Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story

by Frank Lillie Pollock

The river was high, carrying planks and rails and drift of all sorts on its flood. Wisps of mist clung to its surface, and the water boiled strangely brown and pink and muddy strawberry. On the other shore rose the clay bluff, crowned with pine, striped with that bizarre and brilliant coloring that must have given the landing its name.

Lockwood turned back slowly up the swamp road, in no hurry to return to the turpentine camp. The air in the swamp was hot and heavy and enervating, and at the top of the ridge he turned aside into a trail that seemed to run parallel with the river.

Pine woods bordered it, high and dry, and he walked aimlessly for some distance. Through rifts he occasionally caught glimpses of the river rolling greenish-pink between its highly colored shores. The trail turned slightly down the slope and came out into a field of perhaps twenty acres, running almost to the river. It was a piece of rich, black bottom land, one of the gambles of Southern farming, capable of growing an immense crop of cotton or cane, but running an even chance of being flooded out by high water. This year no one was gambling on it, nor did it seem to have been plowed the year before, for it carried weeds and bushes that must have been the growth of more than one season.

He walked down to the end of the field, almost to the belt of willows and cottonwoods that screened the margin of the river. This was the worst country for his projects, he thought, that he had ever seen. It was settled just enough to make a stranger conspicuous; it was wild enough to be hard to get out of. He had no idea how the roads ran, nor whither; and he fancied himself hiding in the swamps, bitten by snakes, devoured by insects, hunted by bloodhounds. He would have found more secrecy and cover in a great city.

Another trail went wandering down the river bank, and he turned into it from a reluctance to go back by the way he had come. It was a mere footpath, worn probably by the tread of negroes, cutting through thickets of titi, opening into glades of vivid green, and crossing creeks on fallen logs. He followed it until his absorbed meditations were suddenly broken by a whiff of smoke and the sound of a voice.

With a criminal’s instinct of caution he stopped short. There was a wide opening on the shore just before him, and he caught the loom of a whitish mass through the willows. He edged forward till he could see clearly.

It was a large house boat of much the usual model, a mere cabin built upon a scow, the rusty and squalid floating house used by the river vagrants that hang upon all the great waterways of the South. But this boat was a little superior in quality; she was painted, though the paint was gray and weatherworn; there was a considerable deck space at each end; and, most important of all, she carried power. There was a small gasoline engine and propeller.

Half tramp, half criminal, Lockwood knew these river dwellers to be, devoured by malaria and hookworms, too tired to work, living on nothing, by a little stealing, a good deal of fishing, and some begging. The three men he saw looked true to type, sallow and malarial-looking, sprawling on the ground as they smoked and spat. Two of them were young fellows, one a mere boy, but the third was a heavily built man of middle age with a tangle of brown beard and a stupid, savage face. They all wore “pin-check” cotton trousers, loose shirts, sleeves rolled up, and dirty canvas shoes. They were watching a very light-yellow negro who was cooking something in a frying pan over a small fire.

Lockwood was armed, and not in the least afraid of them; but he did not want to be seen. He wormed his way into the jungle and edged slowly past the camp, tearing himself on thorns and stepping into deep, black mud, till he was safely past. He got through without being observed, as far as he knew, came out into the path and started more briskly down the river again.

The sun was almost down. In another half hour the sudden, Southern darkness would be deep in the woods, and he made haste, walking soundlessly on the soft, damp earth. But within a quarter of a mile, as a long vista opened before him, he caught a glimpse of some one else coming toward him up the twilight path.