Diamond Tolls/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
DELIA floated down the crossing and sat on the bow of her little shantyboat, with her elbows on her knees and her knuckles under her chin. Her face, so far as the passing birds could have seen, was expressionless. Her eyes looked frankly at the swirling eddies and watched ahead to see that the boat kept in midcurrent.
"So this is Old Mississippi," she told herself. "This is where people come when they really want to forget and be forgotten? This is where you make your own law, and where you don't just give a—give a damn for anything! Well, it looks it."
She smiled whimsically. She sat up straight, and filled a good pair of lungs with sweet air. She raised her chin with a pert, saucy toss of her head. She looked at her palms, and saw there the little roughening, inevitable accompaniment of pulling fourteen-foot shantyboat oars. She looked at the backs of her hands.
"My hands are bare!" she smiled to herself with satisfaction. "And I'm free! I've nothing to bother about, now—just my own thinking!"
So she floated along, and eyed the river banks curiously. There were dark banks, covered with tall trees along which the current pulled, cutting with the suggestion of a saw's teeth. There were miles-wide sandbars opposite these long, curving, dark banks—beautiful golden sandbars on which the sunshine reflected as the moon reflects upon water. Between woods were openings and clearings, and back on some of these west side clearings she saw long, level dirt embankments, which she knew were levees. On the east side were hills and ridges, but no levees.
Here and there she saw little houseboats moored in eddies, and at intervals she saw gasolene ferryboats crossing the river. She saw occasional buildings on the banks, and passed a little settlement or two. But all these signs of humanity were far away, and they but added to the immensity of the Mississippi River upon whose flood she was floating down. It was of an overwhelming size, that old river! It spread out till it was a mile wide, and when she looked up or down stream, she looked into miles distance where the river turned around a bend under a dancing haze of sheen; down stream, the grade was visibly down, and the plane of the surface sloped and gave the voyager the feeling that she was sliding into oblivion, a mere fleck on a vast, living torrent.
"It's that I am here to feel and enjoy," she told herself.
Up stream, the plane sloped up and miles back she could see the waters coming down toward her, a wave that rose surely to a crest a thousand miles away and a thousand feet in the air—such a wave as the sea never dreams of throwing, but which the imagination pictures as one floats in a low shantyboat somewhere down the face of that whelming swell. Suppose that wave should heave up and break? Fancy swinging under the crest of a wave breaking a thousand feet higher than one's head!
Delia, feeling that wave, shuddered a little. That wave, in fact, for her was swelling up and swinging over and breaking down upon her—not the Mississippi tide wave, but another wave, a spiritual wave which she believed and hoped would engulf her. It pleased her fancy to recall the river woman's quaint statement that the forks of the Ohio was the jumping-off place for some.
But while she enjoyed the sensation of the oblivion, and while she gazed with pleasure at the miles up stream and the miles down stream, and the great breadth of protecting torrent between her and the far shantyboats and the occasional ferries, she became conscious of a menace. A cold chill swept along her back. She looked up and down and around, trying to discover the source of that menace, but it was a long time before she saw anything that suggested a reason for the sudden change from friendly solitude to dreaded company.
Something seemed to warn her that she was under observation—that something was watching her. She looked around impatiently, and she stepped into her boat to get her binoculars to scrutinize the surroundings. As she started back on to the bow deck she paused within the doorway.
"Don't go outside to look!" something said to her, and accordingly, she obeyed the voice and began her scrutiny from under the shadow of her own cabin.
She looked ahead to port and to starboard, and astern. She looked up and down and then away astern. Miles and miles up the river, across the low edge of a wide sandbar, she picked up a spot upon the water, and when she had found the exact focus for her glasses, that spot resolved itself into a boat, into a gasolene cruiser.
Delia felt a little thrill at discovering that craft. It was not a pleasurable thrill, nor yet a distinctly unpleasant one. It seemed to answer the feeling of menace which had driven her from comfort.
