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.”