CHAPTER V.—TOMMY TODD'S.
The island seemed to stretch endlessly north and south, and to average half a mile in width; but there was a long slice of bay from the inner sound, nearly opposite to where the ship lay rolling in the surf and burning sullenly. Cavarly went over the sand hills and saw it, and made out a forested shore across the water, and saw the sail of a fishing boat in the distance.
They left Gerry and me to draw the bodies up the sand, and give them such poor graves as we could scoop with our hands.
It was dark before the boats were brought to the inner beach. I heard Calhoun telling Cavarly there would be no landing from the cruisers till daybreak, and probably none at all.
“What would they do it for? The ship's burned.”
“I don' calculate till I know where we are.”
“Well—suppose it's the Bahamas. They wouldn't then.”
“Bahamas! How come we to get to the Bahamas? Ho, they wouldn't.”
I think he knew it was the United States, and no Bahamas.
We were wet, shivering, and exhausted. The night was dark, the wind cold and of spray. Cavarly ordered us to scatter, and each find dry sand among the dunes, if he could, to cover himself with. What with the darkness and the shrieking wind, at twenty feet from your next neighbour you were quite alone, seeing and hearing nothing of him. Presently I was stumbling among sliding sand heaps; and after I had found a sheltered spot, I did not care where it was, but scraped off the wet top sand and, burying myself in the dry beneath, there lay shaking and gasping with the chill till I fell asleep.
The morning broke with the grey, driving clouds still over us. We got away, without looking to see whether the cruisers on the other side were waiting or not, every man with sand on his hair and clothes, a silent and pale-faced company. Few had slept for the wet and cold.
I was in the boat with Cavarly, and saw him gazing at the distant shore and wrinkling his brow and pulling his beard. A thin, sallow man it was, named Henry, who pulled the bow oar and kept his head turned over his shoulder. Presently he unshipped his oar, got up and looked ahead.
“Cap'n,” he said, “beggin' your pardon, that's Redwood, North Ca'lina.”
“I reckon like enough,” growled Cavarly.
“Happen I was bo'n over there,” said Henry. “Drove the mules to a mule windlass, what they haul seines with, on that same beach. That's Tommy Todd's boathouse, an' he lives back o' them pitch pines.”
“Sit down,” said Cavarly, “an' pull for Tommy Todd's.”
The men gave a faint cheer and shouted to the boat behind. But Cavarly looked no more cheerful than before.
We drew to the shore, where an old weather-beaten boathouse stood, the mule windlass before it, two uprights with a monstrous spool between; and we straggled wearily up the beach, seeing in the distance a long, shambling house among the pitch pines, with smoke rising from the chimney. There Henry beat upon the door, opened it to a sound within, and we streamed into a low, smoky room where a man and a woman sat at breakfast. A fat negro woman was frying bacon on a stove, and an old negro man sat bent over in a chair.
“Hiop! Jemima!” cried the man at the table. “Four, six, eight! Hol' on! Too many.”
“Don' you know me, Tommy Todd? I'm Pete Henry.”
“Maybe you be. Jemima! You're sociable, Pete Henry. Ten, twelve! Been gettin' acquainted, ain't you! Fourteen, fifteen! Jemima!”
Cavarly introduced himself and made Mr. Todd more calm, for he seemed an excitable man and sarcastic. He was square-set, but bony, and wore a thin, gray chin beard and a faded black coat with dangling tails.
Mrs. Todd screeched when we first began to pour in, the fat negro woman jabbered wildly and crowded herself back of the stove, and the old negro man cried out in astonishment, “An' mah name's Tuppentine!” But presently we were seated about everywhere, and mainly on the floor, eating corn bread and bacon, which the fat cook fried for us, rolling her eyes as if it had come to her that we would ask for fried cook, when there was no more bacon.
“Druv in by the Yankees! Jemima!” said Mr. Todd.
I heard him telling Cavarly, if he went down to Redwood early the next morning, there might be a steamer which would take him round through the Sound and up the Chowan River to a railroad at some place, and so from there to Richmond.
After that the men lay all about the house, and slept. I went out of doors and found the sun shining. Cavarly, Gerry, and Still were standing near the door. They all turned and looked at me. Cavarly frowned suddenly, as if with a twinge of pain, and pulled his beard.
I went down on the sand and by the boathouse found a warm, drowsy place in the sun and out of the breeze. Far across the water I could see the low yellow lines of the Banks. I lay there an hour or more, contented as an ox, or any healthy animal that has been through sore labour and afterwards been given a stomachful and bit of sun to lie in. Only I was stiff and sore. And it was sad, looking across the water, to think of Dan Morgan in his scooped grave, with the sands and the sea about him.
