Part 10

“Naw, son!” Mobile denied in tones which throbbed with disgust. “I jes’ wants to let in a leetle mo’ fresh air.”

“Us favors mo’ fresh air, too,” Pap snickered.

“I done got ’em sawed loose--mighty nigh,” Mobile said. “Dey’s sawed plum’ across on de sides an’ de bottom, but dey ain’t sawed on de top. You reckon us-all is got muscle enough to ketch holt dat gratin’ an’ bend her in or shove her out?”

“Shorely!” Mustard asserted eagerly. “I kin heft a bale of cotton an’ tote it up de gang-plank of a steamboat.”

The three stood up in the window with their feet resting on the sill.

They stooped and caught hold of the grating at the lower end, and leaning backward, they lifted up and in. Under that mighty strain, the iron grating attached to the masonry by four bars at the top slowly bent and left an opening underneath large enough to allow their bodies to pass through.

The three lost no time in climbing out. They had gone around to the front of the jail when Mustard stopped.

“Hol’ on dar, Mobile,” he muttered. “I done ferget my cawnet-hawn an’ lef’ it in de jail. I needs dat hawn.”

“Leave it be,” Mobile advised.

“I done fergot my trombone-hawn,” Pap added. “Go back an’ git ’em fer us, Mustard.”

“Naw,” Mobile protested. “I got plenty money. I’ll pay you fer ’em.”

“Naw,” Mustard rejoined vehemently. “Marse Tom gimme dat cawnet-hawn, an’ he’s powerful proud of it. He say he’d know de sound of dat cawnet in Chinee.”

Their argument ended right there, for suddenly from a window in the second story of the jail two voices screeched like a calliope:

“Murder-r! He’p! Come here, eve’ybody!”

Yells and whoops and screams and wails came from Solly and Smart who realized that Mustard and Pap had escaped and who saw the reward for their capture slipping away, leaving themselves in durance.

At the first screech, Rogers, the constable, who was sitting on a near-by door-step, ran to the jail and arrived just in time to empty his pistol at the fleeing forms of the three negroes as they passed under the last electric street light, and ran onto the protection levee at the river.

Then the constable hastened back to the jail and became the recipient of some surprising misinformation from the wailing negroes in the prison. In an eager antiphony, they recited what they knew, snatching the sentences from each other’s lips:

“Dem two niggers whut got away robbed de sto’ at Tickfall----”

“An’ kilt dat Mister Skull whut owned it----”

“De feller whut blows de cawnet-hawn done it----”

“He brag his brags dat he done kilt mo’ coons dan he kin count----”

“De monkey-faced tromboner hid behind de levee all mawnin’----”

“An’ de cawnet-nigger axed eve’ybody did us know de tromboner befo’ de tromboner would come out----”

“Ef you ketch ’em agin, Mister Rogers, does us niggers git de reward bill?”

Mister Rogers, accompanied by the two negroes, left the jail in a trot and a few minutes later the constable pounded with his night-stick on the front door of Sheriff Ulloa’s home, demanding admittance on most important business.

VI

IN THE MASSACRE SWAMP.

“We goes fo’ miles up dis levee to de Massacre swamp, niggers,” Mobile panted, as he ran. “Den faller de hog-path two miles to de ole Kerlerac plantation house. I knows dis country like I knows de insides of a white man’s hen-coop. Trot, niggers, trot!”

When the Federal soldiers visited the State of Louisiana during the Civil War, they carried guns and ammunition, but they did their best fighting and won their greatest victories and wrought their most extensive devastation with water--muddy river water.

Invading the State, they cut the levees of the Red, Atchafalaya, and Mississippi Rivers, and then let the snows melting on the loyal northern hills pour their floods and do their destructive work.

Because of this method of warfare, Louisiana was the last State to begin to recover from the effects of the Civil War.

Her agricultural enterprises absolutely require the protection of the river levees; prostrated financially, the State had no money to rebuild when peace was declared what war had destroyed.

Mobile, followed by Pap Curtain and Mustard Prophet, was going straight to a spot which indicated after half a century one of the effects of this mode of warfare.

The Kerlerac plantation house was a three-story building erected of stone conveyed, literally, from the ends of the earth, for the building material had been brought as ballast in the sailing vessels which landed with empty bottoms at the Kerlerac plantation to receive the products of her soil.

