“That may be, too. There isn’t any town there now, but at one time it was the second largest cotton shipping port in the United States.”
“Seems rather strange that it should have been so very important and then have disappeared so completely,” Scott protested.
“It was just about wiped out by cholera and yellow fever in 1841. About that time the real railroads began hauling the cotton to other ports on the Atlantic coast and they never rebuilt the old town. They moved most of the frame houses away to other towns on the Gulf and the brick ones went to pieces.”
“Sounds interesting,” Scott said, finally convinced that Murphy was at least trying to tell the truth about it. “Now I suppose they are hauling their lumber down over this same right-of-way and loading it on boats in that fine harbor.”
“That’s my guess,” Murphy replied. “This old railroad embankment probably suggested it to them.”
“Well, let’s follow it up and see for ourselves,” Scott suggested.
They walked rapidly now, for there did not seem to be much chance of meeting any one out there in the swamp. Every now and then the cat owls back in the shadows of the moss-covered cypress trees burst forth into series of weird, unearthly shrieks which made their blood run cold. It sounded to the boys as though two or three women were being murdered at once.
“Gee whiz!” Scott exclaimed, as he ducked vigorously at an unusually explosive screech which seemed to come from directly overhead, “this would be a fine place for a fellow who believed in ghosts. I wonder whether they do their hauling at night or in the daytime?”
“Probably in the daytime if they have nigger labor. They could never get a nigger into this swamp at night, and besides, there are not half a dozen people a year who ever come into this country. A deer hunter now and then; nobody else.”
They had made their way through the swamp for about three miles when the darkness of the swamp gave way to the moonlight of an open pine ridge. It was quite a relief to come out of that gloom and they breathed more freely in the open.