Part 4

The ground around them was covered with vegetation, so ropy with vines that a raccoon could not penetrate it; the branches of the immense trees hung downward, and were draped with long, ropelike funereal streamers and festoons of Spanish moss, so that it seemed that half the vegetable world was growing from below upward and the other half was growing from above downward, making a hot-house purgatory, shut off from the sky above and the earth below, and enclosing the men who rode that narrow path like a trap.

The dim ridge which their horses trod was the one route of ingress and egress through that obscure, uncharted morass reeking with poison and choked with a growth which seemed coeval with the dawn of creation itself.

Gaitskill, noting the sudden silence of the negroes, became uneasy. He knew that if the darkies were thrown into a panic they would spur their mounts into the jungle to hide, and that would be the end of both the horse and his rider.

“Marse Tom,” old Isaiah said in a trembling tone, “My hoss is a walkin’ lame.”

Gaitskill stopped and stood facing the long line of frightened negroes.

“All you niggers pull to one side and let Isaiah ride back to town!” he called.

“Who? Me?” Isaiah bawled. “Naw, _suh_! Dis hoss ain’t so powerful lame--not as much as he wus when I fust spoke. An’ even if his behine leg wus twisted plum’ off, I’d shore make him hop along wid you-alls.”

“Any of the rest of you niggers got lame horses?” Gaitskill laughed.

“Naw, suh, kunnel,” Hitch Diamond yelled, the last man in the line. “My hoss is walkin’ so spry I cain’t keep him behine by hisse’f. Lemme ride up dar close to you!”

“Stay where you are, Hitch!” Gaitskill laughed. “You asked me to let you ride behind. Come on, men!”

The path widened and the horses struck into a trot which brought them to the hog-camp in half an hour.

Throughout the length and breadth of this swamp, about a mile apart, there were curious mounds rising ten or twelve feet above the surrounding marsh. All these mounds were round in shape and flat on the top.

Some of them were not more than a hundred feet in diameter, while others were large, containing half an acre of land. They had been built a hundred years before by the Indians--and served a very practical purpose. When the water flooded the swamp in the autumn the wild animals took refuge on these mounds. The Indians penetrated the jungle in their canoes and visited each mound, easily slaying the deer and bears, and thus procuring their winter supply of meat.

The Gaitskill hog-camp occupied the largest of these mounds, the cabin standing in the center of a two-acre plot. The flat top of the mound had been kept cleared of timber, but the jungle encroached to the very edge.

The posse galloped into this clearing, and Colonel Gaitskill dismounted from his horse.

“You darkies stay here!” he commanded. “I’ll see whether Diada is in the cabin.”

The cabin was empty. All of Isaiah’s smoked sausage and hams had disappeared. Little Bit’s mandolin, with the strings broken, lay in the corner of the room, and a part of Mrs. Gaitskill’s silk kimono hung from a splinter on the wall, showing how it had been torn off. From a nail on the wall hung a long lasso.

Taking down the rope Gaitskill walked out again to the negroes.

“She’s not here, men,” he announced. “We’ll have to hunt her in the swamp.”

Adjusting the rope to his saddle-horn he mounted and sat for a moment debating his next move.

Then Diada emerged from the jungle and stood at the edge of the clearing, looking curiously at the troop of men.

“Dar she!” the negroes howled.

Gaitskill rode slowly forward, holding out his hand in a gesture of friendliness about as one would approach to catch a horse. But Diada moved slowly backward, keeping in the cleared space, always just one leap distant from the jungle.

Twice they circled the clearing in this ridiculous fashion, Gaitskill repeating in most wheedling and coaxing tones every expression of fondness and endearment with which he was acquainted.

“Dat chin-music ain’t gittin’ Marse Tom _nothin’_,” Vinegar Atts declared, watching the elusive Diada. “Me ’n’ Hitch’s done tried dat!”

Finally Gaitskill abandoned that plan, and quietly loosened his rope and got ready to throw.

Riding back a few feet he gave the rope a quick swing, and the noose settled prettily around the arms of the giant woman just above her elbows. There was not a trace of fear in her face, and she moved slowly backward until the rope was taut. To the interested negroes it looked like the simple, peaceable game of “playing horse.”