Yearly, during and after the war, the June floods had swept across that plantation, the water standing from four to forty feet deep above every inch of its soil.

The old plantation house, surrounded by its stately lawns and shaded by its colossal evergreen oaks, was abandoned, and now after sixty years the stone ruins stood in the midst of an almost impenetrable swamp and cypress trees nearly as large around as a man’s body grew in the center of the building, their branches protruding above where the roof had been.

The first gray streaks of dawn showed in the sky when Mobile led his panting and exhausted followers between the walls of this old house and allowed them a moment’s rest.

“Don’t take too long to blow, brudders!” Mobile warned them, his own tongue hanging out like a hot dog’s, his mouth spread wide, showing a gold front tooth. “Ef de white folks follers us, dey’ll come right straight to dis here house an’ start deir hunt from here. I knows ’em!”

“Whut you fetch us here fer, den?” Pap Curtain inquired indignantly.

“Us niggers is got to hab some money,” Mobile informed him, “an’ I knows whar a white man has hid some. Less git it, an’ ’vide up, an’ scoot!”

He walked through the briars and underbrush, stumbling among the fallen stones, to a certain corner; then motioning for silence, he listened.

“Dat mought be wind,” he muttered uneasily. “Den again, it mought be a steamboat puffin’ up de river. Den, agin, it moughtn’t.”

Raising a large stone, he kicked at the dirt underneath, then suddenly ceased his operations and listened.

Then in the dim light his face became ashen, turning a scar upon his cheek white, and his heart thumped like a drum. He let the rock fall back upon the treasure, and motioned to Pap and Mustard to follow, leading them four times around the walls and crisscross through the center and then back to the entrance.

“Listen, niggers!” Mobile chattered. “My Gawd, listen!”

Far across the swamp they could hear distinctly a steady repetition of three short sounds followed by a long, lowing bellow like a bull: “_Ow, ow, ow! Oo-oo-oo-o!_”

“Whut’s dat?” Mustard asked.

“_Nigger dogs!_” Mobile cried with a voice like a sob. “_Bloodhounds!_”

An uncontrollable sobbing seized the negro and his fright was pitiable. Mustard and Pap, having no experience with such dogs, looked at him uncomprehendingly.

Finally, Mobile dropped to the ground and listened. Then rising, he announced:

“A whole pack, niggers--dogs an’ men! We’ll never git outen dis swamp alive--dem dam’ dogs’ll gnaw our bones! Come on, less see kin we make it to de Massacre Bayou!”

They started on a straight line, running side by side.

Then within a hundred yards they faced a slough as large as a lake, no one knew how deep with mud and water. Taking a long detour around this, they looked back and in two miles of running, still found themselves in plain sight of the Kerlerac plantation house.

“Dat’s de las’ big puddle, niggers,” Mobile informed them. “Now go straight an’ wade eve’ything you come to!”

The ingenuity of the Spanish inquisition devised no tortures comparable to the possibilities of pain arising from a forced flight through a Louisiana jungle.

A vine trailing the ground for hundreds of yards in some mysterious manner wraps three times around a man’s leg, trips him, and leaves him to struggle with a bond which he cannot unwrap, cannot break, and cannot cut with a sharp pocket-knife.

Wild rose vines with thorns like spear-points and barbed like a fishhook snag the garments and the skin, and, like Shylock, demand their pound of flesh. Hidden in every puddle of water, the hard, sharp cypress knees lie ambushed in the mud like bayonets to impale anything which falls upon them.

Overhead, thorn-armed vines and the drooping branches of the dreadful prickly ash hang down to retard man’s progress and augument his anguish.

In every damp spot the deadly moccasin lurks; by every decayed stump and root the venomous cottonmouth guards its den; insects thrashed up by the agitation of the grass and weeds rise like an Egyptian plague and blind the eyes and fill the nostrils and choke the throat.

And through it all, mud which bogs the runner to his knees; at every twenty steps a pool of water and mire, which may be shallow enough for a sparrow to wade without wetting his feathers, or as deep as a well; and poison ivy, growing waist high, saturating man’s garments with its vitriol juices, and burning the flesh as if the runner were wading in a caldron of boiling oil!

But the pursuing dog slips unhindered through the jungle, runs unmired through the mud, swims the pools of water, and stands howling underneath the tree where the fugitive has climbed to escape the canine’s tearing teeth.

