“You know, I never was in Mobile but once, an’ then I was with Hanna, an’ we didn’t have no fun. I reckon you an’ me, we’d have a better time by ourselves.”
He poked Lockwood in the ribs. Lockwood glanced at Louise, who was smiling faintly.
“Sure we’ll go, Tom!” he said. “Just as soon as work slacks up a little at the camp. By the way, you’d better not say anything to Hanna about it.”
“You bet!” returned Tom, winking. “Likely I hadn’t oughter told you nothin’ about this yere oil mine. He said I wasn’t to let it out. But it’ll be all right. Most likely he’d have told you himself later.”
“Just between friends,” suggested Lockwood gravely, and Tom innocently assented.
Lockwood carried a memory of Louise’s anxious smile as he rode away. He thought that he had got at the heart of Hanna’s scheme at last. A fake oil well—the crudest of swindles, but good enough to impose upon these unsophisticated children of the big swamps. Easy also to expose!
The position looked plain; the only problem was as to how he should attack it. Hanna’s standing in that house was far more solid than his own; the boys liked him, but they would believe Hanna first. Louise indeed might trust him; passionately he wished it might be so. But he could not interfere in this game until he knew the cards in his own hands. He felt confident of the fraud that was being practiced, but he would have to have the proof. He would have to go to Pascagoula, either with Tom Power or alone.
Then would come the exposure, the explosion, possibly the killing. The Power boys themselves would be quick enough to resent being victimized, and from stories he had heard they had drawn pistols before. But the exposure would almost certainly involve his own exposure. Louise would learn that he had been in prison.
He shrank hotly from that revelation. He thought it over all the next day, while he sweated about the smoking still, and the day after while he rode the woods. He hung back from visiting the Powers; he hesitated to act.
He saw the house boat as usual that afternoon, still moored where he had first found it, where he had since seen it almost every day. To-day, he heard a sound of voices in strong altercation on the house boat, and guessed that the thieves had fallen out. He approached the bayou, his horse treading softly on the pine needles and mold, pulled up just beyond the line of willows, and listened.