CHAPTER V

The errand within the cabin of the shanty-boat had not proved swift or easy of dispatch. When Desmond and Mrs. Faurie had approached the dingy and plebeian craft along the muddy bank, he once more urged that she should wait without and permit him to make the preliminary examination.

“The boat is clean!” cried Chub, on the defensive. “It is as clean as any other old place. Mr. Desmond is so particular. It _isn’t_ damp. Its smell is just doolicious.”

Chub continued insistent, and Mrs. Faurie once more yielded.

Oakum, tar, and the peculiar and distinctive odor of junk were the blended perfumes thus lauded which floated out to them from the open door of the cabin. The boat was gently oscillating on the current, teetering as if with the instinct of dance, for the river was at flood height, and even thus close to the shore the encroaching waters were deep. As Mrs. Faurie and Desmond made their way along the gang-plank to the deck, she glanced over her shoulder at the great cable that held the craft to the bank, passed again and again around the girth of a tree. “I hope she is tied up fast and hard; I should object of all things to go floating down the Mississippi River, the involuntary guest of such a trading-boat, impossible to land except by the uncovenanted grace of the current.”

The cabin seemed dark at first, by contrast with the pellucid atmosphere without. A formless hodgepodge of barrel and box, of bunk and junk, it presented, until the eye was sufficiently accustomed to its comparative obscurity to discern such degree of symmetry as informed its arrangement. One end was dedicated to the domestic life of the proprietor; holding the cooking apparatus, expressed in a monkey stove that furnished heat as well, a tier of bunks on either side, a few broken-backed chairs grouped around a table, a gaunt, pale woman in a tattered gray woolen skirt and a man’s ragged red sweater, with a mass of dull, straight brown hair “banged” across her freckled forehead and hanging unkempt down upon her shoulders. She held in her arms a wan, puny baby, bent on sucking its thumb, and giving the universe only such attention as it could spare from that absorbing occupation. Knowing this habit to be an infringement of juvenile etiquette, the woman had tried to effect a diversion the instant she saw the flutter of Mrs. Faurie’s gray silk gown at the door. But a house cannot be set in order for distinguished inspection on the spur of the moment, and still less can a neglected infant’s conduct be immediately brought up to standard. A piercing, heart-rending wail made the air hideous, and as the released thumb, all curiously translucent and blanched and reduced in size, went back into the child’s mouth, Mrs. Faurie, entering, whirled around and saw both the effort to save appearances and its failure.

She shook her head in indignant rebuke. “That will never do!” she said imperiously. “You ought not to let the child spoil its hand. That is a bad habit, and keeps it from being bright. It just sogs away over that old thumb, and you don’t care so long as it is quiet and doesn’t worry you.”

The woman rose with a belligerent toss of the head. “Mighty easy to talk!—mighty easy! But you just wait, young lady, till you gits some childern of yer own, an’ see if you won’t be sorter lax todes anythink that will keep ’em from yellin’, when yer head is achin’ fit ter bust. I been havin’ chills and ager all winter.”

“_Some children of my own!_” Mrs. Faurie drew herself up, majestic and boastful. “I have _three_ of my own,—nearly as tall as I am—_three_! This”—pulling Chub forward—“is my baby,—and doesn’t suck his thumb, and never did. And that reminds me,” she continued, as the forlorn river nymph stared amazed at this rich and brilliant apparition of health, and wealth, and beauty, and transcendent youth that might have seemed immortal, feeling the contrast God knows how poignantly, “there are a lot of baby clothes left over up at my house—I am Mrs. Faurie and live close by;—they will fit that fellow out for a year or two to come. I will send them down to you this evening if you will promise to put some pepper on that child’s thumb to keep it out of his mouth.”

The woman murmured her thanks, but she did not feel her gratitude so acutely, rags and dirt being the natural concomitants of her life, as her interest in this resplendent personage, and the error as to her age and state of life. “Lord!”—she smiled broadly, showing the devastations of a mouth whence many aching teeth had been “rotted out with bluestone” in default of a dentist’s care—“I thought you was just a girl,—turned twenty, mebbe; and this”—she pointed at Desmond—“was your courtin’ beau.”

