“Well, I don’t claim to be a first-class turpentine man,” said Lockwood, “but I want to learn to be one. It’s possible that I may go into the business myself next year with a partner. Wages aren’t the main point with me. I’d like, though, to be able to get a day off now and again, when things aren’t too busy.”
“I dunno. I’d rather get an experienced man,” said Craig. “Stay and eat dinner with us, anyway, and then we’ll look over the camp.”
Lockwood ate a large, hot, and homely dinner at the house of the camp foreman, in company with the foreman, Craig, and store clerk and the “stiller”—the principal white employees. Afterward Craig took him out, smoking innumerable cigarettes which he rolled up with a single deft twist, and conducted him over the camp, about the still, the storehouse, the cooperage workshop, the grindery where hundreds of axes and “hacks” were kept keen, the mule stables, the quarters of the negroes. Apparently pointing out these details, Craig shrewdly elicited all Lockwood knew of the turpentine process. Afterward they walked into the woods, observed the run of the gum, and the work of the chippers. Craig looked at his watch.
“I’ve got to be on horseback,” he said. “How about two dollars a day and board, until my man gets out of the infirmary?”
Lockwood accepted instantly. In fact, he would almost have worked for a week for his board alone—his board, and the local standing which the regular job would furnish.
He was to start work the next day, and meanwhile he had to bring up his suit case from the landing, where he had dropped it in the warehouse the night before. He loitered at the commissary for some time, cementing his friendship with the store clerk, and it was past the middle of the afternoon when he started to walk back to the landing.
The Power boys had come back. He saw their big car standing by the front door when he passed the house, but no one was in sight. He hurried past; the great, white, dilapidated old mansion seemed already intensely familiar to him, and intensely significant—the theater of a coming crisis.
He went past the post office without stopping to speak to Mr. Ferrell, who nodded from the gallery. He retraced the road that he had traveled in the night; the creek rushed swirling over glittering pebbles, shut in by thickets of titi, glossy-green bay leaves, cypress and gum, lighted up by huge, blazing-red, trumpet-shaped flowers that hung in clusters from tangling vines. Beyond the swamp the road rose into pine woods again. Then he came to the crossing road, and turned toward the river.
Far in the distance he caught a glimpse of the Alabama River, like a pinkish streak through the brilliant pine foliage. It was still more than a mile away, and the corduroyed road ran through depths of swamp for the most part, skirted lagoons of stagnant black water, crossed sluggish-brown bayous, went over a higher and dryer ridge of “hammock land,” and came down at last to the landing.
The warehouse was open, and there were a few men about it. A couple of buggies were hitched to a tree, and a wagon was loading with cases of freight. It was a wagon from the turpentine camp, he discovered, and he had his suit case put aboard, glad to be saved the trouble of its weight.