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.