Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story

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Title: Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story
Author: Pollock, Frank Lillie
Language: English
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Rainbow Landing

An Adventure Story

By
FRANK LILLIE POLLOCK
Author of “The Glacier Gate”

NEW YORK
CHELSEA HOUSE
PUBLISHERS

Rainbow Landing

CONTENTS

I. The End of a Trail
II. Respite
III. Power’s Luck
IV. A Misfire
V. The Woods Rider
VI. The Meeting
VII. ’Possum and Poker
VIII. New Forces
IX. Pascagoula Oil
X. Tangled Trails
XI. The Warning
XII. Crisis
XIII. Open War
XIV. The Last Chance
XV. The Fog
XVI. The Pay Car
XVII. Counterplot
XVIII. Resurrection
XIX. The Labyrinth
XX. Deep Water

RAINBOW LANDING

CHAPTER I

THE END OF A TRAIL

The boat was late in leaving the Mobile wharf. Dusk fell as it
wallowed noisily and slowly up against the current of the Alabama
River, under the great bridge, past Hurricane and the lumber mills.
The shores ceased to be cleared. Swamps and forests gathered on each
shore, dense jungles of cypress and gum and titi, that belted almost
the whole course of the river from Mobile to Selma.

Lockwood ate an intensely indigestible supper in the saloon in the
company of the dozen or so passengers, mostly silent, malarial-looking
up-river farmers. Afterwards there was nothing whatever to do. The
passengers smoked for an hour or two on the forward deck, talking in a
gentle drawl of cotton and hogs and turpentine, and then vanished to
their berths.

It was not much like the old days, when the river boats ran from
Mobile to Montgomery crowded with passengers, carrying cotton and
slaves and quick-fingered, hair-trigger gamblers; when wine flowed at
a gorgeous bar, and rich planters gambled bales of cotton on a single
poker hand. The Alabama almost rivaled the Mississippi in those days,
and competing boats raced in a flare of pitch smoke, occasionally
piling up on a sand bar and blowing up their boilers. But improved
roads and motors had killed the river. The few remaining boats ran
irregularly and slowly, decadent, slovenly, dejected, carrying only
low grade passengers and freight, or those whose destination lay
outside the range of railroads or gasoline.

Long before nine o’clock the decks were cleared. Lockwood sat up for
half an hour longer, and then went to his stateroom himself, in sheer
boredom. It was hot there and close, and there were mosquitoes in
spite of the screened window, but he undressed, lay down, smoked,
tried to read, and tried to sleep.

Sleep was not a success. He had slept badly for a long time, and when
he did sleep his dreams were often worse than wakefulness. Violent and
uneasy thoughts do not make a good pillow, and there was nothing
soothing to-night in the throb and quiver of the boat, nor the
unceasing _crash-crash_ of the stern-wheel paddles under him. He dozed
and woke, dozed and finally found himself intensely and nervously
awake, his whole imagination concentrated on the encounter he
anticipated at the end of the journey. He tentatively touched the
little automatic pistol that never left him, slung in a holster under
his left arm. He sat and looked out, then dressed himself and went out
to the desolate darkness of the forward deck.

The night was pitchy black, and a little fog hung low on the muddy
surface of the Alabama. The glow of the boat’s deck lights showed the
passing shore close alongside, a sliding series of bald white sycamore
trunks, bare cypresses, water maples, clumps of mistletoe, Spanish
moss, depths of unending swamp that looked as savage as Africa. The
powerful searchlight at the bow shot ahead like an inquiring finger,
touching the stream in the far distance, shifting and lifting,
throwing into uncanny brilliance a clump of trees on the next bend a
mile ahead, as the pilot picked out his landmarks for the deep
channel.

Occasionally the whole boat vibrated and shook with the terrific blast
of the whistle, a powerful siren made to carry twenty miles over the
swamps, to let every landing know the boat was coming, and give plenty
of time to meet her.

The air was full of dampness and fog and a woody, musky smell of
rotting vegetation from the vast swamps. No light, no sign of human
occupation showed anywhere along the shores. Lockwood returned to his
stateroom, wearied and mosquito bitten, lay down in his berth, and
tried to read yesterday’s Mobile paper.

He could not read any more than he could sleep. He had a singular
feeling that something was going to happen at last. Perhaps the boat
would run on a sand bar, or blow up her boilers; they were directly
under him, but he felt highly indifferent. Some one else was sleepless
as well as himself, for in the adjoining cabin he heard a soft sound
of movement, a rustle of paper, the click of a suit case being opened
and shut. He did not know who was in there. The door of that cabin had
remained closed ever since the boat left Mobile that afternoon, and
the occupant had not come out for supper.

Lockwood had no curiosity about it. He was brain weary, but not
sleepy. He felt desperately tired that night—tired of everything,
tired particularly of the long trail he had followed so far without
success, which he was still following, which he would continue to
follow as long as he lived, for he had nothing else to do with his
life.

He had no anxiety, for he feared nothing and loved nothing, he
thought. He felt that he was even tired of hate, which, he considered,
was the only emotion left for him on earth—the only emotion, that is,
except that great final one which he was seeking, and which would last
not much longer than the flash of a pistol shot.

He was tired, and perhaps he was so tired that he even dozed a little
after all, for he came to himself suddenly, shaken by the enormous
bellow of the boat’s siren. It blew again; he heard the clang of a
bell. Probably they were approaching a landing, and he got up and
opened his door upon the side deck. Glancing at his watch, he saw that
it was nearly two o’clock.

Down below him in the gloom there was a great stirring and shouting of
the negro roustabouts who were getting out the freight. No port was in
sight, but far ahead he saw at last a flicker of a fire somewhere far
ahead. The searchlight found it, quenched it for an instant with its
white intensity, then shifted, giving a glimpse of trees, of a wooden
shed. Undoubtedly this was a stopping place. Again the whistle roared
tremendously.

A negro steward came out from the saloon carrying a couple of suit
cases.

“What place is this?” Lockwood asked him.

“Dis yere’s Rainbow Landin’, suh.”

A white man had come out also, and was looking over the rail a yard
away. As the boat came up, the landing seemed to be a landing and
nothing more. There was a wide, open space on the bank, inclosed by
cottonwood trees, and a large wooden building with a platform on the
riverside. Some one had lighted a fire ashore. He could see three or
four dark figures moving about it. A boat emerged from the gloom and
nosed about the warehouse. The searchlight reconnoitered carefully,
swept the shore, and lifted to the bluff rising behind it. Lockwood
caught a glimpse of a bare clay face, streaked with fantastic strata
of crimson and green and white.

A bell clanged. The clumsy boat slowed and turned her nose inshore.
The branch of a big cottonwood brushed over the upper deck, as she
rammed the warehouse platform with a force that set the structure
quivering. A negro leaped ashore with a hawser. The bell clanged
again. The boat stopped and swung back, her hawser taut against the
current.

A man in the open warehouse door shouted sonorously and unintelligibly
up to the pilot house. Two long gangplanks were run ashore, and
instantly a stream of negroes shouldered boxes and bales and started
to land the freight at a trot, calling, laughing, singing. The
searchlight steadied on them like a watchful eye.

In the glare of the electric light Lockwood watched the wild
spectacle, the dark river flashing yellow by the boat, the margin of
the immense swamp, the grotesquely brilliant streaks of the colored
clay, and the fire looking like the camp of some lost expedition.
There was a flash of negro eyes and teeth; it was like a midnight
scene on the shore of the Congo, and the roustabouts wailed a wild and
wordless crooning as they hustled the freight ashore.

The boat clerk called the addresses of the packages as they were
carried off, and the warehouse keeper checked them from the other end
of the planks. From the high deck rail Lockwood could overlook the
freight, and he was surprised at their number for this desolate spot.
He was still more surprised at their character. In the brilliant
electric light he could see the crates of fruit, the boxes marked
“Fragile,” bearing the stencil of the most expensive Mobile stores, a
big box that must have contained at least a hundred boxes of cigars,
an ornate brass hanging lamp, carefully crated, a great leather
easy-chair also elaborately packed. All of them seemed addressed to
the same name. It might be a store, or a hotel, perhaps—if it were not
so absurd to imagine a hotel in these swamps.

“Power” called the clerk monotonously, as package after package went
ashore. “Power—Power.”

All this freight was going to some one named Power—some one evidently
who had a cultivated taste and money to spend. But the valuable stuff
was all put ashore at last, and the roustabouts began to carry sacks
of fertilizer and corn and cottonseed.

Lockwood leaned on the rail and continued to watch the bizarre
activity. He did not notice that some one else had come out of the
saloon and stood within a yard of his elbow, until the voice of the
newcomer reached him.

“Seems like they’ve got a heap of freight to——”

Lockwood never heard the rest of that sentence. For a moment the whole
wild scene reeled around him; he turned deaf and dizzy; he felt for an
instant as if he had been suddenly dipped in ice water, and then his
blood rushed flaming hot.

He had not heard that voice for over five years, but he knew its first
word. It had come—the meeting he had pursued for four years, through
unimaginable discouragements and hardships and distress. Through
sleepless nights he had imagined it a thousand times, but he had never
expected it to come like this; and now at the crisis he was astonished
to find that he felt no fury of hatred, but only a dead stupefaction.

He collected himself, muttered some answer. He ventured a glance, and
met the man’s eye. It was McGibbon, right enough, and not greatly
changed; his eye rested casually on Lockwood, and then shifted back to
the landing. Lockwood was not himself afraid of recognition; for years
he had guarded against that danger, and those years had changed him
greatly.

It flashed upon him that McGibbon must have been the unseen passenger
in the next cabin, since he had not been visible on the boat before.
No wonder Lockwood had been sensible of something ominous in the air!
Evidently McGibbon was going ashore here as soon as the gangplanks
were cleared of freight, for the two suit cases stood beside him, and
the deck steward was hovering about, fearful of losing his tip.

Had it not been for this negro, Lockwood could have shot the man
unseen, as they stood there. His hand unconsciously crept toward the
little automatic that he had carried for years, awaiting this day. He
could slip ashore in the darkness, hide in the swamps, reach the
railroad. But the steward loitered behind them, and Lockwood waited,
his head still awhirl, for the situation to develop itself.

McGibbon said nothing more, and in a few minutes he beckoned to the
negro and they started down the stairs to the lower deck. Lockwood saw
him come out on the gangplank, make his way between the roustabouts,
pass into the dark warehouses at the other end. With a shock Lockwood
realized that he had let his opportunity pass. In a panic he plunged
back to his cabin, snatched up his own suit case and dashed out, and
down to the lower deck.

“Hol’ on, captain! Dis yere ain’t whar you gits off!” the porter cried
as he headed for the plank; but Lockwood brushed past, through
roustabouts, and into the warehouse. It was dimly lighted by a couple
of lanterns, showing the piled freight, the sacks of oats and
cottonseed and fertilizer, the crates and barrels and cases. But
McGibbon was not there.

There was an open door at the other end. He set down his suit case and
hastened toward it. Outside was the flat, sandy shore space, backed by
the woods and the rainbow-colored hill. A road led slantingly up the
bluff. He saw a lantern swinging in the distance, and still farther
was a white glare that could be nothing but the lights of a motor car
on the higher ground.

He was furious with himself now for his delay. He had never dreamed
that he was going to flinch at the critical moment. With the pistol in
his hand he rushed madly out of the circle of the searchlight and
toward the landward road. But he was too late once more. He heard a
sound of loud talking, then the car started with an enormous roar,
broke into what seemed sudden, reckless speed, and its lights vanished
into the encircling woods.

McGibbon must have gone in it, but to make sure he went on to the top
of the hill, and found no one there. He could dimly make out the
commencement of a very good road, and far away now he could see the
lamp rays of the flying car. He turned back, sick and almost weak with
the reaction, and slipped the automatic into his pocket again.

A horse hitched to a buggy was tied to a live oak on the shore, and
there were a couple of men beside it as Lockwood came down to the
bottom of the road again. One of them was carrying a strong flash
light, and turned it on the stranger. Its ray also revealed a row of
rough barrels, and something crunched under his feet with a familiar
feeling. He had worked in the turpentine woods before, and he knew
rosin barrels when he saw them.

“Was that car from the turpentine camp?” he inquired, by an
inspiration.

“No, sir; I reckon not. Must have been the Power boys’ car,” came an
answer in a soft Alabaman voice from behind the electric ray.

“Sure was,” confirmed another drawl. “Reckon it was here to meet Mr.
Hanna. I seen him get off the boat. He’s stayin’ with the Power boys.”

Hanna? McGibbon had changed his name then. But that was to be
expected; and Lockwood himself was not carrying the same name as five
years ago, when he and McGibbon were partners.

“Where do the Powers live?” he asked his almost invisible
interlocutors.

“’Bout two mile from here, past the post office. Goin’ thar to-night?”

“Oh, no,” Lockwood exclaimed. “In fact, I’m going to the turpentine
camp. But I’ve got to find a place to stay to-night.”

“Ain’t but one, I reckon. Mr. Ferrell at the post office takes in
travelers sometimes. It’s a right smart ways from here, but I’ve got
his hawse an’ buggy, and I’m goin’ that way, so I can carry you, if
you like.”

Lockwood accepted gladly. It was too dark for him to see much of the
road as they topped the rising ground, but he made out the loom of
immense woods against the sky. The road dipped again; mist lay thick
and choking close to the ground, full of the swamp odor of rotting
wood. Innumerable frogs croaked and trilled, and though it was a warm
spring night the air in the hollows struck with a poisonous chill.

The road rose again. The woods fell away; they passed several negro
cabins and cornfields. Then it wound through a belt of dense forest,
but this time scented with the clean, sweet aroma of the long-leafed
pine. The mist vanished, and he could see the crests of the big trees
palmlike against the sky.

“You are a turpentine man, sir?” inquired his guide, after a long
period of silence.

“Yes, I’ve been in the turpentine business,” Lockwood answered
truthfully. He was afraid to ask directly about what most filled his
mind, but at last he ventured to inquire:

“Has Mr. Hanna got anything to do with the camp?”

“Hanna? No, sir. I don’t reckon he knows anything ’bout turpentining.
He’s just stayin’ with the Power boys. Been with ’em ever sence they
come into their good luck, I reckon—brought it to ’em, some says.”

It was a new thing for McGibbon, or Hanna, to bring anybody good luck,
Lockwood thought; and he asked:

“What sort of luck?”

“All kinds—money, mainly. Well, right here I’ve got to turn off. But
you keep right straight down the road, and you’ll come to the post
office in ’bout a quarter mile. They’ll all be asleep, I expect, but
you kin roust ’em out. They won’t mind—no, sir!”

The road indeed forked here, and the buggy proceeded down the other
branch, as Lockwood started to walk in the indicated direction. A moon
was just beginning to show above the pines now, and he could see a
little more distinctly. Presently he saw a group of three or four
middle-sized buildings close to the road.

Undoubtedly this was Mr. Ferrell’s post office. Lockwood hesitated; he
did not much care to attract attention, considering his mission; and
lodging was immaterial to him, after all. It would be only a few hours
till daylight, and he had never felt less inclined to sleep in his
life.

He sat down on a log opposite the dark and silent group of houses.
Nothing moved in that whole wilderness landscape. The moon crept up;
its light fell white on the sand of the road, crossed by the intensely
black shadows of the water-oaks. Restlessly Lockwood got up and walked
on again. The Power boys’ place was not much farther, he understood,
and he desired above all things to see the spot where his enemy had
gone.

The moon was growing brilliantly clear now. The road passed through a
strip of pine woods, a series of partially cultivated fields. Then
there was a fence on the right, with a great grove of some stately
trees behind it, oaks or walnuts, planted with symmetry. Within a
hundred yards he came to a pair of heavy gateposts, from which a
broken gate hung askew. He looked within and stopped, taken aback.

Fifty yards within, at the end of a long and wide drive, stood a great
house, fronted with a Colonial portico, looking like pure marble in
the moonlight. The earth of the drive was of silver-white sand. The
faintest haze of mist hung in the air, transfiguring the breathless
scene to magic. Not a leaf stirred on the trees. It was a spectacle of
black and silver and marble, half theatrical, half ghostly, but
seeming wholly unreal, as if it might vanish at a breath.

CHAPTER II

RESPITE

The sheer unearthly beauty of the spectacle was so thrilling and
unexpected that Lockwood stepped back, breathless. A sense of deep
peace that was as strange and poignant as pain sank into his heart. He
felt himself and his grim purpose to be a blot on this exquisite
earth.

But this was certainly where McGibbon lay, or Hanna, as he called
himself now. This was certainly the Powers’ place. There was no light
at any window, no sound or movement anywhere about the place. Afraid
of being seen from the house, he moved a little way up the road, and
sat down on a fallen tree trunk. The live-oak leaves were silvery and
still overhead, and a whip-poor-will reiterated its monotonous and
musical cry among the deep leaves.

But memory had broken the enchantment of the night for Lockwood. To
meet McGibbon on the river had been the last thing he expected, still
less to find him landing in this wilderness of swamp, bayou, and pine
forest. He had traced the man to Mobile from New Orleans, from
Pensacola, and had heard a rumor that he might be in Selma. He had
taken the boat instead of the train; it was cheaper, and he was short
of money, and for money his poverty had proved his fortune.

It was a three years’ trail that had come to an end here at Rainbow
Landing, a trail that had led from Virginia to Washington, and halfway
across the continent, and south to the Gulf Coast. The search was all
he had to live for—if he could signify by the name of Life the
wretched and ruined years which seemed all that were left to him.

He was not the first man who has been ruined by a business associate,
but it is not often that the ruin is so complete and sweeping. Looking
back now, Lockwood was continually filled with an increasing amazement
that anybody could ever have been so incredibly trusting, so almost
criminally young as he had been.

Yet that far-away, foolish, and happy life dated only seven years
back. It seemed twenty; but three of those years had been the life of
a dog, of a wolf; and two of them had been spent in prison for a crime
that was not, at least willingly, his own. He remembered well the day
of his release, when he saw the aged and pallid face in the shop-front
mirror, and barely recognized it as his own. He did not care. It was
more effectual disguise, and he had already determined what he must
do. Luckily he had a little cash now to help him—a small legacy of a
thousand dollars left him during his imprisonment. With this he
established his “gold reserve.”

McGibbon, he found, had ventured back to Melbourne to pick up the last
profits from Lockwood’s once-flourishing business, which he had first
inflated and then wrecked. Afterward he had gone with the plunder to
Washington, and this was where Lockwood first took up the trail.

McGibbon was flush then; he spent his money freely, and he left his
tracks in the capital, and afterward in Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Here
the money must have run short, for he went to Smithfield, Illinois,
where he became interested in a small printing concern, remained there
six months, and left, leaving the printing shop bankrupt.

He left under a cloud, which for some time Lockwood could not pierce.
His own money became exhausted. He had to seek work, and he took what
he could get. He became an unskilled laborer; he was a
department-store salesman. It never occurred to him to seek office
work, or in his own field of real-estate dealing. When he had again
accumulated a stake, he renewed the search, and eventually found that
McGibbon had gone to Ohio.

But he was still a year behind his quarry’s movements. McGibbon had
left Ohio, had gone west. In Colorado he was concerned in a sugar-beet
factory, which had its safe blown open and several thousand dollars
taken. The track was lost again. Lockwood fell into grievous straits
in the West, but his determination only blackened and hardened.
McGibbon moved East. Lockwood might have come up with him, but he was
crushed under a motor car in St. Louis and in the hospital for six
weeks. He found that his man had gone down the river, possibly to New
Orleans. Lockwood followed to that city, and secured a job in a
motor-sales establishment. He understood automobiles, and had a knack
with machinery.

McGibbon, who now used another name, had left his mark unmistakably in
New Orleans, where he had been tried on a charge of obtaining money
under false pretenses. He had been acquitted, had left the city
apparently, but all that had happened a year before Lockwood unearthed
the facts. He spent months in fruitless investigation during the time
he could spare from his work at the motor shop. Finally he imagined a
clew leading to Pensacola and West Florida. Lockwood spent three
months in a turpentine camp in the pine woods, returned to New
Orleans, went to Mobile, and finally thought he had information of his
man in Selma, up at the navigable head of the Alabama River.

The moon wheeled and sank low over the vast swamps as he sat half
drowsily on his log, wondering at the strange chance that had cut his
wanderings suddenly short. He could scarcely believe that the end was
so near, that the forces accumulated for years were about to burst.

He tried to think out a detailed plan. It was useless. He would have
to learn Hanna’s habitual movements, learn the geography of this wild
country, plan his escape in advance. At the moment he had to admit
that he did not feel equal to the situation. He felt none of the wild
and vindictive exultation that he had anticipated. He felt merely
empty and tired and anxious for rest and delay.

It was partly due to a sleepless night and lack of food, as he knew.
But the moonlight had gone, and a gray dawn was breaking. The oak
leaves looked cold and dead, dripping with heavy dew. The east began
to glow and flare. Somewhere he heard a negro voice chanting weirdly.
The South was waking up. He arose from his seat and began to walk
slowly back toward the post office.

The Power house was still silent and asleep when he passed the gate
again. It looked slightly dingy in the morning light, and its magic
had gone. But when he reached the business settlement at the post
office he found everything wide-awake. Smoke was rising from the stone
outside chimneys of the three houses, and the two or three negro
cabins in the background, a negro was chopping wood by the road, and
the door of the postal station already stood wide open.

A signboard over the door said “Atha,” the official name of the
office, and a larger and almost obliterated board was painted “T.
Ferrell, General Merchandise.” The store was a long, unpainted plank
building of one story, with the end toward the road, finishing in a
square, roofed “gallery,” whence steps led down. Farmers could drive
up alongside this gallery and transact their business without leaving
their buggy seat or saddle. Heavy plank shutters, now thrown back,
defended the front windows that displayed a dusty collection of most
miscellaneous articles.

Lockwood went in. There was something of everything in the dim
recesses of that store. There were hardware and guns and ammunition;
bananas, oranges, snuff, and tobacco; patent medicines and millinery;
boots, shoes, plows, and harness, carpentering tools and cotton, silk,
and ribbons. One corner was walled off by a partition with a wicket
and a window. This was the post office, and here Lockwood found
Ferrell slowly sorting letters, evidently for an out-going early mail.

“Why, yes, sir; I certainly reckon so,” he said in reply to Lockwood’s
request for breakfast. “Sam! O-oh, Sam! Run up to the house and tell
Mrs. Ferrell there’s a gentleman goin’ to eat breakfast with us.” He
dropped the last of the letters into the pouch, came out from his
inclosure, and looked the stranger over genially. He was a middle-aged
man with a stubby beard, long, untidy, brown hair, and wrinkled,
kindly, simple eyes.

“Come in on the boat last night?” he inquired. “I heard her blowin’.
She was right late, wasn’t she? Where’d you stay all night?”

“They told me to come here,” Lockwood explained. “But it was close to
morning then and I didn’t like to wake you up, so I sat by the road
till daylight. It was only two or three hours.”

“Shucks! You oughter just given us a holler. Mighty glad to have you.
Breakfast’ll be ready right directly. What did you say your name might
be, sir?”

Lockwood stayed chatting with the merchant while they waited for the
breakfast. He ate with appetite, and it occurred to him that this
might be the last meal he would eat in safety for a long time.
Afterward they went back to the store. Lockwood was eager to obtain
information, but he hesitated to ask questions, and for some time they
smoked on the gallery in the level, early sun, exchanging indifferent
remarks.

“Reckon you’re a turpentine man, ain’t you?” Ferrell said at last.

“Well, I’ve worked in the turpentine woods,” Lockwood admitted.
“There’s a big camp down this way, isn’t there?”

“Sure—Craig’s camp. I just ’lowed that’s where you were bound for. I
reckon you’re the new woods rider that Craig’s expecting.”

“Well—I might be,” said Lockwood cautiously, “He’s expecting one, is
he?”

“Sure. Burns, the other woods rider, he got throwed from his horse
last week. Hit against a pine stump hard and was hurt right bad. It’s
the busy season now, and Craig needs a man bad.”

“Yes, I was going down to see Craig,” Lockwood responded carelessly.
“How far is the camp from here?”

“Couple of miles, straight down past the Powers’ place. Cross the
bridge over the bayou and take the trail into the woods.”

“The Powers’ place?” said Lockwood. “That’s the——”

It was the opening he wanted, but at that instant a farmer drove up in
a shaky buggy drawn by a mule, got out, and came up the steps. He was
introduced to Lockwood, took a chew of tobacco, and finally went into
the store, where he spent half an hour.

“Well, you’ll likely find Charley Craig at the camp ’bout noon,”
Ferrell resumed when the customer had gone. “Not much before. He’s out
in the saddle by daylight and don’t get back to the camp till dinner
time. But if you’re a turpentine man he’ll sure be glad to see you.”

The mail rider came up then and took away the pouch, starting on his
round of twenty-five miles through the isolated post offices of that
river region. Another farmer came up, sat for some time on the steps
and departed. Three men went by in a frightfully dilapidated Ford car.
More people loafed in; a little group formed on the gallery; and
Ferrell introduced Lockwood to them all with punctilious ceremony,
with the air of presenting an honored guest.

It was an attention with which Lockwood would willingly have
dispensed. At this rate, he thought, every one in the neighborhood
would soon know his face.

He sat back, saying little, listening to the slow drawl of talk and
the low-pitched laughter. They were unlettered and ragged and
sunburned, these Alabama farmers, but they had the courtesy of
gentlemen and the leisure of aristocrats. He heard the gossip of the
country—of the rise in the river, flooding out the bottom lands, of
the weather for cotton, of a nigger who had been stealing hogs, and of
a man who had been shot near Nadawah.

He gathered an impression of the district from it all, an isolated,
almost primeval country of forest and swamp, of scattered farms, of
the overgrown ruins of once great estates, of great timber mills and
turpentine camps, the industries of the forests. It was thirty miles
to the railroad, twenty to the telegraph, though a rural telephone
line intersected the district.

He lingered and waited, hoping to pick up something of importance.
There was a sense of deep peace and rest on that sunny veranda in the
sweet, hot May morning. Among these gentle-voiced Southerners there
seemed neither hurry nor strife. Negro women went by in gay ginghams,
shuffling their bare, black feet in the amber dust. The air was like a
caress to the nerves, and for the first time in years Lockwood felt
his tension relax. He was within sight of the end, he told himself,
and he could afford to take breath.

CHAPTER III

POWER’S LUCK

Lockwood had already resolved to accept the hint of the turpentine
camp. It was absolutely necessary now that he should have some excuse
for his presence. He was sure he could get work in the camp, now that
the rush of the season was in full swing, and it would give him time
and countenance.

So he waited, till it should be time to find Craig at his place.
Whites and blacks came and went in a slow dribble, leaving always a
residual group on the gallery, but toward the middle of the forenoon
he espied a large car in the distance, driven up the road at a furious
pace. It swerved up to the store, skidded wildly in the sand, and
brought up in front of the steps.

Lockwood coveted that machine. With its aid he could make a hundred
miles in a night, and an escape would be easily arranged. With acute
interest he turned to look at the two young men who leaped out and
came up the steps, passing loud and cheerful greetings by name to
almost every one on the store gallery.

“Mornin’, Mr. Power! Howdy, Jackson! Good mornin’, sir!” went round,
and Lockwood noticed that everybody looked pleased and interested. He
was more than interested himself. These were more than the owners of
the coveted car. These were the men he most wanted to see—McGibbon’s
new friends.

Both of them were extravagantly well dressed for that place. They wore
expensive outing suits, with silk shirts and gorgeous ties under their
soft collars. Silk socks of brilliant hue showed above their canvas
shoes, and each of them sported a heavy watch chain.

One of the flashy motorists might have been twenty-five, big and
heavily built, with a florid, good-natured face and a thick, brown
mustache. He wore a large, scintillating stone in his tie, which might
truly have been a diamond. His brother appeared much younger, perhaps
not twenty, slim and dark and handsome, also decorated with a diamond
pin and a flashing ring on his left hand. The faces of both of them
expressed reckless good-humor and an undisciplined exuberance of
animal spirits—possibly, also, the effect of a drink or two, early in
the day as it was.

These, then, were the recipients of the cigars and furniture, of the
expensive freight. It appeared that these were McGibbon’s hosts. But
they most certainly did not appear all likely to be confederates or
associates of such a man as McGibbon. Lockwood’s first suspicions died
as he looked and listened. More likely, he thought, these rich young
countrymen were fresh victims of his enemy, though his guide of the
night before had said that Hanna had brought them luck—all kinds,
mostly money.

The brothers got their mail at the post-office wicket, and came out on
the gallery again, laughing loudly. They were duly introduced to
Lockwood, and shook his hand heartily.

“Right glad to know you, suh,” declared the eldest. “I hope you’ll
come in and see us. Everybody knows where we-all live. Will you be
stoppin’ long?”

“Mr. Lockwood’s the new woods rider for the turpentine camp,” the
postmaster explained.

“Well, I’m not sure about that yet,” Lockwood put in. “It depends on
Mr. Craig. I haven’t seen him.”

“I reckon that’ll be all right,” said Tom Power, with large optimism
“I might run you down to the camp. Charley Craig’s a good friend of
mine. Only he likely wouldn’t be there now. We’ll be comin’ back by
here in an hour or so. Kin you wait that long?”

“Why, yes. That’ll be mighty good of you,” said Lockwood gratefully.
Things were shaping just as he could have wished. “I’ll wait here a
while. But don’t trouble unless it happens to suit.”

“Suit us right down to the ground,” cried the younger brother. “We’ve
got to go down to the landing right now. Got to see about some freight
that come in on the boat last night. Any of you-all want to ride down
with us?”

Two of the idlers accepted, and the big car went off in a whirl of
sand.

“Them boys certainly are goin’ the pace,” some one said.

“They shorely are,” a second concurred. “Well, I reckon they’ve got
the price, and they’re both of ’em good fellows.”

“Best in the world,” said Mr. Ferrell. “I hear the old man don’t like
it, though. Says he can’t live up to autymobeels and champagne, and
he’s goin’ back to live in the woods.”

“They’ve come into money, have they?” Lockwood inquired.

“Yes, sir. I dunno how much. Nobody does. I don’t reckon they know
themselves, nor cares, so long’s it lasts. Anyhow, they say they
didn’t git half, nor a quarter of what was comin’ to ’em by rights.”

“They was livin’ ’way up the river in the swamps, an’ never heerd on
it,” drawled another lounger. “Might have died without knowin’ nothin’
’bout it, ef it hadn’t been for that smart lawyer down in Mobile.”

“Some says Hanna had something to do with it,” said Ferrell.

“What’s the story?” Lockwood ventured to ask openly.

“Why, this here property—the old Burwell plantation—used to be one of
the big estates here one time, before the war,” said the postmaster.
“There was the house; you’ll see it when you go by to the camp, and
maybe a thousand acres with it. Most of it was timbered, though, and
pine wasn’t worth nothin’ in them days; but there was two or three
hundred acres of good light land, and some bottom land, and they used
to run fifteen or twenty plows, and raise right smart lot of cotton, I
reckon.

“But then the whole Burwell family died out, all in one generation,
you might say. Some kind of a third cousin got it, and he hadn’t no
kin, and died without marryin’. There wasn’t no heirs then nowhere. A
good few people put in some claim, I guess, but they couldn’t make
good; and the whole place laid idle, and most of the plantation growed
up with blackberries and dogwood. So, of course, the State took it at
last.

