Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story
Date: 2022-03-21T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Adventure stories; Alabama -- Fiction

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Title: Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story

Author: Frank Lillie Pollock

Release date: March 21, 2022 [eBook #67677]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Chelsea House

Credits: Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAINBOW LANDING: AN ADVENTURE STORY ***

Rainbow Landing

An Adventure Story
By
FRANK LILLIE POLLOCK
Author of “The Glacier Gate”
NEW YORK
CHELSEA HOUSE
PUBLISHERS

Rainbow Landing
Copyright, 1926, by CHELSEA HOUSE
Printed in the U. S. A.

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian.

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

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Table of Contents

- Rainbow Landing
- 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
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE