Talking over his shoulder as he paddled, Joe explained the events of the past days more fully to his cousin, and described his discovery of the rosin mine.
“If we win out, of course we’ll share it,” he added. “As a matter of fact, I expect you have an equal right in it with me. That was the old family distillery, you know.”
“Not a bit of it,” Bob returned. “You found the thing, and you certainly deserve all that comes out of it. I wouldn’t take a cent. But, as a matter of fact, I doubt if either of us has any right in it. Burnam bought the place. He gets whatever is in the ground, whether it’s a coal mine or a rosin mine.”
“I don’t know about that!” returned Joe, with irritation. “Anyway, I’ll hold that rosin as security for what he owes me.”
“Dat’s right!” Sam approved. “An’ we’re goin’ cotch ’em. Dey’ve got a long start, but we’ll cotch em, an’ when we do cotch ’em, why, dey’ve got all dat rosin dug up for us. Won’t be nothing for us to do but tote it away.”
“Pretty heavy toting,” said Bob. “That boat must have carried several loads, to clean out the big hole you speak of.”
“Yes, I expect she loaded up at night and floated down the river to some spot where they’ve hidden the stuff, and then got a tow back with the steamboat. But Sam’s right. Those pirates really have done the heaviest part of the work. And we ought to be able to locate where they’ve gone. That black houseboat’s too big a thing to hide.”
Bob was used to paddling on Canadian rivers; Sam was a good canoeman, and with a strong current running they traveled fast. They went past the places they had lately visited on the hunt for Old Dick’s bees. On each shore rose the dense, gloomy woods, broken at intervals by a bayou or creek mouth. Two or three times they paused to look into one of these openings where the houseboat might lie hidden, but there was never any trace of it; and Joe did not really expect to find the river pirates hidden so near.
The river twisted like a serpent, and as they went round every bend they scanned the broad stream ahead for anything afloat. Nothing appeared, nor anything human on the shores, though they kept a close lookout in hopes of seeing somebody who might give them news of the houseboat. It grew near noon, and Joe was desperately hungry, having had nothing but a bite of cold food in the early dawn, back at the camp. Sam was hungry too, and they went ashore to rest and eat.
They went on again after a very brief delay, and for nearly another hour they paddled with the current. Then by good luck they espied a man fishing from a boat close to the shore, a swamp farmer who lived a mile back from the river. They paddled in and hailed him.
“You didn’t see anything of a black houseboat going down the river lately?” asked Joe.
“Shore did. I seen that black boat goin’ down ’bout day this mornin’—Blue Bob’s houseboat.” drawled the fisherman.
“Blue Bob!” exclaimed Joe, startled.
“Yes, sir. I reckon I orter know his boat—dog bite him! I’ve seen him goin’ down the river an’ gettin’ hauled back by the steamboat right smart of times this spring. I dunno what he’s up to. He stole three of my hawgs last month. Are you-all huntin’ him? Has he stole anything of yourn?”
“He certainly has. Do you know if he had a light-haired, yellow-faced man along with him?”
“I reckon he did. There’s a man like that in the gang, an’ some says he’s kin to Bob. Some says he’s wusser’n Bob himself. There’s another man in the gang anyways; sometimes the gang’s more, sometimes less. They’re a right-down des’prit lot. You boys better not fool with ’em none.”
“Where do you suppose they were making for?” Joe asked.
“I dunno. They lays up in all the bayous. Folks says Blue Bob mainly hangs out around the River Island, though.”
Joe asked no more questions, but bade the man farewell, and turned the canoe slowly into the stream again. Blue Bob, the notorious river pirate! That put a different complexion on the whole affair, and he no longer wondered at the theft of the rosin since that energetic and reckless gang had been at work. Glancing back at Sam, he saw that the negro boy looked considerably perturbed.
“What you goin’ to do now, Mr. Joe?” Sam inquired uneasily, holding his paddle suspended.
“Why, go ahead,” Joe responded, with somewhat more confidence than he felt.
“I don’t want to fool with no Blue Bob,” Sam protested. “He’s a shore ’nough bad man, an’ he’s allus got a mighty tough gang with him. Dey’ve all got guns, an’ dey’ll shore use ’em. What’ll we do s’posin’ we cotch ’em? Reckon we goin’ be like de man what cotched a rattlesnake by de tail!”
“What do you say, Bob?” Joe demanded. “Are you afraid of your namesake? No use talking, he’s a rough customer, just as they say.”