“Most of the timberland was sold then. Charley Craig, the turpentine
man, bought some of it, and leased some more to turpentine it.
Gradually the State land agents sold most all of it off in bits, all
but the house and about a hundred acres of sandy land that wasn’t no
good for anything. They rented that to a fellow from Monroe County,
and he tried to farm it. I reckon he never got rich on it, but the
Powers sure ought to be thankful to him for keeping the brush cut off.

“Then this smart lawyer in Mobile got wind of it and started to dig up
an heir. He figured that the Burwells must surely have some sort of
kinsfolk somewhere, and sure enough he located old Henry Power, three
years ago.

“Power was livin’ up the river then, as I said, in a cabin in the
swamps, not much better’n any nigger. I didn’t know ’em much then, but
I reckon they was a tolerable tough lot. The boys was up to most kinds
of devilment, and some said they was mixed up with ‘Blue Bob’s’ river
gang. I dunno; likely there was nothing in that yarn; for they was
mighty good boys, if somewhat lively, and everybody liked ’em, pore as
they was.

“It sure must have jolted old Henry Power when he heard that the
Burwell property was coming to him. But it took close to a year to get
it. The legislature had to pass a bill; but that lawyer had things
fixed up hard and fast, and there was no getting away from the
evidence that Power was the right man.

“But he didn’t get the whole estate—not by a heap. In the first place,
the State couldn’t give back what it had sold, and it wouldn’t give up
but half of what it got from selling the timber, and then I guess the
lawyer got about half of that again for his share. But, anyhow, I’ve
heard that Power got a haul of close on to fifty thousand, besides
getting their clear title to the house and what was left of the land.”

“I see,” said Lockwood, more interested than he cared to show. “And
now they’re enjoying it!”

“They shorely are. You seen that big autymobeel. They’ve got a fast
motor boat down in the bayou, too—cost a thousand dollars, I hear.
Champagne at ten dollars a bottle is what they drink.”

“Old Henry Power don’t drink none of it,” drawled a farmer. “Says corn
liquor is good enough for him yet.”

“Mebbe so. I reckon so. Anyway, the boys is some high rollers these
days, and not stingy, neither. Any man what wants a loan can get it
there. And there ain’t nothing too good for Miss Louise.”

“Their sister?”

“Yes, sir. She’s been away in N’Orleans, they say. Earnin’ her own
livin’, likely. But she come back last fall. The old man wanted her
back, and she had to have her share of what’s going.”

“How about Mr. Hanna?” asked Lockwood. “Has he been here long?”

There was a short silence.

“Sharp cuss, that Mr. Hanna!” said a man sitting on the steps.

“Why, I reckon he’s all right,” said Ferrell indulgently. “Great
friend of the Power boys. He come here soon after they got the place.
Northern man, seems to be, and knows his way round all the big cities,
I reckon. Likely it was him put the boys up to all them fancy drinks.
They never knowed nothing about such things before.”

“Well, I’d like to know the Power boys,” Lockwood remarked carelessly.

“Why, you do know ’em!” Ferrell exclaimed with amazement. “Wasn’t you
introduced to ’em both right here? They’ll expect you to go and see
’em—visit ’em if you can, and stay as long as you like. We ain’t got
no Northern ways down here in the piny woods.”

This theory of reckless hospitality did not, however, deter Mr.
Ferrell from accepting fifty cents from Lockwood for his breakfast.
Lockwood waited and smoked on the gallery as the forenoon wore on. He
wanted to get another look at the Power boys; certainly he would call
on them if he saw any opening. He was not afraid that McGibbon—or
Hanna—would recognize him. His face was thinner and darker and had, he
thought, totally changed in expression. His hair had grizzled. In the
old days, too, he had worn a small, pointed beard and mustache; and he
now went clean shaven.

But the big car did not return from the landing. As he waited and
meditated, the balance of Lockwood’s purpose changed a little. He
thought he saw light in the situation. There might be good hunting
here after all, for a bird of prey. He imagined Hanna arriving in this
wilderness, suave, dignified, experienced, swooping down upon these
newly rich poor whites, and he imagined the tremendous weight and
influence the man would carry.

Even so McGibbon had swooped down upon him at Melbourne, seven years
ago—handsome, dignified, wise, with an apparently vast experience of
men and affairs, and Lockwood had fallen under the impression, though
he had had considerable experience of men and affairs himself. He had
a real-estate business at that time in Melbourne, Virginia, a
fast-growing city, and his business was growing with it.

The two men became friends, and soon were in practical partnership,
though no legal partnership was ever established. Lockwood was an
excellent salesman of real-estate, but a timid speculator, and
incapable of the intricacies of office detail and bookkeeping. It was
in these last that McGibbon excelled. In fact, the expert accountants
at the trial had been obliged to confess themselves baffled by some of
the extraordinary complications of figures with which McGibbon had
covered up his tracks.

Looking back, Lockwood saw that the man must have been bleeding the
business all along, though to this day he did not understand all the
methods employed. Nor did he yet have any positive proof that Maxwell
was McGibbon’s confederate—Maxwell, smooth, hard, close-mouthed, but
with eyes and ears open for real-estate opportunities. He had got
them, too. McGibbon had seen to that.

It was Maxwell who had come forward when the crash arrived. Lockwood’s
whole assets were tied up in a block of speculative building; a
business depression had killed the market, and he could neither finish
the half-built houses nor sell them as they stood. He was obliged to
accept Maxwell’s ridiculous valuation; and Maxwell had finished the
houses, held them for a few months, and then apparently turned them
over to McGibbon, who had sold them at an immense advantage. The
method of the freeze-out was plain enough now. But Lockwood had known
the latter part only by report, for the prison doors had closed behind
him. McGibbon had been also indicted as an accessory, on the same
charges of fraud and misappropriation of funds; but he had no
difficulty in clearing himself; and with apparent reluctance he had
given damning evidence against his partner.

Now Lockwood believed that he had caught the bloodsucker in the act of
attaching himself to another prey. It was poetic justice, it was no
less than providential that he should have arrived at that moment at
Rainbow Landing.

Noon approached, and still Power’s car did not return. Lockwood grew
restless and uneasy. He got up and walked back down the amber and
yellow road. He might go to the turpentine camp; at any rate, he was
anxious to have another look at the house where McGibbon had managed
to establish himself.

He passed the great grove of walnut and oak and reached the entrance.
The white colonial house wore by no means its moonlight air of mystery
and grace. In the blazing sun it showed sadly old and weatherworn; its
white paint was scaling off, a sickly and dirty gray; the fence was
broken down in many places; the rickety gate hung by one hinge.
Rubbish of deadwood, a tin can or two and rags of burlap littered the
white sand of the driveway. None of the family was in sight; but at
the front door a negro was holding two saddled horses, and Lockwood
walked quickly on.

He had not gone fifty yards when he heard the trample of the horses’
hoofs behind him, and stepped aside. He had a glimpse of the shining
coats of the animals, and the glitter of new leather, but his
attention was all for the riders.

A girl was riding past him, sitting astride, in a gray skirt and a
white waist. He knew instantly that it must be Louise Power; he had
only a flash of brown hair under the black hat, of dark eyes, of a
sweet and slightly opened mouth, but it roused a dim stirring of
recollection in him.

She was gone before he could analyze it, and McGibbon rode close after
her. Lockwood had raised his hat, and McGibbon acknowledged the
salutation curtly, with a casual glance at the pedestrian. The horses
went ahead at a canter, and were presently small in the distance
between the pines.

It was McGibbon, beyond any doubt. Lockwood recognized him even more
certainly than the night before. He looked after the riders with dark
satisfaction. He knew where to have McGibbon now; he could take his
time and choose his hour. But his mind involuntarily and uneasily
turned to search the problem of where he had already seen the girl’s
face.

CHAPTER IV

A MISFIRE

He could not place the recollection; it was lost somewhere in the
shadowy past. But the sight of his enemy in the clear light of day had
stirred up all the bitterest depths of his memory and his hate.
McGibbon—or Hanna, as he must now call him—seemed to have changed
little; he looked as handsome, as suave, as dignified as ever, and
Lockwood imagined what an imposing presence he must appear to this
pretty girl of the backwoods.

The riders were out of sight now, but he continued down the road
almost unconsciously, deep in plans. He took no notice of how far he
had walked, until he felt planks resounding hollowly under his feet.
He had come to a bridge, an immensely long bridge of timber, crossing
a small creek bordered by dense swamp. He crossed the bridge and
peceived a road, apparently not greatly in use, that led away to the
left into the woods.

He remembered Mr. Ferrell’s directions. This must be the trail to the
turpentine camp, and now that he had come so far he determined to go
on and interview Charley Craig. A job in the pine woods would exactly
suit his purposes in every way just then, and he needed the wages it
would earn. This was no moment to break in on his gold reserve.

He turned down the road to the left, which curved off uncertainly
among the pines. The ground was marked here and there by the ruts of
heavy wagons; he detected also the corrugated imprint of a motor’s
tire, and within a few rods he began to see traces of the turpentine
industry.

The ground was rising from the creek swamp into pine land, grown with
pines of all sizes, from bushy shrubs to immense trunks rising
arrow-straight and without a branch to the feathery, palmlike crest a
hundred feet from the earth. Nearly every pine of more than eight
inches in diameter had a great slash of bark chipped from one side,
showing the bare wood smeared and frosted with drops of gum, oozing,
dripping, or crystallized into solid white or bluish masses, looking
livid and diseased. At the lower edge of this slash a tin gutter was
fixed, collecting the slow ooze of the gum, and leading it into a
large tin cup that hung from a hook.

All this was very familiar to Lockwood, and he regarded it with
something of an expert eye. Under the stimulus of the hot weather the
gum was flowing freely. Many of the cups were nearly full of the
intensely sticky, whitish mass that exhaled a sharp, wholesome odor.
Everywhere he looked the trees had been turpentined; the camp was
evidently running at full blast; and a little way farther he came upon
a negro “chipper” who was taking off a fresh slice of the bark with
his razor-edged tool like a light adze.

The road wound about through the pines and crossed a gallberry flat.
He heard voices and came out into the clearing where the camp itself
was built.

There were thirty or forty negro families living in the camp, and
women and children swarmed about the cabins, staring at the stranger.
Lockwood approached the still—a huge brick furnace with a built-in
copper retort, sheltered by a corrugated iron roof and topped by a
tall chimney. Lumps of rosin littered the earth; empty and full rosin
barrels stood everywhere; there was a powerful smell of pine and tar
and turpentine, but the still was not working that day.

No white man was in sight, but he picked out a house of superior
quality, painted green and with curtained windows, which must be the
quarters either of Craig himself or of the foreman. Close to it stood
a long, low building, much resembling the Atha post office, which was
undoubtedly the commissary store. This place is always the real center
of a turpentine camp, and Lockwood went in to make inquiries.

A young man without coat or vest, smoking a cigarette, greeted the
visitor with lazy affability. Lockwood inquired for the chief.

“He’s just now come in,” said the clerk, and he knocked at the door of
the inner office, and then opened it.

A tall, spare, oldish man sat within, writing at a plain table.
Charley Craig was a well-known figure in central Alabama, and is so
still. All his life had been spent in contact with the long-leaf pine;
he had turpentined the trees, lumbered them, run sawmills. The rosin
of the gum must have preserved his youth, for he was past sixty, but
still able to ride, run, or fight with almost any of the young fellows
he employed.

“I understand you want a woods rider, Mr. Craig,” Lockwood explained
himself.

Craig searched him up and down with piercing gray eyes.

“You understand the turpentine business? Come in and take a seat,” he
said. “I may need another man for a while. One of my men got hurt.
You’ve done this job before?”

“No, I never rode the woods,” Lockwood admitted, “but I think I
understand what the job is. I’ve worked in camp in west Florida. I
know something about the still, and how to run a charge——”

“Can you ride?”

“Yes, after I get over some saddle soreness.”

“Know how to handle the men? The turpentine nigger is a special sort,
you know—tough devils, and hard to manage.”

“I’ve lived among niggers all my life, and I reckon I can handle most
of ’em.”

“What wages do you want?” Craig asked, after a little thought.

“Well, I don’t claim to be a first-class turpentine man,” said
Lockwood, “but I want to learn to be one. It’s possible that I may go
into the business myself next year with a partner. Wages aren’t the
main point with me. I’d like, though, to be able to get a day off now
and again, when things aren’t too busy.”

“I dunno. I’d rather get an experienced man,” said Craig. “Stay and
eat dinner with us, anyway, and then we’ll look over the camp.”

Lockwood ate a large, hot, and homely dinner at the house of the camp
foreman, in company with the foreman, Craig, and store clerk and the
“stiller”—the principal white employees. Afterward Craig took him out,
smoking innumerable cigarettes which he rolled up with a single deft
twist, and conducted him over the camp, about the still, the
storehouse, the cooperage workshop, the grindery where hundreds of
axes and “hacks” were kept keen, the mule stables, the quarters of the
negroes. Apparently pointing out these details, Craig shrewdly
elicited all Lockwood knew of the turpentine process. Afterward they
walked into the woods, observed the run of the gum, and the work of
the chippers. Craig looked at his watch.

“I’ve got to be on horseback,” he said. “How about two dollars a day
and board, until my man gets out of the infirmary?”

Lockwood accepted instantly. In fact, he would almost have worked for
a week for his board alone—his board, and the local standing which the
regular job would furnish.

He was to start work the next day, and meanwhile he had to bring up
his suit case from the landing, where he had dropped it in the
warehouse the night before. He loitered at the commissary for some
time, cementing his friendship with the store clerk, and it was past
the middle of the afternoon when he started to walk back to the
landing.

The Power boys had come back. He saw their big car standing by the
front door when he passed the house, but no one was in sight. He
hurried past; the great, white, dilapidated old mansion seemed already
intensely familiar to him, and intensely significant—the theater of a
coming crisis.

He went past the post office without stopping to speak to Mr. Ferrell,
who nodded from the gallery. He retraced the road that he had traveled
in the night; the creek rushed swirling over glittering pebbles, shut
in by thickets of titi, glossy-green bay leaves, cypress and gum,
lighted up by huge, blazing-red, trumpet-shaped flowers that hung in
clusters from tangling vines. Beyond the swamp the road rose into pine
woods again. Then he came to the crossing road, and turned toward the
river.

Far in the distance he caught a glimpse of the Alabama River, like a
pinkish streak through the brilliant pine foliage. It was still more
than a mile away, and the corduroyed road ran through depths of swamp
for the most part, skirted lagoons of stagnant black water, crossed
sluggish-brown bayous, went over a higher and dryer ridge of “hammock
land,” and came down at last to the landing.

The warehouse was open, and there were a few men about it. A couple of
buggies were hitched to a tree, and a wagon was loading with cases of
freight. It was a wagon from the turpentine camp, he discovered, and
he had his suit case put aboard, glad to be saved the trouble of its
weight.

The river was high, carrying planks and rails and drift of all sorts
on its flood. Wisps of mist clung to its surface, and the water boiled
strangely brown and pink and muddy strawberry. On the other shore rose
the clay bluff, crowned with pine, striped with that bizarre and
brilliant coloring that must have given the landing its name.

Lockwood turned back slowly up the swamp road, in no hurry to return
to the turpentine camp. The air in the swamp was hot and heavy and
enervating, and at the top of the ridge he turned aside into a trail
that seemed to run parallel with the river.

Pine woods bordered it, high and dry, and he walked aimlessly for some
distance. Through rifts he occasionally caught glimpses of the river
rolling greenish-pink between its highly colored shores. The trail
turned slightly down the slope and came out into a field of perhaps
twenty acres, running almost to the river. It was a piece of rich,
black bottom land, one of the gambles of Southern farming, capable of
growing an immense crop of cotton or cane, but running an even chance
of being flooded out by high water. This year no one was gambling on
it, nor did it seem to have been plowed the year before, for it
carried weeds and bushes that must have been the growth of more than
one season.

He walked down to the end of the field, almost to the belt of willows
and cottonwoods that screened the margin of the river. This was the
worst country for his projects, he thought, that he had ever seen. It
was settled just enough to make a stranger conspicuous; it was wild
enough to be hard to get out of. He had no idea how the roads ran, nor
whither; and he fancied himself hiding in the swamps, bitten by
snakes, devoured by insects, hunted by bloodhounds. He would have
found more secrecy and cover in a great city.

Another trail went wandering down the river bank, and he turned into
it from a reluctance to go back by the way he had come. It was a mere
footpath, worn probably by the tread of negroes, cutting through
thickets of titi, opening into glades of vivid green, and crossing
creeks on fallen logs. He followed it until his absorbed meditations
were suddenly broken by a whiff of smoke and the sound of a voice.

With a criminal’s instinct of caution he stopped short. There was a
wide opening on the shore just before him, and he caught the loom of a
whitish mass through the willows. He edged forward till he could see
clearly.

It was a large house boat of much the usual model, a mere cabin built
upon a scow, the rusty and squalid floating house used by the river
vagrants that hang upon all the great waterways of the South. But this
boat was a little superior in quality; she was painted, though the
paint was gray and weatherworn; there was a considerable deck space at
each end; and, most important of all, she carried power. There was a
small gasoline engine and propeller.

Half tramp, half criminal, Lockwood knew these river dwellers to be,
devoured by malaria and hookworms, too tired to work, living on
nothing, by a little stealing, a good deal of fishing, and some
begging. The three men he saw looked true to type, sallow and
malarial-looking, sprawling on the ground as they smoked and spat. Two
of them were young fellows, one a mere boy, but the third was a
heavily built man of middle age with a tangle of brown beard and a
stupid, savage face. They all wore “pin-check” cotton trousers, loose
shirts, sleeves rolled up, and dirty canvas shoes. They were watching
a very light-yellow negro who was cooking something in a frying pan
over a small fire.

Lockwood was armed, and not in the least afraid of them; but he did
not want to be seen. He wormed his way into the jungle and edged
slowly past the camp, tearing himself on thorns and stepping into
deep, black mud, till he was safely past. He got through without being
observed, as far as he knew, came out into the path and started more
briskly down the river again.

The sun was almost down. In another half hour the sudden, Southern
darkness would be deep in the woods, and he made haste, walking
soundlessly on the soft, damp earth. But within a quarter of a mile,
as a long vista opened before him, he caught a glimpse of some one
else coming toward him up the twilight path.

His first thought was that it was a fourth of the river men returning
to camp, and he did not wish to seem to have been spying. He stepped
instantly into the thickets, behind a screen of bamboo vines, to let
the man go past. But as he came nearer, Lockwood saw that it was
Hanna.

He still wore the gray suit and the leggings of his morning ride, and
he walked carelessly, whistling between his teeth, looking ahead as if
he expected to meet some one. Evidently he was going to the house
boat. In a moment the whole possibilities of the situation flashed
upon Lockwood.

From where he stood he could drop Hanna with a single shot, and the
slight, sharp crack of the smokeless cartridge would be heard by
nobody. His death would certainly be credited to the river men, and
their record and reputation would probably make the charge plausible.

Almost without knowing it, he drew the little automatic he had carried
so long, and pushed back the safety. Hanna was coming on carelessly,
still whistling. Through the leaves Lockwood had the bead drawn
unwaveringly on his chest, when he found that he could not shoot. A
mighty force seemed to stay his finger on the trigger. The great
moment he had desired for years had come, was passing, and he could
not use it! He did not hate Hanna less, but he did not want to drop
him dead in his tracks. Hanna went by unconsciously, within a yard of
the blue muzzle.

Lockwood lowered the pistol, and found himself shaking and sweating.
He looked helplessly after his enemy’s back, watched till Hanna was
out of sight, and then turned on his own way. He swore under his
breath; he felt as if he had failed in an imperative duty; he was full
of disappointment and disgust. It was not till he had almost reached
the turpentine camp that he thought to wonder why Hanna should be
going to visit the river pirates. But when he thought of the problem
it seemed full of perplexity and interest.

CHAPTER V

THE WOODS RIDER

The next morning Lockwood was assigned the brown horse and saddle
outfit that had been used by the injured man, and he began active work
as a turpentine woods rider. The “orchard” which he was to supervise
covered an irregular area of perhaps a couple of miles, in a long
strip around to the south and west of the Power property. All of it
had, indeed, originally belonged to the Burwell estate. The ground was
level, or very gently rolling, broken only by occasional strips of
dense creek swamp. Nearly all the underbrush had been cleared out the
preceding year, and the woods were easy and pleasant for riding.

About thirty negroes worked on this orchard, each assigned to a
definite “furrow,” or allotment of trees, which had to be freshly
chipped every week when the run of gum was good. It was Lockwood’s
duty to keep these men up to their work, to see that the cups did not
overflow or become displaced, that things went rapidly and smoothly,
and, above all, to see that no dropped match or cigarette started a
fire, for a fire in a turpentine orchard is as disastrous a thing as
can be imagined.

For three days he rode the woods, growing very saddle sore at first,
but gathering his ideas and reconstructing his plans, which seemed to
have fallen into chaos. He thought of his astounding failure to act on
the path by the river, but it did not seem astounding now. He had to
realize that assassination was a method barred to him; he would never
be able to bring himself to do it. He thought of other means.

He might discover himself to Hanna; he had no doubt that the man would
instantly accept the challenge to draw and shoot; and the issue would
be self-defense. Lockwood was not afraid of the chances; he had
practiced endlessly with the little blue automatic, and the weapon had
grown as familiar to him as his own fingers.

During those first days he did not leave the turpentine tract, and he
saw nothing of either Hanna or the Power boys. He heard a good deal of
them, however. In the evening there was always a group of white men at
the commissary store, employees of the camp, and occasional visitors
from the neighborhood, and bits of gossip were continually dropped
regarding these _nouveaux riches_ of the woods. They were the chief
objects of attention of the whole district, but it was an extremely
friendly attention.

Nobody grudged them their good luck, though they told amused and
admiring tales of the wild pace the boys seemed to be setting. The
motor car had cost seven thousand dollars; cases of smuggled wine and
liquor were coming in at two hundred dollars apiece—figures which
Lockwood could only regard as wild exaggerations. Tom Power had driven
the car to Flomaton, thirty-five miles over sandy roads, in less than
an hour.

They talked of Hanna with less freedom, and he seemed less popular.
Now and again Louise was mentioned, but it would have been beyond
their code of courtesy to discuss her. They said she was “a mighty
sweet girl,” and let it go at that.

Lockwood heard curious and amusing tales of the swamp country at these
gatherings, of flooded rivers and hurricanes, of bears and alligators,
of extraordinary snake superstitions, and shootings and outlaw negroes
and river pirates. There was a continued talk of the river, which,
though deposed from its old importance, yet loomed as the chief
physical fact of the district. It rose or fell with amazing rapidity;
it flooded the bottom-land cotton; it floated rafts of pine down to
Mobile; no one could talk of that part of Alabama without speaking of
the river and of the men who used it.

Among these last, Lockwood heard frequent mention of the house boat he
had seen moored at the shore. It had moved now and lay at the mouth of
the great bayou that bordered the turpentine tract, crossing the road
and passing directly behind Power’s house. The boat belonged to “Blue
Bob’s gang,” Lockwood heard—a crew that seemed to have made a
reputation for themselves all along the river. They were river
thieves, it appeared, and were said to drive a considerable trade,
mainly among the negroes, in “shinney.” This is a powerful beverage
usually distilled from the refuse of cane sirup-making, by means of a
couple of empty gasoline tins and a few feet of rubber tubing. Craig
did not care to have such an establishment camped so close to his
business, for shinney and the turpentine negro make an entirely
uncontrollable combination.

He had threatened several times to “run off” these undesirable
vagrants, but the Power boys had spoken in their behalf. Lockwood
gathered that in the old days the Power family had not been very much
better than the house boat people themselves; and they were generous
enough to remember their former associates of poverty.

Lockwood followed the course of this bayou every day on his rounds,
and only a couple of days later he heard the muffled thud-thud of a
motor engine. His first impression was that the house boat was coming
up, but the noise came on far too fast for that clumsy craft. He edged
his horse behind a titi thicket, and in a moment saw a motor boat come
round a swampy curve of the waterway and recognized the figures in it
as Hanna and Louise Power.

The girl was at the wheel, and Hanna appeared to be giving her a
lesson in navigating the boat. She steered crookedly and uncertainly.
Hanna had his face at her shoulder, and seemed to be talking fluently.
Lockwood thought that Louise looked uneasy and nervous, as if she were
having difficulty with the mechanism. He tried again to remember where
he had seen that face, certainly pretty enough to be recollected, and
just opposite him the engine stopped.

The boat drifted a little, while Hanna tried to start it. Then the
propeller swished, and the boat got under way again, moving slowly
past him for thirty yards, and sheering in toward shore where the bank
was low and dry enough to land. Hanna got out and held out his hand.
Miss Power shook her head. Lockwood could not hear what was said, but
the next moment the engine broke into faster explosions, the boat
backed off and came flying down the bayou again, leaving Hanna ashore.

Hanna shouted something laughingly and expostulatingly after her, but
she paid no attention. The boat drove past Lockwood, sending a great
wash of waves up the clay bank, and disappeared around the curve.

The laugh died out of Hanna’s face as he looked after the flying boat.
He glanced up and down the bayou, and Lockwood chuckled maliciously.
He was on the wrong side of the water; he would have to go by the
turpentine camp and up to the bridge over the creek in order to get
home—a full three-mile walk, and it was a hot day. Hanna looked
dubiously at the muddy water as if he thought of swimming; once
across, and it was not a mile in a bee line to Power’s house. But he
thought better of it, and turned into the woods.

Still greatly amused, Lockwood rode on his route which led down the
bayou shore. He guessed that Hanna had annoyed the girl by his talk,
and had been rightly served. Then as he rode round the curve of the
bayou he was astonished to see the boat lying motionless not far ahead
and close inshore.

Miss Power was leaning back in her seat, doing nothing—waiting
perhaps, Lockwood thought, for Hanna to come after her. But when he
came a little nearer he saw that the boat had run a third of its
length upon a sand bar projecting into the channel as it curved, and
was fast aground.

He rode down to the margin and took off his hat.

“Can’t I help you? I see you’re aground,” he said.

“I certainly am,” answered the girl without embarrassment, and she
gave him a quick smile that almost seemed to imply an understanding.
“But I don’t know whether you can help me much or not. I can’t start
the engine to back her off.”

“Well, I can try, anyhow,” Lockwood responded, dismounting. He hung
his reins over a gum-tree bough, and splashed through a little mud and
water to the stranded boat.

The sound of the girl’s voice deepened the certitude that he had
somewhere met her before. She had a soft, slurred Gulf-coast accent
that you could cut with a knife—not that this surprised him, for he
was used to it, and he had a fair share of Southern accent himself. He
took a quick, sharp look at her as he got into the boat. She must be
about twenty, he thought. Her dark hair was tucked under a red cloth
cap, and she was wearing a raw-silk blouse with a wide,
red-embroidered collar, showing the fine, somewhat sunburned curves of
her neck.

“I ran on this sand bar without seeing it. I was coming down the bayou
pretty fast, and I’m not used to this boat,” she explained.

“Yes, I saw you going by,” said Lockwood.

“You could see me? You saw——” she exclaimed, startled; and he fancied
she turned the least shade pinker under her tan.

“Going and coming,” Lockwood nodded, manipulating the levers. The
engine burst suddenly into intermittent explosions. It missed
frequently, but the propeller tore up the water, failing, however, to
pull the boat off the sand.

“I reckon you can manage to get home with it,” he said. “But I’ll have
to get out. You’ll never get clear with so much weight in her.”

He stepped out, and the lightened boat slid slowly back and floated
clear, backing out into the bayou, and then the throb of the engine
ceased.

“Oh, it’s stopped again!” Miss Power exclaimed hopelessly.

From the shore Lockwood directed and advised. Nothing worked. The boat
veered slowly on the almost imperceptible current, while the girl
fumbled with the levers.

There was only one thing to do. Lockwood waited till the bow swung
nearest land, then splashed out, only a little more than knee-deep,
and got carefully into the boat again. He applied an expert hand to
the machine, produced a few explosions, and then again obstinate
silence.

“If I could have this thing for an hour I’m sure I could put it in
order,” he said, growing irritated. “As it is——”

“You’ve surely had experience enough with motor engines, haven’t you,
Mr. Lockwood?” said Louise, smiling at him.

Lockwood absolutely jumped with the shock of it, and turned quickly to
look at her.

“You know me? I knew we had met. But I couldn’t——”

“You don’t remember Lyman & Fourget, in New Orleans?”

“Of course. I worked in their salesrooms and repair shop.”

“I was in the office. I recognized you at once when we passed you the
other day on the road. But I don’t suppose you noticed me.”

“Of course!” said Lockwood slowly. “Of course, I remember now.”

Really he remembered very hazily. Miss Power must have been one of
those girls, stenographers and bookkeepers, in the glass-inclosed
office in one corner of the main floor.

“Of course. I remember you perfectly now,” he said, not quite
truthfully. “Strange that I didn’t place you at first. How did you
remember my name? Of course, you’re Miss Power. I guessed that
anyway.”

“Yes, everybody knows me about here.” She looked at him with candid
curiosity. “I reckon everybody knows you by this time. Strangers are
rare, you know. What are you doing up here in the woods?”

“I’m a turpentine man, too—I’m all kinds of a man. The fact is, I
wanted to get out of the city for the summer. I’ve been in Mobile and
Pensacola. I left New Orleans late last fall.”

“Yes, I left not very long after you did. I was glad to get out of New
Orleans, too, and papa wanted me to come home.”

She stopped suddenly, and glanced at him with some keenness. Lockwood,
sitting with his hand on the useless wheel, as the boat slowly veered
on the drift, thought of what he had heard in casual gossip—how this
girl had escaped from the primal squalor and discredit of the family
life “up the river,” and had gone out to mold her own fortunes.
Certainly she had not failed in it. She must have been drawing a fair
salary at Lyman & Fourget’s; and she had taken on a tone of city
smoothness and culture, a very different manner from the rollicking
roughness of her brothers.

“But how am I going to get home?” she cried plaintively. “We’re
drifting that way, aren’t we? About an inch an hour.”

“I’ll try again,” and once more he managed to start the engine into a
splutter of activity. For a few yards he navigated the boat, and then
turned.

“If you’ll allow me, I think I’d better drive her home for you. She
might last, though more likely she’ll play out again.”

“I wish you would. One of the boys will drive you back in our car. But
what about your horse?”

“He’ll do where he is. Everybody knows who that horse belongs to, and
I suppose I can be back in half an hour.”

He was really in no hurry to get back, and he almost wished the engine
would give trouble again. He wanted to talk with this girl; he was
anxious to get on some sort of terms with her; he desired very much to
know on what sort of terms she stood with Hanna.

“Not a very cheerful place to come for an excursion,” he said, as they
rounded a bend of raw clay banks, and saw a water moccasin slide off
into the bayou.

“Mr. Hanna was teaching me to run the boat. It’s easier in this still
water than out in the river. I expect,” she added with some
hesitation, “that you saw how I left him ashore.”

“I did.”

“I’d no idea anybody was looking. It was a joke, you know. He thought
I was going ashore, too, but I didn’t want to.”

“So you made him walk home,” said Lockwood, at this dubious
explanation. “Well, it’ll do him no harm. I expect he’s well on the
way by this time.”

