Colonel Tom Gaitskill sprang to his feet, seized Dr. Sentelle’s walking stick by the little end, and flourished it at Hopey.
“Hopey!” he whooped to be heard above the noise, “you take that—infernal—female—wench out of this house. Do it now! I’ll——”
Diada turned around and looked at Colonel Gaitskill. She beheld an immense club flourished threateningly above her head. On the day before, she had seen old Isaiah at the hog-camp waving an ax at her with the same menacing gesture.
With a loud whoop, Diada sprang across the drawing-room, dived headfirst through a large plateglass window, ran across the yard, and departed from Colonel Tom Gaitskill’s hospitable home forever.
V
HITCH ENLISTS THE PARSON’S AID
On the following morning, Mrs. Tom Gaitskill had a real cause for worry: Diada could not be found and was last seen going toward the Little Moccasin Swamp.
This swamp was twelve miles long and eight wide, traversed by winding streams of slow-moving, oily, yellow water, abounding with quagmires, full of poisonous vines and deadly serpents, the feeding range of wild hogs as vicious as wolves. It was a man-trap, a dreadful place to all except the most experienced woodsmen. Many a hunter had led his squirrel-dog into that swamp, and only the dog found his way back home. The man’s friends found him a few days later by watching the spiral flight of the buzzards concentrating at one spot in the jungle.
“Tom,” Mrs. Gaitskill exclaimed in anxious tones, “you must send Hitch Diamond after Diada at once!”
“Let her go!” Gaitskill replied indifferently. “I’m surfeited with her society. Maybe she’ll come back after a while.”
“You know she will not, Tom,” Mrs. Gaitskill protested with glistening eyes. “If she is not captured before she gets too deep in that swamp, she is gone forever.”