"There!" her mind seemed to say.
Instead of going out to sit on the deck, she prepared a meal on the three-burner oil stove in her cabin. It was a dainty meal—a luncheon that included salad, tea, and bread ample for a fair appetite. The boat, swinging and swaying in the mid-channel swirls, hung broadside to the current. As she ate, she could distinguish the gasolene boat far astern, floating in her wake, but not approaching nearer that she could see.
She resumed her vigil on the bow of the boat, sitting there as she had been sitting when she drifted out of the Ohio. She at last observed that the boat astern was coming nearer, for she could see it plainly with her unassisted eyes. As night drew near, the boat drew up within a mile, and Delia, watching both shores ahead, sought for a little shantyboat town where she could land in among people.
She had passed Hickman, and the river had turned wild below there. Woods grew to the very bank of the river, so that midstream was open, but her course down stream crowded into a bend that grew ever gloomier and darker, and the shantyboats which she discovered under the high, caving banks were in singles. She knew better than to run in beside a lone shantyboat!
A dread, which is a part of the Mississippi's training of the soul, filled her thoughts. With sunset near, a strange little chill swept over the river. Real danger menaced! The gasolene boat drawing down nearer and nearer, after holding aloof all day long—Delia realized that her hour of trial was at hand.
"I knew it!" she whispered to herself, "I expected this. Now I mustn't flinch!"
A long, straight reach ran for miles down ahead of her. With her glasses she searched both shores, and saw only a scattered shantyboat or two. It was a wide, wild river, and wherever she ran in, she would be dependent upon her own resources. She could expect no help in that lonesome reach of woods and sandbars.
She dared not float in the night. There were terrors in midstream which she dreaded more than the questionable and gloomy bank. So she landed at the foot of a long, narrow sandbar, in a wide, almost currentless eddy. She made fast with her bow lines to the limbs of a snag that lay half in and half out of the water where her bow bumped against them.
She prepared supper, though she felt that she never would be able to eat another meal in the coming of night. As she cooked, the gasolene cruiser swung by under power, cut across into the eddy below her, and then floated up toward her boat in the slow eddy current.
In the pit sat a man whom she could see plainly now. He was busied getting his own supper in the galley on a gasolene stove. She watched him from behind her windows; nothing in his appearance or motions or manœuvres added to her confidence.
The boat landed against the bank only fifty yards distant. The man threw an anchor over the stern and then ran a bow line up the bank to a stake which he drove. Watching him nervously, she saw that this was an excellent thing, and resolved herself to remember it, and moor her own craft in that way. It would serve better than to have a spar plank against the bank to keep the boat from pounding.
An old river man, the gasolene boat navigator was quickly in shape for the night. The dark had come. The reach was as lonesome as any from Cairo to Mendova. The last Delia saw of him in the fading twilight that followed sunset was his side-long glances in the direction of her boat.
She lighted her lamp and after a little thinking she left the doors unlocked. She felt that the attack would come either from the bow or stern, and she thought that she would be able to escape if the opposite door was not fastened.
She waited, growing calm the while. The actual presence of the great danger for a river woman, especially for such a pretty girl as she was, seemed to calm her. She sat in the low rocking chair which she had brought for comfort, where she could read, mend, and just sit.
Sure enough, she heard footsteps along the sloping bank and felt the sagging of the boat as the man walked up the gangplank and stepped upon the bow of her little houseboat.
"Hello, girlee!" he hailed, pushing open the door, and stepping into the room.
She crouched in the low chair, her hands against her bosom. She glared up into his eyes with an expression which bade him pause, but he did not heed it.
"Hello, girlee!" he repeated, turning to close the door. He walked across the room toward another chair, adding, "I thought I'd come visiting, knowing you wouldn't mind!"
As he reached to the back of the other chair she drew her automatic pistol and fired.
"Agrrah!" he grunted, and then with a cry he backed away, saying: "You've shot me! Damn you, you've shot me!"