So were they, it appeared. The bayou made another twist, and there was
a tiny pier, made of three pine logs, and a rough boat shelter of
planks. Lockwood steered in, and they landed.

“We’ll go up to the house and get the car,” said Louise, as Lockwood
paused dubiously. “You must meet my father besides. He knows about
you, and I think you’ve met my brothers already.”

They went up a path for a couple of hundred yards, through the strip
of pines, across a garden of collards and cabbages, and into the
great, smooth, sandy expanse of the back yard, which an old negro was
just sweeping with a huge broom of twigs. Louise opened a gate in an
arch smothered in roses, and they passed through into the front yard,
equally hard and sandy and swept, and they came to the steps of the
wide gallery that ran around two-thirds of the house.

Lockwood was in tense expectation of meeting Hanna, of the critical
moment of introduction, of speaking, of possible—though
unlikely—recognition. It was with a sensible letting down of the
strain that he saw only old Power on the gallery, his feet cocked up
on the railing, half somnolent, holding an unlighted cob pipe in his
teeth. On the steps young Jackson Power sat huddled up, still wearing
his expensive clothing, but coatless and with his sleeves rolled up,
looking half dead with boredom.

He jumped up joyfully as the pair came in. Henry Power awakened
completely, and they gave him so delighted a welcome that it was plain
they were overjoyed at anything to break up the monotony of life.

“Mr. Lockwood, sir! You’re Craig’s new woods rider, I believe. I’ve
heerd of you. Come up on the gallery an’ have a chair where it’s
cooler.”

Mr. Power had adopted none of the extravagant habits of his sons. He
wore a blue cotton shirt without any collar or vest, strong brown
trousers whose leather suspenders were very conspicuous, and he had no
shoes on. His speech was a little shaky with age; he must have been
far over seventy, for he had been in the Civil War as a mere boy, and
he had almost as rich and slurred an Alabama accent as any negro. He
had no grammar, and he looked what he was—a barbarian from the big
swamps, but a trace of old-time courtesy and “family” hung about him
yet.

Jackson meanwhile had hurried to bring out a bottle and glasses, and
was apparently appalled when Lockwood declined any refreshment. He
took a drink himself, while Louise, dropping into a rocking-chair,
explained Lockwood’s interposition, rather magnifying the assistance
he had given.

“You’ll have to drive Mr. Lockwood back to where I found him,
Jackson,” she said. “You can pick up Mr. Hanna as you come back.”

“Oh Lordy, sis!” Jackson exclaimed. “You ain’t gone and made Mr. Hanna
walk all that ways round to the bridge?”

He laughed, and yet looked uneasy. If Hanna had offered his sister any
insult, he would have to be shown the door, or perhaps thrashed, or
perhaps shot. But Louise laughed easily.

“He preferred to come that way,” she said, and Jackson looked
relieved.

“Sure I’ll drive you back,” he said to Lockwood. “But you ain’t in no
such hurry, surely. Say, why can’t you stop and eat supper with us?”

Lockwood pleaded his duty and his horse left in the woods. He was not
yet prepared to meet Hanna, to sit at table with him. But he felt a
conviction that he would have to face it sooner or later.

CHAPTER VI

THE MEETING

Lockwood rode his rounds the next day with a queer feeling of change.
It had been coming on for days, that feeling—in fact, ever since the
night when he had watched that magical moonlight on the white front of
the colonial house; and it had culminated in the meeting of yesterday.
Memory came back to him slowly and in scraps. He certainly recollected
Louise in New Orleans. He remembered having spoken to her casually as
she passed him; he had once had some dealing or other with her in the
office; but he could not remember a single word she had ever said to
him. Evidently, however, she had remembered him, and the thought
brought a stir of warmth to his blood.

He wondered anxiously what Hanna’s relations with the girl might be.
It made him furious to think that he should have any relations at all.
But what, indeed, were Hanna’s relations with the whole family?

In a broad way, Lockwood thought he could answer that. It was
undoubtedly a confidence game that was being worked. Hanna was winning
the money at cards, perhaps, or appropriating it in some even more
crafty manner. Lockwood chuckled rather grimly as he thought how
opportunely he had arrived. It would put a fine edge on his vengeance
to spoil Hanna’s game before killing him.

The next morning a thunderstorm passed crashing over the woods, with
torrents of terrific rain that lasted for twenty minutes. A jet of
hail followed it. Lockwood and his horse sheltered in a deserted negro
cabin, and immediately afterward the sun burst out again with torrid
heat. The earth steamed and reeked.

In this hot weather the turpentine gum had been running very fast, and
the cups filled rapidly. “Dipping” was going on in Lockwood’s area. At
intervals through the woods he came upon a sweating, half-naked negro
staggering with one of the enormously heavy wooden “dip buckets,”
filling it from the gum cups. At intervals empty barrels had been sent
down, into which the buckets were emptied, and mule wagons were slowly
making the rounds, hauling the full barrels to the camp and leaving
empty ones. In a day or two the still would be at work.

Lockwood had a continual, unreasoning expectation of again seeing
Louise in the motor boat every time he went by the bayou. He took
pains with his costume; he polished his boots, removed some of the gum
stains from his khaki breeches, and put a preen tie under his low
collar. But she did not come.

On the third day afterward, however, he did hear the throbbing of the
motor boat coming up the water, and his heart jumped. He was fifty
yards back from the bayou, but he drove his horse hastily forward,
just in time to see the boat come in sight. It was the Powers’ boat
certainly, but all it held was young Jackson Power. Lockwood rode down
to the shore and halloed a greeting, and the boy steered in at once.

“Engine running all right now?” Lockwood inquired.

“Seems like. I don’t reckon there was nothing wrong with her really.
This boat sure ought to run good. She cost three thousand dollars.”

“What?” exclaimed Lockwood.

“Yes, sir. We got her in Mobile.”

Lockwood scrutinized the boy, suspecting a stupid lie.

“Well, I think you paid too much,” he said. “You could have got it for
fifteen hundred at the outside if you’d gone to the right place.”

“Well, it did seem a heap of money to me,” Jackson admitted. “But Mr.
Hanna said it was all right. It was Mr. Hanna sent the order.”

Hanna had bought the boat! Lockwood seemed to get a sudden glimpse of
his enemy’s game. Jackson was looking at him with a half question,
reflective and sober; but Lockwood judged that criticisms would be
premature just then.

“Well, maybe it’s a better boat than I thought,” he said easily.

“Reckon it must be.” Jackson lounged back comfortably, took out a
silver and pearl cigarette case and offered to toss it to Lockwood,
who shook his head.

“Sis says she used to know you in N’Orleans,” he remarked, striking a
match.

“Oh, I wasn’t in her class,” Lockwood laughed. “She was a young
business lady. I was just an auto mechanic in overalls. It’s kind of
her to remember me at all.”

“Great place, N’Orleans, they say,” went on Jackson wistfully. “I
expect you’ve seen lots of fine towns like that, though.”

The turpentine rider smiled. He knew that throughout the Gulf States
New Orleans is the ideal of metropolitan romance. It is what Paris is
to Europe, what New York is to the Northeast.

“I ain’t never been nowhere,” the boy continued. “I do sure aim to go
to Mobile and N’Orleans one day. We’re green, but what’s it matter?
We’ve got the price. I’d like to go by Pascagoula, too. We-all have
got investments there,” he added with pride.

“Buying land?”

“Naw. A heap better’n land. Say,” he pursued in a confidential tone.
“I reckon you know a whole lot about cars. What do you reckon our big
car cost?”

“Well, I know just what the catalogue price of that car is—or what it
was last fall,” Lockwood returned. “I could have got you that car in
New Orleans for two thousand six hundred dollars.”

“Well, she cost us close to six thousand.”

“What?”

“Yes, sir. But she’s a special model—not another like her.”

“Seems a big price,” said Lockwood, still noncommittal.

“Yes, sir. It sure does. Looks like the dealers knowed we didn’t know
nothin’, and hit us all round, don’t it? Well, I reckon we kin stand
it—once or twice. But Hanna must certainly have picked out all the
high spots.”

It seemed as if Jackson was prepared to become confidential with a
little encouragement, but the habit of suspicion made Lockwood hold
back. The boy might be trying to pump him. Hanna might somehow have
scented hostility already.

“Oh, I expect it’s all right. I really didn’t look closely at your
car,” he said hastily. “Don’t tell Mr. Hanna what I said. It isn’t any
of my business. I expect he knows what he’s doing.”

“I’ll bet he does,” said Jackson with conviction. “He’s the wisest guy
I ever saw—up to all the city tricks. You don’t know him, do you?
Well, you’re going to see him to-night, I hope. I was just heading for
Craig’s camp to find you. We-all want you to come over and eat supper
with us to-night. Sis sent you a special invitation.”

“Thanks. I’ll be mighty glad to,” Lockwood accepted, after a momentary
shrinking from the idea of sitting at supper with his enemy. But the
meeting would have to come sooner or later.

“I dunno what she’s fixed to eat, but she’s been making the niggers
fly round the kitchen all mornin’,” Jackson added. “We kin sure give
you something to drink, anyway, and maybe we’ll play a little cards
after supper. I’ll come over with the car, and carry you across.”

“No, don’t trouble to do that. I can ride, or walk,” said Lockwood.

Lockwood returned to camp rather earlier than usual that afternoon,
shaved with care, and changed his clothes. It had come—the moment for
confronting his enemy, and a last-moment fear of being recognized
overcame him. He examined himself in the mirror, and then from his
baggage he rummaged out a small photograph, which he scrutinized in
comparison.

The picture showed a rather boyish face, with a short, soft, pointed
beard, and hair worn just a little longer than usual. He had had a
fancy in those days for looking artistic. That was less than seven
years ago, and it might have been twenty, he thought, looking at
himself in the glass. The absence of the beard and mustache threw out
the strong, rather hard lines of the mouth and chin. The hair was
short now, and slightly touched with premature gray—prison gray. The
face was crossed with scores of tiny wrinkles—prison wrinkles. The
expression had changed; it was no longer the same man. There was
little chance that any one from his former life would recognize him.

A little before six o’clock he reached the broken-down gate of the old
mansion. From the driveway he discerned a row of men in rocking-chairs
on the front gallery—Henry Power and his two boys, and a fourth, Hanna
himself.

The boys shouted a welcome to him at twenty yards, and a negro rushed
up to take his horse. Old Henry shook hands with him in a ceremonious
fashion, making him welcome in old-fashioned phrases; and then he was
introduced to Hanna. He had braced himself to the ordeal of shaking
hands, but at the last moment he could not bring himself to it. He
created a diversion by dropping his hat, which rolled down the gallery
steps.

A selection of chairs was offered him, but Tom Power beckoned him
mysteriously into the house with a wink. Inside, signs of age and
neglect were plain enough. Evidently the Powers had done little in the
way of repairs; but there was a new and gorgeously gaudy rug on the
hard-pine floor, and a magnificent hall lamp hung by gilded chains
from the ceiling. When Tom led him into the dining room there was the
same incongruity—a new table and sideboard of magnificent mahogany,
worthless new pictures on the walls in blinding frames. There were
cracked windowpanes and plaster, and smoked ceiling, and a vast
old-fashioned fireplace, big enough to roast a whole hog, yawning
black and sooty over its hearth of uneven red brick.

The table was already laid for supper, shining with new china and
silver. At that moment Louise came in hurriedly on some affair of
preparation. She gave a startled exclamation, shook hands charmingly
with Lockwood, and looked slightly disapproving as her brother led him
toward the sideboard. Then she disappeared again toward the kitchen.

“What’ll you take?” Tom inquired. “We’ve got ’most everything.”

The sideboard indeed resembled a bar. There was a row of all sorts of
bottles—plebeian native corn whisky, liqueurs, gin, cocktails, even
aristocratic gold necks. Lockwood was about to decline anything at
all; but he saw Tom’s shocked and mortified expression, and he
accepted a very small cocktail. Tom himself took a rather large one,
and it was plainly not his first that day. But he still could not be
called anything but sober, and they went back to the gallery, lighted
now by the sunset, and Lockwood found a chair as far from Hanna as
possible.

CHAPTER VII

’POSSUM AND POKER

Henry Power was detailing to him in a low and gentle voice a series of
reminiscences of lurid, old days along the river. The old man had no
sort of objection to recalling his submerged past, and Lockwood was
beginning to get interested, when supper was announced.

That was a meal never to be forgotten. It was served on china with a
magnificent amount of gold decoration, and three glasses and a
champagne bottle stood at every place but two—those of Louise and of
her father. A sumptuous boiled ham appeared immediately, along with a
baked ’possum and sweet potatoes; and in a torrent, it seemed, with
these came sweet potatoes boiled, fried and preserved in sirup, mashed
Irish potatoes, okra, rice, olives, salad, hot biscuits, and several
kinds of cornbread.

Jackson Power opened the wine, with a great popping and joviality. It
was extremely effervescent and sweet, and was probably synthetic,
though the label was printed in French. The boys drank it in quantity;
Hanna more sparingly. Louise took only water, and old Henry consumed
large cups of strong black coffee.

Hanna sat directly opposite Lockwood, and the woods rider compelled
himself to meet his enemy’s eye with coolness. Hanna had changed
little since he was McGibbon; he was handsome as ever, and as suave
and dignified, but Lockwood had the key to that face now, and he read
behind the hard mouth, the hard, watchful gray eyes. Hanna, for his
part, had been observing Lockwood with a good deal of unobtrusive
curiosity, though they had hardly exchanged three sentences. At last
he said, across the table:

“You’re not an Alabama man, Mr. Lockwood?”

“No. Blue-grass Kentuckian,” Lockwood answered.

“I know that country well. Were you ever in Virginia?”

“I’ve been in Richmond and Norfolk.”

“There are Lockwoods in Richmond. No kin of yours, are they? No? Well,
it’s not an uncommon name.”

The conversation turned, but Lockwood caught Hanna’s slightly puzzled
expression turned upon him at intervals. Some chord of memory had been
touched, if not fully sounded. The danger had perhaps been greater
than he thought; but he felt it was past now; and he was not afraid of
being severely catechised at any Southern dinner table.

For he was evidently the guest of honor to-night, and they watched
over his welfare assiduously. Preserved figs, pie with whipped cream,
and an ethereal sort of pudding finished the repast; and then Tom
passed a box of cigars and one of cigarettes. The men drifted back to
the front gallery to smoke, and Louise disappeared somewhere. It was
dark and warm on the gallery now, and fragrant with honeysuckle.
Lockwood found no enjoyment in the situation; he was afraid that Hanna
would come over to talk to him, and when he had finished his cigar he
spoke of leaving. At the camp he had to be out at daylight.

“Hold on,” Tom objected. “It ain’t late, and we-all are fixin’ to play
a little poker to-night.”

“Well——” Lockwood hesitated.

“Mr. Lockwood’ll play or not, jest as he damn well likes,” said Henry
effectively.

“Then I reckon I won’t play to-night,” said Lockwood, who had heard
too many tall tales of the sort of poker played in this house. “I’ll
watch you for a while, maybe.”

Shortly after this there was a halloo down the road, and they heard
the soft trampling as the Fenway boys rode into the yard—a pair of
brown-faced, handsome young giants, in careful black coats and
collars, the sons of a well-to-do planter five miles back from the
river, where the land was better. Thereupon the whole party, excepting
the old man, returned to the dining room, where the table had been
cleared.

Drinks were handed round, cards and chips produced. Lockwood declined
a hand, but sat back and looked on with interest. It was no large
game—a ten-cent ante and dollar limit—but from the first it was
apparent that Tom Power was disposed to force the pace. He lost a
hundred dollars in half an hour; then won a jack pot of sixty dollars,
and began to regain, and to go ahead. Corn whisky was going now, and
he was recklessly ready to make or break himself or anybody else.

But it was Hanna’s game that Lockwood watched most closely. He had a
suspicion that Hanna was playing the card sharper in this house,
winning great sums from the Powers, but he was forced to admit that he
could see no indication of it to-night.

Luck was tending to drift toward one of the Fenway boys, who
accumulated a great stack of chips before him. Tom cursed freely but
cheerfully, and took another drink. Lose or win, he was enjoying
himself. His brother was playing recklessly also, but winning a
little. The room was growing thick with smoke, in spite of the open
windows; the players were all inclined to grow a little noisy, and
eventually Lockwood’s interest waned.

He went to the open window to breathe, and on the dim gallery he
perceived Henry Power, his feet on the railing, a pipe in his mouth. A
little farther away he saw the gleam of a white dress in the faintly
sweet darkness.

He went quietly around to the door and upon the gallery. It was a hot,
dark evening, with the moon not yet risen. Overhead the stars glowed
like white fires, and low in the south, over the vast pine forests,
there was a rapid intermittence of distance, silent lightning.

“May I come out?” he asked, feeling for a chair. “Aren’t you a poker
player, either, Mr. Power?”

“Papa’s asleep,” said Louise in an undertone. “He doesn’t very often
play cards, except a very small game sometimes with old friends. Not
like _this_.”

“It does look like a pretty fast game to-night,” Lockwood admitted.
Louise turned her face toward him, and even in the gloom he thought it
looked extraordinarily serious. Through the open window came a
tremendous burst of laughter. Somebody’s bluff had been called.

Away from the gallery the night lay black and hot and impenetrable. At
moments of stillness in the cardroom the silence was like a material
heaviness. Then suddenly and sweetly, far away through the woods,
sounded the mellow, musical call of a horn, a hunter’s horn, such as
is still used in southern Alabama. The nocturnal fox hunters use
them—a horn made of a cow horn scraped thin, without reeds or anything
inside it. It needs training to make it sound at all, but an expert
can make its note carry five miles. The long, plaintive call sounded
again, curiously repeated.

Henry Power roused himself partially, with a grunt.

“Seems like I heard a horn blowin’,” he said drowsily. “Some fellers
gittin’ up a fox-chase? But thar ain’t no moon.”

The most hardened English fox-hunter would pale at these mild midnight
fox-chases of Alabama, in which horsemen and hounds tear madly through
the densest woods, through swamps, jungles, bayous and sloughs, by
moonlight generally too pale to show the perils. It was just the
sport, Lockwood, thought, that would appeal to the Power boys, and at
that moment Jackson came quickly out upon the gallery, and listened.
Again the far-away horn blew.

“Like to be out on a fox-chase to-night myself,” he remarked. “Want to
go, when the moon gits up? We kin let you have a horse. No? Well, I
reckon I’ll just give ’em a call myself.”

He took down a horn that Lockwood had noticed hanging by the doorway,
and went down the steps, listening. A third time the distant call
blew, and Jackson answered it in a series of rising and long-falling
notes that echoed far away through the pine woods. There was another
blast from the distant hunter, and the boy came back and replaced the
instrument.

“Show ’em that somebody else kin blow a horn,” he said cheerfully; but
as he passed into the light Lockwood noticed that his face was
serious. Perhaps he had been losing heavily.

Old Henry dozed peacefully again.

The far-away blowing of the horn of the invisible hunter, the
extraordinary wildness and remoteness of the whole scene, the whole
episode struck Lockwood’s imagination powerfully.

“Not much like New Orleans, is it?” he remarked, thinking of the
rattle and racket of the street past Lyman & Fourget’s motor shop.

“I was thinking of that,” said Louise. “It all seems so strange,
though I was brought up in these woods. I never thought it would seem
so strange when I came back.”

“How long were you in New Orleans?” he asked.

“Mr. Lockwood, what have you heard about me?” she countered suddenly.

“Why—not much,” he stammered. “I heard that you went away to the city,
some years ago. Mighty courageous thing to do, it seems to me.”

“A wild and rash thing, you mean. So it surely was; but it turned out
all right, and I’m glad I did it. Of course you know our story. All
the country is talking of it. We lived ten miles up the river, in a
cabin, very little better than niggers. I couldn’t stand it. There was
no life for me, no future. I was only seventeen when I went away. I
never expected to come back. Think of it—a country girl from the big
swamps. I’d only once been on a railway train in my life. It makes me
tremble to think what might have happened to me, but I must have had
luck, for I never had any great amount of trouble. Everybody was nice
to me—almost. It’s only in the South that a girl could have got
through so well.”

“You found the life you wanted?”

“Well—not to perfection. You were at Lyman & Fourget’s, too, you know.
But it was a better life, and I might have stayed. Then came the great
change in our fortunes. But it wasn’t the money that brought me back.
Everybody thinks it was, but it wasn’t. There were more reasons than
one. I knew that papa and the boys wanted me back, and they needed me
mighty bad—worse than when we were poor. Mamma has been dead for
years, you know, and I don’t know what this place would have come to,
if I hadn’t taken the helm.”

In the dining room there was another great burst of laughter, and a
crash of falling chips. The pungent cigar smoke floated out through
the window.

“Do you like it here?” said Lockwood gently.

“Yes—but I didn’t think it would be like this,” with a gesture toward
the open window.

“Poker?”

“Yes—everything. You’ve seen something; you’ll see more. I can’t blame
the boys so much. They’re the best fellows in the world. But they
haven’t a thing to do; they grew up idle, and now their pockets are
full of money, and they’re bursting with life, and they’re always
looking for something new to play with. And Mr. Hanna——”

“Yes?” said Lockwood, with intense interest.

Just then old Power awoke with a sudden snort. He took down his feet
from the railing, yawned and looked about confusedly.

“You-all must ’scuse me. Reckon I’ve sure enough been asleep. I’m used
ter goin’ to bed with the birds an’ gittin’ up with the sun. I reckon
I’m a-goin’ to bed now. You’ll ’scuse me, Mr. Lockwood, sir. You young
folks stay up long’s you want to. Good night, sir.”

He went indoors, yawning. But the thread of confidence was broken, and
a not quite comfortable silence ensued.

“I have to be up at daylight, too,” Lockwood said at last. “So I
reckon I’d better slip quietly away without disturbing the card
party.”

The girl did not make any objection. She arose as he did.

“Well, I hope you’ll come again to see us,” she said, just a little
hesitantly. “You must get to know the boys better. You know, they’ve
both taken a great liking to you.”

“I like them both immensely,” Lockwood assured her sincerely.

“The fact is,” she went on, “I do hope you get to be friends with
them. I think it would be good for them to have you for a friend.
You’ll think it’s strange for me to say this, but after all we’ve
known each other a long time—in New Orleans. You see, Mr. Hanna is the
only friend we have here who knows anything of the world. I know far
more than the boys do, but, of course, I’m only their sister, and they
wouldn’t take my opinion on anything. But Mr. Hanna——”

“You don’t trust his opinion?”

“No—no! I don’t say that. But still, two opinions are always better
than one, and I’d like the boys to get your view of things. We can’t
have too many friends, anyway.”

“I’ll certainly be delighted if your brothers will count me a friend,”
said Lockwood. “I hope that you, too, will count me so?”

Louise did not make any answer whatever to this. Lockwood secured his
hat and prepared to go, feeling that he had perhaps said too much. But
she gave him her hand at the steps with a charming smile and answered
him.

“Certainly I’ll count you as a friend, and we’ll expect you to drop in
at any time, whenever you happen to be riding past. The boys will look
for you.”

“And you, too?”

“Of course!” she laughed. “Since I’m inviting you.”

CHAPTER VIII

NEW FORCES

Lockwood rode the woods dreamily that next forenoon.

It was going to be impossible to kill Hanna, unless in the heat of
sudden self-defense. He wondered at himself, for life had suddenly
come to seem once more valuable to him. The old black purpose that had
driven him so long was fading away. Not that he had forgiven his
enemy; he was as determined as ever to defeat Hanna’s purposes, to see
him sure of prison, if possible—not that he had any objection to
taking his life, but he was no longer willing to wreck his own life to
compass Hanna’s death. He had, in fact, developed an interest keener
even than that of hate.

His horse trod almost without sound on the deep carpet of pine
needles, and as he came to the bayou he perceived the loom of a great,
gray bulk. Coming nearer, he recognized it as the house boat he had
seen before, moored now directly across the bayou from him. It had not
been there the day before. It must have been brought up early that
morning.

A small fire smoldered on the shore by the mooring, with a coffee pot
and iron frying pan beside it, but there was no one near the fire. On
the little railed deck space at the stern a man sat fishing and
smoking. It was the bearded pirate Lockwood had seen before. His bare
feet were propped on the deck rail; he tilted back in a rickety chair;
he smoked his pipe with his hands in his pockets, and the fishing rod
was wedged into a crevice of the deck. His hat was off, and Lockwood
could see a great bluish stain or scar covering much of one side of
his forehead, which might have been a powder burn from a pistol fired
at close range. For some moments the two men stared at one another in
silence across the muddy water.

“Ho-owdy!” the riverman drawled at last.

“Good mo-ornin’!” Lockwood responded with equal languor. “You stopping
here?”

“For a while, mebbe.” He examined the horse and rider. “Reckon you’re
one of the turpentine riders?”

“Yes. And I expect you’re Blue Bob.”

“Mebbe some calls me that. My name’s Bob Carr. This hyar’s my house
boat. You reckon Craig’s got anythin’ to say ’bout hit?”

“I reckon not,” said Lockwood amiably, “so long as you don’t interfere
with his camp.”

“Ef nobody don’t bother us none we don’t bother them none,” growled
the river dweller, returning Lockwood’s grin with animosity; and the
woods rider turned his horse into the pines again. He had nothing
whatever to say to the river pirate, but he promised himself to keep a
watchful eye on that boat.

He sighted it again that afternoon, apparently deserted, but next
morning he did not go to the woods. The turpentine still was set
going, and he remained at the camp to assist in “running a charge.”
The copper retort bricked in on the top of the furnace was a large
one, and a “charge” meant a good many barrels. One by one the shouting
negroes swayed the heavy barrels of “dip” up to the platform around
the retort, emptying the gum into the mouth, together with a due
allowance of water, anxiously watched by the expert still man. The cap
was then screwed down, and a carefully regulated fire of pine logs set
going in the furnace below.

The spiral worm went off from the shoulder of the retort, passed
through a tank of cold water, and ended in a tap below. In due course
steam began to issue from this orifice, then there was a slow,
increasing drop of liquid. The still man watched it carefully,
collected the drops and tasted them. It was turpentine. The spirit was
coming off, and a bucket was set to catch it.

Being more volatile than water, the spirit came off first. The slow
drops quickened to a stream. The bucket was filled and emptied many
times, filling one barrel after another, while the furnace fire was
kept at a steady glow. Too much heat would boil off the water as well
as the turpentine. It went on for hours, until at last the experienced
eye and nose of the “stiller” detected that what was coming through
the worm was not turpentine but water. He closed the tap. The
turpentine was done. It was the rosin next.

Three negroes dragged open a large vent in the lower side of the
retort, and a vast gush of blackish, reeking, boiling rosin tumbled
out into a huge wooden trough. It was the residue of the distilling,
less valuable than the spirit, but still valuable. It passed through
three strainers—the first of coarse wire mesh to catch the chips and
large rubbish, one of fine mesh, and lastly a layer of raw cotton,
known technically as a “tar baby.” As the trough filled, the still
intensely hot rosin was drawn off at the farther end and poured
bubbling and reeking into rough casks. Here it slowly hardened into
rocklike solidity, to be headed up finally for shipment down the
river.

It was hard, hot, dirty, delicate work, though Lockwood was not
capable of any of the skilled part of it. His duty mainly was in
seeing that the negroes brought up the gum barrels promptly, handled
the rosin with exactitude and kept the fire right. After the retort
was screwed up, everything had to go with precision, or the whole
charge would be ruined.

When the rosin was cleared, the fire was drawn and the still allowed
to cool. Late that afternoon Lockwood made a hasty round of the woods
to see the run of the gum, but he was tired and dirty and sticky, and
he felt in no condition to pay a visit to the Powers.

The next day, however, there was no distilling, and he was able to
take a couple of hours off in the afternoon. It was rather a failure.
Hanna was not at home, but neither was anybody else, with the
exception of old Henry, who sat as usual upon the gallery in his
rocking-chair. He urged Lockwood to stay and “eat supper,” when the
rest of the household would probably be back; but Lockwood had to
return to the camp.

Next day the still was run again—a day of terrible heat, when the bare
sand of the camp seemed to glow and burn white-hot in the sun, and
even the tough turpentine negroes complained bitterly. Lockwood’s own
head swam, especially as the blazing hot rosin poured out in the
blazing sun, but he kept going until the charge was run; and then
everybody suspended work, and, dripping with sweat, got into the
shade.

A violent thunderstorm broke that night and cooled the air. The whole
atmosphere next morning seemed fresh-washed and alive with ozone, and
that afternoon Lockwood rode again to the Powers’ house, arriving more
fortunately. Louise was there; so were the two brothers, apparently in
their customary state of intense boredom in lack of any violent
amusement. After a few minutes’ general talk on the gallery the girl
disappeared, leaving him with her brothers.

Tom glanced aside at the bottle from which he had one drink, and
yawned dismally.

“Cawn-plantin’ time,” said Jackson indolently.

“What are you doing with your farm? Doing any planting?” said
Lockwood.

“Plantin’?” laughed Tom. “You ain’t never seen this farm, I reckon.
Yes, we’ve got a nigger plowin’ down in the bottom field. Come down
and see it, if you wanter.”

It was something to do. They all three strolled slowly down through
the oak grove, past a small frame barn where a few hens scratched
among corn shucks, and reached the bottom field, of about ten acres.
The soil looked like almost pure sand. It turned up like brown sugar
from the share, and where it had dried it was almost white.

“This yere’s the porest land on earth,” said Tom. “You can’t make five
bushels of cawn to the acre. We done put forty dollars’ worth of
fertilizer on this yere field, and I’ll bet we don’t get cawn enough
to pay for it.”

“The whole farm’s like this yere,” agreed his brother.

“Fact is, I never was cut out for no farmer,” Tom admitted. “I always
wanted to be a steamboat man. When we-all got this yere money, my
notion was to buy a river boat, and run between Mobile and Selma.”

“Well, I thought we oughter go into the cotton-brokerage business,”
said Jackson. “But dad, he wouldn’t hear of it. He likes the swamps,
seems like, and he was just bound he’d come and live on his old
place.”

“You could grow peanuts on this light soil,” Lockwood suggested. “With
the peanuts you could raise hogs.”

“Why, we did get some registered Duroc Jerseys,” said Tom. “But they
ain’t doin’ no good. Takes more cawn to feed ’em than they’re worth.
Fact is, we ain’t got no hog-proof fences on this place and I reckon
it’d take two hundred dollars to put ’em up. It’s more’n it would be
worth. Can’t make nothin’ outer this farm. It’s the porest land out
yere.”

“It shore is!” Jackson agreed.

It did look like it. Lockwood was amused, however, at this economical
spirit in the face of the wild spending that was continually going on;
but the explanation was clear.

The Power boys were not “cut out for farmers,” as Tom said. They took
no sort of interest in this plantation, a rather discouraging
proposition for anybody. They did not need the corn crop; they had
more money than they had ever dreamed of possessing.

Previous to getting it they had been desperately poor, but they had
never worked hard. From what Louise had told him, from what the boys
and old Henry had said, Lockwood was able to picture their life—the
three-roomed cabin up the river, a little corn planting, hunting,
fishing, drink, and gambling—a reckless, squalid, perhaps lawless
existence. No wonder Louise had wished to escape from it; the marvel
was that she had succeeded so well.

They had all escaped from it. They seemed to believe themselves
everlastingly rich. They were flinging away money with both hands. And
now entered Hanna—a mystery which Lockwood was not yet able to
penetrate.

