"Mr. Payne, I take it?"
Roger turned to face the speaker, a tall, hawk-nosed man whose sallow,
leathery face was set in the lines of the hard worker.
"Yes, I'm Payne. Are you the captain?"
"I'm boss of the ditching outfit, Mr. Payne. White's my name. Was you
planning we should lay up at Gumbo Key to-night?"
Roger looked across the bay at the last glimpse of the Egret's white
hull as she sped into the mouth of the river. The setting sun glinted
on paint and nickel and brasswork. It was fancy, perhaps, but he
seemed to make out the figure of Annette still leaning over the
starboard rail.
"Yes--I was," he said slowly. The Egret shifted her course slightly,
and like the snuffing of a light disappeared round the first bend in
the river.
"Well, I dunno," said White. "So far's I'm concerned the quicker I get
my outfit up the river the better I'll like it."
"Do you know the river well?"
"Reckon I do."
"Can you run it by night?"
"Shore can--especially as it's going to be broad moonlight."
"All right," said Roger. "Let's go."
All through the night, without halting save for occasional engine
trouble, the little gasoline tug dragged its unwieldly tow up the
tree-lined reaches of the Chokohatchee River. The moonlight illumined
the waterway as with a million softly shaded lights. The Spanish moss
which hung from the live oak and cypress along the bank was transmuted
into scintillating draperies of twinkling silver. Upon the flowing
water the light lay like an immutable sheen, seemingly a part of the
flowing current, an endless stream of molten silver. Fishes, snakes
and nocturnal animals broke and rippled the sheen of the water's
surface. A huge, sharp fin ripping the silver before the tug's bows
told of a tarpon strayed far inland with the tide. An otter's head,
round and hard, jutted up, looked round, dove again.
In the magic light and shading, the tubby lines of the little tug were
softened and altered; its paint-cracked deck and wheelhouse silvered
and mellowed. The twin wire cables stretching back to the tow became
two glistening silver ropes. At their ends, cavernous gloomy and grimy
despite the moonlight, wallowed the high bulky hull of the ditcher's
scow.
To Roger Payne, standing beside White in the little wheelhouse, the
mournful chuckle of the Southern nightingale, as it sounded time after
time from the cavernous darkness of the jungle shore seemed to strike
at him personally with a note of knowing mockery. The weirdness and
the elusiveness of the scene seemed the inevitable ending of the
strange day. On the rippling water the moonbeams twinkled like silvery
fairy sprites at play; and in the junglelike woods on the shores yawned
great caverns of darkness, their evil suggestiveness only heightened by
the bars of light shooting down through the matted leaves.
Back on the scow a sleepless negro, lying face up to the moonlight,
began to croon weirdly.
"What in the devil do you call that?" asked Roger.
White listened, his head to one side.
"Haiti nigger--French patois," was his reply. "There; catch the
'_mom'selle_'? Haiti nigger singing."
He reached down and picked up a bolt.
"Haiti negro?" said Roger, puzzled. "How did he get in that gang?"
"Oh, they drift over once in a while." White was measuring the
distance to the scow.
The bolt hummed through the air, struck the ditcher's shovels with a
clang and splashed into the water.
"Missed!" growled White. "Shut up, you Sam. This ain't no voodoo
outfit."
"Voodoo!" Roger laughed mirthlessly. "That would be the finishing
touch."
"How come?" said White, puzzled.
"Do you happen to know Mr. Garman, White?"
"I was 'specting you to ask that, Mr. Payne," was the drawled reply.
"I got this to say: I know Garman, but that's all. I dig ditches for
my living. I dig 'em fast and I dig 'em good; and--and that's all I'm
up here for, one way or 'nother."
"Right! and the faster you dig 'em, the better it will suit me."
"Me, too," was the earnest reply.
Roger looked at the man sharply.
"Why? Don't you like the job?"
"The job's all right. I've said I'd dig 'em, and I'll dig 'em fast.
But the quicker I get done, and the quicker I get my outfit pointed
downstream again, and the quicker I'm out of this river, the better
suited I'll be. That's all I'm saying."
Roger laughed grimly.
"You talk like you'd had dealings with Garman before, White?"
"That's all I'm saying," repeated the man. Then suddenly: "What's
that?"
A clear shaft of light pierced the moonmist ahead, lighting a broad
space in the river from the next bend down to the tug. While they
watched in fascination the light came nearer, flashing in their eyes,
and behind it resounded the unmistakable hum of the Egret's engines.
