spoon still in her hand. “I
wonder all them passengers don’t come ashore, an’ track off through the
woods, like he spoke of doin’ las’ night an’ flag the train.”
“Gosh, Jessy Jane,--it’s a durned sight too fur. Ten mile, at least, ez
the crow flies, an’ thar ain’t no road nor nuthin’.”
He said no more for his mouth was full, and the attention of the woman
was diverted by the entrance of her husband, with the declaration that
he was as hungry as a bear. He was of a bulky presence, seeming to
crowd the restricted little apartment, which was more like the cabin of
a shanty-boat than a room in a stationary dwelling. It was of a hazy
aspect, low-ceiled and soot-blackened, as shown by a lamp swinging from
the central beam, smoking portentously from an untrimmed protrusion of
charring wick. Two tiers of bunks were arranged nautically on either
side, and the windows still above were small oblong apertures,
suggestive of cabin lights or transoms; perhaps this had been their
earlier use, for several articles about the place betokened an origin
inapposite to the culture and condition of its occupants. A fine
barometer in a shining mahogany case graced the wall near a door leading
to an inner apartment. The handsome binocular glass lay on a shelf so
rough that the undressed wood offered an opportunity for splinters to
every unwary touch. Each of the pillow-cases bore a rude patch where the
name of a steamboat had been cut out, and the dirty cloth on the table
was of linen damask suited to the requirements of the somewhat exacting
traveling public. Even the bowl into which the woman was heaping a
greasy mass of potatoes and pork from the pot was of the decorated china
affected by the packet usage, and a compote filled with doughy fat
biscuits bore the title of a steamer that went to the bottom one windy
night some years ago.
Now and again the ladder without would creak beneath the weight of a
sudden footfall when the woman would desist from her occupation, the big
spoon brandished in her hand, and her red hair flying fibrous in the hot
breath of the stove, to mark in eager excitement the entrance of first
one and then another figure that seemed evolved from the falling night,
cogeners of the gloom and the solitude, normal to the place and the
hour.
“Ye’re sharp on time,--how did ye know the _Cher’kee Rose_ had struck?”
she cried, as a pallid, wiry, small man with close cropped sandy hair,
wearing jockey boots and riding breeches, with a stable cap on one side
of his head, climbed into view up the ladder without.
He vouchsafed her a wink of his lashless, red-lidded left eye, in full
of all accounts of greeting and reply. He stood flicking his boots with
a crop and wagged his sandy head knowingly at the group of men about the
stove.
“I was at Cameron Landing, the last p’int she teched. I went aboard an’
seen her passenger list. She’s got some swell guys aboard.”
“Pity, then, she didn’t go down when she struck,” said a lowering,
square-faced man, of a half sailor aspect, the master of a shanty-boat
lying snugly under the willows in a bayou hard by. “The water on this
side the bar is full twenty fathom, even at dead low water.”
“Bless my stirrups, that’s one hundred an’ twenty feet!” cried “Colty”
Connover, palpably dismayed by the loss of the opportunities of the
accident.
“The wind is fixin’ ter blow,” said Daniel Berridge from the table, with
his mouth full, but glancing up through the open door at the darkening
skies. “Mought h’ist the old tub off the tow-head after all’s come an’
gone.”
“Oh, oh, oh, oh,” said Connover, wagging his head
expressively,--“there’d be rich pickings for true in those passengers’
baggage.” He smacked his lips wistfully.
For this was a coterie of riverside harpies brought together by the
rumor of the disaster in the hope of the opportunity of spoils. They had
long infested the riparian region, not only baffling the law and justice
but even evading suspicion. Their operations were cleverly diversified,
restricted to no special locality. By the aid of the swift and
inconspicuous dug-out an emissary could drop down the river twenty miles
and abstract a bale of cotton, from a way-landing, awaiting shipment, or
roll off a couple of boxes or a barrel, under cover of the water, till
such time as the shanty-boater should find it practicable to fish them
thence some dark midnight,--while the suits for their non-delivery
dragged on in the courts between the shipper and the consignee. A bunch
of yearlings driven off from the herds that were wont to be grazed in
the “open swamp” throughout seasons of drought when these dense
low-lying woodlands are clear of water, would seem the enterprise of
professed cattle thieves, and suspicion pointed to rogues of bucolic
affiliations, but the beef had been slaughtered and salted and shipped
down the Mississippi by the small craft of the tramp or pirate
proclivities and sold in distant markets before the depletion in the
numbers of the herd was discovered by the owner.