Calhoun came round the boathouse, and sat down near me.
“They're on to us,” he said.
I started and felt as if struck with a stone.
“What!”
“Calmly, Bennie Ben. Cavarly's been talking with Still and keeping the corner of his eye on me till I'm nervous. It's pretty straight anyhow. He couldn't help coming to it. You didn't suppose the old man was foolish? Now, if he comes to you about it, you'd better give in. Lying isn't your style. You're not gifted that way, meaning no offense. You couldn't do it without looking as if you'd burgled a bank. If he comes to me, I don't know. It looks to me like a circus with a tight-rope dancing very neat. I don't see how you could better it.”
Calhoun smoothed his cheek thoughtfully, and seemed to be balancing the nice chances.
“Somebody's coming down, Bennie Ben. Hear 'em? Cavarly saw me. Thinks he'll take us together. If they don't say anything, we don't say anything. That's our point.”
He slid down the sand about thirty feet, and lay in the sun, with his hat over his face. I did not know anything better to do than to seem asleep, and probably had my mouth shut tight and hands stiff, so that anyone could see through me if he chose to take the trouble.
The footsteps came round the corner and stopped beside me, then moved down the sand. In a moment I opened my eyes a crack. Cavarly was sitting on the sand near Calhoun, Gerry and Still standing behind him. Calhoun had just pushed his hat from his face.
“Warm here,” he said.
“I'm thinking,” said Cavarly, “we'll take that boat and go up to Richmond. But you an' Ben Cree there, I was thinkin' you're some dif'ent.”
“Why,” said Calhoun, looking surprised, “don't you want us to go with you?”
“Oh, yes, yes! Not that at all. Glad to have you. But it might happen you'd have some idea—Course I don' know. But you ain't really bound——”
“Why,” continued Calhoun, “if you're thinking of sending Ben to his people, you'd better take him with you as far as you go. Maybe you could see him through to Baltimore.”
“Hey! that's so,” said Cavarly cheerfully. “An' wha's your point?”
“Mine! Well, you see my position. What would you advise, as a friend?”
Cavarly hesitated and spoke stiffly, with embarrassment. “I don' know as I'm up to that. Appears most natural to go to Richmond.”
“Just so. And what point would there be in not staying by you. We go to—what you call it—Redwood, to-morrow? Early?”
“Six o'clock.”
“All right.”
I sat up as the three men passed, but they hardly looked at me, and said nothing. Calhoun kept his hat over his face till their footsteps died away, then turned around.
“Captain didn't argue that well,” he remarked. “He ought to be dead sure, and he isn't.”
“Well,” I said, “he might feel sure of it when we got to Richmond, and then he'd arrest us, wouldn't he?”
“Richmond! We're not going to Richmond. We're going to light out of here to-night.”
I thought Calhoun was difficult to follow in his plans, and waited for more.
“Why, see here, Bennie Ben!” he said indignantly. “Here's the old man going round looking like a suppressed wildcat and thinking I'm not on to him! That's absurd. It don't give me any credit. He ought to be sure we fiddled with his compass, and he ought to know I'm on to him. Must be he's busted with his ship. Why, he's a clever man, Bennie, but look how he's doing! Course, if a fellow is going to do another fellow, he has to make up his mind.”
“But where are we going?”
“North. Follow the pole star. You lie by that pantry door to-night, Bennie Ben. I figure it out like x plus y.”
Calhoun settled his hat over his face and seemed to give himself genuinely to sleep. He said nothing more till we heard Mr. Todd shouting, “Hiop! Dinner!”
And in the afternoon he fell to wandering about aimlessly. I did not dare follow him, so that I was more than half unhappy with tickling curiosity, and glad when night came, and I had no longer to carry about in daylight a secret that made me nervous. If Calhoun had heard me on the point of telling Cavarly that I hoped to see him again another time, he would not have thought himself so infallible a plotter.
Mrs. Todd had learned from the men how I first fell among them—a thin woman and not very talkative. She brought me another blanket, where I lay by the pantry door, and said:
“Now, don't ye mind, don't ye mind;” which set me to swallowing lumps in my throat suddenly. It had not occurred to me those many days to be homesick, and it was a poor time to begin. She touched my hair with dry, bony fingers, and I remembered having seen a queer black and white drawing over the mantelpiece in the next room, of a medium-sized boy in a short jacket. It could not have been a good drawing, for he looked very flattened out. I sat up quickly to stop the homesickness, and asked:
“Is he your son, in the drawing?”