He was not winning the boys’ money at poker; he was not inducing them
to cash checks for him, nor borrowing money, so far as Lockwood had
gathered. What was he getting out of it?

Lockwood reflected that he would like to know through whose hands went
these orders for motors, wines, and jewelry, through what medium they
were filled. From what Jackson had said about the car, he was pretty
sure that he already knew.

But definite discoveries were slow in coming, though he rode over to
the big house several times in the next ten days. Twice he found
Louise alone on the gallery and had half an hour’s talk with her, but
she did not recur to her confidences of the night of the poker party.

Once he found no one there but Hanna, and he spent a difficult twenty
minutes before he felt that he could leave. Lockwood had firm faith
now in his disguise; he felt sure that Hanna had not recognized him
and could not; but there was an instinctive antipathy between the two
men, though they talked politely about the weather, the land, and the
river. He soon excused himself and escaped.

His time was much taken up at the camp. A great accumulation of rosin
and spirit had been collected, to be shipped up the river to
Montgomery, and Lockwood went down to see it loaded on the boat. The
boat was at the landing when he arrived, discharging cargo, and there
was as usual a good deal of freight for the Powers. Tom was there
watching it carried ashore, and he had his car and a mule wagon to
transport it home.

Lockwood saw the crates and boxes, and on his next visit to the house
the family exhibited the contents to him with a great deal of pride.
There were two immense leather library chairs, a mahogany table, a
hanging lamp, and a case of table silver. There was a gift for Louise,
a pearl necklace, which she brought downstairs to show. Tom mentioned
what he had paid for it, and the price did not seem exorbitant, if the
pearls were as real as they looked.

He also had received a quantity of motor-car literature by post, and
he mentioned that he was thinking of buying a small, light car, better
for the sandy roads than the big one. Lockwood perhaps looked a trifle
startled.

“I reckon you think we-all is shore goin’ the pace,” said Tom, a
little defiantly.

“It’s all right to go the pace if you can stand the speed,” Lockwood
returned.

“Oh, I reckon we kin stand it. We ain’t blowin’ in all our money, not
as you think—no, sir, not by a long shot! Fact is, there’s more comin’
in than goin’ out. We’re saltin’ it down.”

“Investing it?”

“That’s what we’re doin’. If you’ve got a few hundred dollars, I kin
shore put you up to a good thing—or I dunno, neither. Afraid it’ll be
about all taken up.”

“Did Mr. Hanna put you up to it?” Lockwood asked, with assumed
carelessness, though he had the sense of an approaching revelation.

CHAPTER IX

PASCAGOULA OIL

Tom glanced doubtfully at Jackson and at his sister. Neither Hanna nor
old Henry was present.

“I reckon you can tell Mr. Lockwood about it,” said Louise. “It’s all
among friends.”

“Shorely. Well, then—did you ever hear of Pascagoula Oil?”

Lockwood shook his head, foolishly imagining some brand of motor
lubricant.

“It’s an oil mine—an oil well—down on the coast, somewhere round
Pascagoula way. They’re keepin’ it dark; only a few folks in it; but
they’ll be pumpin’ millions of gallons of oil directly. They’re
pumpin’ some now. Hanna knew all about it from the start, an’ he got
us in on the ground floor.”

“I see,” said Lockwood, with heavy foreboding. Louise was watching his
face anxiously.

“Do you know much about the well?”

“Shorely we do. We know all about it.” He went into the next room and
brought back a bundle of papers. “Look yere. Photografts of it, from
their first drillin’ up to now. Here’s the story of the whole thing,
tellin’ how much oil there is, an’ everything. Take this stuff away
with you an’ read it, if you wanter.”

Lockwood glanced over the badly printed prospectus, and the pictures,
which might have been pictures of an oil derrick anywhere.

“So Mr. Hanna got you in on the ground floor, did he?” he said slowly.
“Have you got much stock in it?”

“Well, that’s the worst of it. We couldn’t git enough. Only fifty
shares, five thousand dollars. Hanna’s got a wad of it, near three
thousand shares, I reckon. Oh, it’s all right—don’t have no suspicion
about that, sir. Why, it’s payin’ dividends right now. Yes, sir! Five
per cent every quarter—twenty per cent a year. We’ve got back already
near a thousand of what we put in.

“And that ain’t all! We could git double for our shares what we paid
for ’em. I know we could. I’ve had letters askin’ me to sell, offerin’
all sorts of prices. I sold once. Yes, sir, just to see that it was
genuine I sold one of my hundred-dollar shares, an’ got two hundred
dollars for it. What do you think about that? Some investment, eh?”

“Yes, it does sound good,” said Lockwood. “But, Tom, if I were you I’d
go down there and see the oil wells myself, before I put any more
money into the thing.”

“I did speak to Hanna about going down,” said Tom. “He didn’t seem to
want to go much. Say,” he added, with an inspiration. “Supposin’ you
an’ me go, eh? We’ll stop in Mobile, an’ have a hell of a time. It
won’t cost you a cent. You know all about Mobile, I reckon?”

“I know it a little.”

“You know, I never was in Mobile but once, an’ then I was with Hanna,
an’ we didn’t have no fun. I reckon you an’ me, we’d have a better
time by ourselves.”

He poked Lockwood in the ribs. Lockwood glanced at Louise, who was
smiling faintly.

“Sure we’ll go, Tom!” he said. “Just as soon as work slacks up a
little at the camp. By the way, you’d better not say anything to Hanna
about it.”

“You bet!” returned Tom, winking. “Likely I hadn’t oughter told you
nothin’ about this yere oil mine. He said I wasn’t to let it out. But
it’ll be all right. Most likely he’d have told you himself later.”

“Just between friends,” suggested Lockwood gravely, and Tom innocently
assented.

Lockwood carried a memory of Louise’s anxious smile as he rode away.
He thought that he had got at the heart of Hanna’s scheme at last. A
fake oil well—the crudest of swindles, but good enough to impose upon
these unsophisticated children of the big swamps. Easy also to expose!

The position looked plain; the only problem was as to how he should
attack it. Hanna’s standing in that house was far more solid than his
own; the boys liked him, but they would believe Hanna first. Louise
indeed might trust him; passionately he wished it might be so. But he
could not interfere in this game until he knew the cards in his own
hands. He felt confident of the fraud that was being practiced, but he
would have to have the proof. He would have to go to Pascagoula,
either with Tom Power or alone.

Then would come the exposure, the explosion, possibly the killing. The
Power boys themselves would be quick enough to resent being
victimized, and from stories he had heard they had drawn pistols
before. But the exposure would almost certainly involve his own
exposure. Louise would learn that he had been in prison.

He shrank hotly from that revelation. He thought it over all the next
day, while he sweated about the smoking still, and the day after while
he rode the woods. He hung back from visiting the Powers; he hesitated
to act.

He saw the house boat as usual that afternoon, still moored where he
had first found it, where he had since seen it almost every day.
To-day, he heard a sound of voices in strong altercation on the house
boat, and guessed that the thieves had fallen out. He approached the
bayou, his horse treading softly on the pine needles and mold, pulled
up just beyond the line of willows, and listened.

Nobody was in sight ashore or aboard the boat, but a sound of
quarreling came out violently through the open, glassless windows of
the cabin. He could scarcely distinguish a word, but he almost
immediately recognized one of the voices as that of Jackson Power.

He was startled and shocked. At least two other voices joined, but
they were so intermingled that he could make out nothing. Then Jackson
burst out clearly:

“I won’t do it. I ain’t had——”

“You cayn’t prove nothin’!” interrupted another.

“Then let him do it, ef he——”

The voices dropped again to confused wrangling. Once more they rose to
angry exclamations and profanities. So fierce it grew that he expected
to see a knot of fighting figures roll out of the cabin door, or to
hear a crash of shooting. But again the altercation subsided, and
comparative quiet ensued.

Still Lockwood sat his horse silently behind the willows, puzzled, but
resolved to hear the last of it. But there was nothing more to hear.
The rest of the conversation was inaudible; and in the course of
fifteen minutes young Power came out of the cabin, jumped ashore, and
made off up the bayou toward his home. He looked angry and greatly
upset.

Lockwood was just about to ride away, when another man came out from
behind a titi thicket near the mooring, where he might have been
ambushed all the time, and quietly went aboard the boat. It was Hanna.

Again Lockwood listened. A mutter of low voices came from the house
boat, but no words were distinguishable. Lockwood rode on after a few
minutes of vain eavesdropping, but as he turned away he noted an
object that gave him a sharper thrill than anything.

Whether it had merely escaped his notice before, he knew not; but
hanging outside the stern wall of the cabin was a hunter’s horn of
curved cow horn—the same sort of horn as Jackson had blown in reply on
the night of the poker game. Lockwood began to see possible depths of
intricacy in the situation which he had not suspected.

The sight of the horn on the house boat impressed Lockwood powerfully.
It was not an extraordinary article to find there, indeed; but he
remembered the blowing and response on the night of the card party. It
seemed to him now remarkably as if these had been preconcerted
signals. Young Jackson’s presence on the house boat, the quarrel that
Lockwood had overheard, the boy’s evidently intimate relation with the
river gang made the shadowy possibility seem almost probable.

The Power boys were no doubt old acquaintances of Blue Bob; they had
even interfered when Charley Craig had wished to “run him off.” They
had no social prejudices, and Jackson would probably not be above
drinking shinney or gambling on board the house boat. Probably the
quarrel had related to a hand of cards, and the horn-blowing might
have been a summons or appointment for a rendezvous.

So Lockwood half reassured himself, and then he remembered that Hanna
had been listening, too. Hanna had taken an interest in the
altercation, and had afterwards gone aboard to talk with river
pirates. It was the second time that Lockwood had caught him going to
them, and what he could have to say to them was a mystery.

It was nearly a week before he again saw any members of the Power
family. He rode over once just before dusk and found nobody at home. A
few days later, finding some spare time on his hands early in the
forenoon, he repeated his call. He found old Henry Power sitting in
his customary attitude of relaxation on the front gallery. He had
discarded shoes and socks in the heat, and his bare brown feet were
cocked up on the railing. His cob pipe was in his mouth, and an empty
tumbler stood on a stool beside him. No one else was in sight.

Lockwood’s hyper-sensitive nerves made him instantly sense a shade of
difference in the old squatter’s greeting. He hesitated; then
dismounted and tied his horse.

“Won’t you come up?” Henry drawled, without rising. “Right hot, ain’t
it?”

The words were not quite inhospitable, but Henry’s face did not beam
with its usual cordiality. Lockwood sat down on the top step of the
gallery and fanned himself with his hat. It was hot, indeed.

“Won’t you have a shot o’ cawn licker?” Power suggested, with a rather
forced manner.

“No, I can’t drink in hot weather,” Lockwood declined. “Are the boys
at home?”

“Naw. They’ve done gone out in the cyar,” responded Henry, gazing
straight out through the walnut avenue.

“They have a good time with that car,” said Lockwood, assured now of a
chilliness in his reception.

“Seems like that thar gas buggy is all they ever think about,” replied
the old man, unbending slightly. “Hawses is plenty good enough fer me.
I wouldn’t trade a good hawse fer the best engine-wagon the Yankees
ever made. No, suh! Louise feels that way, too. She’s gone out ridin’
now—gone to visit Em’ly Smith.”

Lockwood seized this information with avidity. He knew where the
Smiths lived, a couple of miles beyond the Atha store. He might
contrive to meet her on her way back.

He was afraid to ask when she would return, and he was afraid of
seeming to hurry away. He rolled a cigarette, keeping an eye on the
road, and talking of casual matters. One of the chippers had been
found dead in the woods, and Craig had insisted that Blue Bob leave
the bayou. He passed these items of gossip along, but Henry did not
seem greatly interested. He wriggled his toes and smoked his pipe,
saying little. He was plainly uncomfortable, under some compulsion
that restrained his normal geniality. It was a much too serious matter
for Lockwood to feel entertained. Something had cooled old Power;
there was a hostile influence at work. Had the boys reported to Hanna
his comments on Pascagoula Oil?

“Won’t you stay an’ eat dinner with us?” said Henry perfunctorily,
when Lockwood presently got up.

“Afraid I can’t. I just dropped in a minute—on my way to the post
office.”

Henry did not ask him to come again, but merely nodded a brief
farewell as Lockwood saluted him from the saddle and rode off.

CHAPTER X

TANGLED TRAILS

Perhaps Louise could tell him what had corrupted her father’s
hospitable soul. He was scared by the sudden idea that perhaps the
poison had entered her mind also. Perhaps she, too, would be cold and
distant with him.

He began to be desperately afraid of missing her. It was his last
chance, perhaps. He would shrink from visiting the house again. There
was no horse ahead as he looked toward the store. The hot, sandy
yellow road was empty but for a great gasoline truck trundling up the
distant rise. He galloped down to the creek, through the shade and
steamy dampness of the swamp, and up the slope. Negroes were chopping
cotton in the fields under a broiling sun; they looked up lazily. A
white man overseeing them on horseback waved a salutation to him.
There was the usual knot of loafers on the gallery of Ferrell’s store,
but Lockwood did not pull up. He rode on to the forking of the road,
and looked up the way to Smith’s. The road was shady with a line of
water-oaks on its south side, and was entirely lacking in life as far
as he could see. He stood in the shadow of the trees for a few
minutes, then turned back for a quarter mile in the opposite
direction, not to look as though he awaited some one. He dawdled,
riding as slowly as possible, and then returned to the corner.

Still no one was visible. He was quite unreasonably disappointed, for
Louise might not be returning for hours, perhaps not till the cool of
the evening. Then, even as he stood irresolute, he saw a feminine
figure on horseback come around a turn of the road in the distance.

He rode slowly to meet her, certain who it must be. From a distance he
thought Louise looked startled as she recognized him, but she smiled
as she rode up. She was flushed with the heat, and sparkles of
perspiration stood on her nose.

“I didn’t know you woods riders came away up here,” she laughed. “Is
Craig scouting for more turpentine?”

“No—no. I had to go up to the store,” Lockwood hesitated. “I had a
sort of morning off. I turned into this road for the shade. I was just
going back.”

He turned his horse and they moved slowly forward side by side.

“Yes, isn’t it powerfully hot for springtime,” said Louise. “It was
cooler when I started.”

“Your father said you’d gone out riding——”

“Did you see papa?” she exclaimed, looking keenly at him. “Did he tell
you where I’d gone?”

“Er—not exactly,” Lockwood equivocated. “I just called in as I passed,
you know. By the way, what’s the matter with your father? He didn’t
seem exactly cordial.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, nothing, exactly. There was just a sort of effect of coolness—not
his usual manner.”

“I don’t know. You should have asked him,” said Louise carelessly,
almost abruptly, and she urged her horse a little faster.

Lockwood felt rebuffed. There _was_ something wrong, and it had been
communicated to Louise. He followed a little behind her, and nothing
more was said until they came to the glare of the main road. Lockwood
felt desperate as what might be his last chance slipped by.

“You’re not in a hurry to go home. We might ride a little farther,
where it’s cooler,” he suggested without hope.

Louise hesitated and looked at her wrist watch.

“I ought to go back before it gets any hotter.” She paused
irresolutely. “Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere. Up the trail through the pine woods. I don’t think the
mosquitoes will bother us.”

Louise cast a somewhat anxious glance down the empty road toward the
store, and then turned her horse into the path Lockwood indicated, in
silence.

It was a rude wagon trail cut diagonally back through the woods toward
the river, and the horses trod noiselessly on the deep-packed pine
needles. There was not much coolness among the big trees, and Louise
commented on the heat again. They discussed the weather
conventionally, the woods, the flowers, the run of turpentine gum,
with long silences. Lockwood felt tongue-tied and embarrassed and
foolish, cursing the evil spell that seemed to have fallen over all
his relations with the Power family. Louise was apparently willing to
ride with him, but she seemed to make it markedly apparent that she
had withdrawn her intimacy. They might as well have ridden straight
home after all.

The road sagged down to a creek-bed, dense with titi and bay-trees.
Mosquitoes and yellow-flies boiled out of the swamp. A long black
snake, frog hunting, shot into the creek like black lightning, and
Louise put on speed and splashed through the water and up the slope to
higher ground, away from the insects. The trail debouched into
another. Lockwood recognized the region where he had encountered Hanna
on the first day of his coming.

The air was full of a hot smell of pine gum. It was a poor sort of
pleasure ride. Lockwood, in disgust, was several times at the point of
proposing to turn back. Louise, saying nothing, swerved round into
still another trail skirting a ridge that ran parallel with the river
a few hundred yards away.

Suddenly Louise’s horse shied violently and wheeled half around,
jostling into Lockwood’s mount, that recoiled back in sympathetic
fright.

“Back! Keep back!” Louise called, half laughing, getting her horse
under control.

At the edge of the trail ten feet ahead a snake lay in a bunchy heap,
a snake four or five feet long perhaps, glossy as satin with its
spring skin, and with a dull checker-pattern down its back. Its flat
head poised, cold and menacing and motionless, above its huddle of
coil; and from the middle of the heap its tail stood up vibrating too
fast for the eye to follow, with a penetrating buzz. The horses
shivered, pricking their ears forward.

“The first rattler I’ve seen this year,” said Louise. “They’re not as
common as they used to be. I don’t believe we can get the horses past
it.”

There was really plenty of room beyond the snake’s striking range, but
the horses refused to go on. Lockwood looked around for a long pole or
a rock, preparing to dismount. He could see no sort of weapon, and he
drew the automatic pistol from its holster under his left arm.

“Don’t laugh at me if I make a clean miss,” he apologized in advance.

He had practiced daily for two years with this weapon, but the target
was small, and it was really only by a fluke of the greatest luck that
he shot the rattlesnake square through its flat head with the first
bullet. It flopped off the bank out of sight into a hollow in a
squirming tangle.

“What a good shot!” Louise exclaimed. “Tom thinks he’s wonderful with
a gun, but I believe he’d have missed that.”

“Just practice,” said Lockwood modestly, concealing his own surprise
and putting the pistol back.

“I never saw anybody carry a gun like that before,” Louise continued.

“It can be drawn more quickly, without appearing to reach for the
pocket,” Lockwood explained.

She gave him a peculiar, questioning look, though efficiency in
drawing a gun was something that her experience of life must have made
familiar.

“You’re not expecting to have to draw it quickly, are you?”

“I never shot anybody in my life, and I never was shot at. But you
never can tell,” he returned, edging his still suspicious horse past
the place where the snake had lain. He wanted to get off this
dangerous subject of pistols.

“I might send a nigger back this evening for that snake,” he
suggested. “Would you like its skin for a belt?”

“Not for me, thanks. I don’t——” she began, and stopped.

A man had come out from a bypath into the trail, silently as a wild
animal, a few yards in front. He was a white man, shabby and bearded,
carrying a shotgun. As he passed the horses he took off his battered
felt hat respectfully and Louise muttered a curt “howdy.” Lockwood
caught a glimpse of the great blue powder-mark on the exposed
forehead. Louise shook her horse into a fast canter. As Lockwood
glanced over his shoulder he saw the riverman standing still and
gazing after them.

CHAPTER XI

THE WARNING

“So you know Blue Bob,” he remarked, overtaking the girl after some
fifty yards.

“Know him! I reckon so! I’ve always known him, I think, and I’ve
dreaded and hated that man all my life.”

The trail ended suddenly at a cut-over slash, growing up again with
bushy small pines and scrub oak. Away to the left a strip of the
Alabama showed greenish and reddish. Below them, down in the hammock
land Lockwood saw a squalid wooden shanty in a small clearing. A woman
was apparently cooking at a fire in the yard. Louise checked her horse
and sat looking over the landscape, but evidently she was not thinking
of it.

“How mamma and I dreaded it when Bob’s house boat came down the river,
in the old days!” she exclaimed bitterly. “The boys were always going
aboard it. There was always drinking and gambling and fighting; and
one terrible night——”

She stopped, and turned her eyes on the dilapidated pine cabin with
its acre of growing corn.

“That’s the sort of place we used to live in. Do you wonder that I
don’t want to go back to it?” she said intensely.

Lockwood looked at the paintless pine shanty, roofed with small
rough-split boards, curled up with the weather. It probably had three
rooms; a wide open passage, or “dog-trot,” extended from front to
rear. A crumbling chimney of stone and mud rose at one end. The
clearing, with its corn and ragged garden was fenceless, and a wild
jungle of mixed peach trees, rose bushes, and blackberry canes blocked
the front of the yard.

He looked back at Louise’s flushed face. Her constraint had dropped
suddenly away; the episode of the snake and the meeting with the river
pirate had broken up the ice.

“There’s no danger of having to go back to that,” he said.

“I don’t know. I’m frightened,” she said somberly.

“Tell me,” he ventured, “did your brother repeat to Hanna what I said
about the oil investment?”

“Yes. Tom told him,” she answered reluctantly.

“Hanna was furious, I suppose.”

“Not furious. He was—well, coldly indignant. He said that we could
have our money back any time we wanted to draw out of the oil
investment. He said nothing more before me. But I know he said
something about you to papa and the boys. Well, you saw for yourself
that there was a difference. Do you really think that oil speculation
is dangerous?”

“I can’t judge. I certainly never heard of any oil wells around
Pascagoula.”

“But it’s being kept quiet—not to let the public in, they say,” she
pleaded anxiously.

“Oil borings can’t be kept secret. There has to be heaps of heavy
machinery, a derrick built, gangs of men. It’s conspicuous a mile
away. All I say is, that I do hope that before going any deeper your
father will get a report from some good business firm in Mobile.”

Louise sighed.

“It was just like that!” she said, pointing again at the squatter’s
cabin. “There were just three rooms, and only one fireplace. We cooked
outdoors mostly, but it was often freezing cold in the winter. There
was wood all around us, but we never had enough to burn. The boys
always forgot to cut it. Papa and Tom worked sometimes on the river or
in the turpentine camps, and they planted an acre or two of corn, but
all they took any interest in was hunting and trapping and fishing.
They used to go away down into the delta sometimes for weeks.

“We always had plenty of rabbits and sweet potatoes and squirrels, but
that was all. I don’t think I ever tasted milk. There never was any
money. I had hardly clothes enough for decency. But there was money
for whisky. Not that the boys were ever cruel or even unkind. You can
see how they are now. But we used to hear them come home down the
river at night, drunk and shouting and firing their pistols——”

She stopped with a shudder, and then broke out again.

“There was one awful night, three years ago. It was a drinking and
gambling carouse on Blue Bob’s boat, and a man was killed. Nobody ever
knew who did it, but Bob left the Alabama River for nearly a year
after that. I wish he had never come back. Jackson was on the boat
that night, but he never told us anything about it. Men don’t tell
women about such things. But the women know all the same, and have to
carry the weight of them.”

She was flushed and shaking, and she winked to keep the tears back.
Lockwood had never seen her so moved. It tortured him, but he was
afraid to try to comfort her.

“Don’t think of those miseries. You’re safe from all that now,” he
reminded her again.

“I don’t know. We ought to be. We ought to be so happy, with all the
money and comfort. Mamma died before she ever saw it. Safe? With all
this reckless spending? Neither papa nor the boys will listen to
anything I say. Women don’t know anything about money, of course. But
I’m ten times as wise as they are. Ten thousand dollars seems
something with no end to it to them. Do you know, I’ve let them give
me diamonds, expensive jewelry, because I knew they could be turned
back into cash again if the need came. I did hope that you could make
friends with Tom and Jackson, so that they would take advice from you;
but now Mr. Hanna seems to have turned them all against you.”

“I expect he has. Never mind,” said Lockwood. “I’ll bring pressure on
Mr. Hanna soon.”

“What sort of pressure?”

“A sort he’ll understand. Don’t lose your nerve, Miss Louise. You
won’t have to go back to the swamps.”

“Of course, for myself, I could always go back to the city again and
earn my living.”

“You won’t have to do that either. Trust me. It’ll all come out
right.”

She looked at him in a perplexed way, pathetic, like a puzzled child,
and sighed deeply again.

“You’re encouraging. But I don’t see what you can do, really. Unless
you kill Mr. Hanna,” she added, smiling.

“That would be one way,” Lockwood agreed gravely.

“I didn’t mean that, of course!” Louise cried, shocked. “You didn’t
think that I really meant it?”

“Of course not. Neither did I. But Hanna will trip himself up sooner
or later. Do what you can to check the spending, and I want to be kept
posted as to how things are going. How can you let me know? I don’t
suppose I’d be a welcome visitor at your house. You ride often, don’t
you? Can’t I go with you again? I can always take an hour off, and if
I could meet you any time, morning or evening——”

“Oh, I’m afraid—I’m afraid I couldn’t!” exclaimed Louise, obviously
startled at the suggestion, and coloring hotly. She stooped over the
reins, looked at her wrist watch.

“It’s almost noon,” she cried. “Goodness! I must go home this minute.”

She turned her horse and started back at a fast canter along the
trail.

She kept well ahead and dropped only casual words over her shoulder
till they reached the main road. The noon sun beat down fiercely. The
yellow dust wavered up like flames around the horses’ hoofs. Here she
pulled up, and turned back to him.

“Please don’t come any farther,” she said nervously. “You really have
made me feel lots more encouraged. The worst of it was that I never
could talk about these things to anybody. And—and I do ride sometimes.
I think—I might have to go down the road over the bridge across the
bayou—not to-morrow—perhaps the next evening—right after supper——”

“Watch for me on the bridge if you do,” said Lockwood, as she almost
broke down in confusion.

She gave him a quick smile and rode off without a word of good-by. He
watched her moving figure through the dust until she was out of sight
beyond the creek swamp, and then he proceeded more slowly toward the
turpentine camp. He was both elated and uneasy, with such a sense of
tingling delight in his heart as he had never expected to feel again.

Directly after supper, on the second day afterwards, he was waiting in
the saddle on the bayou bridge. He waited a quarter of an hour before
he saw Louise riding slowly down the slope.

“What news? Anything?” he questioned.

“Nothing changed. Everything the same,” she answered. She did not seem
to want to talk about it this evening. There was an hour and a half of
daylight left, and they rode slowly down the soft road through the
turpentine pines.

They saw nobody but a couple of negroes with mule teams. Louise did
not appear depressed; on the contrary she was in nervously high
spirits, ready to chatter lightly. The big issues were dropped. They
talked of trifling matters, of their likes and dislikes, intimate and
personal things. They exchanged reminiscences of the motor shop in New
Orleans; Louise told amusing incidents of her childhood up the river.
Those old days had not been all bad, it seemed. That ride brought them
into closer personal touch than anything before, Lockwood felt; but it
was too short. Dusk seemed to fall like an evil magic, and they turned
back. Lockwood stopped on the bridge where they had met, and he
watched Louise fading up the road through the twilight.

That was the first of four such rides—once more in the evening, once
on the afternoon of a day when heavy sudden rain had driven the wood
negroes in, and all the clay roadsides glittered red and vermilion and
green as if freshly washed with rainbow paint; and once in the cool of
an early Sunday morning.

Few and brief as they were, these hours were the most delicious and
exciting that Lockwood had ever known. He was supposed to be gathering
information and planning tactics, but they hardly ever talked of the
problematic situation. Behind each of them was an unhappy past which
they put out of sight, and a threatening future which they ignored for
the moment. Things were at a standstill at the Power house; nothing
was to be done at the moment. They talked mostly of trivial things,
but these all seemed momentous. They were on terms of the frankest
comradeship, and not a word was interchanged that might not have been
pronounced in public; yet Lockwood had a heavily increasing sense of
guilt.

These half surreptitious rides were not the thing. Social customs are
rigid in the rural South. Under no circumstances would Louise’s family
have permitted them. Plenty of people had seen them, and the affair
would not be long in being talked of. Old Henry was sure to hear of
it. Trouble would come of it; Hanna would take advantage of it; for he
was certain that Hanna had already sensed Lockwood’s hostility. Yet he
could not give up this sole means of remaining in touch with Louise.

He had not set eyes on Henry Power since the day of his visit. Once
the boys had motored past him on the road, but at such speed that he
could not tell whether they had returned his salutation or not. But he
felt a coolness in the whole district, that must have proceeded from
that house. Mr. Ferrell was no longer so genial when he handed out the
mail; and the usual hearty greetings of the farmers about the store
had diminished to perfunctory nods, and side glances of suspicion.
Slander was going about him, but he could not guess what form it was
taking.

A few days later Charley Craig called him aside to the office.

“What’s this I hear about you being one of these here prohibition
spotters?” he demanded, fixing a penetrating eye on his woods rider.

“Why, nothing at all about it!” returned Lockwood, staggered. “It’s
the first I’ve heard of it. Who’s been saying that?”

“Well—a good many fellows are saying it,” said Craig. “I didn’t know
what to think. I’ll say you’re doing well here, but you ain’t no
turpentine man, I can see you’ve got something else on your mind. I
don’t want no government men round here. I can do all the prohibition
enforcement myself that I need in this here camp. If I find any man
bringing in a bottle of liquor I’ll take the hide off’n him. I’ve run
Blue Bob out of the bayou. I ain’t got no use for bootleggers, but I
ain’t got none for spotters either.”

“Well, I’m no spotter, I do assure you,” said Lockwood. “But I will
say that a spotter would find a mighty rich field here at Rainbow
Landing. I’ve no interest in bootleggers, one way or the other. Did
that story come from the Power place?”

“I dunno as I’d just say that it did,” returned Craig carefully. He
began to fill his pipe and spoke with elaborate casualness. “I’d hate
to get the Power boys worked up against me, if I was you. They’re good
boys, but they growed up rough and reckless. I’d look out right sharp
for ’em.”

It was meant for a warning, and Lockwood grasped that there might be
more danger in the air than he had imagined.

He met Louise the next Sunday morning. She was less cheerful than
usual. She looked tired, as if she had slept badly. She said she felt
exhausted with the heat, and did not want to ride far. They made a
mile circuit through the woods, and were coming back to the road
before Lockwood ventured to question her as to the movement of
affairs.

“Not so badly. The boys have decided not to buy the light car. Hanna
even advised against it. I wonder why. There was a card game at the
house last night. Jackson won nearly seven hundred dollars from the
Fenways. It lasted till nearly morning and I couldn’t sleep. That’s
why I feel worn out to-day. I wonder how long this is going to last.”

“Not long now. As I said before—just trust me.”

“I do trust you.” She laughed rather wearily. “You can see that I do,
or I wouldn’t be riding with you now, since Tom told me”—she glanced
up at him laughingly and grotesquely exaggerated the Alabama
drawl—“that I wasn’t ter have nothin’ more to do with you, nohow—at
all!”

If she laughed it was to cover the perturbation that her eyes
betrayed. Lockwood had half expected it, but he was appalled.

“So I’m afraid this will have to be our last ride,” she added soberly.

“Our last? Never!” he ejaculated. “It mustn’t be. I’ve a thousand
things to say to you—things I haven’t told you yet—important things!”

It seemed to him suddenly that he had wasted all these hours of golden
opportunity. He should have told her his story. Some time she would
have to know it. It would be better to tell her himself, before the
catastrophe broke.

“Let’s turn back. Make it another hour, if this is to be the last,” he
pleaded, drawing up close beside her and extending his hand.

She put his hand aside and motioned silently ahead. They had come back
near the road. Through a screen of tall gallberry he saw something
that stood still and glittered in the sun. The trail turned, and he
saw the Powers’ car drawn up almost to block the opening of the way,
and Tom was leaning with both arms on the wheel and staring toward
them.