The cunning and capacity that devised these exploits tolerated no policy
of repetition. Never did the gang fit their feet into their old tracks.
Thus the thwarted authorities failed of even a clew to forward
conviction and certain tempting baits dangled unnoticed and ineffective,
while the miscreants for a season went their ways with circumspection
and kept well within the law. Only once did they attempt the exploit of
a railroad hold-up, and so entirely did it succeed that at the mere
recollection the small, light gray eyes of the shanty-boater narrowed to
a mere slit as he gazed speculatively from his chair across the room and
through the open door at the great dim bulk of the stranded steamboat,
lying there on the bar in the midst of the weltering surges of deep,
swift water on every side. There was no smoke from her chimneys, no stir
now on her decks, but a series of shining yellow points had just begun
to gleam from her cabin lights, and a circlet of shifting topaz
reflections gemmed the turgid waters. Purple and gray were the clouds;
the sky was starless and blank; the great bare terraces of the bank on
either side were like a desert in extent, uninhabited, unfrequented.
Anything more expressive of helplessness than the steamer aground it
were difficult to conceive,--bereft of all power of locomotion, of
volition, of communication.
“Now, just how many of those ‘swell guys’ are on that boat?” a deep bass
voice queried.
The speaker was of more reputable aspect than any of the others. He was
the only man in the room with a clean-shaven jaw and wearing a coat; the
abnormal size of his right arm, visible under the sleeve, indicated the
vocation of a blacksmith. He had a round bullet head that implied a sort
of brute force, and his black hair was short and close-clipped. In view
of his mental supremacy and his worldly superiority as a respectable
mechanic the authority he arrogated was little questioned, and, as he
flung himself back in his chair, tilted on the hind legs and fixed his
sharp black eyes on the half tipsy jockey, Connover sought to justify
his statement by adducing proofs.
“Why,” still flicking his boots and thrusting his stable-cap far back on
his sparse sandy hair, “there is Edward Floyd-Rosney and family, and he
is a millionaire. You are obliged to know that.”
Jasper Binnhart nodded his head in acceptance of the statement.
“And, Lord, what a string he had before he sold out when he went abroad.
He owned ‘County Guy,’ the third son of imported Paladin, dam Fortuna,
blood bay, stands sixteen hands high, such action.” He smote his meager
thigh in the abandonment of enthusiasm. “I saw him in Louisville at the
training stables--such form!”
“And who else?” demanded Binnhart.
“Why, a beautiful roan filly--three years old--Floyd-Rosney gave only
three thousand dollars for her, but speedy! And he owned----”
“Who else is on that boat?” reiterated Binnhart raucously. “I don’t want
to hear ’bout no horses, without I’m on my shoeing stool,” he added with
a sneer.
“Oh, yes, I know, of course.” The jockey felt the bit himself and
adapted his pace to the pressure of control. It seems strange to
contemplate, but even such a nature as his has its æsthetic element, its
aspirations and enthusiasms, its dreams and vicissitudes of hope. All
these just now had a string on them, as he would have phrased it, and
were dragging in the dust. He had ridden with credit in several events
elsewhere, but he was the victim of intemperance and his weak moral
endowment offered special material for the fashioning of a cat’s paw.
It was said and believed that he had “pulled” more than one horse in a
race, and although this was not indisputable, the suspicion barred him
from the employ of cautious turfmen. In connection with his frequent
intoxication, it had brought him down at last to work as a groom for his
daily bread, and what was to him more essential, his daily dram, in a
livery stable in the little inland town of Caxton, some ten or twelve
miles distant, for there was scant opportunity in view of the stringent
laws against gambling to ply his vocation as a jockey in Mississippi.
“Oh, you are talkin’ about the passenger list. The _Cherokee Rose_ has
sure got swells aboard. There are Mrs. Dean and Miss Hildegarde Dean.
You must have read a deal about _her_ in the society columns of the
newspapers. She won hands down in Orleans las’ winter. Reg’lar favorite,
an’ distanced the field.”