Then Gaitskill spurred his horse to one side and gave the rope a sharp jerk. Instantly a long-bladed butcher-knife flashed in Diada’s hand, and the severed rope trailed loosely upon the ground, while the now harmless noose slipped down over her hands and was lightly tossed aside.

“Dar now!” Hitch Diamond exclaimed in tragic tones. “Dat fish is done unbit an’ div!”

Gaitskill slowly drew in the rope and was busy making another noose, when there was a warning shout from the negroes.

Diada was coming across the clearing toward Gaitskill, leaping like a deer. There was no trace of anger in her manner, and no sign of danger except the long-bladed knife in her powerful hand.

Gaitskill’s nervous horse shied at that monstrous woman with her fluttering, ragged garments, and wheeled and bolted, snorting with terror.

The jungle kept the horse in the clearing as effectively as a barbed-wire fence, but the animal had two acres of level ground to run on and he proceeded to cover that ground in record-breaking time. Gaitskill might have quieted the animal very quickly, except for the fact that this performance seemed to please Diada, and she continued her pursuit, chasing Colonel Gaitskill all around the lot.

“Look out, Marse Tom!” the negroes bawled, amid whoops of laughter. “Don’t let her ketch yer!”

The laughter of the negroes diverted Diada’s attention to them.

With a loud “_Whoosh!_” she sailed into that compact mass of men and horses, scattering them like a brick dropped into a pile of feathers. Horses nickered and plunged, mules squealed and kicked, and negroes screamed with fright, and in a moment the cleared space in front of the hog-camp was a circus-ring of panicky men and beasts performing every imaginable stunt, with Diada in the star rôle of circus-master and chief of clowns.

Colonel Gaitskill’s horse found the path which led back to Tickfall, plunged down the embankment, and ran away with his helpless rider. The negroes, seeing Gaitskill’s departure, followed at their swiftest gait, their shrieks and wails of fright and woe rolling through the swamp with hideous reverberations.

One mile from the hog-camp Gaitskill regained control of his horse, and turned to ride back.

Then he heard the thundering hoofs of the horses and mules coming down the narrow bridle-path toward him. The road was not wide enough to pull aside and let them pass; even if it were, in that moment of panic, the horses and mules might become frightened at him and plunge into the swamp.

Gaitskill regretted the necessity for his action, but there was nothing else to do; he led that column of wailing negroes in ignominious flight back toward Tickfall.

He kept ahead of them until he reached the main road, then turned aside and let them precede him.

As he sat watching that ludicrous procession of squalling blacks, his own horse suddenly snorted and bolted down the road at its wildest speed. Gaitskill looked back to ascertain the cause of the animal’s fright.

Lo, Diada was in full pursuit of the flying posse, trotting with the speed of a galloping horse, her tongue hanging out like a hot dog’s, Mrs. Gaitskill’s kimono trailing behind her like a torn battle-flag, her long, ugly-bladed knife clutched in her powerful hand. One word came from her throat with the explosive sound of a pistol-shot:

“_Whoo-ash!_”

There was no stopping his horse, so Gaitskill rode the four miles back to Tickfall in something like eight minutes. When he swung out of the swamp road into the town he looked back again.

Diada was half a mile behind him, trotting tirelessly, covering about ten feet of ground with each tremendous stride. Her farewell admonition came to him across the distance.

Softened by the intervening space, it seemed to contain a plaintive note of appeal; yet this impression was but momentary, for Gaitskill found too close a kinship between this outlandish expression and the snarl of the wolf, the hiss of the snake, and the scream of the jungle beast bent on blood and death.

IX

“DESE HERE IS TURR’BLE TIMES”

Fifty-five terrified negroes galloped wildly into Tickfall, distributed themselves in the various negro settlements of the village, and told fifty-five separate and distinct tales of horror about the fiasco at the hog-camp.

One half truth ran through all the narratives, holding them together as vari-colored beads are held upon a string:

“Marse Tom Gaitskill bragged his brags at de cotton-shed dat he wus gwine walk right up an’ put his hand on dat wild woman. But he never done it a-tall--naw, suh.”