He turned, and seeing the stern door swinging partly open, he dashed toward it, flung it wide, and leaped from the deck. After the splash she heard him floundering away from the boat.
She stood surprised by what she had done. It was unbelievable, incredible. She had been attacked by a man, and she had driven him from her! She had not been obliged to flee from him!
"Why, it was easy," she said to herself. "All I did was just—shoot!"
She patted the automatic pistol as though it had been a glove or a scarf. She let the cocked hammer down, and put another cartridge into the case, to take the place of the one she had fired.
"Is that all there is to it?" she asked herself, and then she laughed lightly and aloud.
The secret of Old Mississipp' was hers! She had discovered it, and she laughed with delight at the discovery she had made. There was nothing to it but keep her mouth closed and shoot—shoot quick and straight!
She locked the doors now and sat down to think it all over. She tried to read, but reading was less exciting, less exacting, less true than just thinking. All the romances of the world, all the news items, all the learned essays were as nothing compared to the unmatched adventure through which she had gone that night.
She had saved herself from that visitor who waited to call in the dark. She gave no thought to the question of what had become of him. That was immaterial. Nothing had happened to her; that was the idea uppermost in her mind.
She sat there, with the automatic pistol in her lap, stroking it with a rare tenderness and affection.
"My dear sweet!" she called it, and then as she found new ideas, she gave it the appellation so familiar down Old Mississip': "This is law! This is law and I administer it!"
Delia looked into the mirror which hung against the cabin wall. She saw her cheeks were a little flattened, and her colour was dulled, but the fire in her eyes was of a different kind than any she had ever seen in them before. It was a cold, grim fire. It seemed to her as though all the lightness and gaiety had departed from her heart for ever more. Yet she was not dissatisfied. Far from it!
Never was she so perfectly certain that she was right, and that she had done well as at this moment when she stood any man's equal in any man's game.
She could not think of resting, of trying to go to sleep. She had too much on her mind to let go in stupid repose and somnolence. She had made the greatest discovery in the world. A man had declared:
"Damn you! You've shot me!" and then had turned and fled from her.
Sweeter words no man had ever addressed to a woman, she thought, repeating them over and over again. How silly, how uninteresting, how utterly inconsequential were the countless things other men had addressed to her, compared to that choking compliment by that strange and desperate river man, who had damned her and then fled staggering from her—hard hit and preferring the open door to the river rather than approach her, even to get to the river bank.
She looked at herself in the mirror, and remembered the look on the faces of the river women whom she had seen up the river the previous night, women whom she had envied, even to their colourless skins and grim, knowing eyes. Something about those women stirred her deeply. They possessed so many things that a young and pretty girl, tripping down Old Mississip' for the first time, could not possess. There was a poise, an independence, a certain erectness which Delia wondered if she would ever possess.
She was startled with delight when she saw in her own countenance that same expression now. It had never been in her eyes and face before. She had always felt hunted, and she had always been hunted—but now she was neither hunted nor afraid. She had met a man on his own grounds and driven him reeling backward, cursing, whipped, and glad to escape into the coiling river if only thereby he could find his way from her presence!
A curious, satisfied calm followed the panic which had affected her during the hours when she was looking for some safe place from his pursuit. It seemed to her as though the river had ceased to menace, and it was once more a free and open highway for her pleasure! The weakness of which she had always been aware as a girl and a young woman suddenly vanished. She was now able to cope on equal terms with the river!
The cabin-boat was twenty-two feet long, eight feet wide, and seven feet six inches from the bottom of the hull to the eaves of the cabin roof. The cabin was twelve feet long, which left five feet for the length of each deck, ample room for pulling the sweeps or to sit and watch the banks move by.
The cabin, divided into two parts, had a little kitchenette of a galley, leaving the living room eight feet square. The partition jutted out from each wall only a foot, so that there was practically only one room. A curtain served in the doorway, but Delia left the curtain open so that she could see both doors from where she sat.