“I ain’t talkin’ about the wimmen,” said the smith.
“Well, mebbe old Horace Dean ain’t as rich as some, but they are dressed
as winners, sure. I seen ’em in a box at the horse-show--I was there
with Stanley’s stable--an’ the di’monds Mrs. Dean had on mos’ put out my
eyes.”
“She don’t wear di’monds on a steamboat, I reckon,” put in Mrs.
Berridge. “Them I have seen on deck ginerally don’t look no better
’n--’n--me.”
“But you are a good-looker, ennyways, Mrs. Berridge,” said the jockey,
and he paid her the tribute of another facetious wink.
“But the woman would carry her di’monds in her trunk or hand-bag,”
suggested the shanty-boater.
“Horace Dean ain’t aboard, eh? Let us have the men’s names,” said the
smith. He was turning the matter over exactly as if he had it in some
raw material on the anvil before him, striking it here and there,
testing its malleability, shaping it to utility.
“Oh, well, there’s one of the Ducies, the fellow that has been abroad so
long--registers from Lyons, France. Adrian Ducie.”
The younger Berridge turned half around from the table, chewing hard to
clear his mouth before he spoke impressively: “One of the Ducies? Now
you are coming to the Sure-enoughs! They used to own Duciehurst. They
did for a fack. Finest place in Mississippi; in the world, I reckon.”
“But, used to be ain’t now, by a long shot,” said Jorrocks, the
shanty-boater, sustaining the intention of the investigation. “No Ducie
nowadays would be worth a hold-up.”
“This is a young man?” Binnhart queried.
“Rising thirty, I reckon,” replied the jockey.
“You dunno--you ain’t seen his teeth,” said Mrs. Berridge. “That’s the
way you jockeys jedge of age.” She could be facetious, too.
“Then there’s old Colonel Kenwynton?” said Connover.
“He has got a deal of fight left in him yet,” observed Binnhart,
reflectively. “He would put up a nervy tussle.”
“Yes, sir,” corroborated the shanty-boater, with emphasis. “The devil
himself will have a tough job when he undertakes to tow old Jack
Kenwynton in.”
“There are several other men, names I don’t know--dark horses,” said
the jockey seriously, seeing at last the trend of the discussion.
Binnhart was slowly, thoughtfully, shaking his head. “A good many men, I
misdoubts. Then there are the captain and the clerks and the mate, but
they would all be took by surprise, an’ mos’ likely without arms.”
“An’ then there’s another man, besides,” suggested the elder Berridge. A
certain wrinkled anxiety had corrugated the bedraggled limpness of his
countenance and he was obviously relieved by the effect of the
computation of the odds.
“Oh, yes,” cried Mrs. Berridge, “that comical galoot what bided here
las’ night, an’ this evenin’ hired our dugout an’ paddled out to the
steamboat. He ain’t back yit.” She paused at the door and peered into
the gathering gloom.
“Jessy Jane,” cried her husband with an accession of interest, “tell ’em
all what you heard him say las’ night. Every other word was
‘Duciehurst.’”
The younger Berridge was a stalwart fellow, in attire and features
resembling his father, save that his straw-tinted beard and shock of
hair were not yet bleached by the river-damp and the damage of time to
the dull drab hue of the elder’s locks. The woman had evidently intended
to reserve such values as she had discovered for the benefit of her own,
her husband and his father. But Dan Berridge, all improvident and
undiscerning, was gobbling a second great supply of the cat-fish, and
did not even note the expanding interest that began to illumine
Binnhart’s sharp eyes as they followed her around the table while she
again set on the platter. She sought to gain time and perchance to
effect a diversion by inviting him to partake of the meal, but he
replied that he had eaten his supper already, “and a better one,” he
added as he cast a disparaging glance at the cloth. The rude jeer would
have served to balk his curiosity, one might have thought,--that in
resentment she would have withheld the disclosure he coveted. But the
jeer tamed her. She realized and contemned their poverty, and despised
themselves because they were so poor. The dignity of labor, the
blessedness of content, the joy of health and strength, the relative
values of the gifts of life, the law of compensation, no homilies had
ever been preached here on these texts. She could not controvert nor
contend. It was indeed a coarse, cheap meal brought to the door by the
river, a poverty-cursed home on its fantastic stilts, where they might
live only so long as the waters willed, and she was all at once ashamed
of it, and of her own compact of rude comfort and quiescence with it.