In half an hour the negroes, scratched, torn, snagged, wounded, bleeding, mud-covered, half-naked, looking more like wild beasts than men, stood on the banks of the Massacre Bayou. Forty yards behind them a pack of ravening dogs bayed a red-hot trail.

“Swim it!” Mobile panted. “Git across dis creek, fer Gawd’s sake!”

They leaped into the stream and dragged their exhausted bodies up the opposite bank just as the raging dogs stopped at the water’s edge on the bank they had just left.

Mobile ran to a hickory sapling as large around as his arm.

“He’p me break dis off, men,” he screamed. “We got to fight ’em!”

With the strength of desperation, the three men wrenched at the sapling, snapped it off at the roots, broke it in a proper length for a club, and as quickly as possible selected and prepared two others like it.

“Look out, niggers!” Mobile howled. “Dey’s gittin’ ready to swim across! Kill eve’y dog as quick as his front feet touches the land on dis side. Whatever happens, git dem big, black, long-eared debbils fust!”

While he was speaking two of the bloodhounds leaped from the bank and came toward them, swerving not an inch before the threatening clubs.

Mobile stepped to the edge of the water and stood poised to strike, his crazed eyes glaring at one of the swimming dogs, the features of his face quivering with spasms of pain and exhaustion. Then the hickory descended, and the immense dog sank under the water with a startled grunt.

Mobile and Pap both ministered to the other bloodhound which followed its mate to the bottom of the bayou.

Then the whole pack, deer-dogs, fox-hounds, hog-dogs, and mongrels, making the swamp hideous with their howls and yelps, sprang into the stream.

The three negroes ran up and down the bank of the stream, striking with weary arms, kicking with feet as heavy as lead, sobbing, praying, cursing, raving--adding their insane voices to the noise of the hounds, making pandemonium of the silent, shadowy swamp.

At last the hound-pack, wearied by swimming and unable to effect a landing, turned back to the opposite shore in defeat.

“Saved!” Mobile sobbed. “Now, niggers, trot down this here bayou till we git to de public road!”

Ten minutes later, they fell in the dust of the public highway like monstrous worms or rather like raw, skinned cattle divested of their hides and their carcasses left as food for the carrion crows.

For a few minutes they were motionless, lying like dead men; then a consciousness of approaching danger roused them to renew their flight.

Rising totteringly to their feet, they breathed deeply, and started. Then all hope died.

From out of the high weeds on the side of the road, a deep-seamed, weather-tanned Spanish face appeared, and two fearless eyes held the gaze of the helpless negroes like a hypnotist.

“You niggers stop right there!” a quiet voice said.

It was Sheriff Ulloa, who knew the route of fugitive criminals, and had taken the precaution to guard the only outlet from the Massacre Swamp.

“Please, suh, boss, save us,” the negroes sobbed in a chorus.

“All right,” the sheriff said grimly. “Trot right down the center of this road and go back to the jail you got out of.”

VII

“GON’ER GIT THEM NIGGERS!”

Just at noon the three negroes stumbled through the door of the jail, and like men walking in their sleep, obeyed the command of the sheriff and climbed the steps to the second story. There they fell to the floor and sank into unconsciousness.

The sheriff closed the jail door and sat down on the steps in front, where he gave himself up to most serious thought. Almost an hour later he arose, reëntered the jail, and returning to his three prisoners picked out Mobile Boone and kicked him into wakefulness.

“Get up, Mobile,” he commanded. “Follow me downstairs.”

Dumbly, the negro obeyed. On the ground floor the sheriff stopped and spoke:

“Mobile, what are you in here for?”

“I got drunk in de Chicken-Wing an’ tried to claw a nigger’s nose off.”

“Were you arrested with those other two negroes?”

“Naw, suh. Dey fetch me to de calaboose on Sunday mawnin’ an’ dem two coons come in late Sunday night. I never seed ary one of ’em befo’.”

“If I let you out will you leave town right away?”

“Bless gracious, boss,” Mobile exclaimed with most obvious sincerity, “ef you lets me outen dis jail, I’ll put dis town so fur behine me back dat it’ll cost you ninety-seben dollars to send me a postich card.”

The sheriff laughed.

“I means it, boss,” Mobile assured him. “Jes gimme a shirt an’ a pair of britches so I won’t look like I was jes’ bawned, an’ I’ll shore ax you good-by!”