They were too close to turn back. He had seen them.

“Try to come up the bayou—in the motor boat—early any forenoon!”
Lockwood tossed to Louise under his breath. He did not know whether
she had heard him. She had turned very pale, sitting stiffly in the
saddle and gazing straight ahead at her brother. Lockwood thought they
must both have looked extremely guilty as they rode up to the standing
car.

Tom gave them a sullen grim look.

“You ride straight on home, sis!” he commanded. “I’ve got to have a
talk with Mr. Lockwood here.”

“What are you going to say?” Louise cried. “I won’t go. Tom! I won’t
have you quarrel.”

“Better go, as your brother says. We’re not going to quarrel,”
Lockwood advised cheerfully.

She hesitated, looking wildly from one to the other, then she pushed
her horse past the car and fled up the road. Several times she glanced
fearfully back, and then vanished over the bridge.

“What is it, Tom?” Lockwood asked amicably.

“I’ve got just this to say,” Power growled. “You ain’t no gentleman,
and ef I ketch you comin’ round my sister again I’ll kill you.”

“What’s the matter? What has Hanna been saying about me?” Lockwood
questioned, still pleasantly.

“What makes you think he’s been sayin’ anythin’? Well, he has. I
reckon you know what it is. Hanna says he knowed you the first time he
seen you here, but he didn’t want to make no trouble, and he didn’t
say nothing. He says you was arrested over in Mississippi for
swindlin’, and you’d have been jailed ef you hadn’t got away.”

“That’s a damned lie,” Lockwood returned.

“’Course you’d say that. I dunno whether you’re lyin’ or not
yourself.”

Tom suddenly produced a pearl-handled revolver and rested it across
the steering wheel. It was not exactly a threat, but the lie had been
as good as passed.

Lockwood dropped the reins and spread his hands wide to show them
empty, then folded his arms over his chest. Under his fingers he felt
the cold iron of his own pistol under his shoulder. He was not in the
least afraid. He was confident that he could draw and fire first, if
he needed. But he had no idea of being provoked into a shooting affray
and ruining his whole cause. He would almost rather take a bullet
himself then than put one into Tom Power.

“And you’re goin’ under a false name now, Hanna says,” Tom continued.
“What about that? Is your right name Lockwood, or not?”

Strangely, the necessary lie stuck in Lockwood’s throat. He stammered;
he jerked out a belated “of course!” that sounded strangely.

“Ain’t no ‘of course’ about it!” said Tom staring sharply. “Now I
reckon you know as well as I do ef you’re a fit man to be ridin’ with
my sister—agin’ her father’s orders, too.”

“God knows I’m not, Tom,” Lockwood assented.

Power gazed at him, perplexed. Lockwood felt a warm flash of sympathy
and liking for him, he looked so puzzled and honest and bewildered,
devoid of malice, anxious really to defend his sister, and perfectly
ready to commit murder.

“Don’t worry, Tom. I’m not as bad as you think,” he said, smiling.

“I dunno about that. Well, I’ve done warned you. I don’t want to start
no trouble, but I reckon you’d better leave this here district for
your own good. Don’t make no mistake now. You know what you’ve got
comin’ to you.”

He put his foot on the starter, and the engine murmured and hummed.
Laying down the pistol, he put in the clutch and moved off. He gave
Lockwood one more glance, half menacing, half perplexed, and did not
look back again.

CHAPTER XII

CRISIS

Lockwood returned in depression to the turpentine camp, and spent the
rest of that idle Sunday in anxiety and self-reproach. He seemed to
have muddled things badly. He had blundered into a condition of open
war with the Powers. He had given Hanna every opportunity to stack all
the cards against him. His usefulness was destroyed. He might as well,
he thought, revert to his first plan of settling it with Hanna at the
pistol’s point. But what, then, of Louise? Gunpowder would hardly
solve the situation as it stood now.

He was sorry that he had proposed that Louise meet him on the bayou.
It would be the wildest folly. He did not think that she would come.
But she might come. All the next forenoon he kept as close to the
bayou shore as he could. More than once he tore down to the water,
imagining that he heard the boat’s engine. They were false alarms, and
he felt deeply relieved when afternoon came, and she had not appeared.

All the next day he was in a tension of dread and expectancy, and the
next one after. But days passed; a week passed, and he ceased to look
for the boat. He wondered in vain what she was doing. He began to be
afraid that she would not come, and he could not imagine any safe
means of getting into touch with her.

Twice or thrice he passed the Power automobile on the road, but Louise
was never in it. He met Hanna once, who gave him an ironically
deferential bow. He thought of using the telephone at the commissary
store, which was connected with the Power house. It was a rural wire
that ran to Bay Minette. You could get connections with Mobile—with
New York, for that matter, if you waited long enough.

Craig had once rung up New Orleans to get a quotation on rosin, though
it had taken him nearly all day to get through. The telephone was in
the Powers’ hall; its use could be heard all over the house; but if he
could ever happen to know that Louise was alone there he resolved to
try it.

Once, indeed, he was lucky enough to espy the big car speeding
westward with Hanna and the three Power men aboard. He hastened back
to the camp, but to his disgust the commissary store was full of
loungers, turpentine men and farmers, talking, smoking, laughing close
beside the telephone. He waited an hour, and then gave it up.

But the very next morning, before ten o’clock, he heard the
unmistakable _thud_-_thud_ of a gasoline engine on the water. He was
two hundred yards inland, but he dashed at a gallop down to the bayou,
and saw the motor boat moving slowly up the mud-colored channel, with
Louise at the wheel, anxiously scanning the shore.

Dismounting, he caught her attention and signaled her where to steer
inland. The boat came alongside a big, half sunken log. He took her
hand and helped her out. He almost yielded to the impulse to draw her
close to him, but her face showed that this was no time for sentiment.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” he said. “What is it? Has anything happened?”

“I didn’t mean to come. I had to. I was afraid—I didn’t know what to
do,” she said, breathing fast. “It was the only chance. I knew
everybody was going out in the car this morning. I was to go, too, but
I made an excuse. It’s that oil well, you know. Papa and the boys are
going to buy more of the stock.”

“How much more?”

“Perhaps twenty or thirty thousand dollars.”

Lockwood whistled softly.

“But I understood that no more was on the market.”

“Yes. But a member of the company has just died—so Mr. Hanna says—and
his shares are to be sold. He showed us the letter. They want one
hundred and twenty dollars a share now. Mr. Hanna said he could get
two hundred dollars, but he wanted to let his friends in first. There
are about three hundred shares, and the boys are wild to have them.”

“I see,” said Lockwood dryly. “But nothing has been done yet?”

“They talked it all over last night. Mr. Hanna didn’t urge it much,
but he said it was the chance of a lifetime; he thinks the shares may
be worth five hundred dollars in a year or two. I said all I could
against it, but it didn’t do any good. The boys don’t think a woman
knows anything of business, but they do think a great deal of your
opinion, and I wish you’d give them some advice.”

“Well, there’s only one thing I could say—that I don’t believe the
stock is worth a cent, that I don’t believe there is any oil well at
all, and perhaps not even any company. But I couldn’t say that without
some definite information to back it up.”

“Of course, Hanna would deny everything you said, and I suppose papa
and the boys would take his word,” said Louise in distress. “That man
seems to have bewitched them all. Wish he had never come here. He
tormented me so in New Orleans——”

“In New Orleans!” Lockwood exclaimed.

She hesitated, clasping and unclasping her hands. Then she looked at
him frankly.

“He was a nightmare to me. He persecuted me—followed me. That was
partly why I left and came here—to get away from him.”

“Ah!” said Lockwood, with a long breath between his teeth. “And he
followed you here?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. He came up on the boat and stopped a day
or two at Ferrell’s. He was supposed to be looking for a chance to buy
timberlands. Tom brought him home to dinner, and asked him to stop
with us. I was terrified when I saw him. I nearly told papa what I
knew of him—but then the boys would probably have shot him, and so I
didn’t know what to do, and said nothing.

“But Hanna behaved well. The first chance he got, he apologized to me
very nicely for all the past; he said he was afraid he had been a
nuisance, but that he wouldn’t trouble me any more. And I must say he
didn’t—not till——”

“That day on the bayou?” asked Lockwood.

“Yes. You saw it. I had to put him ashore. He was trying to be
persuasive. But I’m not a bit afraid of him, in that way. I can take
care of myself, and he knows it. But you know what he’s been doing to
the boys. He began to teach them to mix new drinks from the first, and
he gave Tom a tip on the cotton market that cleared eight hundred
dollars, and after that they were willing to let him have the handling
of everything we had. Now this oil stock business has come up.”

“It’s Hanna’s big coup,” said Lockwood. “He’s decided to stop
gathering chicken-feed and make some real money.”

“But what can we do?” cried Louise hopelessly. Lockwood took a sudden
resolution.

“Listen, Miss Louise!” he said. “I didn’t intend to tell you now, but
Hanna is no stranger to me, either; and I didn’t come to Rainbow
Landing by chance, any more than he did. Hanna is a high-class
swindler, a mere confidence man. I ought to know. He got my confidence
and robbed me of everything I had in the world.”

They had stopped walking and stood facing one another, oblivious of
everything but the intensity of these mutual confidences.

“It was years ago,” Lockwood went on. “I’ve been after him ever since.
I’ve been through horrors in that time, but I didn’t mind them. I had
only one idea. I was going to find Hanna and kill him.”

“Oh!” Louise murmured, but she did not flinch. The idea of such a
vendetta was not unfamiliar to Miss Power’s Alabaman experience.

“I tracked him to New Orleans—that was when I met you. Then I traced
him up the river. I nearly shot him the first day I was here, but I
didn’t have my escape ready. Then, I saw you; I heard something of
your family, of Hanna’s doings. I guessed something of his game, and I
made up my mind to wreck it first. And then——”

“What then?”

“Then—what shall I say?” exclaimed Lockwood. “I got work here. I met
you and your people. Something changed in me. I hadn’t valued my life
a particle, but lately it’s come to seem that there might perhaps be
something in living after all. I’m as determined as ever to break
Hanna, but I don’t believe now that I’d be willing to ruin all the
rest of my life for the sake of killing him. In fact, I think I’ve
found something stronger in life than hate.”

She had been looking at him intently; now she dropped her eyes,
coloring. Then she turned slowly and began to walk again.

“You mustn’t ruin your life,” she said gently. “It’s worth a great
deal. Your coming here has meant a great deal to—to all of us. It has
saved us, perhaps, from dreadful things. You have a great deal to live
for, I know. As for Hanna—I don’t blame you for wanting to break him
or even kill him; but if what you say is true, you should be able to
put him in prison, and that ought to satisfy you.”

Prison! That word came like an icicle into Lockwood’s hot
indiscretions. A terror seized him. He could not be thankful enough
that he had not confessed further.

“I think, perhaps, we can do that,” he answered her. “But there’s just
one thing to do now. I must go to Pascagoula and find out the truth of
this oil company.”

“Would you really do that? But it’s too much to ask you. Why couldn’t
Tom go?”

“Tom’s going would give the whole thing away. Besides, I’m afraid it
needs some one with more than Tom’s experience of crooked business to
probe this. No, I’ll go myself. You needn’t be grateful. Remember,
this is my quarrel, too.”

“But I’m more than grateful,” she exclaimed. “But I don’t think you
need go to Pascagoula. The office of the oil company is in
Mobile—Maury Building, Royal Street, Room 24. I remember the address.”

Lockwood made a note of it.

“The real struggle will come when I try to expose Hanna,” he warned
her. “He’ll fight. See if you can’t prepare your father’s mind a
little; possibly hint at Hanna’s behavior in New Orleans.”

“I’ll do all I can—and wait for you to come back!” she promised. Her
eyes met his, full of gratitude and confidence. In Lockwood’s heart
there was a sudden uprush of something vital and sweet, that washed
away almost the last of the old black bitterness. He held her hand
somewhat tightly as he took his leave, and suppressed a great many
words that came into his mouth. For the present they were allies—no
more.

CHAPTER XIII

OPEN WAR

Lockwood got three days’ leave of absence from Craig with some
difficulty, and only by alleging business in Mobile of the utmost
importance. The camp was busy; Craig did not want to let him go, and
was much afraid that he would not come back. He valued his new woods
rider; and he had remarked to the camp foreman that Lockwood was
naturally cut out for a turpentine man, and he was going to hold on to
him.

By good luck the camp motor car was going over to Bay Minette, and
Lockwood went there in it. The afternoon train was crowded, full of
well-dressed people and the stir of life from which it seemed to him
that he had been long exiled. He reached Mobile late in the day; the
sunshine lay low on the palms of Government Street as he walked up
from the Louisville & Nashville depot, and he knew that it was too
late to make any investigations that day.

He lodged himself at the St. Andrew Hotel, and he sat that evening and
smoked under the live oaks of Bienville Square, where the fountain
splashed and gurgled. Only four blocks away stood the Maury Building,
where the office of the “oil company” was said to be. In the morning
he would find out if there was any oil company there, and, if not, the
secretary of the board of trade would probably tell him all he wished
to know.

He spent an impatient and restless night in a stifling hot hotel
bedroom, and shortly after nine o’clock next morning he went up in the
elevator of the Maury Building. The door of No. 24 was locked. There
was no sign, no lettering on the ground glass, nothing but the
uninforming number. Disappointed, he went down again, and sought
information from the colored elevator boy, passing a quarter.

“Who’s in Number 24?”

“Numbah twenty-fo’? Dat’s Mr. Harding’s room, suh.”

“What time does he generally get down?”

“Why, he ain’t noways reg’lar, captain. Sometimes he don’t come down
at all. Mostly he’s here ’fo’ noon.”

“I see. Is the office of the Pascagoula Oil Company in this building?”

“Dunno, sur. Ain’t never heard of ’em.”

Lockwood returned toward ten o’clock, finding the office still closed.
It was not till past eleven that he at last found the door of No. 24
unlocked. He went in without ceremony. The room was quite unfurnished,
but for a shabby flat desk and a couple of chairs. There were cigar
stubs on the floor and a strong odor of stale smoke in the air. Behind
the desk sat a well-dressed, heavy-faced man of middle age, smoking
and reading the Mobile _Register_.

At the first glance Lockwood had a flash of memory from his past life
that was like a shock; but it was vague, and he could not localize it.
He stared in silence at the man, who had put down the paper and was
looking at him.

“Are you—are you Mr. Harding?” Lockwood got out at last, trying to
recover himself.

“Yes, sir. That’s my name,” replied the cigar smoker, in distinctly
Northern accents. And at that moment Lockwood’s memory found its mark.

He had a painful vision of his own real-estate office long ago, of
McGibbon, of Maxwell sullenly stating the forced terms that meant
ruin. Yes, it was Maxwell, it was Hanna’s old confederate, here in
Mobile, here in the rooms of the “Pascagoula Oil Company;” and a great
flood of illumination swept over Lockwood’s whole mind. It was through
Mobile that the orders for the Powers’ reckless purchases had gone.
Ten to one it was through this office, leaving a fifty-per-cent
commission.

“I am,” Lockwood stated, “a piano salesman.”

“Well?” returned Harding, who was plainly far from recognizing his
visitor.

“I’ve just come down from Rainbow Landing. I guess you know the Powers
there?”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“They’re thinking of buying a piano. I called to see you. I believe
the order will go through you, won’t it?”

“Who told you that?” Harding queried roughly.

“I guessed at it. There are all sorts of discounts and commissions,
you know.”

The man picked up his cigar again, looked at it, hesitating visibly;
then spoke:

“I don’t know how you’ve got this idea. I’m not in the piano business.
If you want to sell the Powers a piano, why go ahead. But this is a
law office.”

“Oh, a law office!” said Lockwood, inwardly tickled at the word. “I
thought you represented the Pascagoula Oil Company.”

Harding was visibly taken aback this time, and stared hard at his
interlocutor.

“Never heard of it,” he returned.

“But,” Lockwood insisted, “this is the address given on their
stationery and literature.”

“Hum!” said Harding reflectively. His manner softened a good deal.
“Come to think of it, I do believe I’ve heard of ’em. I’ve only been
in this office a couple of months. I guess they were the people here
before me. But they’re gone. Yes, sir, they’ve moved. But I can find
’em for you. Ain’t they in the telephone book? Well, I can find out,
anyhow.”

“I wish you would.”

“I certainly will,” said Harding, growing more genial. “Are you
located in town? At the St. Andrew? Good! I’ll telephone you just as
soon as I find the address.”

They parted with great mutual cordiality, and Lockwood chuckled when
he was on the street again. He chuckled with success; he was almost
certain now; but to make absolutely certain he called at the office of
the Pascagoula Land and Development Company, whose name he had
accidentally heard that day.

Their offices were decorated with semitropical fruits and vegetables
of every description, and he learned from the manager that oil was
almost the sole natural product which their territory could not
furnish. No oil had ever been discovered in that county; no boring had
ever been done; and he could not be in error, for he had spent his
life there.

It was merely what Lockwood had been certain of all along, but he felt
that the matter was now clinched. He planned to take the midnight
train back to Bay Minette. He returned to his hotel, and, to his
extreme surprise, was handed a note which Harding had sent over by
messenger an hour before. He had located the Pascagoula Oil Company,
Harding said; if Lockwood would call again in the Maury Building the
next morning he would receive the information he wanted.

Of course Harding could very well have put the address in his note,
but he evidently had planned some move, and Lockwood was sufficiently
curious to wait over. He spent another night at the hotel, and it was
with the expectation of an extremely curious and interesting
conversation that he opened the door of office No. 24 the next
morning. Harding was not there, but Hanna sat looking across the desk
at his entrance.

Lockwood paused, bewildered, and then remembered the long-distance
telephone. Undoubtedly Harding had sent a hurry call. Hanna had had
just time to motor to the railway and catch the Mobile train.

The nerves thrilled down his spine. It was going to come to a
show-down at last. He felt the pressure of the little automatic at his
hip—not that this office building was the place for pistols, with the
click of typewriters, the coming and going of people in the adjoining
rooms.

“Well!” said Hanna curtly. “Have a chair. So you’ve been looking into
oil stocks.”

“I didn’t need to look much,” Lockwood returned, without sitting down.
“I got my material for a report without much trouble.”

“And you’re fixing to make a report?”

“I surely am.”

“What do you expect to get out of it?”

“I get _you_, out of it, Hanna.”

“I see!” said the crook reflectively. “Well, that’s a good stunt.
Blackmail, hey? Ever since you came to Rainbow Landing I’ve been
trying to figger out what you came for. ’Course I seen right away that
you wasn’t there for the turpentine business. For a while I did think
you were after the girl.”

“The girl is neither your affair nor mine,” said Lockwood.

“Well, I thought you might be sweet on her,” went on Hanna, looking
keenly at his opponent’s face. “I was sweet on her myself, one time.
Fact is, I could have her now, if I wanted her. But I’ve got other
fish to fry.”

“I know you’re lying, Hanna!” Lockwood returned.

“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” Hanna resumed, with no air of
resentment. “You’ll find out soon. But I was going to say that we
might do a deal. I’ll let you alone with the girl, and you let me
alone with the rest of ’em. I could block your game in a minute, you
know. What I say goes in that family.”

“Not so much as you think. But I’m making no such deal.”

“Well, then, what’s your figure?”

“For what?”

“Why, suppose you don’t go back with any report on oil stocks. In
fact, you don’t go back there at all. Supposing I fall for your
blackmailing scheme. Supposing I pay into a bank—say at Chicago—two
thousand dollars, and you go there and draw it.”

“And leave you to clean out the Power bank roll?”

“Not so bad as that. I’m not going to put them clean out of business.
They’ll still be rich compared to what they were before. Those people
are bound to get skinned. They’re begging for it. If I don’t get it,
somebody else will.”

“Still, when I make friends with folks I hate to rob them,” said
Lockwood cautiously.

“Maybe, but it’s the way of the world,” Hanna returned. “I happened on
them by chance. Say, you’ve no idea of the state I found them in.
Money was burning holes in their pockets, and they hadn’t the faintest
notion how to spend it. I expect you’ve seen through my game. You know
they paid about double for everything they bought. The orders all went
through me. But still, Lord! I did let them have something. Most men
would have turned them inside out.”

“Well, that’s what you’re planning to do now.”

“I don’t know,” Hanna replied thoughtfully. “Sometimes I’ve thought of
settling down and spending the rest of my life on that plantation. Why
not? But, anyhow. I’m the dog in the manger—see? You’ve got to keep
out, and I’m prepared to bonus you for it.”

“Suppose I reported all this talk to our friends?”

“They wouldn’t believe you, son,” said the bandit with assurance. “I
won’t deny that you might make me some little trouble, if you came
back with a fishy tale about my oil well. I might have to take Tom
down the coast and show him some oil derricks. There’s heaps of ’em
near Mobile. But you might bother me some, and so I say, what’s your
figure? I’ll make it five thousand.”

“Not enough!” said Lockwood.

“Why, I won’t clear much over twice that!” Hanna complained. “You’re a
devil of a hard man to do business with. I’ll go six thousand, and
that’s my last raise, by gad! It’ll be paid you in Chicago, and you’ll
have to sign a statement that you’ve investigated my oil well and
found it all right, and that you’ve left Alabama for good.”

Lockwood shook his head stolidly.

“Then what the deuce do you want?” Hanna demanded.

“Ten thousand cash, or a certified check payable to Henry Power. I
figure that’s about the amount you’ve got out of him so far.”

Hanna exploded a tremendous and astonished oath. His eyes and forehead
wrinkled up like a bulldog’s, and he stared at Lockwood venomously.

“What’s your game?” he exclaimed. “Who are you, anyway? I know I’ve
seen you outside of Alabama.”

“No, you don’t know me, Hanna,” said Lockwood with equal animosity.
“My only game is to beat you and break you. You’d better not go back
to Rainbow Landing yourself. Or go, if you like, and I’ll meet you and
beat you on your own ground.”

“That’s to be seen,” Hanna returned, resuming apparent coolness. “I
could blacken your name so that the boys would shoot you on sight. But
no use quarreling. I’ve made you an offer. I’ll split the game, but I
won’t spoil it. What do you say? It’s your last chance.”

“It’s yours,” said Lockwood. “Will you disgorge, or are you going to
go back to Rainbow Landing and risk it. You’ll be jailed or shot.”

Hanna grinned at him across the desk without saying anything. Lockwood
walked to the door, opened it, and turned back. If he expected Hanna
to back down at the last moment, he was disappointed. The confidence
man still grinned derisively, and Lockwood went out.

He felt agitated and flurried now, sorry, too, that he had become
involved in a wordy wrangle, sorry that he had showed his hand. His
great need now was to get back as fast as possible to Rainbow Landing,
for he knew well that Hanna would waste no moments now. There was a
train at three o’clock, and his watch said that it was noon.

For greater certainty he determined to get into touch with Louise at
once. There was no telegraph connection, but there was the telephone,
and he went to the city central office, and asked to be put through,
but at last he had to give it up. There was just time to get his suit
case at the hotel and go to the depot. When he arrived there he
learned that the time had been changed, and that his train had been
gone half an hour.

However, it was boat day, and the steamer would leave for upriver
points at five o’clock. Considering the long drive from Bay Minette to
Craig’s camp, and the uncertainty of being able to obtain a motor, he
thought that his chance was probably better by boat than by rail.

The boat, as always, was an hour late in getting off. Lockwood did not
sleep much that night. He did not undress, but he lay down in his
berth for a few hours, marking each landing as they passed it. The
great searchlight swung its long finger of light ahead; the cypress
swamps, the marshy headlands, the ghostly line of sycamores and live
oaks slipped past. A heavy, hot smell of vegetable decay came off the
land.

The lumbering steamer made good speed that night. Shortly after
midnight they came up to the colored bluffs of Rainbow Landing, and
hauled in to the warehouse, amid the usual shouting and excitement of
the negroes. Lockwood was the only passenger to land, and there were
no more than three or four waiting figures ashore. He had hardly
stepped off the plank when one of these figures stepped forward to
meet him.

“Mr. Craig sent me over to meet you, Mr. Lockwood. His car’s busted a
tire, but I’ve got my buggy to drive you to the camp.”

Lockwood could not see the man’s face in the gloom, but he guessed it
to be one of the farmers of the neighborhood. They all knew him by
this time, and he had met most of them, though he could hardly have
remembered their names.

“Thanks—all right!” he said gladly. “How did Mr. Craig know I was
coming on this boat?”

“I reckoned you sent him word,” said the man, leading the way to where
a horse was hitched back in the darkness. When he thought of it,
Lockwood believed that he had told Craig that he would be up on the
first boat. They drove away at a fast trot through the swamp, up to
the crossroad, down past the post office—all familiar ground now. They
passed the Power house, wrapped in complete darkness.

“Do you know if Mr. Hanna is back?” he inquired.

“Yes, sir. Seen him this evenin’,” the driver answered.

Hanna had beaten him then. Lockwood was revolving this fact anxiously
when the driver pulled up suddenly, got out and went behind the buggy,
uttering a disgusted curse. They had just reached the bayou bridge.

“Wish you’d please git out, sir. Tire’s done come off.”

Lockwood swung out. He had one foot on the step and one on the ground
when there was a silent and ferocious rush upon him out of the
darkness. Something fell like thunder upon his skull. Fire flamed over
his brain, and vanished suddenly in black darkness.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAST CHANCE

Of what happened immediately afterward Lockwood had no knowledge.

It seemed that almost whole days had passed before he half started up
in semilucidity. He could move neither his hands nor his feet. It was
still dark. He could hear the thud and wash of engines and waters, and
he imagined himself still on the river steamer. He smelled the heavy,
decaying odor of the swamps. His head ached terribly, and seemed
swollen to enormous dimensions. He could not think nor collect
himself, and he relapsed into dizzy unconsciousness.

But when he recovered intelligence there was light in his eyes. He lay
on his back; there was a ceiling of pine boards above him. Still
dreaming of the river boat, he tried to move himself, and found that
his arms were tied fast at the wrists, and his legs at the ankles.

He turned his head sideways, growing dizzy with the slight movement.
He was in a long room, perhaps ten feet by twenty. Opposite him a
couple of bunks were built into the wall, empty except for frightfully
tattered rags that might once have been called blankets. At each end
of the room was an open door, where the sunlight shone in, and he had
a glimpse of green thickets, and he smelled swamp water. Outside the
door human figures moved indistinctly.

Now he knew where he was. He was in a house boat, probably the boat he
had grown familiar with on the bayou; though how he had got there he
could not at the moment imagine. His head was too painful for thought;
he lay back, crushed down with unspeakable defeat and weakness and
despair.

The door darkened. A big figure came in, and Lockwood saw a face
brought close to his own—a bearded, brutal face, with a great bluish
stain or scar on the forehead.

“Done woke up, air ye?” said Blue Bob.

Lockwood stared back, incapable of speaking. The riverman laughed a
little and went out, returning with a lump of corn pone and a tin cup
of coffee.

“Here, swaller this,” he said, “an’ you’ll feel better.”

Three more men came in, and stood staring at the prisoner with the
stolid curiosity of animals. Lockwood’s wrists were loosened; the food
put into his hands. He could not eat the corn bread, but he drank the
bitter, black coffee, and it did stimulate him. His head cleared. He
looked round at the ring of hard faces.

“What’s this for? What are you going to do with me?” he demanded
weakly.

“Dunno,” said Bob. “We’re goin’ to take right good keer of you, so you
won’t git away.”

Lockwood shut his eyes again, beginning to remember, to
understand—slowly, painfully piecing out the situation. Hanna was in
alliance with the river gang, just as he had half suspected. It was a
winning alliance, too. Lockwood could not but feel that he had lost
his game—for the present. He was not much afraid for his life. The
pirates might have murdered him very easily, but they had spared him;
they said they were going to “take good keer” of him. Hanna wanted him
out of the way until the oil deal could be put through.

His coat was gone, his boots, his cambric shirt. There was not much
left but his trousers and underwear. His pistol was gone, of course,
and his pocketbook and his watch, even his handkerchief. But the money
belt was there. They had not thought to search him to the skin. He
felt the familiar rasp of the leather and the hardness of the
ten-dollar gold coins inside, and it gave him hope; so much does money
seem to be power.

He asked to be let up, but they refused; and really he was better
where he was. He spent the rest of the day in the bunk, dozing
fitfully into nightmares, sometimes feverishly awake, too sick to know
how the hours passed.

Twice more they brought him food, fried catfish and corn pone and the
same black coffee, strong as oak-ash lye. He drank, but he could not
eat; and after a time he found the cabin in darkness again. Some one
tied his hands up without any regard for his comfort.

A loud chorus of snoring went on from the pirates in their bunks. Thus
unguarded, he might have tried to escape, but he was far too ill to
think of any such thing. He slept himself instead, and was the better
for it. He awoke next morning with the swimming sensation almost gone
from his head, and even a slight appetite.

That day they let him out of the bunk, greatly to his relief, for the
place swarmed with fleas, and probably with worse vermin. His ankles
were still loosely hobbled, but he was allowed to sit on the open
stern deck.

His first glance was for familiar landmarks. He found none. The boat
was lying in a little bay or bayou, perhaps a creek mouth, surrounded
by dense thickets of titi and rattan. Through a tangle of overhanging
willow he thought he saw the Alabama River outside, but anybody might
have passed down the stream within fifty yards without suspecting the
presence of the house boat, or even of the harbor where it lay.

He did not know the place. He was sure it was no part of the bayou
near Craig’s camp. He recollected the thudding of engines he had heard
or felt soon after being kidnapped. The house boat was moving then.
They must have taken her out of the bayou, down the river for some
miles, and laid her in this hiding place, which they had probably used
before.

The boat was moored against a huge log that made a natural wharf. On
an open sandy space ashore a cooking fire was burning. Not far from it
two of the gang lay flat on their backs in the shade. Blue Bob stayed
aboard, with the fourth of the party, a young man, little more than a
boy, with a vacuous, animal face, and long, youthful down sprouting
from his chin.

“Well—going to let me go ashore?” Lockwood remarked, by way of being
conversational.

“Naw!” Bob growled, staring stupidly.

Lockwood tried again, getting no answer. Studying his captors, he
decided that it was not so much animosity as sheer lack of words. They
spoke little more to one another than to him. He observed them all
that day with growing amazement; he thought he had never seen men so
devoid of all the attributes of humanity. His amazement grew to a sort
of horror. He felt as if he had fallen into the hands of some
half-human animals, some soulless race without either understanding or
mercy.

They spoke mainly in drawled monosyllables; they played cards and shot
craps endlessly, but without excitement—perhaps having no money to
stake. No doubt they were all devoured with malaria and hookworms; but
all the same they could handle an ax with masterly dexterity, and on
occasion they could be as quick as cats.

Half asleep as they generally seemed, Lockwood felt their eyes
perpetually upon him. At every movement, some one turned his head like
a flash, and every one of these men carried a gun, the handle
protruding shamelessly from the hip pocket. Bob had two—one of them
being Lockwood’s own automatic.

After several futile attempts, Lockwood gave up trying to get on any
sort of relations with them. He watched them with dread and repulsion
as they rolled dice on the dirty deck. One of the “bones” fell through
a crack in the planking, and, trying to loosen a board to reach it,
the youngest of the men broke the blade of his sheath knife. He tossed
away the shortened blade with a curse, but the broken tip remained on
the deck and Lockwood fixed his eyes on it.