“He didn’t git no nigher dat woman dan de eend of a lassoo, an’ when she snuck up behine him wid dat big butcher-knife in her han’, dat white man jes’ nachelly _’vaporated_! Yes, suh! Us niggers tried to keep up an’ go along home wid him, but we ain’t never got in sight of Marse Tom till yit--an’ us is plum’ back in town! Dat nigger woman run at us jes’ like a wild hawg--you-all knows how de hawgs pop dey jaws an’ says ’_Whoosh_!’ When a wild hawg does dat way, nigger, you better coon up a tree. Well, suh, dat’s jes’ whut she said to us--_’Whoosh_!’”

Thus the negroes walked from house to house telling their appalling stories to little groups of pop-eyed listeners, adding something more blood-curdling to the tales with each repetition, until the terrified inhabitants of Shiny, Shoofly, Hell’s Half-Acre, and Dirty Six were as uneasy and fearful as if they were standing in the crumbling crater of a rumbling volcano.

Then the grapevine telephone was put into operation.

There is nothing as mysterious to the white man as the negro’s method of communicating information for long distances and to the remotest cabins of his race. “Word wus sont,” is the negro’s only explanation of how he happened to know twenty minutes after it occurred that a murder had been committed in the woods twenty miles away.

Long before night the town began to fill up with negroes coming in from plantations ten and twelve miles away. They arrived unostentatiously, seeming to spring up from the very sand of the street. They seemed jumpy when they were spoken to, moved about not singly but in groups, and kept looking back over their shoulders.

The white people of the town noticed the anxiety and strain, and it became a contagion. They knew that a wild woman was at large, meditating they knew not what outrage.

The sun set as red as blood, and in a few minutes a heavy, smelly, yellow Gulf fog swept the town, making objects invisible at a distance of twenty feet, almost blotting out the little electric lights which had just enough candle-power to reveal where they were but not sufficient to show where anything else was.

The Reverend Dr. Sentelle stumped his way down to the post office upon his ponderous cane, mailed a letter, and stood for a moment in the doorway puffing a cigar. Several negroes passed, walking down the middle of the street just as the venerable preacher flicked his cigar-stump toward the gutter. The butt whirled round and round and struck the ground with a splash of fire from the lighted end.

What a howl!

The men ran down the street yelping like hound-dogs, their feet pounding upon the sand, their voices trailing off into less audible sounds of woe as they continued their rapid flight.

Wondering at the unusual occurrence, Dr. Sentelle felt his way back to his home through the thick fog, and stood leaning upon his gate gazing up the street.

An object approached him, loomed up with gigantic proportions through the fantastic exaggerations of the fog, stopped a few feet from where the preacher stood, and spoke one word in a thunderous tone:

“Whoosh!”

Dr. Sentelle’s heavy walking stick went clattering upon the ground, he reeled backward, struck his heels against the porch steps, and sat down with a violence which filled the dome of his cranium with bursting, falling stars.

“Heavens!” he exclaimed.

Diada stooped, picked up Dr. Sentelle’s stick by the little end, and, thus armed with a weighty club, she went loping onward.

A group of darkies sat in a negro barber-shop discussing the wild woman of the woods. Diada opened the door, entered as quietly and peaceably as she could, and remarked:

“Whoosh!”

The negroes disappeared as promptly and as completely as if that word were a cyclone puffing at a handful of feathers.

Diada trotted down the street in the direction they had gone and found herself in front of the Hen-Scratch saloon, where a house full of patrons talked in whispers and fortified themselves by indulgence in red liquor. Diada entered the swinging door and gave the pass-word: “Whoosh!”

The negroes whooshed. They went away from that place in every direction, exhausting the treasuries of their throats for sounds to vocalize their surprise and terror.

Suddenly from every negro section of the town there arose a wail which reverberated through the village of Tickfall and brought every white man to his feet white with fear:

“_Ah-ee!_ _Ah-ee!_ _Ah-ee!_”

Every white man seized his arms and ammunition and started for the front door; then the thought of his defenseless family stopped him, and held him there to patrol his yard and guard his own house from the unknown peril which threatened.

Everywhere could be heard this wild call of fear.

Horses and mules broke out of their enclosures and galloped wildly about the streets with a thunder of pounding hoofs, calling to each other with frenzied nickering. The cows began a ceaseless bawling, and the excited dogs ran madly up and down the premises of their masters, making a pandemonium with their furious barking.

