“I ain’t carin’ fur Binnhart arter the way he made me trick that crazy loon out’n his secrets an’ then declared he’d gimme nuthin’ thout he found the truck.”
“Pulled the horse an’ lost yer pay, too,” grinned Colty.
“But all the rest will be tarred with the same stick——”
“Not me nor you,” interrupted Colty Connover,—“’cause he said he wouldn’t shoot. He swore he wouldn’t.”
Suddenly she pushed back her tousled red hair as she stood near the glass door, and looked up with a startled apprehension on her face.
“Listen, Colty, listen——! What is that sound—what is that sound?”
Then a strange thing happened. The sun, low in its circuit, was already westering on the October day. Even now its radiance fell through the great windows and open doors all aslant, and lay in deep orange tints athwart the bare, dusty floors. Many a skein-like effulgence was suspended from the panes, and on these fine and fiery lines illuminated motes were scattered like the notation of music on an immaterial cleff. There was no wind, no rustle of the magnolia trees glimpsed without. The river was silent as always. The stillness was intense, indescribable, and, suddenly, with a long drawn sigh, a creaking dissonance, the old house gave forth one loud moan, voicing its sorrows, its humiliation, its inanimate woe.
The two looked at each other with aghast, white faces. Then, with a common impulse, they fled from—they knew not what. The woman sprang out of the shattered glass door and sped through the shrubbery, across the ruined levee to her dug-out, swinging at the old landing. The groom dashed down the hall, the echoes of his steps hard on his heels like swift pursuers, out into the road, and thence, scarcely relaxing his pace, ran along the rugged ground till he was in the turn-row, where his speed was aided by the smooth hard-beaten earth. The cotton was breast high, and glittering in the afternoon sun—a famous crop. He could scarcely see the pickers, although he noted here and there their big cylindrical baskets, filled as the bags, suspended from their necks, overflowed from time to time. A great wagon was drawing up at one side where the road struck the turn-row, and this notified him that the weigher, with his steelyards, had arrived to pay off the laborers according to the weight of the contents of their baskets, and to convey the product to Ran Ducie’s gin. He welcomed the sight of another white man, for he desired more credible testimony, in case it should be needed, than the haphazard observation of the darkey cotton pickers that he was miles distant from the scene of Binnhart’s hold-up at the time of the shooting. Hence he attached himself to the society of the weigher, and made himself unpleasantly conspicuous, and was officious and obstructive during the weighing process, as much from latent intention as maladroit folly. When, at last, the wagons were heaped and he and the weigher took their seats behind two of the big mules, the pickers, trailing on foot contentedly in the rear, his companion observed: “I’m goin’ to tell Mr. Ducie that the nex’ time he treats you to a ride he may pervide a coach and four, for durned if I’ll have you monkeying in the cotton fields along of me another time.” Colty Connover had made the desired impression and on this score he was content. Nevertheless, again and again during the afternoon, throughout the process of the weighing, and on the road to the town, and in the midst of his duties at the livery stable there recurred to him a stupefied, stunned realization of some uncomprehended crisis, and again and again he asked himself helplessly: “What was that strange sound in the old house? What was it?”
And on the river bank, in the little amphibious cabin upon its grotesque high-water stilts, through all the afternoon and deep into the night, the woman with a vague thrill of terror futilely wondered, “What was that strange, strange sound in the old house? What was it?”