It was scarcely two inches long, but was the nearest approach to a
cutting tool that had come anywhere near his reach. He managed to
shuffle near it; he put his foot on it. Eventually he sat down on his
heels, got the triangular bit of steel into his hands, and transferred
it to his trousers pocket. It was not much, but it might be something.

The day dragged on. That afternoon something went by on the river
outside, invisible through the trees—probably a raft of timber. Toward
evening they fed him and put him back in his bunk, tying his hands
once more at the wrists.

A clammy white fog from the swamps drifted smokily through the
doorways. The whole cabin was hazy and damp. The pirates had a big
fire burning on the shore; he could see the red reflection of it; and
then, faint and rapidly increasing, he heard the distant drumming of
the engine of a motor boat coming down the river.

Every nerve thrilled in him. It was destiny that was coming, he knew.
He heard the boat slacken, then scrape through the willow boughs that
masked the bayou, and then a bump upon the house boat, and a voice.

His heart sank. It was worse than destiny; it was disaster.

“Got him safe?” said Hanna.

“Got him alive,” returned Bob. “Ruther hev him dead?”

“I sure would,” said the other earnestly.

Then there was a long, hoarse mutter of talk which Lockwood could not
make out. Hanna was arguing something. Then silence fell. Feet
trampled the deck outside, and Blue Bob came into the cabin, carrying
a flaring torch of fat pine, which filled the foggy room with resinous
smoke and a lurid light. Hanna followed him, and looked down at
Lockwood in his bunk.

“I’ve got no time to fool with you now,” he said curtly. “You asked
for this and you’ve got it. Now these fellows’ll float you down to
Mobile, and Harding’ll give you a ticket to Chicago and fifty dollars.
Right now you’ll give me the signed statement I mentioned, saying that
you’ve looked into my enterprise and consider it quite sound.”

“Nothing doing,” said Lockwood.

Hanna stepped closer and looked down at him curiously.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You haven’t got a ghost of a show
now. You’re down and out. I’ve told the Power boys things about you.
They’ll shoot you at sight if you ever turn up there again. I don’t
need to do anything for you, but I felt as if I ought to give you a
last chance. That’s what’s the matter with me—got too tender a
conscience.

“These boys ain’t troubled that way, though,” he added, indicating the
boat’s crew. “I’ll just leave you with them. Let’s get out of here,
Bob. It’s hotter’n hell.”

He half turned and bestowed a piercing glance on the prisoner.

“It’s your last chance,” he said. “Well?”

“No,” said Lockwood.

“Well, you’ve had a run for your money, anyway,” returned the crook,
and he went out.

For another five minutes, perhaps, the men talked on the rear deck.

“Ain’t takin’ no sech chances. Do it yourself,” he heard Bob say.

“You done it once, I guess,” replied Hanna. “Hush!” as the pirate
uttered a loud oath of denial.

The talk sank again; and then the motor boat throbbed away into
silence. Hanna was gone; but the pirates talked long among themselves,
while the river fog drifted ghost-white over the boat. From time to
time some one came and looked at him through the misty doorway.

He had never known the river men so excited; he would not have thought
it possible for them to have had so much conversation. He guessed what
they were discussing. From moment to moment he almost expected the
attack, the shot, or a crushing club stroke. He was tied, helpless as
a sheep.

“If we-all do this hyar job,” he heard Bob say, “we gotter git cl’ar
offn the Alabama fer good. We kin sell the boat in Mobile, an’ go——”

Some one interrupted indistinctly. Bob swore and insisted.

“All same, Bob, this yere’s a heap safer’n that other time, an’ you
got outer that all right,” another voice drawled.

“Outer what?” Bob snarled savagely. “Outer nothin’. Jackson Power
knows he done it—thinks so, anyways. Mebbe he did. Everybody was
lettin’ off their pistols at once, an’——”

“Shucks, Bob. He was shot with an autymatic, an’ nobody hadn’t no
autymatic that night but you.”

“Ef you says I done it, I’ll cut your liver out!” Bob threatened. “I
tell you it shore was young Jack Power.”

“Well, jest so long’s he thinks so! Shet up, Bob! We’ve got to touch
up young Jackson again, anyways.”

“Sure we will,” said Bob. “A thousand this time, and Hanna don’t git
none of it. Then with what we gits fer——”

Echoes of some old affray, it seemed, that still had power to terrify.
The familiar mention of Jackson Power’s name startled him, recalling
what he had seen or heard himself; but he had no thought just then to
spend upon that wild youth’s connection with the river gang.

How long had he to live?—what chance had he? were the only problems
that his brain could hold. He could not possibly doubt that his fate
had been decided upon. Was it to be to-night, while he lay tied,
helpless as a sheep?

If he had some weapon, even a stick—even if his hands had been free,
he could have faced it better. He strained at the rope that bound his
wrists behind his back. It was dark in the cabin; no one could see
what he did; and the knots slipped and gave just a little. Not nearly
enough to release his hands, but with the tips of his fingers he could
feel the bit of knife point in his trousers pocket.

He worked it around, point against the cloth, and pressed it through
the slit it made. It must be sharp, he thought with satisfaction; and
at that moment the pirates from the deck came crowding in.

He fancied that it was his last moment. But no one paid him any
attention beyond a casual glance. They tumbled into their bunks, all
but Blue Bob, who produced a long tallow candle and lighted it. He set
it in the middle of the floor, squatted down on the floor himself,
with his back against a bunk, took a chew of tobacco, and fixed his
eyes on the prisoner.

Lockwood realized that the death watch had been put on him; but the
realization came with relief, for it meant that nothing was intended
for that night. But this night would certainly be the last.

The thick fog drifted and coiled about the pale candle flame burning
straight in the windless air. The air was full of moisture, steaming
hot. Mosquitoes buzzed thickly. Far ashore he heard the calling of
owls. He hoped that Bob would doze off, but the pirate remained
tenaciously awake, chewing tobacco like a machine. Lockwood had a wild
instant thought of trying to bribe him with the gold in his belt.
Madness! Blue Bob would take the gold, and dispatch him even more
certainly afterward.

Once outside, in that darkness and fog, they would never recapture
him, either on land or water. He held the bit of steel between his
fingers, behind his back. By twisting his fingers back he could just
touch the knife edge to the rope at his wrist. He might cut it, but in
the face of that black stare across the cabin he dared not move a
muscle.

He shut his eyes and pretended to sleep, peeping occasionally through
his lashes. Unceasingly Bob chewed his quid. Lockwood’s brain ached
with the nervous tension. He groaned and half turned, as if sleeping
restlessly, and for a moment Bob’s jaws stopped working.

At last he must really have slept, though he seemed to be always
conscious of the candlelight and the fog. But he came to himself with
a sense of waking, not out of but into a nightmare. The candle still
burned, but it was low now. The fog banked in wet clouds about it; and
Bob was gone. Another man had taken his place.

This watcher also chewed tobacco, but Lockwood saw at once that he was
less vigilant. He presently fetched a fresh candle and lighted it from
the first, then, sitting down, yawned loudly. He had been wakened from
his first sleep, and had trouble to keep from relapsing.

Lockwood lay with closed eyes, but tense, wide awake now, peeping at
intervals. The man kept firmly awake for fifteen minutes. His lids
drooped; he rubbed them with his knuckles and stared straight ahead;
then he shifted his position, sighed, and blinked heavily.

Holding the bit of steel between finger and thumb, Lockwood began to
saw at the cord with noiseless, imperceptible movements. By twisting
his fingers he could just reach the rope, but he could bring very
little force upon it. Fortunately the knife was almost razor sharp.
Once he cut his own flesh; twice he dropped the knife and had to feel
for it among the rags and corn shucks; but he could feel the strands
parting, and at last his hands went freely apart.

The guard was dozing, blinking, evidently dazed with sleep. Lockwood
sighed, snored, and drew his heels up to his body as if restless. The
watchman paid no attention, and Lockwood reached down with his left
hand and ripped through his ankle cords with half a minute’s quick
work.

Then he hesitated, as a man may when his life depends on the dexterity
of the next minute. The pirate had a sudden spell of wakefulness; he
knuckled his eyes and stretched, and it was full twenty minutes before
he relaxed into drowsiness again.

Lockwood gathered up the ragged blanket, and rose on his elbow,
measuring the distance to the doorway. He slipped his shoeless feet
over the ledge of the bunk—and then suddenly caught the wide-open,
amazed eyes of his guard.

Before the man’s open mouth could produce its yell Lockwood flung the
blanket over the candle, and bolted, crouching low, for the door.
Black darkness fell behind him. There was a howl, a shot exploded with
a deafening crash, and then an uproar of stamping feet, ejaculations,
and another shot as he dived through the door. But then he was out and
had jumped ashore upon the big log.

He halted bewildered. The dense fog lay all around him like a gray
wall. A low fire on the shore made a pale blur. That second of delay
almost ruined him. A man plunged after him from the boat, running
square into him. Lockwood caught him a heavy uppercut, putting all his
energy of vindictiveness into it. It lifted the pirate clean off his
feet, and he crashed over backward with a grunt.

Lockwood rushed down to the other end of the boat. He was afraid to
try the woods in that smother of dark and fog. He almost collided with
another ruffian who was leaping ashore from the stern. The man grabbed
at him and fired; but Lockwood had ducked, dropping flat. He smelled
the water close to him. He wallowed forward, into thick, deep mud,
then into deepening water.

“Hyar—hyar he goes!” he heard Blue Bob bellowing. “Git pine splinters!
Make a blaze, d—n you! He can’t git fur!”

Lockwood tried to sight the small canoe that usually trailed beside
the house boat. He had counted on it, but nothing was visible. If he
could secure it—but there was no use looking. Even the house boat was
a mere blur of blackness. He crawled forward into the gloom and,
getting into deeper water, began to swim with a long, noiseless
stroke.

He was a good swimmer, and was practically stripped but for his
trousers. Leaves, branches rustled over his head. He had come to the
screened mouth of the bayou. He strove to push through without sound,
but some snapping branch must have betrayed him. A perfect volley of
shots were fired at him, ripping the leaves, driving up the water, but
not one of them touched him. Careless of noise now, he struck out
strongly and went through, and felt the powerful pull of the big river
current outside.

CHAPTER XV

THE FOG

Back in the bayou was an uproar. Fat pine torches were flaming, so
that the whole foggy place seemed a great glow; and then he heard the
splash of paddles and saw something like a spot of lighted haze coming
out. It was the canoe. He stopped swimming and floated soundlessly. He
struck something—a half-submerged snag, and clung to it. The canoe
dashed nearer, without outlines, a moving blur of light; and he ducked
completely under, holding his breath.

It passed so close that the glare of the torches shone on his eyes
through the water. But for the fog he would certainly have been
detected. The blur faded. He put his eyes and nose up. The boat was
circling away downstream, and a shot blazed suddenly from it, probably
at a drifting log. The pirates were taking a chance at anything.
Lockwood let go and floated again. The canoe came about and sped
upriver. He could hear the talking, clear through the thick, wet air.

“I’m sure he’s hit. I saw him plain one minute.”

“Ef he ain’t drowned or dead, we’ll find him wounded on the bank
somewhere in the mornin’.”

“Not a particle of use lookin’ in this yere fog.”

They kept on searching, however, going some distance up, and then down
again close to the shore. Lockwood risked swimming again, heading out
into mid-river. The twist and shift of the currents bothered him. They
seemed to set in all directions, and he lost track of which way he was
going.

The canoe went some distance downstream and then came back, reëntering
the bayou mouth. He lost sight of the torch glare. Both shores were
invisible, and there was nothing around him but the gray wall of fog
and the suck and gurgle of the treacherous currents.

To his surprise he felt bottom suddenly. He thought he must have been
carried shoreward, but it proved to be a sand bar, with about three
feet of water over it. He stood up gladly to rest. He was an excellent
and strong swimmer, but the weight of the gold belt was coming at last
to make itself felt.

He meant to gain the shore some way downstream where he could lie in
the woods till daylight. Then he could find his way to a road, a
house, where he could hire a horse, a mule, or a car to take him
either to Craig’s camp or a railway station. But he was puzzled by the
currents, which seemed to set in opposite directions at the ends of
the sand bar. He knew how treacherous are the shifts and eddies of the
Alabama; but, selecting his direction at last, he waded deep and swam
again.

For perhaps half an hour he struggled with the river, floating,
swimming, once clinging to a floating log and drifting for some way.
Darkness and fog made him feel lost in an illimitable ocean, but at
last he touched bottom again, and detected the faint loom of trees
against the dark sky. He waded forward, stumbled against a cypress
trunk. The river was high, and a foot of water was running over the
roots of the shore growths.

He felt his way ahead, splashing among the trees. The water grew
shallow, gave place to mud, and he ran into a dense thicket of tough
shrubs, tangled together with bamboo vines, spiky with thorns, and
growing right out of the deep ooze. It was perfectly impenetrable. He
had to sheer away to the right till he seemed to discern a break in
the barrier. The ground was soft and full of bog-holes. Now and again
he went to his knees, once to his hips, and he remembered tales he had
heard of bottomless pits in these river swamps, where stray hogs and
men had disappeared.

But after escaping the human wolves of the house boat, he could not
believe that he was destined to fall into a death-trap in the swamp.
But it was impossible to keep any straight course. He zigzagged and
turned where he felt footing, picking a route by instinct and feeling.
The whole swamp resounded with the croaking and piping and thrumming
of frogs; they fell silent at his splashing steps, and started again
when he had gone by; and all the treetops were streaked and starred
with the greenish-yellow flicker of innumerable fireflies.

Huge rotten logs collapsed in a welter of wet slush as he trod on
them. He blundered into a wide slough of liquid mud, and floundered
out again. Most of all he was afraid of the moccasin snakes that must
swarm in such a place; but he comforted himself with the thought that
the moccasin is not a fighter like the rattlesnake, but makes for
water at any disturbance.

He was bound to come to dry land if he kept straight ahead. But it was
impossible to keep straight ahead. Turned back at one place by a dense
jungle of massed titi and palmetto, he was checked at another by a
belt of mud so deep that he dared not try to wade. He stumbled through
a screen of clinging vines and fell into water to his waist, and,
pulling himself out, he discerned a broad lagoon, its extent uncertain
in the darkness.

He dared not try to cross it. It occurred to him that he had best make
his way back to the river shore and swim downstream till he came to a
higher landing place. As he thought of it, he discovered that he had
no longer any idea in which direction the river lay.

He had made so many turnings that he had turned himself around. All
ways looked alike now, in that gloom and tangle. He might be going
parallel with the river, and the shore swamps would never end.

But he could not stop where he was. The ground seemed slowly sinking
under him. He plunged on blindly again, hoping that luck would bring
him to some spot solid enough to wait there till daylight.

But that noisome lagoon seemed somehow to have surrounded him. Water
covered the ground, from an inch to a foot deep, with knobby cypress
“knees” sticking up everywhere. Splashing through he came to a growth
of sharp palmetto. It might mean firmer ground. Indeed, the earth
seemed to harden, as the growth grew thicker. Clumps of bear-grass and
bay-trees loomed faintly. He trod on really firm ground, hammock-land,
he thought, above high-river mark. Next to this might come the pine
belt.

Much encouraged, he stumbled ahead through tall, coarse grasses to his
hips. Dense timber loomed somewhere ahead. He was trying to make out
pinecrests, when a sharp, startling “biz-z-z!” crackled from the
darkness at his feet.

He stopped as if suddenly frozen. He dared not breathe nor move a
muscle. He could not locate the sound, which had ceased. The snake
might be within two feet, ready to strike at his slightest movement;
it might be six feet away. Motionless as death, he stood listening,
with crawling chills creeping down his spine. Nothing sounded but the
piping and grumbling of the frogs. He had to risk it, and he gathered
his forces and executed a desperate leap backward that carried him a
couple of yards.

He landed unbitten. The rattlesnake buzzed again, but it was plainly
at least five yards away. Lockwood continued to go backward, shivering
and hot all at once.

This was no place to prowl in the dark. These hammock lands are always
haunted by rattlers. He groped back almost to the edge of the wet
ground, discovered a great branching willow, and clambered into its
fork.

Here he settled himself, determined to travel no more in darkness. He
was tired and wet through. There was a deadly chill in the air,
smelling of fog and rotten water, and he felt the ache and shivering
that might mean incipient malaria. It could not be long till dawn, and
he huddled himself in the willow to wait with what stoicism he could
summon.

In spite of the cramped position he must have dozed, for all at once
he found the air full of pallid gray light, drifting and smeary with
fog. The swamp stood up intensely green, the treetops brilliant with
flowers, dripping with moisture, bearded with gray Spanish moss.

Stiff and weary he crawled down from the tree. By daylight he was
disappointed to see that this was not true hammock land. It was merely
a strip of higher ground in the swamp. Beyond it he perceived a
stagnant bayou, where cypresses and gum-trees stood knee deep in
water.

But the strip of high ground might lead somewhere. He broke a long
stick and thrashed it through the weeds as he walked, to drive away
snakes. The dry land rose to a small knoll, dipped to mud and water,
then rose again, and all at once he espied the river through the trees
ahead. But he was stupefied to find it running the wrong way.

It was veiled still in mist, and he thought it might be a backwater.
But the mist was lifting. He caught a glimpse of the opposite shore.
It was really Alabama, wallowing through its swamps—in the wrong
direction.

Then he realized the truth. He was on the other side. He had crossed
the river in the dark without knowing it. The twisting cross currents
had carried him clear across the stream, to the shore opposite Blue
Bob’s bayou.

All the better he thought, as he re-oriented himself. There was less
chance of the outlaws carrying their search so far as this. The sky
was turning pink, and he continued his way up the dry strip along the
shore.

Within a hundred yards he came to a trail that had evidently been cut
to reach the river at low water. Water was over the trail now, but it
was not deep, and by wading inland he got through the worst of the
swamp belt. The ground rose and became dry. A clearing opened ahead.
It was a field of growing corn, with a deserted negro cabin.

Beyond this rose the dry, resinous purity of the long-leaf pine woods.
The wet chill of the swamp was gone. Between the trees he felt the hot
assault of the early sun. He dropped on the pine needles, quite
exhausted, intending to rest only a few minutes, and fell into a heavy
sleep.

The sun was well up among the pine branches when he awoke, refreshed
and intensely hungry. He was on the west bank of the river; he was in
Clark County, probably some twenty miles below Rainbow Landing. There
was a ferry somewhere upstream, but he could not think where it was.
But the railway came down the west bank, not at any great distance
from the river, he thought. If he kept westwards he was bound to
strike it, and he could probably hire a buggy or a car at some farm.

He was in a terribly dilapidated condition, covered with half-dried
mud, shoeless, hatless, his clothing in rags from the swamp. He would
not dare board a train in that guise. After some reflection he opened
his belt, and broke into his gold reserve for the first time since
putting it away. Taking out five of the coins, he put them in his
pocket, cut off the remains of the cord loops on his wrists, cast
aside his tattered socks, and started barefoot along the sandy road.

Within an hour’s walking a ramshackle store presented itself, but it
was able to provide him with a meal, a suit, and hat and boots of the
coarse material worn by negroes. Lockwood clothed himself afresh,
discarding every stitch of his former muddy outfit, and set out again,
being told that a farmer two miles up the road had a car to hire.

Two hours later he was at the railway station at Jackson, where he had
time to be shaved and to improve his toilet a little further. Spirit
had come back into him with food and cleanness. It was a question of
getting back to Rainbow Landing as fast as possible. So far from
having lost the game, he had all the cards. He had all the evidence
against Hanna that could be desired by anybody. Better still, Hanna
doubtless believed him at the bottom of the river, and would be off
his guard.

He thought of confiding in Craig and enlisting his help. Craig had
shown every disposition to be friendly and had no love for Hanna, as
Lockwood knew well. Craig was a man of standing, a business man, whose
backing would mean much.

The first thing was to get to Craig. He caught the afternoon train for
Selma, and had to wait there overnight, for there was no train down
the other side of the river till next morning. In this quietest and
most charming of little Southern cities Lockwood elaborated his plans.
He bought a better hat; he bought another automatic pistol to replace
the one that Blue Bob now carried. He slept soundly at the hotel,
fortified with hope, and took the morning train for Bay Minette.

It rained in torrents during the night, and rained nearly all that
morning as the slow train wound down the line, through the hills and
pine woods, past scattered cotton and cornfields.

The rain had ceased when he reached Bay Minette, late in the
afternoon, but it threatened to recommence at any moment. There was a
motor repair shop that he knew, where a car could usually be hired,
and he made straight for it. He wanted desperately to make Craig’s
camp that night; and he had no more than entered the shop than he
perceived a mud-covered car that he knew well, being worked over in
the repair pit.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PAY CAR

The car was fearfully incrusted with red, yellow, and white mud, but
Lockwood recognized it at once as the light car that Craig used for
sending out to the railroad. A moment later he espied, sitting stiffly
upon a box in a corner, not Craig, indeed, but Williams, the camp
foreman.

“Hello!” he exclaimed joyfully. “Just what I wanted. What are you out
for, Williams? I’ll ride back with you.”

“Howdy, Lockwood!” responded the foreman, looking almost equally
pleased. “Where you been? Where’d you get them clothes? Craig’s been
gettin’ right anxious about you. This is Friday, you know. I come out
to the bank.”

Lockwood had lost count of the days. On Fridays the car went out to
the bank at Bay Minette to bring back the thousand dollars or so for
the weekly pay roll.

“I oughter been back two hours ago,” the turpentine man went on, “but
the roads—O Lawd! I skidded every way—hadn’t no chains on—and last
thing, I skidded right inter a tree, and shook something outer gear.”

“But what’s the matter with you? You didn’t get hurt?” asked Lockwood,
observing Williams’ constrained attitude.

“Kink in my back—strained it someways. Oh, I can drive all right, but
I was wonderin’ what I’d do if I had to get out to crank her. But you
can go back with me, and it’ll be all right.”

It was after five o’clock when they started, with a little rain
falling once more. They both sat in the front seat; the curtains were
all closed, and the satchel containing the bank roll was wedged
tightly between them on the seat.

Williams drove cautiously, squirming occasionally as he wrenched his
lame back. Lockwood offered to take the wheel, but the foreman
refused; he said he was used to this kind of road. But they had to
proceed at the slowest pace to get any sort of security; at every
turning the car skated sideways, and once almost turned end for end.

Even more dangerous were the hollows, where the mud was deep, almost
bottomless, it seemed. There was a chance of being “bogged down,” so
that it would take a team of mules to free the car. The creeks were
up, too, spreading widely out of their channels, and occasionally an
overflow crossed the road, so that they splashed through it half-hub
deep for a hundred yards.

The rain increased a little. It was plainly going to get dark early.

“Got to get on faster than this,” said Williams. “I wouldn’t like to
get caught in the dark, with the roads this way.”

He increased the pace, taking chances, escaping accidents by a
continually narrow margin. It was not more than five or six miles to
the camp now; he began to recognize familiar landmarks. But it was one
of the very worst bits of road, and they were driving slowly through a
sea of liquid-yellow slime, when a man came out from the trees, a
little ahead, with the evident intention of speaking to them.

Lockwood thought he wanted a lift, a thing usual enough. He wore a
long, waterproof coat to his ankles, the high collar turned up to his
nose, and a dripping, black hat pulled down to his eyes. Hardly an
inch of his face could be seen. Williams slowed the car almost to a
stop, to let him aboard. The man stepped on the running board, and
pushed his head and shoulders through the curtains, with his hand
thrust forward.

“Hand out that money you’re carryin’!” he said in a hoarse, obviously
disguised voice.

Lockwood put his hands up. Williams sat as if petrified, still holding
the wheel, and the car came to a dead stop in the mud. The bandit
reached far in and grasped the black satchel from the seat between his
victims.

“Set right still ez you are. I’m keepin’ you-all covered!” he growled
and stepped backward into the road. He backed away a few steps, still
holding the muzzle trained on the car, then wheeled and dived into the
woods where he had emerged.

Williams was tugging at his revolver and swearing fervently, but
Lockwood plunged out of the car. Bursting through a screen of
drenching gallberry bushes he saw the robber at full run, twenty yards
ahead up a narrow trail. Still farther he saw the head and shoulders
of a tied horse.

“Stop! Drop that bag!” he roared. The man glanced once over his
shoulder, but ran on, running awkwardly, hampered by his long slicker.
Lockwood was only ten feet behind when he reached the horse and
attempted to mount. The horse, restless at the commotion, sidled off,
capered, the bandit lost his hold, and Lockwood, charging up, seized
him by the arm.

“Drop it, you damn fool!” he ejaculated. “Are you crazy? Don’t you
know you can’t get away with this?”

The man’s eyes met his under the wet hat-brim, and the satchel dropped
to the ground. Lockwood picked it up.

“Now beat it—quick!” he half whispered. “Here comes Williams.”

As the horse thundered away, smashing through the dripping
undergrowth, he fired two shots far aside into the woods.

Williams was coming at a lame hobble, waving his gun.

“You didn’t let him get away?” he called furiously.

Lockwood turned, wet from head to foot.

“Couldn’t help it,” he said. “He had his gun on me. I wouldn’t get
shot just for Craig’s pay roll.”

“Well, I reckon you saved the pay roll, anyway,” said Williams. “He
had me plumb paralyzed just for a minute. Did you get a look at him?”

“Not so that I’d know him again. Hadn’t we better move on? He might
take a crack at us from the woods.”

“Wish I could get a crack at him!” the foreman grumbled, peering at
the dismal swamp edge. “Well, let’s go. This’ll scare Craig some.
First time anybody got held up here that I can remember. This here’s a
rough country, but there ain’t no crime in it.”

Lockwood had his own opinion about that. Crime seemed to be the only
thing he had met since coming into the swamp country. This unexpected
encounter had suddenly changed all his attitude. He no longer dared to
confide anything in Craig—not, at least, until he had seen Jackson
Power again, and learned why the heir to a fortune came to be holding
up the turpentine pay car. Very likely it was sheer criminal instinct,
he thought. He did not see how it could be anything else; and he
sickened of the whole loathsome tangle.

He was sick of it. He wanted to get out of it all, but he wanted to
take Louise with him. She ought to be glad to go, too, he
thought—almost as glad as she had been when she fled in girlhood from
a home that was perhaps more squalid, but surely not more criminal.

They could go to New Orleans. As the car jolted and splashed, his
weary mind hazily dissolved itself into dreams. He could always earn a
living. Or they might settle on the Gulf coast. He liked the South;
there was an ease and balm about it that was medicine to the soul—only
not here, not at Rainbow Landing. He could plant a grove of Satsuma
oranges or figs or pecans. He might get a partner and go into
turpentine; he knew the business now and liked it. He would forget his
past life. He would forget everything, even his revenge. If Louise
would go with him he would leave Hanna and the rest of the Powers to
swindle one another as they pleased, a nest of criminals together.

The glare of the lamps through the mist showed a pine tree by the road
with a great livid blaze on its trunk. They were getting into the
turpentine region. They turned down the woods trail to the camp. There
was a great uproar at the news of the attempted holdup, when the car
stopped at the commissary store.

Lockwood got praise and welcome, but he could not talk. He was deadly
tired, and every nerve and muscle seemed to ache. He got away to his
old room as soon as he could, took a heavy dose of quinine and went to
bed, where he fell as instantly asleep as if the medicine had been a
knock-out drop.

He slept all night, and awoke feeling rested and considerably more
optimistic. To his astonishment, it was past eight o’clock; to his
joy, he had no fever symptoms. The sun was ablaze on the fresh-washed
pines, and the hard sand had already dried. The camp was quiet; most
of the men were away, but when he went downstairs to breakfast Mrs.
Williams told him that Craig was waiting at the commissary to see him.

The turpentine operator gave Lockwood a hearty greeting.

“Feeling all right this morning? You looked plumb played out last
night. I am shorely indebted to you, Lockwood. I reckon you couldn’t
identify that fellow that held you-all up?”

“Well, I saw that it was a white man—that’s about all,” said Lockwood
carefully. “Between his hat and his coat collar you could hardly see
his face. Do you suppose it might be one of Blue Bob’s gang?”

“Them? Naw! None of them water rats has got sand enough for a real
desperate job. I can’t think of nobody round here that could have done
it. Anyway, I’d be out about twelve hundred dollars only for you, and
I’d like to do something——”

“So you can. You can do something right now,” returned Lockwood
promptly. “I want you to ride over with me to Power’s place, and back
me up in what I say to old Henry.”

“Hey? What for?” exclaimed the turpentine man, looking surprised and
uneasy. “I wouldn’t, if I was you, Lockwood. Lemme tell you, Tom Power
came down here, a-rearin’ and a-tearin’ yesterday, and swearing he’d
put a bullet into you if you ever showed up here again. ’Course, he
was some drunk, but I dunno what had got at him.”

“That wasn’t Tom Powers speaking, not whisky either,” said Lockwood
dryly. “They were his words, but it was the voice of his friend Mr.
Hanna. Hanna is trying to put across a high-class swindle on the
Powers. When I found it out and blocked him he tried to put me away.
He nearly did, too, but I’ll tell you about that later. Just now I
want the facts put straight before Henry Power, if it isn’t too late.”

He rapidly detailed the history of the oil stock. Craig listened
intently, frowning.

“I never did think much of that cuss Hanna,” he commented. “If it’s
all as you say——”

“Don’t take what I say!” Lockwood cried. “Just get Power to get a
report from some reliable business man in Mobile or Pascagoula before
he does anything. That’s all I want.”

“Well, I’ve known old Henry pretty near all my life, and I guess he’ll
listen to me,” said Craig. “I know for a fact that there ain’t any oil
wells at Pascagoula. I’ll just ring them up and see if Henry’s there.”

He went to the telephone, and got the Power house after the usual long
delay. Lockwood listened to the passing of a few words.

“The men are all out,” said Craig, turning aside. “Nobody there but
Miss Louise. She says——”

“What? Here, let me speak to her. She knows more about it than
anybody!” Lockwood exclaimed, and seized the receiver from Craig’s
rather reluctant hand. He hesitated; he hardly knew what to say; he
could hear his tone forced and artificial.

“That you, Miss Power? This is Lockwood, just got back. I’m at the
camp. I’ve found out things. I hope nothing has been done yet about
the oil stock?”

“Not yet.” Her voice sounded startled and tremulous. “But I thought
you had gone away—left Alabama.”

“Did Hanna say that? Has he been saying things about me?”

“Yes.”

“I expected it. Would it be safe for me to come to see you?”

“I—I don’t know. I’m afraid not.”

“Well, I’ve got important things that I simply must tell you. That oil
proposition was a fake, just as I thought—and other things, too. I
must talk to you for ten minutes. I wonder if you’d mind meeting me
somewhere—say down on the bayou, by the motor boat shed?”

There was a silence. The telephone buzzed and whirred emptily.

“Yes,” she said at last, in a somewhat cold voice. “If you have
anything really important to tell me, I can see you. When will you be
there?”

“Any time you like. Say in an hour.”

“Very well.” A pause. “In an hour, then. Good-by.”

Lockwood changed his clothes and had his horse saddled and brought
around. In half an hour he started for the rendezvous, fording the
bayou, and riding down the opposite shore. No one was in sight about
the little wharf where the motor boat was laid up. Over the treetops
he could see the roof of Power’s house, but it was nearly ten minutes
before Louise appeared, coming down the path among the pines. He
thought she greeted him with an air of distance, but he was not
unprepared for this sort of reception.