Mrs. Faurie for once looked embarrassed. “Oh, no,” she recovered herself swiftly; “I’m getting middle-aged now. And where is the bicycle, Chubby?”

The other end of the cabin was fitted up as a store, with shelves about the walls and a sort of counter. Here were displayed toys and gewgaws of imitation jewelry and beads, some bolts of coarse cloth, a glitter of tinware, some earthen and wooden bowls, an assortment of candies and canned goods, tobacco, fine cut and plug, snuff, and some boxes of cheap cigars. Incongruously enough, among these things was a fine, fresh bicycle, with pneumatic tires, evidently perfectly new.

Desmond looked sharply across the counter as the sodden, amphibious, nondescript animal that the raftsman seemed, hardly frog, hardly fish, hardly water-rat, yet partaking of the characteristics of all three, eyed the party furtively from his place among his medley of wares. His straight red hair was pulled forward in wisps on his brow as if it had been wet in a ducking and matted there. His big black hat was on the back of his head. His freckled, red, mottled face had a sort of soaked, bloated suggestion. He hesitated for a very perceptible interval before he named the price, and Mrs. Faurie exclaimed in surprise:—

“Ten dollars! Why, Chubby, you told me that the price was five”; for Chub had waxed confidential with his mother as they had approached, her opposition withdrawn.

Chubby’s earnest, eager countenance scarcely showed above a pile of cigar boxes on the counter over which he peered. He was genuinely surprised, yet not willing to seek to take advantage of any mistake that he might have made.

“I understood you to say that you would sell the wheel for five dollars”; he addressed the boatman directly, with a sober but unflinching gaze.

The trader’s broad face did not change, but there was a furtive gleam in his quick, sharply glancing, rodent-like eye, which sought to measure Chub’s simplicity. “No, sport, I said ten,” he declared, with a smile showing teeth singularly sharp and closely set together in his wide mouth, appearing as if he had more than the ordinary complement.

Another man in the background, big and raw-boned, but young, leaning against the door of a cubby-hole at the rear, which from some obstruction, apparently hastily thrust within, would not shut fast, seemed to bear witness to this statement. He grimaced affirmatively at Chub with the familiarity of previous acquaintance. He had a large face, which seemed somehow out of drawing, as if swollen here and there, and with uninflamed red spots. One eye and one eyebrow were higher than the other, and he had a half-witted or mentally weak appearance, suddenly confirmed when he abruptly licked out a large red tongue in grotesque triumph in the conclusion of the dicker, as Chub responded:—

“Well, ten dollars is cheap anyhow,—dirt cheap,—dog cheap. We will buy it at ten, won’t we, mamma?”

The proprietor had taken Desmond’s measure the instant he entered the cabin. Silently gazing at one another across the counter, both knew as well as if the fact had been put into words that the price had been doubled to meet his scrutiny. It would have been still further advanced had the trader better understood the quality of the wheel.

“Why, ten is _very_ cheap,” Mrs. Faurie began.

“We cannot buy it at ten,” Desmond interrupted swiftly,—“in fact, not at any price.”

Mrs. Faurie turned toward him in angry surprise, her eyes blazing. He met them without flinching. “You must take my word for it!” he said sternly. “Chubby shall not have it! It is useless to discuss prices.”

Desmond had laid his hand on Mrs. Faurie’s arm and was about to lead her forth, when the flatboat-man in sudden fury flung the machine down behind the counter with a great clatter of the spokes and pedals.

“No, no!” he vociferated to Chubby, the insurgent, who was hopefully emptying his pockets and counting his cash; “_you_ can’t buy it at any price. Clear out!—the whole bunch of ye. I’m about to cast off. I’ll souse any stowaways in your old Mississippi bilge-water. I’ll cut the rope and see how ye’ll get ashore then! I’ll land you all in the Gulf of Mexico!” As he voiced his frenzied, disconnected, incoherent threats he suddenly ran past the group, sprang from the deck, and with deer-like swiftness sped up the bank, his open knife in his hand.