The sheriff led the negro across to the office in the court-house, opened a closet, pawed over some old hunting clothes, and found some suitable garments for Mobile. When the negro had put them on, the sheriff handed him a silver dollar and said:

“Now, Mobile, I’ve let you out because the chances are those other two negroes are going to be mobbed. You are innocent and I don’t want to see you strung up. You’d better hit the grit!”

Mobile did. He went down the levee at a gait which bid fair to carry him very far in a brief time--if he could keep it up.

Then the sheriff returned to the jail and sat down in the same place.

The town of Kerlerac was deserted except for the women and children. Practically every male inhabitant had joined the most exciting of all chases--the man-hunt.

The sheriff placed a cigar in his mouth, chewed it almost to the other end without lighting it, then spat it out.

“When that searching party finds their dead dogs and drinks up all their red liquor,” he reasoned to himself, “and come back to town and find those coons in jail, they’ll form a mob. My deputies will desert the crowd when the mob forms, but they won’t join me. It’s up to me to protect the coons.”

The town-clock struck two.

Far down the road, Sheriff Ulloa heard the piercing yell of the fox-hunter.

“They’re coming back,” he muttered.

Taking a large pistol from the holster under his arm, he examined it carefully, revolving the cylinder between his thumb and finger.

A tiny chameleon was playing up and down the bark of a tree twenty feet distant.

With a motion which appeared almost careless, Ulloa made a turn of his wrist, there was a loud explosion from the gun, and the little creature spattered into fragments, leaving a dark, wet spot against the tree which looked as if a man had spat at a hole in the bark and made a center shot.

The shot aroused the two negroes on the floor above, and the man-hunters heard it and hastened back to town.

When the party arrived in Kerlerac they quickly heard of the sheriff’s capture of the fugitives, but not a man came to the sheriff to ask him about the capture. They gathered in a body in the Red Elephant saloon.

Soon one of the deputies, white-faced and panting, ran into the sheriff’s presence with the news that a mob was forming on the outskirts of the town.

“I expected that,” Ulloa answered quietly. “You and the other two deputies arm yourselves with rifles and hide in the tower of the court-house overlooking the front of the jail.”

“What must we do?” the deputy asked tremulously. “Shoot?”

“Do your duty!” Ulloa replied shortly, “whatever you conceive it to be.”

He turned and entered the jail, locking the door behind him.

“Boss,” Mustard Prophet called down to him, “me an’ Pap lef’ our toot-hawns down-stairs. Please, suh, fotch us up de cawnet an’ de trombone!”

With a grim smile the sheriff complied with the request.

“You niggers better play the _Dead March in Saul_,” he muttered grimly. “It’ll be appropriate all right.”

“Us ain’t ’quainted wid dat toon,” Pap grinned, reaching for his trombone. “But me an’ Mustard kin shore fetch ragtime and religion songs.”

In the meantime, in the far end of the town, sixty excited men had supplied themselves with enough rope to hang a man from a not too distant star; had armed themselves with knives and hatchets and axes, with guns and pistols; had appointed their leader, Barto Skaggs, a man of swarthy complexion, a grim mouth, surmounted by a black mustache, and intense, glowing black eyes, which pressed hard against the lids and showed a great deal of white beneath the pupil--the eyes of the wanton destroyer.

“Keep together, men!” Barto Skaggs advised. “When one man acts everybody act with him. Come on!”

With the first forward step of the mob a tall, gangling, half-wit boy, with a long neck, a step-ladder head, a long sharp nose, and a receding chin, and a loose-lipped mouth which dribbled tobacco-juice as he spoke, began to repeat like a chant:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!”

His harsh, crackly, gosling voice, uttering every word with a jerk, soon took the monotonous roll of a snaredrum. Unconsciously the men kept step to the words and the purpose expressed in the sentence was burned into the very fiber of their souls:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!”

Turning into the street which led to the jail two blocks away, the mob rounded the Confederate Circle, in the center of which was a ridiculous, stump-legged, pewter image of a man, too short in its stride for glory, but, nevertheless, erected by a grateful populace as a monument of glory to commemorate the heroes of the South.

Then Sheriff Ulloa stepped out of the jail, locked the door behind him, tossed the key as far as he could throw it into some high weeds growing at the side of the prison, and waited.

