“What place is this?” Lockwood asked him.
“Dis yere’s Rainbow Landin’, suh.”
A white man had come out also, and was looking over the rail a yard away. As the boat came up, the landing seemed to be a landing and nothing more. There was a wide, open space on the bank, inclosed by cottonwood trees, and a large wooden building with a platform on the riverside. Some one had lighted a fire ashore. He could see three or four dark figures moving about it. A boat emerged from the gloom and nosed about the warehouse. The searchlight reconnoitered carefully, swept the shore, and lifted to the bluff rising behind it. Lockwood caught a glimpse of a bare clay face, streaked with fantastic strata of crimson and green and white.
A bell clanged. The clumsy boat slowed and turned her nose inshore. The branch of a big cottonwood brushed over the upper deck, as she rammed the warehouse platform with a force that set the structure quivering. A negro leaped ashore with a hawser. The bell clanged again. The boat stopped and swung back, her hawser taut against the current.
A man in the open warehouse door shouted sonorously and unintelligibly up to the pilot house. Two long gangplanks were run ashore, and instantly a stream of negroes shouldered boxes and bales and started to land the freight at a trot, calling, laughing, singing. The searchlight steadied on them like a watchful eye.
In the glare of the electric light Lockwood watched the wild spectacle, the dark river flashing yellow by the boat, the margin of the immense swamp, the grotesquely brilliant streaks of the colored clay, and the fire looking like the camp of some lost expedition. There was a flash of negro eyes and teeth; it was like a midnight scene on the shore of the Congo, and the roustabouts wailed a wild and wordless crooning as they hustled the freight ashore.
The boat clerk called the addresses of the packages as they were carried off, and the warehouse keeper checked them from the other end of the planks. From the high deck rail Lockwood could overlook the freight, and he was surprised at their number for this desolate spot. He was still more surprised at their character. In the brilliant electric light he could see the crates of fruit, the boxes marked “Fragile,” bearing the stencil of the most expensive Mobile stores, a big box that must have contained at least a hundred boxes of cigars, an ornate brass hanging lamp, carefully crated, a great leather easy-chair also elaborately packed. All of them seemed addressed to the same name. It might be a store, or a hotel, perhaps—if it were not so absurd to imagine a hotel in these swamps.
“Power” called the clerk monotonously, as package after package went ashore. “Power—Power.”
All this freight was going to some one named Power—some one evidently who had a cultivated taste and money to spend. But the valuable stuff was all put ashore at last, and the roustabouts began to carry sacks of fertilizer and corn and cottonseed.
Lockwood leaned on the rail and continued to watch the bizarre activity. He did not notice that some one else had come out of the saloon and stood within a yard of his elbow, until the voice of the newcomer reached him.