“Whatever crooked work is going on around here,” Mr. Graham remarked soberly, “these darkies are not in on it. They are always as jovial in their welcome as that fellow there and they are scared to death of this pond.”
“Or they are good actors,” Scott said. He was unwilling to except any one from his suspicion.
Mr. Graham shook his head. “Of course, you are right to suspect everybody. I was just expressing my own convictions. A white man can act scared pretty well but when a nigger turns gray he is scared.”
A little farther on the logging road ended abruptly at a rough log dock on the edge of a pond. It was unlike any other log pond which Scott had ever seen. It was in reality an arm of the big cypress swamp. Great churn-butted cypress trees rose queerly out of the water around it’s edges. They were bare of leaves, but their limbs were draped with great festoons of Spanish moss. A number of long pine logs, some loose and some bound together into rafts, floated quietly on the black waters. Around the head of the pond directly opposite them and back a way from the water were the crude board shacks of the logging crew.
It was a dull, gray day and the whole scene presented a gloomy enough picture.
“So this is the haunted pond?” Scott asked eagerly, as he took in every detail of the surroundings. “It sure looks it to-day.”
“Yes, this is the place, but it has had me baffled for so long now that I am not sure whether it is haunted or enchanted. Seems sometimes as though it must be enchanted.”
They sat their horses and gazed at the pond in silence for several minutes. Mr. Graham had stopped even thinking about the possible solution. Scott was studying all the details of the layout. This was the place where his problem must be solved and he wanted to be familiar with every foot of it.
“What’s that?” he asked suddenly, pointing at a bunch of brush near the opposite side of the pond.
Mr. Graham studied the clump carefully and made out the outline of a man half screened by the foliage. Even as they looked the form melted away.