“I’m sorry I had to ask you to come here——” he began, but she stopped
him with a little impatient gesture.

“It doesn’t matter. You had something important to say. What is it?”

“Hadn’t you better tell me first what story Hanna has told you?” he
suggested.

“No. How can I know——Oh, please say what you were going to.”

“Very well.” Lockwood went on in brief and businesslike phrases to
tell her of his investigations in Mobile, of his discoveries, and of
Hanna’s proposal.

She searched his face as he talked. Her brown eyes penetrated as if
they would read his soul, but he could read nothing in those eyes,
except that she was judging him and weighing every word.

“Hanna told us,” she said slowly at last, “that you had tried to
blackmail him, and threatened to ruin him unless he paid you a large
sum of money. He declared that he had forced you to leave the South,
under a threat of arrest. I never expected to see you again. Still, I
didn’t think you were that sort of man. I thought there must be some
mistake. But the boys believed it. They were furious.”

Lockwood was irritated at her cool and almost indifferent tone. It was
for this that he had risked his life, and built his castles in the
air!

“Well, I came back three nights ago on the boat, with all this
information,” he went on, in a recklessly casual tone himself. “Hanna
had his friends to meet me—Blue Bob and his gang. They sandbagged me
and took me down the river in their house boat. Hanna came down to see
me, and made me some more proposals. My finish was fixed for
yesterday, I think. But I made a get-away.”

Louise was looking at him now with a different expression.

“You mean they nearly killed you?” she exclaimed. “You went through
all that to help—us?”

“I didn’t go through any more than I could help. It was my own feud,
anyway. But now you’ve got Hanna where you want him. Tell your father
what I’ve said; he’s full of good sense. Tell him to telephone the
Mobile board of trade about Pascagoula Oil—or maybe the chief of
police would be better. Or, if you don’t want to believe me so far,”
he went on recklessly, “I’ll meet Hanna myself. We’ll settle it as I
meant to at first—a bullet in him or one in me.”

Louise half turned away, putting one hand blindly to her throat.

“Oh, don’t torture me!” she murmured. “You make it so hard——”

“What—to believe me?” Lockwood demanded pitilessly.

“To disbelieve you. Yes, I do believe everything you’ve told me!” she
exclaimed impulsively. “In spite of what anybody says.”

“Remember, mine is not an impartial verdict,” he warned her. “It’s an
enemy’s word against Hanna. I’ve been trying to get him for years.
Perhaps you’ll think I’m little better than he is. I’m traveling under
a false name, like him. Yes, my real name isn’t Lockwood. I’ve thought
of nothing but murder for years. And—you’ll have to know—I’ve been in
prison.”

He did not know whether her wide eyes were full of horror or pity.

“It was a bank fraud. McGibbon—that is, Hanna—was my partner. He
cooked the books and statements, drew money that I never knew about.
It was my carelessness. I was no accountant, and I trusted him. I knew
nothing about it, but I was legally responsible, and I was arrested.
Hanna’s testimony helped convict me, and he and his confederate got
away with everything I owned in the world, while I went to jail.

“Listen, now. I’ve said too much not to say more. I’ll have to tell
you the whole wretched story, whether you want to hear it or not.”

He told it rapidly, briefly, almost fiercely.

“I came here like a wolf,” he said. “I was savage. I saw everything
red and black. And then——”

“You came here like a powerful friend,” said Louise. Through his
excitement and doubt he felt a quality in her look that made him
tingle. “I always believed in you. I think I’d believe in you through
anything. You’ve passed through years of horror. They’re over now. And
now——”

She halted inarticulately, and seemed to sketch a little gesture of
consolation.

“You’d believe me through anything, Louise?” he stammered. “You can’t
mean all that—all that——”

He found himself inarticulate, too. Groping for words, he took both
hands of Louise. She let him have them; she was close to him, with her
head thrown back. There was no resistance left in her—almost no life,
it seemed, except that her eyes lighted with a wonderful glow, and
when he kissed her he felt her lips cling passionately to his.

While that minute lasted the whole world spun round him. Then Louise
stepped away from him, with an intense, quick exclamation of fright.
Jackson Power was coming down the path among the pines. He had
certainly seen them.

CHAPTER XVII

COUNTERPLOT

If he had to be interrupted at that moment there was no man whom
Lockwood would rather have seen. Young Jackson came on slowly; he was
wearing his gay summer clothes, with his hands clenched in his coat
pockets, perhaps on a pistol, and his face looked wretched and
haggard.

He gave Lockwood a glance of mingled doubt and defiance, and turned
upon his sister.

“What you doin’ here, Louise?” he said. “You better go back to the
house.”

She hesitated, speechless, looking from one to the other of them in
terror.

“Yes, you’d better go, Miss Power,” Lockwood put in. “I want to have a
talk with your brother. He’s just the man I wanted to see—about the
things we were discussing. Don’t be afraid. It’ll be all right.”

Louise still hesitated, not reassured, and then started without a word
up the pathway. Lockwood saw her looking nervously over her shoulder
till she was out of sight.

“Now what’s all this about? How come I find you here like this with my
sister?” demanded Jackson, trying to be aggressive.

“Say, Jackson, do you want your sister to marry Hanna?” Lockwood
asked.

“Nuther him nor you! What’s that got to do with it? I heard of the
dirty trick you tried to work on him down in Mobile.”

“And you believed it?”

“’Course we did. Why not? Tom’d shoot you on sight if he saw you. Good
thing it was me come down here ’stead of him.”

“Well, it was all a d—d lie,” said Lockwood. He looked the boy over
with a smile. He felt too exultant, too excited in that moment to have
the slightest resentment. In spite of his bravado Jackson looked like
a defiant and frightened schoolboy, and Lockwood half smiled at him
with sympathy and liking.

“Sit down on that log,” he said. “I want to talk to you. You young
devil, what sort of scrape have you been getting into now? Of course,
I knew you on the road last night. What did you try to hold us up for?
You didn’t need the money.”

The boy sat down heavily on the log and took his hands out of his
pockets. His aggressiveness evaporated suddenly.

“I reckon you’ve got the whip hand of me,” he said sullenly. “’Course
I knowed you knew me when you turned me loose. Well, how much do you
want? Seems like I’ve got to buy off the hull earth.”

“You haven’t got to buy me, anyway. Who have you got to buy off? I
don’t want anything. I’m in this as your friend, and I believe you
need one mighty bad. See here! I’m going to tell you something. For
over three years I’ve been looking for Hanna to kill him.”

Jackson glanced up doubtfully, but with a flash of interest—possibly
of sympathy.

“What’s Hanna done to you?” he asked.

“Everything. He got all I had in the world, just as he’s trying to do
to you. He got me sent to prison on the top of it.”

Once more Lockwood told the story of his wrongs and his long hunt for
vengeance.

“Now I’ve got the brute cornered,” he finished, after describing his
escape from the house boat. “I’ve spoiled his game, and he knows it.
You talk to your sister. Take her opinion. She’s seen a bit of the
world. You don’t want Hanna to skin you alive, do you? Will you back
me up?”

“I reckon you’ve both got me—you an’ Hanna,” said Jackson wearily. “I
reckon it looked bad to you, last night, didn’t it? It wasn’t as bad
as it looked, though. My gun wasn’t loaded. I didn’t want to hold up
that thar car.”

“Then what the deuce did you do it for?”

Jackson scrutinized him with gloomy, boyish eyes, eyes so like those
of his sister that they moved Lockwood’s heart.

“Say, Lockwood, I always kinder took to you,” he said. “I couldn’t
hardly believe them yarns Hanna told about you. I dunno hardly who to
believe now. But I reckon I might as well tell you. Looks to me like
it’s got so bad now that it won’t end till somebody’s killed—you or me
or Hanna or Blue Bob.”

“So Blue Bob is in it,” Lockwood remarked.

“Sure. It’s him is at the bottom of it. He made me do that holdup. You
know I used to run with Bob’s gang a whole lot, when we was pore an’
lived up the river. I was up to most any sort of devilment them
days—didn’t have no more sense. Them boys sure was a rough crew. They
used to raid warehouses along the river. But I never was in any of
that.

“I reckon,” he went on after a dubious pause, “you’ve mebbe heerd
about Jeff Forder gettin’ killed. You ain’t? It was three years ago,
an’ they ain’t never yet found out who killed him. Jeff was a lazy,
no-’count piny-woods squatter from ’cross the river, an’ we was all
playin’ poker on Bob’s boat. The boys had considerable money that
night an’ I was a-winnin’ it. Jeff had brung over a gallon of corn
liquor, an’ liquor always did make Jeff right mean. First thing I
remember, Jeff an’ me got to cussin’ over a pot, an’ the next thing
was that everybody’s guns was all a-goin’ off at once. An’ there was
Jeff laid out stiff.

“I dunno who shot him. I know I pulled my gun an’ blazed like all the
rest. They all said it was me. I reckon likely it was. Anyways, they
told me to get outer the State an’ lay low. Bob said he’d keep it
dark. I went an’ hid in the swamps for a week, an’ most starved, an’
then went home. Nobody never was indicted for that killin’. Bob told
me they sunk the body in the river, and it was all safe. Mebbe I’d
never had no trouble if we hadn’t come into that money.

“After that, Bob kept hangin’ round. He touched me up for a hundred
dollars. I didn’t mind givin’ it to him. Shucks! Bob was an old
friend, an’ he’d got me outer a scrape, an’ what’s a hundred dollars?
But then he touched me up again, an’ he kept right on. At last I
kicked, an’ then he told me right out that he knew I killed Jeff
Forder, an’ I just nachrilly had to give him what he wanted.”

“So you’ve been buying him off ever since?”

“I sure have. He must have got two or three thousand outer me, all
together.”

“Did Hanna know anything about this?”

“Yes, he did. I dunno how. But he always stood by me. He helped me get
money outer the old man on some excuse or another, when I had to pay
Bob. Hanna surely helped me a whole lot. Bob used to come and blow the
horn for me to go down an’ meet him in the woods, and I had to blow
back. Lots of times I used to get Hanna to go to meet Bob ’stead of
me, ’cause I was afraid to be seen near that cursed boat. Yes, Hanna
sure helped me a whole lot there.”

“Yes, I reckon he did!” said Lockwood with irony. “I’ll bet Hanna got
his rake-off on that blackmail. But how did all this bring you to hold
up Craig’s car?”

“Why, Bob blowed for me yesterday and said he’d got to have a thousand
dollars. It was the last time, he said. They was all goin’ to Mobile,
an’ then way up the Warrior River, an’ clear outer the Alabama for
good. I was sure glad to hear it. But I didn’t have no thousand
dollars. I couldn’t raise it that day noways. Then Bob put me up to
stoppin’ the car. He said Williams was all alone, with twelve hundred
dollars on him, and it’d be dead easy. I was that desperate I didn’t
care much whether I got the money or Williams shot me. I ain’t seen
Bob since. I dunno what’s goin’ to happen when he finds I ain’t got
the thousand dollars, but I’m right in a corner now, an’ I’ll fight.”

“That’s the talk!” cried Lockwood. “I’ll see you through. Don’t be
afraid. That river gang would never lay any information against you.
They’re scared themselves of—why, look here!” he exclaimed, as a flash
of opportune memory came back to him. “I believe I’ve got it! Did you
carry an automatic pistol the night of that killing?”

“No, I had a .38 Smith & Wesson.”

“Then I’ll bet you never shot anybody. It seems that you were all
drunk. You don’t know what happened. But here’s what I heard on Bob’s
boat.” He repeated the snatches of accusation and recrimination he had
overheard.

“That’s right! Bob did have an automatic. He gave it to me afterward.
But I never knowed that it was an automatic bullet that killed Jeff,”
said Jackson. “Lord! if that’s only so! I’d be a free man again. I’ve
felt the rope around my neck for three years.”

“I’m sure it’s so. Bob gave you the automatic afterward, you said.
He’d have sworn that you’d had it all the time.”

“I’ll kill him for that!” Jackson burst out hotly.

“No, we don’t want him killed. But you can bluff him now; you’ve got
the cards. He’s got no hold over you. Tell him so. Get it all over.”

“Bob was expectin’ me to blow for him to-day,” said Jackson. “If I
don’t call him, he’ll sure come after me.”

“Call him up to-night, then. Do you know where he is? Is it far?”

“Not so very far. I could make him hear. But say! If I’m goin’ to meet
Bob’s gang, you’ve got to come with me. There’s liable to be
shootin’.”

“I’m afraid there is sure to be shooting as soon as Bob sees me,” said
Lockwood. He shrunk from going aboard that fatal house boat again.
“All right; I’ll go along. But I’d better keep back where they won’t
see me unless it’s necessary.”

“Bring a gun,” the boy advised. “And what about Hanna?”

“There’ll be no trouble with Hanna, if you stand by me. He’ll have to
give up all he’s got from you. He’s got the money put away somewhere.
Everything’ll be all right then.”

“What do you get out of it?” the boy grinned a little. “I reckon I
know what you’re hopin’ to get.”

“I reckon you do.”

“Well, if it all turns out as you say, you’ll sure deserve to get it.”
He reflected, dismissing this triviality from his mind. “I s’pose we
might as well do as you say, an’ get it over. I could meet you here at
the motor boat. No, we’d better take the car. The road’s bad, but I
could drive it with my eyes shut, I’ve been over it that often. The
place is only about two miles, an’ I’ll blow for Bob from there.”

“Can you meet me somewhere? I can’t come here.”

“I’ll get you at the camp. The road goes down that way. I’ll be there
about nine o’clock. And say!” he added, with a last suspicion, “if
there’s anything crooked about this, you an’ me don’t both come back
alive!”

* * * * *

Lockwood was waiting a long time before nine o’clock, walking slowly
up the trail as he waited, until he reached the main road. He was
afraid that Jackson would not come after all. He was relieved and
almost surprised when he saw the lights of the car glaring down the
road toward him.

“Glad you come up here,” said Jackson, stopping. “We’ll do better to
go round a little. This woods is no good after a rain.”

They went straight down the road, with its sand almost hard and dry
again after a day of blazing sun. Jackson drove at a recklessly fast
pace, smoking a cigarette, watching the road that glowed and vanished
under the lamp rays. A little mist was rising.

“I had trouble to get away,” said Jackson. “Sis wanted to know where I
was goin’. I wouldn’t tell her. Reckon she thought it was a poker game
somewhere. Hanna saw me, too, but he didn’t say nothin’.”

They passed a group of buildings, a deserted house and small barn. To
the left a dim opening appeared among the pines, apparently a mere
trail.

“Here’s where we turn off,” said the driver. “Lucky it’s a sandy
road.”

For a few hundred yards they went between pines, mostly scarred with
Craig’s turpentine mark. The wheels splashed through a tiny, unbridged
creek. The pines gave way to cypress and sycamore and bay trees, tall
black shapes whose branches almost met over the roadway. The wheels
ran noiselessly on the stoneless ground. The sky seemed black as the
earth; there was nothing but the long bars of brilliance cast through
the haze by the lamps, falling on unending tree trunks, peeled white
trunks, dark trunks overrun with creepers, tall spikes of bear grass,
jungles of titi.

Lockwood lost all knowledge of where he was going. The trail wound and
curved, but young Power seemed to know it like the palm of his hand.
Then the road rose a little. Lockwood caught the ghostly gleam of
trees marked with the turpentine gash, and Jackson stopped the car.

“We’re close there now,” he said. “Reckon we’ll leave the car here.
Better turn her round, though,” he added. “An’ I’ll leave the engine
runnin’. We might want to get away right quick.”

There was a little open ground at one side, and he ran the car off the
trail and turned it around. They left it behind a clump of small
pines, and groped forward on foot. Within fifty yards the road
widened. There was a breath of cooler air. A wide-open space lay
ahead. As he advanced he saw that it was the dark expanse of the
river.

There was a clear space of perhaps half an acre on the shore, closed
on three sides by dense woods, except where the road entered. It was a
small, seldom-used landing where cotton and sirup were occasionally
shipped, and a square, board warehouse stood on high posts close to
the water.

“This here’s where I generally meet ’em,” said Jackson in a low voice.
“Reckon Bob’s got his boat not fur away. I’ll give him a blow.”

From his pocket he produced the hunter’s horn, put it to his mouth and
blew a long, melodious blast that echoed for several minutes from
far-away over the woods. They listened. Away down the river a deep,
distant roar came as if in answer. Jackson laughed.

“Guess that ain’t him. That’s the boat comin’ up. Forgot she was due
to-night. Hark! There he is!”

A mile or two away—Lockwood could not guess the distance—another horn
blew musically, rising, falling, dying into silence.

“All right. Bob’ll be here right soon,” said the boy. “Better fix what
we’re a-goin’ to do.”

Lockwood walked back to the dark warehouse.

“I’ll stay back here,” he said. “I’ll hear and see what goes on, and
I’ll be by you in a second if you need me. Just let Blue Bob know that
he’s done fooling you, and he’ll give in.”

Jackson nodded somewhat dubiously, and walked out into the open space
before the warehouse, while Lockwood leaned against the corner of the
building, and they waited.

Miles away again they heard the roar of the river steamer. Looking
down, Lockwood caught a glimpse of her searchlight over the trees,
like sheet lightning on the sky. The river surged past at his feet,
running strong with the recent rains. Drift of plank and timber went
dimly by. Fifteen or twenty minutes passed nervously. They seemed an
hour. Jackson had lighted a cigarette, and walked up and down as he
smoked, invisible but for the moving spark of fire. Then there was a
faint, low call from the edge of the woods. The boy stopped sharply,
answered it; and then a trail of moving shapes came out into the
clearing. Bob had brought his whole boat’s crew.

Jackson stepped forward to meet them. There was a low mutter.

“No, I ain’t got it,” he heard Jackson say.

There was an explosion of oaths. Some one went back to the woods, came
back with something, struck a match, and instantly there was a flare
of light. He had stuck the match into a turpentine cup half full of
gum, and it burned with the fierce flare of a torch, rolling black
smoke and casting a red glow on the woods and the three sinister
figures that fronted young Power.

Lockwood stepped farther back behind the building. He could not come
near enough now to hear ordinary talk, but he could at any rate see.
The four men had their heads together, talking rapidly. He saw Jackson
gesticulate defiance. The group surged apart. Tensely ready, Lockwood
drew his automatic, and then—he did not know how it happened—half a
dozen shots seemed to crash at once.

Jackson jumped back, his hand spouting flashes. Some one knocked over
the turpentine cup. Darkness fell, except for the burning streams of
liquid gum that flowed over the sand. Lockwood leaped out of his
ambush. As he did so, swift as machine-gun fire, four shots flashed
from the edge of the woods. In the flashes he saw Hanna’s face plainly
behind the pistol. Jackson spun round and dropped. He struggled to get
up, tumbled again and lay still.

Lockwood had instantly turned his own pistol on the ambushed murderer,
now invisible. He fired three—four times into the darkness where he
had seen Hanna’s face, running forward as he fired, into the light of
the gun that smoked and flamed on the ground. He had forgotten the
river men for a moment, till he heard a roar of amazement and fury
from Blue Bob.

The next moment the darkness was criss-crossed by gun flashes,
springing from shadowy hands. Lockwood found himself firing wildly at
those leaping flames. Something knocked the pistol out of his grasp
with a shock that almost paralyzed his arm. At the same instant there
was a fierce burn on the top of his shoulder.

He dropped to his knees, confused and stunned. He groped dimly with
his left hand for the pistol. A clump of weeds caught from the
creeping fire and flared suddenly high. In the swift illumination he
saw Jackson’s body lying still with outflung arms, the face
unrecognizable with blood. He saw the river pirates ten yards back,
and they saw him. There was a simultaneous crash of pistol shots. Sand
flew into his face. He made a dive back toward the warehouse, and the
brief blaze of the weeds went out.

Lockwood dodged around to the rear of the building in the pitch dark.
He heard Bob shouting to relight the gum cup; and then the loose
ground caved under his feet, and he plunged unexpectedly. Water went
over him. The swift inshore eddy dragged him out, rolling him over and
over. Half blinded and dazed, he saw a great flare of light arising on
the shore; the torch had been lighted again. Instinctively he ducked
under, holding his breath. Coming up, the bulk of the warehouse shut
off the light. He was getting his wits back now, and he struck out,
aiding the swift current with his arms and legs.

His right arm was still numbed, however, and of little use. His wet
clothing weighted him heavily. Desperately anxious to get out of
pistol range of shore, he swam with all his strength, and then
something went over him in the dark, crushing him down, scratching his
face.

He fought his way up through a tangle of wet twigs, clutched a large
branch, and found himself clinging to the branchy top of a dead tree
that was drifting fast down the stream. Dimly distinguishing its
outline, he worked himself along to the trunk, got his head and
shoulders on it, and rested.

He heard the deep, distant bellow of the river steamer again. On the
shore, now a hundred yards away, he saw a group of men bending over
something on the earth, in the lurid glare of the gum torch. He could
not see whether Hanna was among them; he thought not.

The scene went out of sight as the current swept him behind a wooded
point. It was the end of poor Jackson. If he were not shot dead he
would be presently finished; and his body, too, would go rolling down
the Alabama eddies. It meant the end of Hanna, too. Lockwood had a
vague plan of heading a lynching party, if he ever got ashore. But
Hanna’s downfall had cost too much.

The tree drifted and swirled about on the twisting currents. He clung
to it for life, for he felt now that he would surely go to the bottom
if he let go. Twice again he heard the tremendous nearing blast of the
steamboat, and occasionally saw the wavering, white ray of her
searchlight playing among the treetops. He was numbed and cold and
half stupefied; and clung to the treetop with the instinct of
desperation.

He was roused suddenly. A blinding glare like the sun was turned into
his eyes. It shifted; down the next curve below he saw the white bulk
of the steamer, magnified by the mist, like a vast mass of
incandescence, poking out the long tentacle of her searchlight. She
glowed all over with electric light, reflected from her white paint,
and on either side she carried the low, black bulk of a loaded barge.

Lockwood thought of trying to signal, but they could not see him
without turning the searchlight on him again. The crash of her stern
paddles drowned the shout he set up. She might pass him—she might run
him down—she might grind him up in her paddles. He could do nothing to
affect his destiny. He watched the white bulk looming larger, hearing
the increasing crash of her machinery.

For a moment he thought she was going right over him. The bluff prow
seemed aimed straight at his head. Then she veered a little. He could
see the pilot high in his glass box; he caught the red flash from her
furnace on the lower deck; and then she surged ponderously by, and the
bow of the left-hand barge brushed smashing through the twigs of his
tree.

He made a scrambling leap. The side of the barge was not two feet out
of water, and he caught the rough planking, held on, and dragged
himself aboard. Nobody was on the barge. He dropped behind the heaped
crates and barrels and lay there.

The boat crashed and wallowed up the river. He saw the warehouse at
that fatal landing as they passed it. No light showed there now. The
tragedy was over. He fancied the murderous scattering in the darkness.
In an hour Blue Bob’s house boat would be driving full speed for
Mobile. He did not care about Blue Bob, but he was determined that
this should be the end of Hanna’s rope.

Within fifteen minutes the boat blew for Rainbow Landing, still two or
three miles away. Lockwood’s head was clearing, his strength coming
back. He lay quietly in the dark behind the freight until the boat
rounded in to the warehouse opposite the scarlet-striped bluff. When
the gangplank was down he made his way through the roustabouts and
went ashore, without any one having detected his stolen ride.

CHAPTER XVIII

RESURRECTION

He slipped through the warehouse and up the hill to the road. It was
intensely dark, but he knew the way this time. He hurried, full of the
driving energy of revenge. Then for the first time the horror came
upon him of the difficulty of going to the Power house with the story
of their son’s death. Jackson had been the favorite of his sister and
of his father. It would look as if he had led the boy into an ambush.
But it could not be helped; the story would have to be told. Within an
hour they would have a posse out.

It was late for that country district, but he saw unexpected lights in
the houses he passed. From Ferrell’s store a couple of riders dashed
out and tore past him, shouting something back in the darkness. A
buggy drove out from a farm lane and turned in the same direction
rapidly, not hearing Lockwood’s shout for a lift.

He pounded along the road, short of breath, dreading more and more to
reach the end, but at last came in sight of the Power gateway.

He had expected to find the house dark, but it was all ablaze with
lights. In the front yard the lights of a big motor car glared, and he
saw several horses tied to trees before the house. Dim figures were
moving on the gallery before the lighted door and windows.

Amazed, but too breathless to think, he ran through the yard and up
the steps. There were rifles leaning on the gallery rail. The hall
seemed to be full of men; he guessed instantly that his news had
somehow arrived before him. Nearly all were men he knew. There was a
sudden dead silence, and every face turned toward him with a look of
startled incredulity, as if his appearance were something
supernatural.

It checked the words on Lockwood’s lips. Puzzled, he took one step
into the hall, and almost collided with Tom Power, hatted and dressed
for riding, with a great revolver slung at his belt. For one second
Tom also stared open-mouthed; then he clutched Lockwood’s throat with
a leap, crushing him back against the wall.

“You d—d murderer! Where’s Jackson?” he snarled between his teeth.

It broke the spell. The crowd surged forward, with a growl like an
awakened beast. Lockwood wrenched away Tom’s grip on his neck.

“What’s the matter?” he began chokingly. “I came to tell you—Jackson’s
shot. I came to raise a posse.”

“The nerve he had to come back here!” somebody said at the edge of the
crowd.

“Saves us a heap of trouble,” was the reply.

“We’ve got the posse,” said Tom grimly. “You needn’t bother about no
posse. All you need’s a rope.”

“Here’s the rope,” some one called out. Old Henry Power pushed his way
in, also belted with a gun. His eyes were bloodshot; he looked
wrinkled and aged, but as deadly inflexible as fate.

“Do it all in order, boys,” he said. “He’ll git what’s due him. Let
him say what he wants ter.”

Lockwood cast his eye desperately over the mob. He wondered where
Louise was—doubtless shut in her room. He looked for some members of
the turpentine camp. They were all his friends, but he saw none of
them.

“You’re making some awful mistake!” he cried. “I didn’t shoot Jackson.
I saw it all. It was Hanna—Hanna and Blue Bob’s gang. Give me a
chance, won’t you? Phone over for Charley Craig.”

“We don’t need none of the turpentine men in this,” said Tom. “Look
for his gun, some of you-all.”

“He ain’t got no gun,” a man reported after exploring. Lockwood’s
automatic, in fact, still lay by the river shore.

“Must have throwed it away. Never mind. Git him outer this.”

“Plenty of good trees right in the yard,” a voice called.

“No—no, not here. We’ll take him down the road a ways,” said Tom
hastily.

He was hustled out of the gallery. Lockwood had never before met the
hostility of a mob. It is something that cows and crushes the spirit.
He lost his head; he tried stumblingly to tell his story as they were
shoving him down the steps. Nobody paid him any attention. His words
sounded weak even to himself. He saw a man carrying a heap of loose
rope over his arm.

At that moment Hanna came hastily out from the rear hall, wearing hat
and leggings, and carrying a rifle. At sight of Lockwood he stopped
dead, a sort of wild amazement on his face, changing to a fire of
victory and vindictiveness. He crowded forward close to the prisoner.

“Where’d you get him?” he exclaimed. “He didn’t come here himself?” He
thrust his face close up to Lockwood’s. “Thought you played a sharp
trick!” he said in a piercing undertone. “But I knew I’d beat you!
I’ve got you on the end of a rope now—you fool!”

Lockwood faced those malevolent eyes, and their fierce exultation
whipped his scattered wits together.

“Listen, all of you men!” he shouted. “This is the man that killed
Jackson—this Hanna here. He was ambushed by the river; he fired four
shots. I saw him as plain as I do now. What lie has he told you?”

“Tell him. Tell him, Hanna. Let him hear what’s agin’ him,” said two
or three voices.

“Well, I was ambushed there sure enough,” said Hanna easily. “I’d seen
Jackson starting down the river road in the car with this fellow, and
I guessed he was up to no good. So I got a horse and rode after them.
You-all saw me go,” nodding to Tom and his father. “I wasn’t long
behind ’em, but I wasn’t quick enough. Just as I came to the landing
this fellow shot Jackson twice in the back, and slung his body
straight into the river.

“I yelled and emptied my gun at him. Looks like I touched him, too,
for he slipped or jumped into the river himself. I couldn’t see
anything of either of ’em. It was pitch dark. I got on my horse and
rode back here quick as I could to get some men out. I left the car. I
reckon it’s there yet. I ought to have brought it, but I was badly
rattled. I guess that’s proof enough to hang him, ain’t it?”

“Proof?” echoed Lockwood, with the energy of final desperation. “It’s
his word against mine. That man would do anything—he’d swear to
anything, to put me out of the way. I know too much about him—I’ve
been after him too long—I’ve got evidence to send him to prison for
the rest of his life, and he knows it.

“Do you know who this man is, Henry Power, and you, Tom? He’s a
professional criminal, a crook, a confidence man. I’ve got his record.
He’s been bleeding you ever since he’s been here, charging you double
for everything you bought, planning to get your last cent with his
fake oil stock. I found out all about that oil stock. Telephone to
Mobile before you doubt me. It isn’t the first time he’s played this
game. It’s his trade.”

He turned fiercely upon Hanna, who was listening with a fixed half
smile.

“You don’t know me, do you? But do you remember Melbourne, Virginia,
and the real-estate business that you wrecked there? Do you remember
the papers you forged and the lies you swore to get me jailed while
you got away with everything I had? I’ve been after you ever since. I
followed you all over this continent. I knew you the minute I saw you
here. I ought to have shot you that minute. Do you know me now, Ed
McGibbon?”

The smile had died from Hanna’s face. He stepped slightly back, his
jaw half dropping, staring as if a ghost had risen before his eyes.
Every man’s gaze was turned on him now. He made an obvious effort to
recover himself, moistening his lips.

“He did give me a start,” he said. “Yes, I know him, but I thought he
was dead years ago. He was once in partnership with me up North, but
he turned out a crook and a grafter, and he got into jail, as he says.
I did all I could to save him. Looks like he’s been going from bad to
worse ever since.”

“You liar!” Lockwood vociferated. “Look at him, men. Look at his face!
He daren’t front me. Get the whole story—both sides—or put me up
against him right now with a gun—with a knife——”

“This is foolishness!” Hanna broke in. “I ain’t going to fight a
murderer. I saw him shoot young Jackson. You’re not going to let him
get away with that, are you? Where’ll we hang him up?”

Nobody replied. The crowd gazed curiously at both men. The furious
vehemence of Lockwood’s attack had made its impression. Even Tom hung
silent, fumbling with his pistol butt. In the hush sounded the beating
of a motor car traveling up the road.

“Who’s that comin’?” some one spoke.

The car crawled laboriously, it seemed, through deep sand, and turned
in Power’s gate. It wabbled drunkenly as it came up the drive. The
glare of its lamps flashed across the group of men as it curved,
steering wildly as if it was going to run through the lynching party.
It stopped with a jerk. Lockwood saw that there was only one man in
it, huddled over the wheel. He made an unsteady effort to rise, to get
out, and fell almost doubled over the door.

“My Lawd A’mighty!” muttered the nearest man, in an awed voice.