It was not necessary for the leader and spokesman to explain to the officer of the law the purpose of their visit.

Fully a block away the half-wit’s strident voice, having gained in volume by the constant repetition of the phrase, conveyed the message in tones which crackled like thorns under a pot:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git----”

The mob halted.

“Turn around and go back, gentlemen,” the sheriff said courteously. “Start your one-man band to playing another tune, and go back!”

In the center of the street there was a rut which had been made by wagon wheels.

The mob moved slowly forward, and stopped at this rut like children toeing a mark in a spelling-match. They seemed to feel that a contest was on, and that this rut was the dead-line.

“We want them niggers, sheriff,” Barto Skaggs said.

“You shall not have them,” Ulloa replied quietly and forcibly. “When you kill those blacks every man of you is a murderer. I shall not be sheriff of a parish which contains sixty murderers--men of prominence--running at large!”

“Aw, come off, George!” an impatient voice exclaimed. “You’ve kilt a plenty of coons in your day!”

“Yes, gentlemen, I have,” Ulloa answered quickly. “_I have never been slow to kill!_ And I was elected sheriff of this parish _by you_ for the one purpose of totally abolishing this wholesale slaughter of innocent and unoffending blacks, and for the protection of offenders from mob violence in order that the law might take its course. I shall do it.”

Looking into the quiet, determined face of the officer, the mob wavered. Then the half-wit’s snare-drum voice rallied them:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git----”

The mob took one cautious step forward. Ulloa drew his pistol from his pocket.

“That’s far enough, fellow citizens,” he said, and now his voice drawled like the purr of a cat and was deadly in its menace. “When you get those niggers I won’t be the sheriff of this parish. I’ll be dead. I don’t know who’ll get me, but I’ll kill the first man who takes the next step forward!”

The mob packed denser, became tense, throbbed like an automobile when the power is turned on. Ulloa’s eyes gazed straight into the destructive orbs of Barto Skaggs and held him like a hypnotist. Then the half-wit began:

“Gon’er git--them niggers! Gon’er git----”

A back-handed blow from Barto Skaggs’s fist struck the half-wit fairly in the mouth and sent him reeling backward, disarranging for a moment the tense compact mass of men.

Then from the second-story front window of the jail, just above the sheriff’s head and behind him, there came a sound which caused the sheriff’s swarthy face to whiten to the eyebrows--the most unfortunate thing which could have happened to his cause:

“Oo-oh! My Gawd, my Gawd! De mobbers is comin’! De mobbers!”

Instantly the mob crouched like panthers ready to spring.

VIII

MOB AND MUSIC.

Up to the moment when their frightened screams had stirred afresh the mob’s lust to kill, Mustard and Pap Curtain had been totally ignorant of what was occurring outside the jail. Wandering idly to the window to look out, they had seen what every negro dreads, whatever the reason for his incarceration--a mob.

With the first frightened cry Sheriff Ulloa knew that it would be impossible to disperse the crowd before him. The scream of the quarry only stimulates the pursuit of the wolf-pack.

For two dreadful minutes the negroes sobbed and prayed; then Mustard Prophet turned shudderingly away from the window and, going to a window on the side of the jail, knelt at the casement and wept like a child, looking up now and then with fear-crazed eyes at the silent statue of the pewter hero of the Lost Cause.

Then while the grim sheriff stood poised and ready, fronting alone the crouching crowd of eager men, the shrill note of an automobile horn was heard and an immense machine whirled around the Confederate Circle and came sailing down the street toward the jail.

One block distant it stopped--abruptly.

The white-haired, white-bearded man at the steering-wheel gazed down the street in surprise. The scene was too familiar to require explanation. Leaping from the car, he walked slowly and cautiously down the street.

Then, up in the second story of the jail, Mustard Prophet leaped to his feet sobbing, praying, shrieking in a perfect frenzy of hope and fear.

“Oh, my Lawd!” he exclaimed. “_Dar’s Marse Tom!_”

Grabbing his cornet like a drowning man clutches at a straw, he placed it to his quivering lips. Loud and clear, throbbing with the eagerness of hope, the courage of despair, the strains of music became almost articulate speaking the words of a song:

All de world am sad and dreary, Eberywhere I roam; Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary, Far from de old folks at home!

The god Mars, who had witnessed many warlike scenes in Louisiana, never beheld an incident so grotesquely dramatic as this.