Compared to the crawling pace of the tug the yacht seemed to leap out
of the night straight at them.
"Yo hoo!" yelled White. "Look out! Want to run us down?"
A full-throated laugh rang out from the Egret's bridge as her course
was changed slightly and her engines throttled down. On the bridge
beside the searchlight Roger saw Garman's huge figure looming.
"Ho, Payne!" came a hail. "Didn't see anything of the ---- we're
after, did you?"
"Not to recognize by that description," replied Roger.
"A ---- by any other name would look the same," laughed Garman. He
leaned over the rail, smoking furiously, his eyes alight with the
savage joy of the chase. "Yes, and he'd stand just as much chance of
getting out alive. I'll get him. He got away from Palm Island into
the swamp. Punctured your friend Ramos in doing so." His laugh rolled
over the water like the growl of a bear. "In fact, punctured him so
successfully that we had to cover Mr. Ramos with three feet of dirt to
cheat the buzzards.--White, is that you?"
"Yessir."
"Well, White, you do your best for Mr. Payne. He's in a hurry to get
his ditches dug. Do your best for him for he's a particular friend of
mine--and of some one else." He laughed again, shouted an order, and
the Egret leaped past them and on down the river.
"Ghost boat, ghost boat!" The Haiti black, back on the scow, waking up
from his sleep, had stared full in the eye of the Egret's searchlight,
and now was staggering round, terror-stricken and dazed.
"Knock him down somebody," called White calmly.
"Ghost boat, ghost boat!"
"Where?"
"Down the--uh! Oh, _ma Dieu_!"
The Egret and her light had disappeared round a bend and the negro was
pointing at the empty moonlit river. Hoots of laughter greeted him.
"Guess you got 'em, Sam. No other boat round here."
"_Ma Dieu_! Ah seen him. Yoh gen'men sho' they wasn't no boat?"
"You're raving. No boat at all."
"Oh--Oh----!"
"Shut up!" cried White. "Shut up!"
A moment's silence. Then, from a black corner on the ditcher came the
negro's voice, moaning in cutting minor notes a primitive jungle croon
of fear and terror. White laughed grimly, making no effort to quiet
him. Roger stared up the river and made out a flicker of purple light
shooting up from the eastern horizon into the misty heavens.
"Thank God!" he said in relief. "Daylight is coming."
He leaped ashore as the tug ran close to an out-jutting point of high
land below Garman's, and cut straight across the prairie toward his
camp. The sunburst of dawn was at its gaudiest when he came within
sight of the tents and he caught the glint of sun on the bare matchets
of the clearing gang as the men prepared for the day's work. Higgins
was standing before his tent, smoking and chafing the men.
"Everything all right, Hig?" asked Roger with false calm.
"All right? Sure. Why wouldn't it be?" Higgins took the pipe from
his lips and looked closer.
"Hi! What's up? What's happened to you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you don't have to tell me, of course; but--but what in the name
of smoked fish makes you look as if you'd been through the Devil's
Playground again?"
Higgins breathed hard after Roger had completed the tale of Garman's
man hunt.
"That's a damn lie about Ramos!" he said. "If he's dead Garman's gang
killed him---Garman himself probably--afterwards."
"How do you know?"
"Willy High Pockets has been here."
"What!"
"Yep. I had him hid down in Blease's shack, but he beat it away."
"Then it was that poor Indian Garman was after!"
"Not quite. There was a white man, too. A guy that Willy met out in
the swamp some place when he beat it that day after Garman had handled
him. It was this white man that Garman was after. Willy was with him.
Garman's bunch had 'em trapped on an island down in the swamp, but
Willy happened to know an Injun way out and they slipped the noose.
Willy came crawling in here last night. He's got a tear from a
forty-four along his hip and the white man sent him to us to get it
doctored up and keep him hidden. I slipped down to Blease's and fixed
it up with them to hide him, but he slipped away to join that white man
as soon as we had him sewed up.
"Where is the white man?"
"Still out in the swamp. He steered Willy till they saw the tents and
then he beat it back."
"Who is he?"
"Don't know; Willy wasn't telling."
"What does Garman want to get him for?"
"Willy 'donno' that either. He 'donno' anything at all about this guy
in the swamp. But he did tell a straight story about the sneak they
made; and there wasn't a shot fired on either side, so Ramos wasn't
shot then. I'll bank on Willy's word for that."