“No, I’m not afraid of any Bob,” said Harman. “Anyway, we don’t have to fight them, do we? What we want to do is to scout around, and find where they’ve hidden their plunder. Then we might go and get a regular posse to help us. But we surely aren’t going to turn back now, are we?”
“Of course not,” said Joe. “Sam, if you’re scared we’ll put you ashore, and you can walk home.”
“No-suh, I reckon I’m ’bleeged to go on now,” said Sam with resignation. “Only I ain’t got no gun, an’ when white folks gits a-shootin’ it’s allus de nigger what gits shot.”
“There won’t be any shooting, Sam. We won’t let them see us at all. Paddle ahead now, boys, and we’ll all make our fortunes.”
In spite of his outward determination, however, Joe was frightened himself. He knew better than his cousin what a dangerous exploit it would be to endeavor to track the river pirate down to his lair in that maze of swamp and bayou that was called the River Island. He sympathized with Sam. If he had been alone he might have given up the attempt, but he was ashamed to show fear before a negro, ashamed to propose retreat after his cousin’s confident speech.
“But we never kin cotch up with ’em ’fore night,” said Sam. “If dey started down ’fore day, dey’ll shore make de River Island ’fore we does.”
Joe perceived that this was probably true, and that if the houseboat once got into the labyrinth of the River Island it would be as hard to find as a rabbit in a blackberry-thicket. But they seemed to be in for it now, and there was no turning back.
The sun blazed down fiercely on the river, and sweat poured off the white faces and the black one as the boys drove the canoe down the current. But it was not till after two o’clock that, as they rounded a bend, the river seemed to split into two broad streams before them. Between the two channels lay a dense, unwholesome-looking swamp, a tangle of titi-shrubs and dead cypresses and vines and willows, all draped with gray curtains of Spanish moss.
“De River Island!” exclaimed Sam.
The River Island was only about twenty years old. Before that, it had been a peninsula formed by a great loop of the river; there were a few fields of corn and cotton in it, and perhaps a house or two. Then in one spring of exceptionally high water the river burst its banks, and tore a new channel for itself right across the neck of the peninsula. As the new channel was the shortest, it remained there, and the old channel shrunk to a muddy, shallow river, wandering sluggishly through a maze of bayous and lagoons. Part of the peninsula was permanently overflowed; the rest of it was a wilderness of forty or fifty square miles. For the most part it was marshy and cut up with bayous, but there were ridges of high land near the middle. Some mulatto hunters dwelt near its edge, for there were bears, deer, wildcats, and wild hogs on the island; but much of the place was impenetrable except in winter, and probably no man had any thorough knowledge of its intricacies.
The paddlers stopped, and the canoe drifted slowly down toward the forks of the river. On the right lay the new channel, which the steamboats used; on the left was the old channel, a dull, sluggish, shallow waterway, but almost certainly the one which the houseboat would have taken, for it led into the heart of the island. Innumerable bayous and lagoons were there, offering good hiding-places, whereas the new channel flowed between comparatively unbroken shores.
“Now keep your eyes peeled, boys!” Joe cautioned, “and dip your paddles easy. Blue Bob’s bound to be somewhere in here, and we’ve got to see him before he sees us.”
Moving scarcely faster than the current, the canoe floated silently into the old channel. The stream was perhaps a hundred feet wide, and seldom more than four or five feet deep. The marks where the full river had once flowed here, in a channel of three times the present width, were still faintly to be seen, and the old river-bed laid bare was now a dense jungle of wet-loving shrubs, tied and twisted together with masses of creepers. The ground was a soft morass; every tall tree was draped with Spanish moss, and a heavy smell of decay of stagnation permeated the hot air.
“Those pirates must be immune to malaria if they live here!” Bob muttered.
Joe did not answer, gazing anxiously about him. He had an impression that they might encounter the houseboat at any turning, and his nerves and eyes were on the strain. He let Sam and Bob paddle, while he sat in the bow, holding his rifle cocked and ready, though he had no idea of provoking hostilities if they could do their scouting unobserved. But no houseboat appeared; and the channel, as it wound and twisted sinuously through the swamp, gave no sign that anybody had ever passed that way before.
Presently a bayou twenty feet wide opened at one side, apparently leading toward the interior of the island.
“Let’s push in here. Looks like just the place they’d hide in,” said Joe in a low voice.