At intervals the noise lulled for a moment; then invariably would be heard a wild scream, clear as the outcry of a panther, ending with Diada’s one word, divided now into two distinct syllables:

“_Whoo-ash!_”

Colonel Tom Gaitskill leaned against the white columns of his porch and listened to the weird sounds which came to him from every quarter. In one negro settlement the inhabitants were bawling a song at the utmost capacity of their lungs, drowning their fears with music.

In another settlement, with the regularity and drumlike throb of a mighty chorus of immense hammers pounding upon steel anvils, was heard the cry: “Ah-ee! Ah-eel Ah-ee!”

From the section of the town occupied by the whites could be heard the nickering and running of horses, the bellowing of the cows, the barking of the dogs, and now and then a fusillade of pistol shots. While in the negro section closest to his home, Colonel Gaitskill could hear the Rev. Vinegar Atts bellowing like a bull of Bashan, praying in a voice which could be heard a mile, while those who knelt with him backed him up in his stentorian implorations with responses which echoed like a roll of thunder:

“O Lawd, dese here is turr’ble times----”

(“Listen, Lawd, dat’s de trufe--turr’ble times----”)

“De sun is done turned inter darkness an’ de moon inter blood, an’ de drefful day of de Lawd am come----”

(“O-o-o Lawd, she sho’ am come----”)

“We done saw de woman clothed wid de sun an’ de moon am under her foots----”

(“Ah-ee! Amen!”)

“Accawdin’ to Dy Word she done flied out to de wilderness whar she done been nourished fer a time, an’ half a time, an’ yuther times----”

(“Ah-ee! Double time----”)

“Woe to de inhabiters of de yearth----”

(“Whoa!”)

“O-o-o Lawd, fotch down thy angel to tote dis nigger home----”

Not a man or woman, white or black, closed an eye in Tickfall that night.

The sheriff and a number of business men held innumerable conversations over the telephone and finally a company of them convened in the sheriff’s office in the courthouse to confer about what should be done to quell the panic. But conversations and conferences came to naught because they were afraid to go through the negro settlements in the dense darkness lest some panic-stricken negro fire upon them from behind the door or beneath some cabin.

At the first streak of dawn the negroes, with one accord, moved toward the business part of the town and assembled in a dense mass around the courthouse, looking to the white people for protection.

Sheriff Flournoy made them a speech telling them that the white people were their friends, that no harm could come to them, that there was no cause for uneasiness, and that he wanted them to stay around the courthouse all day.

At the conclusion of his speech, Flournoy started across the street to enter the Tickfall bank. There was a wild yell from the negroes and a mighty scramble among them to get around on the other side of the courthouse.

Diada came out of an alley beside the Gaitskill store and stood in the middle of the street. She was holding Dr. Sentelle’s ponderous walking stick by the small end like a club. She gazed, apparently in wonder, at the crowd of negroes and whites.

As the silent mob viewed her with alarm, wondering what outrage she would commit next, she caught the big stick with a hand on either end, raised it high above her head, and screamed:

“Whoosh! Whoo-ash! Whoosh!”

Flournoy drew his pistol and fired in the air above her head three times.

Diada ducked at each shot, then she stood upright, whirled the club around her head, and threw it at the sheriff. The missile curved like an arrow and went straight toward the mark. Flournoy avoided a crushed skull by falling flat upon the ground and letting the club pass over him.

When he rose to his feet, Diada was trotting down the road with the speed of the wind.

“Get your horses--everybody!” Flournoy shouted.

With that word of command began the greatest man-hunt that Tickfall Parish had ever known.

X

THE MAN-HUNT

Every man in Tickfall who had any sort of animal to ride bestrode the beast and joined the procession, which moved out of town in the wake of Diada. Hundreds of negroes who had ridden in from the plantations the night before galloped down the road behind the whites. And every canine of any size or color attached himself to the posse and went plunging along with the men.

They came to a straight stretch of road where they could see for over two miles. At the far end of that stretch they beheld Diada, her head and shoulders stooped far over, trotting with gigantic strides, traveling with the tireless persistence of a desert camel.

