Diamond Tolls/Chapter 11

by Raymond S. Spears

 

CHAPTER XI

WHEN they had eaten supper Urleigh sat down beside the bed where the wounded river man's weakness compelled him to lie.

"It looks funny to me." Gost shook his head. Wouldn't it to you? You see, I went on board that girl's shantyboat, and just said 'good evening' same as a man will. Course, I hadn't any right to be there, but she had her doors unlocked, and swinging. She didn't look mad, or anything. She was just a pretty girl, and alone. What do you expect, a pretty girl alone down Old Mississip'?"

A note of personal injury entered the man's tone.

"Now what'd you think, yourself? I ask you, man to man. I didn't go anywhere near her—just started to set down. I wasn't rough. I just visited. She drawed an automatic and plugged away, just as off hand and careless as that! Never give me a chance to explain or anything. Never said a word. What'd she shoot me for? I'd been through the snow, course! I'd ought to hailed from the bank—but that don't make any difference. She was damned quick with her gun! What'd you think if a lady kinda hauled off, careless like, and plugged you through?"

"I'd be astonished," Urleigh admitted.

"I was hurt, I knowed how bad, too! I stumbled out over the stern and the water wa'n't deep, hard sand bottom. I got ashore, and ran up the sandbar, and I took some more snow, like I said. It made me crazy. That's all there was to it, from what I can see, or you can see, or any man can see, ain't it?"

"That's all—perhaps she was frightened."

"Frightened? Hell! That's what got me to thinking. She just drawed her gun, kinda smiled, and let go! If she'd acted scairt—you see yourself! If a lady's scairt, and shoots you, you understand. Likely you apologize. Anyhow, you ain't sore. You understand, even if you didn't mean no harm, but she meant it! She smiled, I tell you, when she plugged me. She was satisfied. I tell you, she's bad, that woman. A woman like that ain't no right to be bad, I tell you. Why, damn it, she's pretty! She's beautiful. A man don't expect that kind to be mean, and smiling about it. I've been all around. Paris and London, and N'Orleans, and New York, and Chicago; why, I didn't find no woman anywhere, not like her! I tell you, that's what she was waiting for—a chance to plug me. What for? You got any idea what for?"

"Why, it was night—she was alone—she was afraid——"

"Not by a d——d sight! She wa'n't no more worried'n a fly. She just let go, calm and smiling like! The reason why? I'll tell you. She knowed what she wanted, and she'd got it, and she took it. That's what is. I don't know her; I never knowed her. But I got my suspicions; when I was scouting around, getting ready, and getting pointers. I run into something then that was funny. You know Goles, the salesman? Well, it was about him. Diamond salesmen don't have no friends, do they? They don't talk; they're suspicious as h——l; and they're bonded. Why, the comp'ny had him trailed, he was so smooth they suspected something. The papers said so, didn't they? They took him into that restaurant, didn't they, there in Cincinnati?"

"Yes—that's so. That's as far as they ever traced him."

"Well, he was going down to Old Wrest's, wasn't he?"

"That's so, too."

"Well, what do you s'pose he went away down the north bank for, and to Vernon and then to Madison? What'd he do that for? What'd he drop in there to Madison for? Away down below Warsaw, and he was going to Warsaw? If he was going to Warsaw!"

"If he was going to Warsaw?"

"Sure! That's what's aching me, and I never thought! Not before, I didn't. I tell you when that girl let go at me, so darned handy and already, and me the sure-enough simp, never understanding a little bit, why, she showed herself to me! Look't! There she sat, reading magazines and books on the bow deck. Pretty! Lord! Why, if I hadn't been watching up the river, I'd tumbled then, right away! But I held off. There she was, and there she kept. Course, I didn't drive like h——l down the river. I knew better'n that. What I didn't know was that she tripped along, making up what she'd lost, floating nights, down the Ohio, and I tied in nights. There, day after day, just ahead of me, maybe, or just astern. And me worried about up the river."

"You think she baited you on?"

"Ain't I be'n telling you? Then I went aboard, and she smiled. Plumb satisfied she was! She smiled, and let go her little billie doo, and I fall off the deck, and hog-wallow up the sandbar. Ain't she got my gasolene boat then? Sure she has! And she's got it yet, I know that. Believe me, if that girl gets the drop on me again, she's got to spend her time doing something 'sides smile. I ain't never killed no woman, but she's bad, that woman is. Delia, h——l! Ain't I the come-on, though? But if I'm a come-on, there'll be a comeback, too! Believe me there will!"

Urleigh could not explain. He was hard put to it, trying to catch the drift of the river man's plaint. He could see that the man had a grievance of some kind, but he dared not try to delve into it by direct question. The thing he wanted to know was hinted at. The diamond salesman had not gone to Warsaw but had circled around and struck the Ohio far below Warsaw. What happened then was not plain. The river man seemed to know, but he would not tell.

Who was Delia, the girl who had shot Gost? That was a question which seemed to have little bearing on the diamond question. In some way, however, she was accused of having lured to attack the more or less innocent Gost, whose record was known far and wide because he worked jewellers in various ways. Because Gost—White Collar Dan—had been shot, and because Urleigh knew that he was the kind of a man to know about the lost diamonds and the evanescent Obert Goles.

Thus far Urleigh was fortunate. He had carried Goles several hundred miles from Cincinnati—taken him to Madison. Why had he gone down there instead of to Warsaw? What had he done in Madison? This was a point which his friend Grost, of the agency, could inquire into.

The river man was tired, weak because of his wound and wearied by the excitement of his mind, baffled by the mishap that had come upon him so unexpected, and from such unwonted hands. He fell into a fitful sleep almost immediately, and Urleigh went out to look at the dark flood, which so little resembled the Ohio River with which he was famihar along the water-front of the city.

