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.