They pushed in. The bayou water was black and almost stagnant. Ricks of dead trees lay on the shores or half in the water. Queer pink cypress “knees” protruded through the mud. A long, brilliantly green snake wound swiftly through and through the branches, turning his head toward the stealthy canoe. A pair of wild ducks spattered up and rushed noisily through the air. The boys felt that they were hot on the trail, pausing behind every thicket of titi or palmetto and peering ahead; but within fifty yards further the way was completely blocked by a jam of fallen cypresses tangled together with bamboo-vine. Clearly the houseboat had never passed that way.
Disappointed, they had to turn back. A few rods further down the channel a second bayou opened into the swamp. This one led them by intricate windings for a great distance, until they arrived suddenly at a wide stream, and they realized that they had come back into the old river channel again.
The strain of keeping intensely on the alert, half expecting at any moment to be shot at from ambush, began to tell on all of them.
“Dis here’s shore ’nough one tangle!” remarked Sam, gloomily.
“It’s worse than our bee-hunting,” said Bob, surveying the dismal labyrinth.
It was so hot that mosquitoes had suddenly become unseasonably plentiful, too. But they persevered, and after a few more side excursions that always ended in a tangle of fallen logs or a sudden shoaling into mud, they came at last to a wider channel that opened from the main stream. A brisk current was setting down it, and they steered the canoe into it, once more with expectation. For several hundred yards they traveled between a dense wall of swamp trees, cloudy with Spanish moss that almost met overhead. Then the current slackened, and the stream widened into a broad pond.
It was a most dismal and depressing place. Dead cypresses and black-gum trees broke the surface of the lagoon, and the putty-colored water was full of snags and slimy branches. They paddled all around it, without finding any way out. There must have been an outlet somewhere, but there seemed no passage for the canoe.
“Can’t we get out of here?” exclaimed Bob, desperately, mopping his wet brow. “This is an awful place. I know they never brought any houseboat through here.”
“About the worst place I ever saw,” Joe agreed.
“An’ de sun’s goin’ down direc’ly, Mr. Joe,” put in Sam. “Where we-all goin’ camp to-night?”
The sun was, in fact, getting low behind the island trees. After sunset, the semi-tropical darkness falls quickly. The coming of night filled Joe with apprehension. There was no place in sight that was dry enough for a camp, and to stay in the boat would mean intolerably cramped quarters, myriads of mosquitoes, and a chance of an attack of fever. At any cost they must get clear of this suffocating swamp.
“We might manage to get out on the main river again. There’s dry land there,” Bob suggested.
“Dere’s dry land somewheres in de middle ob dis River Island,” said Sam. “Mebbe we could git to it.”
“I wish we could. It’s too far to go around to the river. Besides, I don’t know whether we could ever find our way back,” said Joe. “Let’s look out for any spot dry enough to get ashore.”
After circling the pond they turned back into the channel by which they had entered it, and paddled some way up. A narrow, deep creek seemed to lead toward the middle of the island, and they turned wearily into it. It did not look like a guide to a camping ground, and before long it ended in a pile of fallen logs, but the soil did appear firm ashore.
Joe pulled the canoe up to the fallen timber and was about to step out, when a thick, brown moccasin snake glided down the logs and dived without a splash into the water. When the boy had recovered from the start this gave him, he selected a different landing-place and jumped. The log caved in under him in a slush of rotten wood. He went down over his ankles in muck, splashed out, scrambled on a firmer tree-trunk, and thence got ashore upon fairly solid ground.
“I’ve scared all the moccasins away anyhow,” he called back. “Be careful how you jump, though. There may be no bottom to that slough.”
Bob transferred himself ashore very cautiously and without getting mired. Sam tossed the packages of provisions to the others, and then scrambled upon the logs himself, securing the canoe by its rope to a stout branch. The ground was unstable and shaking; brown water rose into every footprint. They made their way inland across tiny pools and rivulets, through stretches of marsh overgrown with shiny, broad-leafed plants, over a great patch of low palmetto, and then the ground began to rise perceptibly and to grow drier and firmer.
“Thank goodness, I believe we’re getting out of it!” said Bob.
The swamp vegetation was certainly disappearing. It was a sort of hammock land now. Here and there a small pine appeared. The ground continued to rise, thinly grown with scrub-oak, and at last, after half an hour’s tramping, they came out upon the top of a hog-back ridge that was almost bare of trees. Standing there they could look over nearly the whole low River Island.