Within the cabin Mrs. Faurie started back in dismay as the half-witted creature left the door he had held closed, now showing within the cubby a glimpse of coarse bagging, intimating a surreptitious cotton bale, the corner of which had prevented the slipping of the bolt. He jumped up and down before the group with a capering step and a wild and foolish eye, now to the right as they pushed toward the door, and as they turned aside, now to the left, evidently with the intention of preventing or delaying their exit. Even the woman pushed a chair in front of Mrs. Faurie so suddenly that her knees struck painfully against it. “Take a seat, lady,” she said mockingly. “Oh, _do_ take a seat!”

Desmond scarcely could credit his senses. It was like a disordered scene of a dream. His logical faculties grasped but the one idea of flight. “Make haste,” he cried out to Mrs. Faurie. “Get off the boat even if you jump into the water.” For he felt that the craft was already loosed and moving from the bank.

“For God’s sake, hurry!” he adjured her.

Then as the great gawk of an idiot sprang again in front of them, Desmond seized him, with an effort to sway him back and forth and fling him from his feet; but the river man was as strong and heavier, with a stolidity and lack of expectancy that seemed to add sensibly to his weight and immovableness; and when he was finally thrown, it was after a series of struggles that carried them locked and swaying together around the room, both coming down at last with a tremendous crash, bringing with them not only the stove-pipe but the monkey stove itself. This spewed forth a cataract of live coals over the floor, and as the clouds of soot and smoke circled about the rafters, obscuring still further the dingy quarters, the woman exclaimed loudly and resentfully her fears of fire in notes of woe and injury, and left off such schemes of hindrance as she had furthered to run for a bucket of water from the shelf. A coal had touched the gigantic idiot, and he was bleating like some great calf in a wide open-mouthed blare of sound till admonished by her to lend his aid in extinguishing the fire.

In the midst of the confusion Desmond seized Chub, and though doubting if he could compass the space as the current swung the boat ever farther and farther from the bank, he leaped ashore. The flatboat-man was at the moment running down the bank for the purpose of reëmbarking. Despite the limit on his time which the receding craft imposed, he suddenly swerved from his intention, and made a swift lunge at Desmond, intending to stab him in the back. The attack was not altogether unexpected. Desmond, on the alert, sprang lightly aside, and, being unarmed, struck the boatman with his clenched fist, the blow landing between the eyes.

It was a short, sharp fracas and an easy victory. Desmond was a trained boxer, and here he had light and air and elbow-room, which he had lacked in the wrestle within the cabin. There was not a word spoken between the two; but after the boatman had dragged himself out of the water where he was tossed, to his jeopardy of drowning in the suction, and regained the deck, Desmond, breathless and agitated, took his way up the bank to rejoin Mrs. Faurie, muttering to himself, and now and again pausing to look back over his shoulder at the progress of the boat.

“He ought to be apprehended. If Kentopp had a pistol and had been nearer, we might together have held them both. Perhaps the miscreant might be stopped by a shot if we can get a rifle at Great Oaks mansion; but no,—he’ll be too far down the river by that time. The boat is crossing in the current; he is going to try to get screened behind the towhead, and then the boat will hug the Arkansas shore, and it will be too dark and far to risk a shot. Is there no chance to overhaul him? Is there no telegraph station nearer than Fairglade, Mrs. Faurie?”

But Mrs. Faurie, pale and bewildered, did not reply directly. “Why, Mr. Desmond, that man tried to abduct us all! What could have been his object?”

“Nefarious enough, no doubt; but I don’t understand it at all.” Desmond’s eyes had now a more definite expression of heed, yet she was aware that she only shared his attention.

“And upon my word, Mr. Desmond, I don’t understand your high-handed interference,” she exclaimed. “What was the matter with the bicycle? It seemed a very good wheel. It was your refusal to allow us to buy it that made all the difficulty.”

“The wheel was too good,” said Desmond,—“too good entirely for the price. It was perfectly new and obviously stolen. It was worth fifty dollars at least, and was offered at five. Chubby is no fool to mistake a price. The trader doubled the price when he saw me. But the rise was not enough.”

“Oh, how fortunate that you were with us! I know nothing of the value of these things. No, Chubby, you must never buy from a doubtful source an article far below its value; it implies that you profit by a fraud that you understand.” Then looking over her shoulder, “How distant they are down the river. Mr. Desmond, _look_ how fast the current is running. Do you suppose they were afraid that we would report the suspicious bargain bicycle?”

