Luck was tending to drift toward one of the Fenway boys, who accumulated a great stack of chips before him. Tom cursed freely but cheerfully, and took another drink. Lose or win, he was enjoying himself. His brother was playing recklessly also, but winning a little. The room was growing thick with smoke, in spite of the open windows; the players were all inclined to grow a little noisy, and eventually Lockwood’s interest waned.
He went to the open window to breathe, and on the dim gallery he perceived Henry Power, his feet on the railing, a pipe in his mouth. A little farther away he saw the gleam of a white dress in the faintly sweet darkness.
He went quietly around to the door and upon the gallery. It was a hot, dark evening, with the moon not yet risen. Overhead the stars glowed like white fires, and low in the south, over the vast pine forests, there was a rapid intermittence of distance, silent lightning.
“May I come out?” he asked, feeling for a chair. “Aren’t you a poker player, either, Mr. Power?”
“Papa’s asleep,” said Louise in an undertone. “He doesn’t very often play cards, except a very small game sometimes with old friends. Not like this.”
“It does look like a pretty fast game to-night,” Lockwood admitted. Louise turned her face toward him, and even in the gloom he thought it looked extraordinarily serious. Through the open window came a tremendous burst of laughter. Somebody’s bluff had been called.
Away from the gallery the night lay black and hot and impenetrable. At moments of stillness in the cardroom the silence was like a material heaviness. Then suddenly and sweetly, far away through the woods, sounded the mellow, musical call of a horn, a hunter’s horn, such as is still used in southern Alabama. The nocturnal fox hunters use them—a horn made of a cow horn scraped thin, without reeds or anything inside it. It needs training to make it sound at all, but an expert can make its note carry five miles. The long, plaintive call sounded again, curiously repeated.
Henry Power roused himself partially, with a grunt.
“Seems like I heard a horn blowin’,” he said drowsily. “Some fellers gittin’ up a fox-chase? But thar ain’t no moon.”
The most hardened English fox-hunter would pale at these mild midnight fox-chases of Alabama, in which horsemen and hounds tear madly through the densest woods, through swamps, jungles, bayous and sloughs, by moonlight generally too pale to show the perils. It was just the sport, Lockwood, thought, that would appeal to the Power boys, and at that moment Jackson came quickly out upon the gallery, and listened. Again the far-away horn blew.