“Jackson!” shouted old Henry, with a tremendous oath, rushing at the
car. He tore open the door, threw his arms around the collapsed
figure, half lifted it out, with broken, blasphemous ejaculations.
Lockwood was just behind him. He caught a glimpse of the hatless,
pallid face of the boy, grotesquely streaked with blood, the wet, torn
clothing. The crowd surged up behind them, forgetting both Lockwood
and Hanna in the amazement of this apparition that was like a
resurrection from the dead.

Tom, his arm about his brother’s shoulder, was crying in his face:

“Who done it, Jackson? Who done it? Who shot you?”

The boy’s face worked. His eyes opened, and he rubbed his wet sleeve
across them.

“Got yere!” he mumbled with the ghost of a chuckle. “They done throwed
me in the river, but I got out. Knowed I could drive home ef I could
start the d—d cyar. Hello, Lockwood!” catching sight of him. “Did they
git you, too?”

“Not quite,” said Lockwood, speaking distinctly in the boy’s face.
“Tell them who shot you, Jackson. Could you see?”

“Sure I seen him,” said Jackson faintly. “Seen him in the gun flash. I
seen——By glory! thar he is now!”

He had caught sight of Hanna’s scared face as the crowd shifted. He
seemed to collect himself with a vast effort, and swung up his arm,
the hand closed, as if he fancied it still held a gun. For two or
three seconds Hanna faced that unsteady, wavering arm; then his nerve
broke. He gave a swift glance to right and left, ducked under the arms
of the men next him, and bolted, disappearing toward the rear of the
house.

There was an instant yelling rush in pursuit. Gun flashes split the
darkness. Lockwood was left alone with Henry Power, still supporting
Jackson’s almost inert body.

“Must get him into the house—put him to bed,” he said.

Between them they carried the boy into the hall and up the stairs. On
the upper floor a door opened and Louise came out, carrying a lamp.
She looked drained of life and color, dead-white, her eyes wide and
liquid and terrified.

“It’s all right,” Lockwood said quickly. “Your brother’s back—not
badly hurt, I think. We’ll get him to bed. Hanna’s bolted.
Everything’s going to be all right now. Will you telephone for a
doctor?”

Louise gave him a wonderful, luminous look, seemed to try to speak,
and choked.

They laid Jackson on his bed. He had a wound through the upper left
arm; a bullet had torn one ear and gashed his cheek; making a terrible
bleeding, and there was a bloody furrow across the top of his head,
which probably had most to do with his state. But none of these hurts
appeared serious.

As Lockwood bent over the patient he heard down on the bayou the
rapid, sharp explosions of a motor boat, diminishing to a distant
drumming.

CHAPTER XIX

THE LABYRINTH

The men were straggling back, talking loudly and excitedly in the
darkness. As he ran down the stairs Lockwood met Tom on the gallery,
hot, furious, defeated.

“How is he?” asked Tom.

“Jackson’s not so bad,” returned Lockwood, “Think he’ll be all right.
We’ve phoned for the doctor. Hanna got away?”

“Yes, in the motor boat. He was a-scootin’ down the bayou ’fore we
could git near him. But we’ll git him!” He hesitated. “Reckon there’s
all kinds of apologies comin’ to you, Lockwood. I’m mighty sorry——”

“Sure, we’re all mighty sorry,” put in Postmaster Ferrell. “We
never——”

“Never mind about that! I know where he’s gone,” said Lockwood
instantly. “He’s after his friends—Blue Bob and the house boat, down
the river. Can’t we get another motor boat?”

“Nearest motor boat’s at Foster’s Mills,” said Ferrell. “It’s eleven
miles.”

“Get into the car!” cried Tom. “We can git there ’fore he does. Come
on, Lockwood. Got a gun?”

Somebody handed him a revolver. He jumped into the front seat beside
Tom. Three men piled into the rear—Jim Ferrell, the son of the
postmaster, one of the Fenway boys who had played poker at that house,
and a third man whom he did not know.

Tom drove at a reckless clip. Down the hill they went, over the creek,
up past the post office to the crossroads, and then turned south down
a road that Lockwood had never before traveled. Leaning over, he
sketched his story half breathlessly into Tom’s ear, the words jolted
from his teeth by the speed of their travel.

“I dunno why that young fool didn’t tell me the fix he was in,” said
Tom. “Between us, we’d have fixed Blue Bob. Hanna was playin’ us all
for suckers, seems like.”

The road seemed to be following the river. Twice Lockwood caught a
glimpse of the wide, black water. Halfway, and a tire blew out. It
took ten feverish minutes to place the spare one. They rushed through
an endless swamp, where the road wound in short, dangerous curves, and
then came in sight of Foster’s Mills—a little village of cabins and
frame houses around the great sheds of the sawmills, all utterly dark.

Springing out, Tom rushed up to Foster’s own dwelling and beat on the
door. A window opened; there was a startled exclamation, and in two
minutes Foster came out at a run, in shirt and trousers.

“Sure you-all can have the boat!” he exclaimed, starting toward the
river. “Here, this way! I heerd something goin’ down the river with
engines, I reckon not quarter of an hour ago.”

“A motor boat?” cried Lockwood.

“Mebbe. Sounded heavy for a motor boat, though. I didn’t look out, and
it was too dark anyway to see nothin’.”

“Bob’s house boat, you bet!” exclaimed Ferrell.

“Never mind. She can’t make six miles an hour,” cried Lockwood.

“We’ll never find nothin’ in this dark—an’ there’s fog, too!” Tom
murmured. “Well—come along!”

Packed together in the boat, they put out, with Power at the wheel.
The glaring lights of the car on the landing went dim. There was a
little mist lying low on the water, mixing with the darkness, making
obscurity doubly blank. The river surged and gurgled about them almost
invisibly, and overhead the stars looked few and lightless.

“Not a bit of use in this,” said Tom, after running a couple of miles.
“We can’t see nothin’, and they’ll hear us comin’, and just lay up by
the bank and let us go by.”

He stopped the engine. The boat drifted, and in the silence they all
listened, but vainly, for the sound of another motor.

“But by daylight they’ll be all the way to Mobile,” Lockwood objected.

“I reckon not. I reckon they’ll be makin’ for the delta. That’s where
them river pirates always hides out,” said Fenway.

Power steered toward the left bank, skirted it a little way, and ran
in at a place where there seemed to be high and dry land. They
scrambled ashore silently, with a sense of being checked. Two of the
men groped for wood and lighted a smudge to keep off the mosquitoes.
Tom sat down humped at the foot of a tree, his chin almost on his
knees.

Lockwood was tired, hungry, overstrung, but he felt no need of either
sleep or rest. He walked up and down in the darkness for some time,
smoking intermittently, anxious only for light that they might go
ahead. Flashes from his past misery and hatred passed over him, mixing
feverishly with his visions of the future. He remembered the wonderful
look Louise had given him; he remembered Hanna’s exultant, vindictive
face. Both filled him with the same passion of action. He was boiling
with exultation and vindictiveness himself.

“What was that you was sayin’ about havin’ a feud with Hanna up
North?” Tom asked him suddenly. “Seems like he swindled you.”

“Swindled? He cleaned me out of everything I had in the world!”
Lockwood cried. “It wasn’t a feud. I’ve just been trailing him to kill
him. Hanna said I was under a false name, but it was only a guess. He
didn’t know who I was.”

He poured out the whole story in passionate excitement, concealing
nothing. The men came up from the smudge to listen. He did not care
now who heard it. It was a relief to get the black flood off his
heart. His audience listened in grave silence. They knew what
blood-quarrels meant.

“Well, your time’s comin’ right close now to git him,” said Tom.
“Seems like Hanna has done us all, but I reckon he’s done you wuss’n
anybody. We’ve got to git Blue Bob, too. I cain’t think why young
Jackson never told me that Bob was worryin’ him. None of us ever
believed he had any hand in killin’ Jeff Forder, and it’s so long ago
now that nobody’d have cared ef he had.”

“Yes, I reckon this puts Blue Bob off’n the river for good,” said
Ferrell. “We’ve had more’n enough of that house boat hangin’ round
Rainbow Landing.”

The excitement of the talk died out in feeble words and silences.
Young Fenway was snoring, lying face down on pine needles. Lockwood
felt of a sudden desperately weary, and lay down. He did not think he
could sleep, but he slept. He roused two or three times from vague
nightmares, and slept again, till he was awakened by Ferrell shaking
his shoulder.

Within five minutes the boat was thudding down the river again.
Daylight was in the air. The mist had vanished even before the dawn,
and clung only in pale streaks on the water or lay white over the
great swamps ashore. For half a mile they went straight downward, and
then Tom steered across to investigate a creek mouth where a boat
might lie hidden.

But there was nothing in it. Down they went again, sweeping around one
after another of the vast curves of the river, empty always of life,
looking as deserted as it must have looked when De Soto’s canoes first
sailed it.

“They’ve sure made for the delta,” he heard repeated more than once.

They had lost time in zigzagging investigations from one shore to
another, and it was still more than half an hour before they actually
came in sight of the low swamps of the delta itself, where the
Tombigbee River joined the Alabama, both streams splitting into a
multiplicity of channels, bayous, creeks, flowing sometimes in
opposite directions, through a wild tangle of swamp. Few white men
claimed to know the delta, and few men had explored it except some
half-wild negro hunters, and the house boat men who made a refuge of
its intricacies.

The river swept away to the west in a great curve. A second channel
split away, possibly at one time the main channel of the ever-shifting
river. It was a crooked, deep, sluggish backwater now, flowing between
white, dead timber, and a jungle of titi, black gum, and bay tree. Tom
surveyed it dubiously.

“Blue Bob’ll shore get off the main channel,” said Fenway. “Looks like
this is just his place.”

He steered into the shallow of the swamp. Fog still seemed to linger
here, with a heavy, malarial smell. Great curtains of gray, Spanish
moss hung over the rotting channel. Blackened snags of cypress thrust
up from the bottom, and mosquitoes attacked them in clouds, with the
worse-biting yellow-flies.

No boat was anywhere in sight. A little farther a second channel
seemed to open, but it extended only a hundred feet, and ended in a
mud bank where half a dozen snakes aired themselves. The tortuous
waterway doubled on itself. The woods ceased. They came into a deep,
still channel between a great tract of tall weeds and reeds, backed by
forests of vivid pine.

There was no concealment for anything there. The Power boat rushed
through one cross channel after another to the edge of the woods
again. At the very margin, something swift and invisible went tingling
through the air so close that everybody ducked. Whack! it struck a
tree.

“Where’d that come from?” cried Tom, stopping the boat instantly.

Nobody had heard the report, drowned by the noise of their own
engines; but as they listened tensely they heard the diminishing
thud-thud of a motor launch. Impossible to say where it was. The sound
seemed to spread and echo indefinitely in that maze of trees and
water. It was dying away. Tom started the boat fast ahead into the
swamp. Within fifty yards the crooked channel was blocked by fallen
timber. He turned with difficulty, ran back to the great meadow, and
drove through the crisscross channels seeking a way out. He found one
and they raced through it; but the distant thudding had long become
silent, and now not one of them had any idea in which direction it had
gone.

“Might hunt through this d—d place till you lost yourself, an’ find
nothin’!” young Ferrell growled.

For nearly three hours the boat wound in and out this ghastly
labyrinth of swamp and bayou and jungle. It was certain now that the
enemy was somewhere in the delta, but it seemed to Lockwood that
anybody with the slightest cunning need never be caught in that place
at all.

The other men, bred on the Alabama as they were, were almost as much
at a loss as himself. Not one of them had ever explored the delta so
deeply; perhaps no other white man’s boat at all had threaded it so
far. Time and again they had to turn back; continually they diverged
into fresh, mysterious tangles. They came out once more into the
Alabama, went clear around the tip of the “delta” and some way up the
Tombigbee, then cut into a wide, briskly flowing stream that seemed to
connect the two rivers.

It really brought them to the Alabama again. A bayou diverged from it
parallel to the latter river, a hundred feet of swamp between them.
The bayou crooked like an elbow; it was impossible to see far, and Tom
steered the boat into it. Both banks were grown up with thickets of
titi and bay tree, tangled with rattan and trumpet flower, and they
thumped slowly down the muddy water, peering ahead to see around the
bend.

They were just at the tip of the elbow, when Ferrell threw up his arm,
pointing at the shore alongside.

“What’s that yonder?” he yelled. “Stop her—it’s——”

Lockwood’s startled eye caught the loom of something gray and
houselike behind the screen of shrubbery. He saw the unmistakable
varnished glimmer of the motor boat; and then all the greenery
suddenly spurted smoke.

The air was full of a whiz and tingle. One—two bullets ripped the
boat’s side. The Fenway boy reeled over, clutching his arm that ran
blood. Ferrell let off both barrels of his shotgun wildly, and Tom,
putting on full speed, ran ahead out of the storm and down the bayou.
Dropping revolver shots followed them, falling astern. A hundred yards
down Power eased the boat, drawing close inshore for shelter.

“Well, we’ve done found ’em!” he said grimly.

The boat had two holes through her, but Fenway was the only casualty.
His was not a serious wound, but it was his right arm, and he was
henceforth out of the fighting.

“They’d ’a’ let us run right by ef we hadn’t seen ’em,” said Ferrell.
“Just one second, I seen the boat plain.”

“I saw the motor boat. Hanna’s there,” said Lockwood. “We’ve got
them—but how are we going to get at them?”

Their boat had been drifting slightly, and was now a good hundred and
fifty yards from the point where they had been fired at. Tom headed
slowly out into the channel to reconnoiter. Instantly a high-velocity
bullet sang overhead, another zipped into the water just astern, and
the boat hastily backed into the cover of the shore again. Most of the
shooting had been from revolvers, but there was evidently at least one
rifle aboard Blue Bob’s craft.

“If we try to rush ’em they’ll put us outer business before we kin git
near ’em,” said Power anxiously. “We ain’t got but four men fit to
shoot now, and they’ve mebbe got five.”

“Couldn’t we get around behind them—take them from the land side?”
Lockwood suggested.

Beside them the swamp was too tangled and boggy to land. Tom let the
boat drift down for fifty yards, crossed the channel with a rush,
drawing another shot from above, and sped around a curve out of range.
After a dozen twists the bayou wound back to the Alabama again. They
coasted up the low shore, a wall of shrubbery and creepers, and Tom
ran in beside a fallen tree.

“They must be just about opposite yere,” he said.

Lockwood was nearest the log, and stepped upon it, forcing his way in
through the thicket. At the end of the log he jumped upon a partly dry
spot of ground. Beyond lay a welter of wooded bog. The house boat
might lie on the bayou across this jungle, but nothing could be seen
of it.

Tom had edged his way in after Lockwood.

“Can’t git through here—no use tryin’,” he said, after an expert
glance. “Liable ter go clean outer sight in the mud.”

“Couldn’t we set fire to it, and burn them out?” Lockwood was inspired
to suggest. “The wind’s blowing the right way.”

Tom looked up at the tangled treetops.

“Dunno as it’d burn—too wet. Might smoke ’em some, though.” He glanced
overhead again, and half grinned. “No harm to try. It’s a good deal
dead cypress and gum tree through here, after all. Pull down all the
dry branches an’ vines you kin reach, an’ pile ’em against this here
dead cypress.”

While Lockwood was doing it, Tom went back to the boat and secured a
tin cup of gasoline from the tank. He poured this on the dead tree,
lit a match and tossed it.

There was a flash like an explosion. Fire rushed up to the top of the
tree and spread in a sheet. The hanging rick of moss and dead creepers
seemed to catch like paper. A roaring flame went through the treetops
like a blast, driven by the light breeze, and the two men scrambled
hastily back to the boat with flakes of fire falling around them.

From the interior of the jungle came an intense popping and crackle.
Volumes of smoke rolled up, mixed with jets of light flame, but it did
not last long. The force of the conflagration seemed to fail; the
smoke lessened.

“Gone out. I thought as how it was too wet,” growled Power.

It was not out, though. Smoke still rose persistently though not so
dense; the sharp popping of twigs had died to a low crackle. Lockwood
went ashore and looked through the thickets again. The whole jungled
interior was dense with smoke, but he could see flickers of flame
creeping along the cypress trunks and through the branches. The light
stuff had burned away in one flash, but the dead treetops had caught.

He went back and reported. If the solid wood got well burning the fire
would go right across to the house boat.

“They’ll have to cut loose an’ clear out. Let’s get back to where we
was before, an’ watch,” said Ferrell.

Tom turned the boat, ran downstream, and into the twisting channel
again, back to the spot where they had first stopped. By this time the
fire was making visible headway. Clouds of smoke rolled over the
position of the ambushed house boat and went drifting up the bayou.

Trusting to the smother of smoke, Tom moved the boat up closer, and
closer still, without drawing a shot. In the burning woods a tree
crashed down heavily. Snakes came wriggling out from all directions,
and hurried into the water. Once fairly going, the dry trees burned
furiously, and already they could see the orange glow through the
smoke at the very spot where the house boat must be lying.

“They’ll slip away upstream. We’d never hear nor see them in all this
smoke and noise!” Lockwood exclaimed.

A blazing tree fell crashing through the titi thickets, half its
length in the bayou. Fire was streaming out in plain sight now.

“I dunno!” muttered Tom. “No—git ready, boys! There she comes!”

Something shouldered heavily out through the smoke cloud. It was the
house boat, catching the current and swinging slowly about. She was on
fire at both ends, and the cabin roof was ablaze. She came down like a
huge, dying bulk, turning helplessly end for end, and there was no man
in sight aboard her.

A couple of burned rope ends trailed alongside her. There was no sign
of any motor boat. She sagged across the bayou, grounded on a mud
bank, swung her stern around, and lay there, crackling and blazing.

Tom Power exploded in a loud curse, and ran the boat up to her. He
jumped aboard, revolver in hand, but boarding was hardly needed. The
decks were clear, and nothing could have lived in that smoke-filled
cabin.

CHAPTER XX

DEEP WATER

With a furious face Power drove the motor boat up through the choke of
the smoke clouds, leaving the deserted house boat ablaze on its mud
bank. Blackened and half suffocated, they came to the upper entrance
of the bayou, into the channel that joined the two rivers, and looked
this way and that.

Nothing was in sight either way. Tom suddenly silenced the engine.
They were well away from the roar and crackle of the fire. A dead hush
fell, and through it they heard a faint, distant beating, faint and
elusive as the beat of a dying heart.

“That’s up the Alabama! They’ve headed up again!” everybody spoke at
once.

The turn of the bayou checked the view. Tom started again at full
speed and tore out into the wide water of the Alabama. Nothing was
visible for the half mile they could see. They rushed up this reach
and around the bend, and caught one glimpse of a flying black object
rounding the next bend, a couple of miles ahead.

“There they go! I knowed they was headin’ up!” cried Ferrell.

“But there wasn’t no five men in that boat. One or mebbe two at the
outside,” said Tom.

“Hanna’s put the rest ashore. They’re scattering,” exclaimed Lockwood.
“Never mind. It’s Hanna we want.”

“Dunno ef we kin git him!” returned Tom. “That boat he’s got is the
fastest thing on this river, and she ain’t carryin’ half the load we
are.”

But he put Foster’s boat to all the speed she was capable of. She was
certainly a heavier, clumsier, less powerful craft than Power’s racer.
Weighted as she was, she sat low in the water; sheets of dirty spray
drove back over her as the waves wallowed from her bow. When they
swung round the next curve there was no boat in the visible mile of
water ahead.

Lockwood had a sudden suspicion that Hanna might have taken to the
woods. He remembered his own escape. The man might be making for the
railway on the west shore. But probably he had no money. All his
possessions were at the Power house. Was it possible that Hanna was
doubling back to Rainbow Landing?

There was no telling—no guessing, even. But the rounding of the next
bend still showed no boat ahead.

For half an hour they tore along, half through, half under the water,
while no living thing appeared on the river, nor any human being along
the shore. Foster’s landing came in sight again. The tall chimney was
smoking now, and there was a shrieking of saws from the mill sheds.
They had been seen coming, and Foster himself was at the landing with
news.

“Missed him, didn’t you?” he cried. “A motor boat went up past here
not half an hour ago—going lickety-split, water flyin’ clear over her.
Only one man in her. Your man wouldn’t go back to Rainbow Landing,
would he?”

“I never thought of it!” exclaimed Power, looking startled. “Jackson’s
there, alone with sister and dad.”

“Hanna’s hunted and desperate. He’d do anything now for money—or
revenge,” said Lockwood.

Tom jumped out of the boat.

“Where’s that car we left here?”

The car had been run under a shed. Its gasoline tank had to be
replenished, its radiator filled. It was ten minutes before they were
headed up the road again, leaving the wounded Fenway boy at the mill.
But now they had a speed machine that no boat could match.

If Tom had driven recklessly on the way down, he drove murderously
now. A negro with a mule got out of the way just in time, and stood
trembling and swearing. A dozen times the car seemed about to turn
turtle, but it was heavy, and heavily loaded, and rebalanced itself.

They reached the main road that led to the landing, and swept into it
with a skidding swerve. A light car was jogging on ahead. They passed
it like a flash, Ferrell leaning out, shouting and gesticulating for
it to follow. The two men in it did speed up in pursuit, but they were
hopelessly outdistanced.

The Power house came in sight, peaceful among its great trees in the
blaze of sunshine. The yard was empty, no one in sight. Tom swept in
the open gate and up to the house. Jerking open the doors they
scrambled out of the car, and Lockwood was immediately aware of a
thundering from the upper part of the house like some one beating on a
closed door, and then an unmistakable scream.

With a rush they went over the gallery, into the hall, up the stairs.
A shot crashed. Lockwood saw Louise at the door of a room; she had a
revolver half raised in her hand, and he caught a glimpse of a man
bolting toward the rear of the hall.

“Down there! The back way!” Louise was screaming.

The other three men rushed down the hall, toward the back stairs.
Lockwood alone had the inspiration to plunge back down the front
stairs again. As he darted out the door he saw Hanna running forward
from the rear entrance, carrying a large leather club bag.

Lockwood fired twice, hurriedly, excitedly, missing him clean. Then
the pursuers poured out from the rear door also with a yell and a
burst of shooting. Hanna stumbled, recovered himself, and made a
limping rush for the car that still stood throbbing with the running
engine.

Lockwood ran out to cut him off, shooting again in vain. Hanna dived
into the front seat, and, as the car started Lockwood sprang on the
running board, and leaned over with the pistol not a foot from his
enemy’s head.

He caught the queer, sidelong, startled look that Hanna turned on him
as he pulled the trigger. There was no explosion. He pulled
again—again, with only a series of soft clicks. The gun was empty; and
it flashed upon him that it was a borrowed one, and he had no
cartridges.

The car was speeding down toward the gate. Lockwood clutched the top
supports and hung on, holding the useless pistol. Hanna never glanced
aside. He went out the gate at high speed, turned to the right, and
dashed down the road.

Lockwood had a glimpse over his shoulder of his companions running
across the yard to the road. The light car was just coming up. They
were stopping it, getting aboard, but he could spare no more
attention.

He could not attack, but he would not let go. He had to cling with
both arms to avoid being pitched headlong. There was deep sand on the
road, and Hanna tore through it like a madman. The big car reeled and
skidded. Hanna never once glanced aside, bending low over the wheel,
and they clung there within a yard of one another, as if unconscious
of each other’s presence.

He might have clubbed the man with the gun butt, but he was afraid to
touch him; it would turn the car over. He made an effort to get into
the rear seat; but the catch stuck, and the curtains were down.

He thought dizzily of getting his hands on Hanna, of throttling him
from behind. A violent lurch of the car nearly flung him off. For a
minute he clung trailing by his hands, till he could get footing on
the running board again.

He was determined not to let go. He caught a glimpse of the other car
racing behind. They were shouting at him, motioning him to jump. He
was in their way. But he knew that Hanna’s car could outdistance
anything on the road, and if he let go he was sure he would never
sight it again.

Jets of dust flew up from the road, instantly passed. He heard the
reports. They were shooting at the tires. A bullet ripped the top. The
light car was falling behind. Bullets were their only chance; and now
the heavy sand was past, and Hanna let her out a little more.

The bridge over the bayou was just ahead. A distant crash of firing
came from behind. The fabric top r-ripped. A great splintered star
flashed into the glass windshield. The planks of the bridge roared
under the wheels, and then a long, white streak flew up out of the
steering wheel under Hanna’s very hands.

Like a flash the great car swerved, so violently that Lockwood was
jerked loose, flung to the other side of the bridge. As he went
sprawling, he heard a crash of breaking timber, a vast splash, and a
sheet of muddy water flew high and rained upon him.

The light car was up and had stopped before the waves had ceased
frothing. Twenty feet of the bridge railing was torn away. It was
floating on the bayou below, but Hanna and the big car were deep down.

* * * * *

“Got her up!” said Tom Power, coming wet and mud-splashed and tired
upon the gallery of his house, and setting down a large leather club
bag on the floor, where it streamed water.

It was nearly sunset, and for hours a crowd of men had been dragging
and grappling for the drowned car. The whole population for miles
seemed to have assembled. There was an incessant coming and going
through the house of excited men, eager to hear and discuss all the
details of the affair. Jackson, too, had insisted on Lockwood coming
up to his bedside to tell the story. Henry had already heard it. Men
came up to speak to Lockwood by dozens, men whom he did not know, men
who had been wild to stretch his neck twenty-four hours before, but
who now were anxious to make amends, to apologize, to show their good
will.

Lockwood accepted it all, and shook hands with them all. He was too
used up for anything but placid acquiescence in everything. He hardly
knew how he had got back to the house after the car had gone to
destruction under him. They had put him on the gallery in a long
wicker chair, a glass of orange juice and whisky at his elbow, and
Louise hovered about and ministered to him.

“It took four mules to haul it up,” Tom continued. “The car’s badly
busted. The body’s smashed considerable, and the radiator’s crushed,
and the fenders clean gone, but I don’t believe the engine’s hurt
much, and maybe it kin be repaired.”

“Yes—but did you find——” Lockwood began.

“Hanna? Sure. He was wedged into the wheel. He wasn’t shot. I reckon
he couldn’t get free and he just drowned there like the rat ez he was.
They’ve carried him up to Cole’s store.”

There would have to be an inquest, but under the circumstances it was
sure to be the mildest formality. The local jury would bring in a
verdict of “death by accidental drowning,” as likely as not. Hanna
dead! It seemed impossible to realize it. Lockwood’s face must have
expressed a mixture of emotions.

“It’s shorely doggone hard luck that you didn’t git to kill him after
trailin’ him all them years!” said old Henry sympathetically.

“No—no. I’m only too glad I didn’t,” he said hastily.

“Oh, so am I,” said Louise; and her father looked with disgust at the
sentimentalists.

“If he hadn’t come back here we’d never have got him,” said Tom,
trying the lock of the leather bag.

Louise had not heard the boat come up, nor Hanna enter the house. She
was sitting quietly with her brother, who had gone to sleep after
having his wounds dressed. Old Henry was also asleep, having been up
most of the night; and Hanna had quietly secured the key and locked
the old man in his room.

“I thought once or twice I heard somebody moving in the house,” Louise
said, “but I supposed it was one of the niggers. I was standing by the
bureau; I had my back to the door, when I saw Hanna in the mirror. He
was wet and blackened, and he had that valise in his hand.

“I’m ready to go,” he said. He spoke so queerly that I thought he’d
been drinking. “Hand me over all those jewels of yours. All the
diamonds. Quick!”

“I knew there was a little revolver in that bureau drawer, and I
slipped my hand in and got it as I turned around. Hanna started into
the room, and I aimed the little gun at him. He stopped, and then
laughed, and dared me to shoot. I don’t know whether I’d have shot or
not, but then I heard your car coming, and I screamed. Hanna ran for
the back stairs. The gun went off in my hand. I hope I missed him.”

“You missed him all right, sis,” said Tom, still working in vain with
the lock of the valise. Giving it up, he slit the leather open. “But
he didn’t git what he come back for, after all.”

There were shirts, collars, and ties in the bag, a man’s ordinary
traveling outfit. But under these was a thick packet of hundred-dollar
bills, and in the bottom of the bag a mass of loose jewelry—pins, cuff
links, a watch, a diamond ring—all the loot he had been able to pick
up in his hurry, out of the expensive luxuries he had persuaded the
Powers to buy.

“Yes, this was what he came back for,” said Lockwood. “He hadn’t any
money with him, and he had to get this. Likely he’s had this ready for
weeks, in case he had to bolt at any moment. Let’s see how much there
is.”

The packet contained seven thousand one hundred dollars. Of this, five
thousand dollars was undoubtedly the proceeds of the sale of the “oil
stock;” the rest was of unknown origin, perhaps his commissions on the
Powers’ purchases.

“I reckon that two thousand one hundred dollars is yourn,” said Tom.
“Seems that Hanna done you worse’n any of us. Dog-gone it, here, take
the hull lot! You shorely do deserve it!”

“Hold on! I’m not going to take Hanna’s plunder,” Lockwood laughed.
“Wait. You’re going to need all your money.”

“Well, I certainly ain’t goin’ to buy no more autymobiles,” said Tom.
“I’ll git this one fixed up mebbe. Nor no more wine nor two-bit
cigars. Fine-cut an’ corn licker’s good enough for me, an’ not much of
that, neither. I’m shore goin’ to buy some plows, though, an’ a couple
of good mules, an’ some hawgs. This yere’s the porest land on earth,
but I reckon it’ll grow somethin’. We might buy that fifty acres
’cross the road. That ain’t quite so pore. I been thinkin’ of what you
said ’bout raisin’ hawgs an’ peanuts.”

“I reckon Mr. Lockwood’d better give up turpentinin’, and come here
an’ advise us what we-all ought ter do with our money,” said Henry.
“We could pay him a right good salary—better’n Craig pays any woods
rider. It’d be money in our pockets.”

He meant it. He glanced interrogatively at Tom, who nodded an emphatic
assent.

Lockwood smiled, looking from the gallery across the road to the
woods, all mellow now in the late afternoon light. The crowds had
dispersed; they had followed Hanna’s body to the store. Deep peace
slept on the quiet landscape. It might be poor land, but he had grown
to love it, that country of yellow sand and pine, of yellow-pine and
rainbow sand. He liked its people, too, even those who had just wanted
to lynch him. He had come there as an outlaw, and Rainbow Landing had
made him over.

He met the amused glance of Louise, who was sitting on the gallery
railing just beside him.

“My usefulness is past,” he said to her in an undertone. “You wanted
me to influence the boys to thrift and industry, and now Tom’s taken
such a turn to the right that you’ll have to hold him back. And Hanna
is dead.”

His own words gave him a shock again. Hanna was dead—McGibbon was
dead! That long bitterness was ended. He had hunted his enemy to
death, but he had not drawn one drop of his blood, through all the
fighting and chasing. It was hard to grasp that this long phase of his
life was over, and the new phase would call for new adjustments.

“And now—what?” he said to Louise in a still lower tone. Tom and his
father were still sorting over the contents of Hanna’s bag. “I’m
neither a farmer nor a turpentine man. Do I go back to the cities now,
with Rainbow Landing only a memory?”

Louise looked startled for a moment. She put out one hand almost
instinctively, and Lockwood took it and squeezed it behind the screen
of his chair. She glanced down at him caressingly, protectively.

“Do you think I’d let you go?” she whispered.

THE END

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story" ***

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