She had a certain spirit, however, and when the other visitors chuckled
their enjoyment of her discomfiture she included them in the invitation
after this wise, “Mebbe you-all ain’t too proud to take a snack with
us.” The shanty-boater, who permitted nothing good to pass him,
compromised on a slice of pork, eaten sandwich-wise, in a split pone of
corn-bread held in his hands as he crouched over the monkey-stove at the
other end of the room. Nevertheless, she was submissive and in some sort
constrained to respond when Binnhart said with a suave intonation: “Yes,
ma’am, we would like to hear from you about that talk of Duciehurst.”
“I dunno what you mean,” she said, still with an effort to fence: “oh,
yes, the man jus’ talks in his sleep, that’s all.”
“He’s got secrets,” said her husband, over his shoulder to Binnhart. He
paused suddenly with an appalled countenance to extract from his mouth a
great spiny section of fishbone, which seemed to have caught on the
words. “Tell on, Jesse Jane. I can’t. I’m eatin’.”
It was obviously useless to resist. “Why,” she said, “when the baby had
the croup las’ night an’ kep’ me up an’ awake--don’t you dare to look at
me an’ laugh, you buzzard!” she broke off to speak to the infant, who
was bouncing and crowing jovially at the end of his tether where he was
tied in the bunk, “he knows I’m talkin’ about him. Why, what was I
saying? Oh, I was in the back room there, an’ the man was sleepin’ in
here. An’ he talked, an’ talked in his sleep, loud fur true every wunst
in a while. I wonder he didn’t wake up everybody in the house.”
“What did he say?” asked Binnhart with a look of sharp curiosity.
“I didn’t take time to listen much,” replied the woman, fencing anew.
“Old ‘Possum thar,” nodding at the baby, “looked like he’d choke every
other minute. He’ll smell of turkentine fur a month of Sundays. I fairly
soaked his gullet with that an’ coal-oil.”
“A body kin make money out of other folks’ secrets ef they air the right
kind of secrets.” Binnhart threw out the suggestion placidly.
The woman hesitated. She noted her father-in-law behind the stove,
almost collapsing over his pipe, so inert he might scarcely make shift
to fill it; her husband, his younger image, was still at the table,
lazily chasing the last morsel of fish about his greasy plate with a bit
of cornbread. Little might they hope to metamorphose the babble of a
dreamer into discoveries of value. Jasper Binnhart, on the contrary, was
a man of force, of action, the leader, the prime mover, in every scheme
that had brought to them some measure of success and gain, and then,
too, would she not be present, to aid, to hear, invested with the
mystery and controlling its preservation.
She took on the air of retrospective pondering as she sank down in a
chair on one side of the table, putting her bare elbows on the cloth and
supporting her chin in her hands. “Lemme see,” she said, “ef I kin call
any of his gabble to mind.” She glanced up to find Binnhart’s eyes,
contracted to mere points of light, fixed upon her, and once more she
bent her gaze on the pattern of the damask.
“’Twar mos’ly ’bout Duciehurst, all night, all night. Duciehurst was the
word.”
“That sounds like something doing,” Binnhart remarked. “All my life I
have heard of hidden money at Duciehurst.”
Jessy Jane ceased to pose. She lifted her head suddenly with the
contempt of the uninformed, her lips thickening with a sneer. “Now, what
fool would put money in that old ruined shell, instead of a bank?”
“Why, lots of folks, during the war,” explained Binnhart. “The banks
were not open then, and people hid their vallybles wherever they could.
After the peace some things, here and there, were never found again.”
“Why, shucks, Mrs. Berridge, the name of Duciehurst is famous for hidden
treasure, has been ever since I could remember,” the shanter-boater
said. “You see, Major Ducie and two of his sons were killed in the war,
an’ only one was left, this passenger’s father.” He jerked his thumb
toward the bar, where the boat lay so still in the night, amidst its
element of surging waters. “This son, being so young at the time, just a
child, didn’t know anything about where they had stowed the family
silver and jewels, and a power of gold money, they say.”
“The family gave up the search more than forty years ago, and the place
was sold to satisfy a mortgage,” Binnhart commented.