“He's dead,” she answered gruffly, and then in a moment repeated quite softly: “Don't ye mind, don't ye mind.”
By and by the great kitchen, or living room, was full of men, snoring and wheezing in the dark. Before the lamp was put out I saw Calhoun in a rocking-chair, with his feet under the stove. I lay still, and looked at the two windows which glimmered with the dim moonlight outdoors, and that waiting seemed to be something endless and ghostly.
I did not hear Calhoun till he lay beside me, nor did I hear him open the pantry door, so softly and slowly he moved. But we went through the door, and closed it.
The moonlight shone in the pantry window. I remember taking things from a tin pan and putting them in my pockets. They were a sort of sweet, crusty biscuit. Calhoun put a piece of silver where were no more biscuits, and we slid through the window, and crept along in the shadow of the house.
“Hiop!” said someone close by and softly, through the crack of a window next the pantry. “Hol' on.”
We stopped short.. The window went up slowly, and Mr. Todd leaned out in his shirt.
“Where you goin' th'ough my window?”
“Going to cut and run,” said Calhoun despondently, “if you don't object. If you do, we yield the point. You needn't make a row.”
“Wha' for you goin'?”
“Captain's down on us.”
“Jemima! But I bet you chaps is Yanks, both of ye. Tell ye how I guess it——”
Mrs. Todd appeared as a white outline further back in the room, and said something.
“Hey?” said Mr. Todd.
“Let 'em alone,” she whispered angrily. “Hey? Wha' for?”
“You let 'em alone.”
“Well,” said he, grumbling and hesitating, “I don' know as there's anythin' in it for me. Hol' on now——”
She pulled him back and closed the window softly, and so we came away from the house of Tommy Todd.
It was cold, with a thin slip of moon shivering over the sea. We struck to the rear of the house, through a great pine wood, where the trunks had been scraped for turpentine, and looked like rows of tombstones filing to right and left; and at the end of a mile we fell upon a fair travelled highway, leading a little westward of the pole star.
For that night it was nothing but putting one foot before another, hour after hour, at first eagerly, and at the end only with the dull intent to keep it up till sunrise. At sunrise we passed over a black creek, through a bit of cypress swamp, and into a great pine wood on either side of the road. And here we left the road for a secret, sunny spot to sleep in, finding it well enough, for the wood was full of open spaces, and bottomed over with ridges and hollows of sand.
We were too leg-weary to talk, and only munched biscuits, blinking and drowsing. And, when I woke again, the sun was far around and one of my ears full of sand.
Now Calhoun and I fell to talking—or he talked and I grunted mostly, with the pains in me; and it came upon me that we were in no small boy's trouble, and that, if we ever got out, I might ask people to call me a man and very likely they would.
“Somebody's after us hard just now, I take it,” said Calhoun, “unless they're all gone steamboating. It would be a good thing to get north of the Potomac, Bennie Ben, and the longer we're in Virginia the hotter it will be. For see here, now! Suppose the whole Confederacy gets to frothing at the mouth, and cavorting round like a crazy elephant, and shouting, 'Who did up Cavarly? Ben Cree. Who messed his compass? Ben Cree. Where's Ben Cree? In Virginia.' And suppose the Confederacy comes stamping all over Virginia after you, neglecting the war shameful. What! Maybe they'd ask for me, too? Why, then we get out of this. That's our point.”
I was so stiff with the night's tramp, and lame, so tied about and shot through with queer pains, coming from exposure, that I walked but a few steps, and fell down, and could not rise for the knots in my leg-muscles.
“I'm dead lame, Calhoun,” I said with a sob. “There's an awful pain going through me. I can't tramp again.”
He came back and lifted me, putting his arm under my shoulder and saying, “Why, you're a good man, Bennie, but we pushed hard last night,” and so helped me slowly through the wood.
It is oftentimes, in cities and among comfortable folk, that one hears talk of friendship; but I notice that, in the famous examples of this thing in old times, it always lay between men who saw trouble together, and maybe the open sky at night, and knew what it was to be two alone among enemies. For the man that you have been hungry with, and weary, and frightened, and comforted is never like other men to you again. And, though I suppose men may have friendship for each other for pleasant companionship, and that may be one kind; still, when they have walked together in narrow ways of fortune there comes to be another bond which is quite different.
So much we were thinking of this new trouble and what would come of it, that we hardly looked before us on coming to the road till someone shouted quite near; and there were a mule team, resting in the shadow, a loaded waggon, and at either end Tommy Todd and the old, bent negro, Turpentine.