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.