A man may know a river where the steamboats land against the bank, within a stone-throw of the warehouses and junk yards of a great city; may know it from the flow of cubic feet per second to the passing of tows, shantyboats, driftwood, government boats, and the fatalities that cause coroners' juries to bring in "Unknown cause" verdicts. But at the same time he may not know what is down around the second bend, much less what a lonesome bend or long reach has to offer.

Urleigh had imagined the Mississippi River to be like the Ohio, with towns every little way along the banks and steamers and bridges and a thousand civilized things to fret any tendency toward rurality. Now he was in a section of river where only one light was visible, and that a dim, quivering spark that seemed to be miles distant. He knew the feeling of a black street in a desolation of waterfront dives; he had not the least acquaintance with a desert sandbar or a wooded wilderness river bend.

Just that few minutes that he stood alone looking into the clouded murk of a bottom land night would stand by him whenever he should attempt to add a paragraph of description to his specials about river people. If he should ever write a fiction story, he would never need to fake a description of river dark.

"She was just a pretty girl, and alone!" he repeated from Gost's shrewdly veiling narrative. "She had her doors unlocked and swinging."

Urleigh, unprejudiced, a thorough newspaper reporter, and skilled in deduction, repeated that last sentence:

"She had her doors unlocked and swinging!"

He studied that fact, for he saw that it fixed one phase of the girl's character; her smile, as she shot, fixed another phase.

"She was ready for him," Urleigh decided. "Instead of locking the doors to keep him out, she knew a better way: she left them swinging, so that if she had to, she could run out on the bow, or over the stern. She's a brave, level-headed girl!"

It was a nice bit of deductive reasoning and Urleigh was well satisfied by his conclusion. Gost accused her of leading him on, and teasing him to overstep the bounds of all propriety, whether up the bank or down the lower river. Urleigh studied that phase a long time.

"That may be the story!" he told himself. "I sure want to get to interview that girl—Delia, did he call her? That's it—Delia."

He locked the door of the cabin and having stripped and donned his pajamas, he, too, turned in to sleep. The motion of the boat in the low river swells disturbed him for a time so that he could not immediately go to sleep. During this midway interval he smiled in the dark at the curious adventure. A dream of going down the river in a houseboat was coming true—and under ideal conditions, for he was on the track of a story as strange as any he had ever hoped to cover.

"I'll never get my expense money out of it," he told himself with practical recognition of the conditions. "But I'll have the fun of getting the story straightened out if it costs me a thousand dollars."

A thousand dollars was not too much to pay for the satisfaction of solving such a mystery as he now saw; the prestige he would have for covering such a yarn would add to his value as a free lance. The girl was a find. Not a whisper of a woman in the case had reached any one's ears. His hope was that Delia would prove intimately associated with the case; his fear was that she was just a blind-alley lead or trail. If he could only connect her up with the story in two or three places.

"Then I will have a story!" he told himself.

Gost awakened him at dawn.

"Cut us loose!" Cost said. "We want to trip down! We got to find that girl. We'll stop in down below, somewheres, and ask along. They know she went past Carruthersville, they said there at Hickman sandbar. They're all talking about her, and they've given me the ha-ha, getting shot up! They don't know the right of it, though. They wonder how she got my gasolene boat, and all that. They think we were pals, and that she was huffy about something, and just rowed it and shot me up. Let 'em think what they please. I don't care!"

They floated down, early and late. Gost knew every bar and bend. He pointed to a hundred features, and told Urleigh what they meant. He indicated the point at Slough Landing where a man was killed; showed the soft-paw where Island Ten Bar lay golden yellow under the sunshine; he pointed out where Dancing Laura was run over the stem of a big houseboat when Clarence Pauley chased her with a butcher knife, and where Picking Joe picked her up and tripped away down the river with her.

Urleigh had never known there was a river people till he heard White Collar Dan relate the traditions of the shantyboat towns.

"Right along here," Dan said, "in that Point Pleasant Eddy, there was a man and his wife lived for a few weeks. One night people heard shooting out in the shantyboat, and next day the boat was gone. Guess what happened?"

"What?"

"She was changing her man; if a man's got a wife down here, she has two good bets to lose him: one is to shoot him and throw him overboard; t'other is to just get him 'vorced to Mendova. Both ways has their advantage for a lady."

"Do many women trip the river alone?"

"Not many. That's what beats me about that Delia. Lawse! She's a high-steppin' good looker. You'd ought to seen her. She stood up straight, and good looking and solid! You know, some women stand up all right, but they look soft and squashy. She stood up different—like a statue on a pedestal, but alive! First along, I didn't notice her much, but down below Paducah, I couldn't help but notice. I know how a wild cat feels, now, after it's been and stepped into a bait trap. First along, I didn't notice much, thinking of other things. Then I walked right slam into it. Bang!"

"What would she bait you on for?" Urleigh asked, casually.

"What would she bait me on for? Didn't she know what'd happened? How do I know how she found out? But she knows! You bet she knowed! I remember now. You see, things keep coming back to me. I've been trying to think where it was I seen her first. Where do you expect? It was on the Central Bridge there in Cincinnati. She was leaning on the down side rail, looking away down the river—you know how people do!"

"I've done it myself," Urleigh admitted.

"There she was. Then, down below Louisville, when I'd done my job and made my getaway—there she is! How'd she know about that gasolene boat? And then—and then——"

"You think she aimed to get you after you'd made your getaway?" Urleigh repeated the substance of other questions.

"Well, that's just what she did!" Gost growled. "I fell for it like a fly to the swat! But she's on the river yet. If we can beat the good word down, for she knows I'm out the hospital, we'll visit her, all right. That's what we'll do. I got some questions I want to ask that lady!"