There was something evidently more than this. No mere effort to avoid the imputation of receiving stolen goods would justify such violence, Desmond was reflecting. The Great Oaks party were to be drowned, as if by accident, before the eyes of their friends; or they were to be carried off by a similar unlucky chance apparently, and among some trackless network of sloughs and bayous and lakes of the swamp country, of which such craft is the only voyager, the rickety flatboat would be sunk, with all on board save only the murderous crew, surviving not to tell the tale, and disappearing without a trace,—or was the whole demonstration the expression only of the wild, ungovernable rage of the miscreant, that such a clue to some terrible and heinous crime had been thus fortuitously discovered?

Desmond could not judge, and he looked with a sense of baffled mystery at the craft as it swung along in midstream, smoke issuing not only from the stove-pipe, evidently once more in place, but from the windows and door as well. There was in this obviously no menace, for the proprietor was seated upon the deck at large leisure, manipulating an old violin in a style of very jaunty bravado. The strains floated far on the transmitting medium of the water, and the tune was easily distinguishable as again and again the catgut reiterated “A hot time,—a hot time in the old town to-night.” Desmond was of the opinion that the incident should be forthwith reported to the authorities. But Mr. Stanlett, hearing the details with some concern, demurred to the proposition.

“You cannot be certain that the bicycle was stolen,—at any rate, by that particular flatboat-man. He may have bought it among a lot of stolen stuff, to be sure, but offered it for sale again, not knowing its value or suspecting its history,—a _bona-fide_ purchaser himself.”

Desmond listened in surprise, for Mr. Stanlett had not impressed him as of a particularly charitable nature nor lenient in his judgments.

They were sitting around the hearth in the front parlor after dinner; the fire was blazing in cheery wise, more in accord with the chill of the night and the record of the calendar than the springlike atmosphere of the day just closing in. The Kentopps were staying overnight, and the topic had been for some time up for discussion, after the manner of those whose lives are leisurely affairs and of little distraction. It had come in with the cigars, for the gentlemen had been sociably permitted to bring them into this sanctum after the service of the coffee.

“We want to hear you talk,” said Mrs. Kentopp, with a pretty _moue_.

“Yes, indeed,” cried Mrs. Faurie; “a man never has an idea in his head unless he has a cigar in his mouth. There is some obscure psychological connection between facility of cerebration and blowing rings, and some day when I am not too busy, I’ll think it out.”

“As to the boatman’s casting off in that hasty way,” said Mr. Stanlett, pursuing the subject, “that is not an infrequent trick with better craft. Why, in my time I have been inadvertently left at a wayside landing ten miles from a habitation,—no joke in this country way back in the fifties,—and I have been carried off halfway to Vicksburg before I knew that the boiler had steam up. It is a pity that you floored the men. You overrated the provocation. Rough river rats can’t be expected to show drawing-room manners. That is one disadvantage of college athletics,—it makes a gentleman as handy with his fists as a professional bruiser.”

When Mrs. Faurie interposed to protest her fright and danger, the temper of the party who did not participate in the turmoil within the cabin made it seem as if she were ambitious of the pose of heroine.

“Why, my dear,” Mr. Stanlett reasoned with her, “you said yourself that the man who danced about and sought, as you supposed, to detain your party was a poor simpleton, a weak-minded creature; he doubtless meant no offense, though perhaps they were all nettled at Mr. Desmond’s refusal to buy the bicycle when he had heard it priced.”

“I should have asked no questions about the bicycle, and therefore should have been told no lies,” said Mrs. Kentopp, with airy recklessness. “I should have taken the bicycle at the very cheap asking price, and in my innocent ignorance suffered no qualms of conscience. A little learning of the law is a dangerous thing.”

“Quite right, quite right, madam,” commented Mr. Stanlett. “Really, I feel that we have no obligations in the premises, and our riparian situation here, so isolated, renders it peculiarly necessary for us to be on our guard against collision with the rougher river element.”