To their surprise, Diada did not run into the swamp, but continued upon the main road, which led to the Tickfall landing on the Mississippi River. Seeing this, the men did not attempt to run her down, but remained content to keep her in sight. At the end of an hour she was still trotting easily with no signs of fatigue.

Finally Diada turned and ran into the forest. With a mighty clamor the men raced after her, floundering through the underbrush, and galloping far over into the woods. When the posse had passed out of sight among the trees, Diada quietly climbed down from the branches of a big tree, where she had concealed herself, and started down the road again.

The dogs discovered her first.

Yelping furiously they drove her from the main road across the prairie marsh which skirted Lake Basteneau, and penned her upon a narrow point which projected like a peninsula into the lake and was thickly overgrown with cypress saplings about as large around as a man’s wrist.

The marsh between the road and the lake was too soft for the men to venture on with their horses, and it was even dangerous for a man to walk upon because of the quicksands. But the men could look from the road, across a part of the lake, and easily see Diada and the dogs.

“Don’t go after her, men!” Flournoy called. “Let the dogs run her away from there! We’ll get her when she comes off that point!”

With the large butcher-knife which she had procured from Mrs. Gaitskill’s kitchen she had begun to cut down the cypress-saplings, trimming off the leaves and the branches. She piled them up, dozens of them, working swiftly.

The dogs did not advance to attack Diada. They merely stood and barked at her. But they were in possession of the only exit from the narrow point on which Diada had been trapped.

“Dat gal must be gittin’ ready to beat dem dogs off wid dem poles,” Hitch Diamond remarked to the other negroes. “She’s shore put a job up on herse’f.”

But Diada had a surprise in store for them all.

Balancing one of the long saplings on the top of her hand she hurled it like a javelin with the speed and accuracy of an arrow. A hound-dog gave a yelp which seemed to break in two in the middle--then he died. The javelin had pinned him to the ground like an entomologist’s specimen on a cardboard.

Then the javelins flew thick and fast into that bunch of dogs, and every flying weapon found a mark and brought forth a yelp of death. In a few moments the dogs turned tail and came whining back to their masters.

Diada snatched up a number of the javelins, ran off the point of land, and trotted down the edge of the lake toward the river.

“Leave your horses and follow her, men!” Flournoy ordered.

Four hundred men sprang to the ground, spread out in a long line like a fish-seine and went plunging across the marsh in pursuit of the fleeing woman. The grass was waist high, dead and dry as dust, but it offered no places for concealment, and Diada’s tall form was easily kept in sight.

At intervals the woman turned and hurled a javelin at the posse, but they were careful to stay out of danger.

In a little while the men noticed that Diada had begun to show signs of exhaustion. She was traveling more slowly, stopping now and then to catch her breath, and moving forward with a more pronounced stoop to her mighty shoulders.

She had eaten nothing for two days, had had no rest or sleep, and was now on the last lap of a twelve-mile run at full-speed!

Finally she slowed down to a walk, and the walk became a sort of stumble. She still carried a few of her javelins, and it was evident that she was now dependent upon them to keep her pursuers at a distance, while both she and they realized that she was now in the center of a prairie of marsh grass where she could not supply herself with new weapons when those she possessed were exhausted.

Something of the pathos of the situation dawned upon the men, both white and black, and they became silent, eyes strained toward the weakening, staggering quarry, so soon to fall into their hands.

For twenty minutes the silence was unbroken except for the swish of the marsh grass as the men waded through it. Far across the prairie could be seen the levee of the Mississippi River.

Suddenly the silence was broken by the long, dear, musical whistle of a boat upon the river.

Diada stopped. Again that long, clear whistle came belling across the sun-scorched prairie.

Diada raised her hands straight up above her head like a sun-worshiper, emitted a long, plaintive, howling scream, which ended with that word which was branded upon the memories of Tickfall forever: “Whoosh! Whoo-ash!”

So dramatic was her action that the hair stood up on every man’s head, and a cold chill swept across every sweat-drenched body.

The woman trotted slowly onward, moving now in a straight line toward the river. She had nearly a mile to travel to reach the levee, and she saw that she could not make the distance before she was captured.

Then she sprung another surprise--one which came very near being the death of her pursuers.