“But the river folks take up the search every wunst in a while, an’ go
thar and dig around the walls,” said the younger Berridge.
“Sure!” exclaimed the shanty-boater. “I have been thar myself with a
git-rich-quick gang.” He leered humorously at the party from behind the
stove-pipe. Presently he continued reminiscently:--
“Then pirates tore all the hearths up, mighty nigh, that night. They had
a stonemason along, with crowbars and chisels, an’ such like tools. He
was a tombstone worker, an’ I reckon his biz queered the job, for we
found nothing at all.”
“’Tain’t in a hearthstone,” said the woman, suddenly. “Is there anything
about a house named pillow? He kep’ a-talkin’ about a pillow--I thought
he meant the one he had his head on.”
Jasper Binnhart started as with a galvanic shock. He suddenly let down
the forelegs of his chair and sat stiff and upright.
“Pillar?” he said, in a curiously muffled tone. “Has this mansion of
Duciehurst got anything like a porch with posts? I have never seen the
river-front of the house.”
“Posts!” exclaimed the younger Berridge. “The porch has got posts the
size of a big gum tree, a round dozen, too, an’ mighty nigh as high as a
gum tree.” He fell to steadily picking his teeth with a fish-bone, and
idly riding his chair to and fro.
“What did he say about ‘pillars,’ Mrs. Berridge?” asked the blacksmith,
eagerly.
“He talked about a base, an’ a pilaster, an’ columns, an’ a capital.”
“That’s Jackson, capital o’ Miss’ippi, seat of government, second to
none in the Union,” explained her husband.
“Sometimes he would call ‘Archie, Archie.’”
“Lieutenant Archibald Ducie as sure as you are born,” said the
shanty-boater, solemnly. “He died in Vicksburg, an’ he war the one
rumored to have had charge of hidin’ the money.”
“This man never said nothin’ ’bout no money. Jes’ kept on ’bout
docyments, an’ a chist,” persisted Mrs. Berridge, incredulously.
“Money mought have been in the chist,” remarked her husband.
“He war specially concerned ’bout a ‘pilaster’--he went back to that
ag’in an’ ag’in. He’d whisper, sly an’ secret, ‘in the pilaster.’ What
is a pilaster?”
There was no information forthcoming, and she presently resumed, with a
drawling voice and a dispirited drooping head. “He seemed to say the
docyments was there, though I thought he meant something about a pillow.
I wish I had paid mo’ attention, though I had never heard ’bout a pot o’
money bein’ hid at Duciehurst. I wish I could git the chance to hear
him talk agin in his sleep.”
“But will he come back?” asked Binnhart, eagerly.
“Sure. He said so when he hired the dugout,” said the old water-rat;
“but I made him pay fust, as much as it is wuth--two dollars. He’s got
plenty rocks in his pocket.”
“Well, I should think he’d stay the night with the steamboat, a man of
his sort,” Binnhart said. He cast a glance of gruff distaste about the
squalid and malodorous place, reeking with the greasy smell of fish, and
the sullen lamp. He thought of the contrast with the carpeted saloon,
the glittering chandeliers, the fine pure air, the propinquity of people
of high tone and good social station. Strange! Indeed, it would seem
that no man in his senses would resort instead to this den of thieves
and cut-throats.
“He’ll come back fast enough,” protested the elder Berridge. “There’s
something queer about that man, though he made no secret o’ his name,
Captain Hugh Treherne.”
“There’ll be something mighty queer about me if I don’t git a-holt of
some of them rocks in his pockets ye war tellin’ about,” declared the
shanty-boater.
“What ailed him to take out for the steamer?” demanded Binnhart.
“He seemed all struck of a heap when he seen old Cunnel Kenwynton
through the spy-glass. He claims he knows the old Cunnel,” replied the
water-rat.
“And yet he is coming back here,” exclaimed Binnhart, incredulously. “I
wish I could have heard him talk.”
He rose, still with that intent and baffled look, and went to the door
staring out into the gloomy night to descry, if he might, the course of
the little craft on the face of the waters and its progress; to canvass
the object of the man who wielded the paddle and the nature of the
business he could have with old Colonel Kenwynton; and to speculate in
futile desperation as to the knowledge he might possess of the storied
treasure of Duciehurst, and how this secret might be wrested from him.