The next morning a thunderstorm passed crashing over the woods, with torrents of terrific rain that lasted for twenty minutes. A jet of hail followed it. Lockwood and his horse sheltered in a deserted negro cabin, and immediately afterward the sun burst out again with torrid heat. The earth steamed and reeked.
In this hot weather the turpentine gum had been running very fast, and the cups filled rapidly. “Dipping” was going on in Lockwood’s area. At intervals through the woods he came upon a sweating, half-naked negro staggering with one of the enormously heavy wooden “dip buckets,” filling it from the gum cups. At intervals empty barrels had been sent down, into which the buckets were emptied, and mule wagons were slowly making the rounds, hauling the full barrels to the camp and leaving empty ones. In a day or two the still would be at work.
Lockwood had a continual, unreasoning expectation of again seeing Louise in the motor boat every time he went by the bayou. He took pains with his costume; he polished his boots, removed some of the gum stains from his khaki breeches, and put a preen tie under his low collar. But she did not come.
On the third day afterward, however, he did hear the throbbing of the motor boat coming up the water, and his heart jumped. He was fifty yards back from the bayou, but he drove his horse hastily forward, just in time to see the boat come in sight. It was the Powers’ boat certainly, but all it held was young Jackson Power. Lockwood rode down to the shore and halloed a greeting, and the boy steered in at once.
“Engine running all right now?” Lockwood inquired.
“Seems like. I don’t reckon there was nothing wrong with her really. This boat sure ought to run good. She cost three thousand dollars.”
“What?” exclaimed Lockwood.
“Yes, sir. We got her in Mobile.”
Lockwood scrutinized the boy, suspecting a stupid lie.
“Well, I think you paid too much,” he said. “You could have got it for fifteen hundred at the outside if you’d gone to the right place.”