“They’ve sure made for the delta,” he heard repeated more than once.
They had lost time in zigzagging investigations from one shore to another, and it was still more than half an hour before they actually came in sight of the low swamps of the delta itself, where the Tombigbee River joined the Alabama, both streams splitting into a multiplicity of channels, bayous, creeks, flowing sometimes in opposite directions, through a wild tangle of swamp. Few white men claimed to know the delta, and few men had explored it except some half-wild negro hunters, and the house boat men who made a refuge of its intricacies.
The river swept away to the west in a great curve. A second channel split away, possibly at one time the main channel of the ever-shifting river. It was a crooked, deep, sluggish backwater now, flowing between white, dead timber, and a jungle of titi, black gum, and bay tree. Tom surveyed it dubiously.
“Blue Bob’ll shore get off the main channel,” said Fenway. “Looks like this is just his place.”
He steered into the shallow of the swamp. Fog still seemed to linger here, with a heavy, malarial smell. Great curtains of gray, Spanish moss hung over the rotting channel. Blackened snags of cypress thrust up from the bottom, and mosquitoes attacked them in clouds, with the worse-biting yellow-flies.
No boat was anywhere in sight. A little farther a second channel seemed to open, but it extended only a hundred feet, and ended in a mud bank where half a dozen snakes aired themselves. The tortuous waterway doubled on itself. The woods ceased. They came into a deep, still channel between a great tract of tall weeds and reeds, backed by forests of vivid pine.
There was no concealment for anything there. The Power boat rushed through one cross channel after another to the edge of the woods again. At the very margin, something swift and invisible went tingling through the air so close that everybody ducked. Whack! it struck a tree.
“Where’d that come from?” cried Tom, stopping the boat instantly.
Nobody had heard the report, drowned by the noise of their own engines; but as they listened tensely they heard the diminishing thud-thud of a motor launch. Impossible to say where it was. The sound seemed to spread and echo indefinitely in that maze of trees and water. It was dying away. Tom started the boat fast ahead into the swamp. Within fifty yards the crooked channel was blocked by fallen timber. He turned with difficulty, ran back to the great meadow, and drove through the crisscross channels seeking a way out. He found one and they raced through it; but the distant thudding had long become silent, and now not one of them had any idea in which direction it had gone.
“Might hunt through this d—d place till you lost yourself, an’ find nothin’!” young Ferrell growled.