Back in the bayou was an uproar1. 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 haze2 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 blur3 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 treacherous4 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 mule5, 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 eddies6 of the Alabama; but, selecting his direction at last, he waded7 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 loom9 of trees against the dark sky. He waded forward, stumbled against a cypress10 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 dense11 thicket12 of tough shrubs13, tangled15 together with bamboo vines, spiky16 with thorns, and growing right out of the deep ooze17. It was perfectly18 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 hips19, and he remembered tales he had heard of bottomless pits in these river swamps, where stray hogs20 and men had disappeared.
But after escaping the human wolves of the house boat, he could not believe that he was destined21 to fall into a death-trap in the swamp. But it was impossible to keep any straight course. He zigzagged22 and turned where he felt footing, picking a route by instinct and feeling. The whole swamp resounded23 with the croaking24 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 streaked25 and starred with the greenish-yellow flicker26 of innumerable fireflies.
Huge rotten logs collapsed27 in a welter of wet slush as he trod on them. He blundered into a wide slough28 of liquid mud, and floundered out again. Most of all he was afraid of the moccasin snakes that must swarm29 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 disturbance30.
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 wade8. He stumbled through a screen of clinging vines and fell into water to his waist, and, pulling himself out, he discerned a broad lagoon31, 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 tangle14. 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 plunged32 on blindly again, hoping that luck would bring him to some spot solid enough to wait there till daylight.
But that noisome33 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. Clumps34 of bear-grass and bay-trees loomed35 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 breath............