Far to the south the main channel of the Alabama showed like a silver ribbon. Westward the river was nearer, but was invisible, its course being indicated only by the belt of dark swamp trees. Eastward the swamps seemed to run almost endlessly, but for an occasional ridge top like the one on which they stood. After the dark misery of those morasses the fresh air and the clear sunlight seemed delightful; but the sun was already sinking low over the woods.
They all brightened up wonderfully at getting out of that maze of mud and water. Sam threw off his hat with a loud exclamation of satisfaction.
“Dis here’s a fine place to camp!” he said enthusiastically. “Heaps of wood an’ dry—”
He stopped suddenly, with his roving black eyes fixed on something down to the west, and his face grew keen and suspicious.
“Look, Mr. Joe!” he exclaimed. “Down yander, dere’s a house!”
The white boys gazed where Sam’s finger pointed. But for the quick-eyed negro it might have escaped them, but now they saw it plainly enough—saw, at least, the gray patch among the green that was nothing but a shingled roof. It lay half a mile or so westward, apparently not far from the main river, and on somewhat lower ground than the ridge.
“We’ve got to investigate that,” said Joe, staring.
“Hol’ on, Mr. Joe!” Sam ejaculated. “Don’t you reckon mebbe dat’s Blue Bob’s place?”
“Shucks! Those fellows haven’t got a house. They live on the river,” said Joe. “Besides, isn’t their place just what we’re trying to find?”
“We must see what it is, anyway. Come along,” said Bob.
They started down the slope of the ridge again, descended into a swampy valley, crossed a muddy, sluggish creek on a log, made a detour to avoid an absolutely impassable thicket of tall blackberry-canes, and gradually came upon rising ground again. Scrub-oak reappeared; the ground rose, and then appeared to descend, and from the highest point they saw the mysterious building again, and more clearly. It was a small cabin, looking weather-beaten and gray, almost swamped in thickets, and there was no smoke from its chimney nor any sign of life.
“Just an old deserted negro cabin, I expect,” said Joe, but they advanced cautiously all the same, the white boys in front with rifles ready, and Sam lagging a little in the rear with the load of supplies.
The cabin went out of sight again among the trees, but within a hundred yards they came upon a little spring. It had once been walled up with stones, and a tin cup, destroyed with rust, lay in the water. A tiny rivulet flowed away from it, down the slope ahead of them, and after another fifty yards’ cautious advance Joe stopped, peering through the branches.
The cabin was just ahead, nearly surrounded by thickets of blackberry and wild growths of shrubbery. The briefest examination showed that it was untenanted. The doors and windows were gone; vines hung in masses from the eaves, and tangles of weeds grew tall around the small veranda made by a continuation of the roof over the doorway.
“All safe! No river pirates here!” said Joe, laughing, and he threw his rifle over his shoulder and walked toward the shanty.
The others followed him. The ground was so encumbered with thickets of scrub-oak and tall weeds and blackberries that they had to wind in and out as if through a maze to get up to the cabin. A glance inside showed that no one had dwelt there for some time. Drifts of leaves and dirt littered the plank floor; there was not a particle of anything movable in it, and the rude stone fireplace was destitute of ashes.
A glance inside was enough. Joe stepped off the crumbling veranda.
“It’s a roof over our heads for to-night, anyway,” he said. “Shall we camp in it, or rough it outside?”
Bob did not answer. He was looking curiously into the air, into the cloudless blue of the late afternoon sky. In the dead silence there was a curious low murmur, a faint drone.
“Sounds to me like—like something!” Bob muttered, still with his nose in the air. Looking up likewise, Joe perceived small dark specks coming down from the sky, coming over the tree-tops with the rapidity of light, and plunging down among the thickets around the cabin.
To the left of the old shanty the whole earth was a sea of blackberry-thickets, an acre or more of impenetrable, thorny jungle, growing almost shoulder-high. Bob advanced as close as possible, tried to part the canes, and peered in. He recoiled with an exclamation, brushing at his cheek, where a black bee was clinging and stinging furiously.
“I thought I knew that noise!” he cried. “It’s bees. See ’em coming through the air! That thicket’s chock full of bee-gums. I can see ’em.”
“Shore ’nough!” exclaimed Sam. “I bet dis yere’s where dat old nigger Dick uster live, dat dey tells ’bout.”
Bob looked at his cousin with comprehension dawning in his eyes. “That’s it!” he said. “Joe, we’ve found Old Dick’s bees after all!”