Her bed was a low, thirty-inch wide folding cot covered with a woven Indian blanket, which made it look like a lounge. There were four chairs, one for the kitchen, a comfortable wicker rocker, an armchair, and a dining-room chair.
The ceiling was the roof of the boat, with the stanchions and sheeting all painted a light blue. The walls were painted white. The curtains on the four side windows were dark green and very heavy. Several pictures hung on the walls, a writing desk, a stack of sectional bookcases, and a clothes press completed the furnishings of the interior of the boat. The floor was plain and bare except for two small rugs.
The workmanship on the boat itself showed the craft of a river carpenter. The frame was braced fore and aft and athwartship, against strains and gales. In each corner of the cabin was a little trap, which might be raised to reveal whether the boat was wet or dry, and supply a place in which things could be hidden or stored. In one corner stood a large tin bilge pump, and holes above the gunwale with shutters over them enabled the skipper to pump out any water that might seep through in a storm.
The boat was equipped with three hundred feet of new half-inch handy line coiled dry under the cot; the inch bow and stem mooring lines had hooks under the wide eaves of the bow and stern, on the walls; an anchor, with one hundred and fifty feet of inch line, rested in a locker on the stern, to swing in an eddy or hold the boat off the banks against the strain of the bow lines—as the gasolene marauder had hauled off his boat.
The more accustomed Delia became to river living, the more she was satisfied with her boat. If she paid a good price for it, she had been well and fairly treated, and the old river ship carpenter had built and well found her boat for her.
She retired on this night with a new feeling of satisfaction, and with no qualms of fear. Her thirty-eight calibre automatic guaranteed her against intrusion. Her experience had proved that she could take care of herself without question.
She yielded to an impulse to say a prayer which was of thanks, blew out her light, and retired. For a time she listened to the spattering and pattering of the waves along the hull, and then drifted into sleep from which she did not awaken till after sunrise in the morning.
When she stepped out to look at the gay river from the stern deck, she was surprised to see the gasolene crusier still moored to the bank. She had expected it to be gone.
"Why—why, he must have—perhaps he's drowned!" she whispered, her imagination bringing up the possibility that she had shot too well.
Then she wondered if he might not have crawled back on board the motorboat and be lying there injured. This thought worried her, and she hurried down the bank, not neglecting to take her automatic with her.
She hailed the cruiser from the bank several times, and hearing no reply she climbed on board. It was a clean boat, and except for the odour of cigarettes and a medicine of fragrant smell, it offered no offence to her mind.
The motor was housed in neatly, and the boat was well and handsomely built. It had no name. There was a gun cabinet and a desk built in at the cabin ends of the two narrow staterooms. On the locker seats were stacks of newspapers. A smoking jacket was thrown upon the table with masculine untidiness. The galley contained a few dishes, scraped clean, which needed washing.
She stood in the cabin a long time, wondering what to do. She knew now that the raider, the river pirate, had not returned to his boat. Whether he was dead or alive she could only guess. With difficulty she confronted the situation from the viewpoint of the people to whose customs she had determined to adapt herself.
"I've captured it!" she thought, her cheeks growing warm. "I'd better keep it till I find out whose it really is."
Accordingly, she freed the bow line and hauled in the anchor which was over the stern. Then the boat, which was about thirty-three feet long, floated up the eddy and she pulled it in alongside her houseboat and made it fast, bow and stern, with fenders between the hulls.
She cleaned house in her capture; scrubbed and aired and shook out everything. She ransacked her prize, seeking to discover whose it was. In one locker she found a black sheetiron box, which was locked. She picked the lock with a wire hairpin and cried out with astonishment at what she saw within:
There was a thick brick of yellow-back currency the top bill of which was for one hundred dollars. Besides this brick was a square, black leather case, and when she opened it there were long, narrow envelopes by the score. She unfolded one, and uttered a cry:
"Why—it's a diamond. They've all got diamonds in them!"