Colonel Kentopp waved away the smoke that had thickened about his massive head. “Very true, very true!” he said, with a definiteness of assent welcome indeed to the old gentleman, who had spoken with some hesitation, for no man likes to express a fear that others may decline to entertain. Relieved of the imputation of timorousness, Mr. Stanlett went on with decision:—

“These water-rats, many of them really river pirates, enjoy such immunity that I wonder that they are not more daring and enterprising than they are. I should not like to provoke personal animosity and possible reprisal for injuries, real or fancied, among them.”

“That is just how our house at Dryad-Dene is so much more safely situated than you are here at Great Oaks. Why,”—Colonel Kentopp leaned forward with dilated eyes and lowered voice,—“a handful of marauders could loot Great Oaks mansion any foggy night; and once an oar’s length or two off the landing, they would be as completely lost in the mist and their pursuit as impracticable as if they were in the desert of Sahara.”

Mr. Stanlett looked uncomfortable.

“Yes, indeed,” declared Mrs. Kentopp, dimpling, “a bit inland,—as Great Oaks mansion used to be in the old time, before the bank caved in and the river carried off the whole point,—and this place would be Paradise! I sometimes wish that the river would make another grab at it and take it off—off—away down to the Gulf of Mexico!”

“Thank you for your very queer wishes,” began Mrs. Faurie.

“Only that you might move inland and rebuild near us,—we are _so_ far apart as it is,” said Mrs. Kentopp, with her head askew and her sweetest smile.

“Never because of river pirates. What are our peace officers for, if we are not to take our ease under our own vine and fig tree?” retorted Mrs. Faurie.

“Ah, but evil is inherently stronger than good. Hence the difficulty in the administration of the law and the conservation of the peace,” said Colonel Kentopp, magisterially. “Otherwise, of course, the cause of right and justice would have a clear walk-over. It is unfortunately far easier to conceal a crime than to detect it,—though skill and practice and persistence in ferreting out misdeeds go a long way and ultimately triumph in most instances, no doubt. But then, think of that affair last fall at Whippoorwill Landing,—nefarious business,—the malefactors still at large! Two men killed inside a good trig house,—big, healthy, hearty fellows. I knew Patton well,—used to keep a store in Arkansas;—and not a sign nor a clue yet as to how or why,—both wiped off the face of the earth,—touched off as lightly as the ash of this cigar,” suiting the action to the word, then shaking his head solemnly.

“Oh, oh! raw head and bloody bones! Not another word! You will give the whole house awful dreams,” cried Mrs. Kentopp. “Come, Mr. Stanlett, let us show this worshipful company what bridge whist really is.”

She rose with a great rustle of silk skirts and whisked away to the centre table, where she opened a drawer with an affectation of busy and sly peering, and thence produced a pack of cards. Desmond could not understand why Colonel Kentopp should look so disconcerted and annoyed. He had an air of positive concern as he said with pointed emphasis, “Choose some other game, Annetta, that perhaps we play better,”—with a heavy attempt at mirth. “We are too many for bridge. _I_ would sit out willingly, but I know that Mrs. Faurie will not permit me in my quality as guest,—distinguished stranger!—and Mr. Desmond being ‘home-folks’ here.”

“Bridge mote it be,” Desmond responded lightly, perceiving that Mrs. Kentopp, usurping the initiative of her hostess, had arranged the party expressly for his exclusion as if he were of no consideration, and caring little or naught what the tutor might think or feel; and to his surprise, Desmond cared naught for her demonstration. “I have letters to write,—I hear the packet passes near daylight to-morrow. I was just about to ask to be excused.”

The straight, level brows above Mrs. Faurie’s fine eyes were drawn into something like a frown. It was inconsistent with her high-bred sense of courtesy that this exclusion should have been suggested. She would not willingly have ignored the gentleman, poor and proud, whose dignity should have been the more jealously regarded because of its jeopardy in his subsidiary position. As Desmond, on his way to the library, passed on the veranda without, he glanced through the window at the group, now settled at the table, a cheery scene, with the glow of the old-fashioned crimson curtains and velvet carpet, the sheen of gilt-framed mirrors, the elusive flicker of the fire, the rich dresses of the two women. He could but note that the frown was not altogether effaced from those level brows, somewhat formidable of expression in their _rapprochement_, and he discerned that Mrs. Kentopp had found it necessary to be even more resolutely alluring in her sparkle and flushing laughter and insistent gayety than her wont.