“Know him! I reckon so! I’ve always known him, I think, and I’ve dreaded and hated that man all my life.”
The trail ended suddenly at a cut-over slash, growing up again with bushy small pines and scrub oak. Away to the left a strip of the Alabama showed greenish and reddish. Below them, down in the hammock land Lockwood saw a squalid wooden shanty in a small clearing. A woman was apparently cooking at a fire in the yard. Louise checked her horse and sat looking over the landscape, but evidently she was not thinking of it.
“How mamma and I dreaded it when Bob’s house boat came down the river, in the old days!” she exclaimed bitterly. “The boys were always going aboard it. There was always drinking and gambling and fighting; and one terrible night——”
She stopped, and turned her eyes on the dilapidated pine cabin with its acre of growing corn.
“That’s the sort of place we used to live in. Do you wonder that I don’t want to go back to it?” she said intensely.
Lockwood looked at the paintless pine shanty, roofed with small rough-split boards, curled up with the weather. It probably had three rooms; a wide open passage, or “dog-trot,” extended from front to rear. A crumbling chimney of stone and mud rose at one end. The clearing, with its corn and ragged garden was fenceless, and a wild jungle of mixed peach trees, rose bushes, and blackberry canes blocked the front of the yard.
He looked back at Louise’s flushed face. Her constraint had dropped suddenly away; the episode of the snake and the meeting with the river pirate had broken up the ice.
“There’s no danger of having to go back to that,” he said.
“I don’t know. I’m frightened,” she said somberly.
“Tell me,” he ventured, “did your brother repeat to Hanna what I said about the oil investment?”