Undoubtedly this was Mr. Ferrell’s post office. Lockwood hesitated; he did not much care to attract attention, considering his mission; and lodging was immaterial to him, after all. It would be only a few hours till daylight, and he had never felt less inclined to sleep in his life.
He sat down on a log opposite the dark and silent group of houses. Nothing moved in that whole wilderness landscape. The moon crept up; its light fell white on the sand of the road, crossed by the intensely black shadows of the water-oaks. Restlessly Lockwood got up and walked on again. The Power boys’ place was not much farther, he understood, and he desired above all things to see the spot where his enemy had gone.
The moon was growing brilliantly clear now. The road passed through a strip of pine woods, a series of partially cultivated fields. Then there was a fence on the right, with a great grove of some stately trees behind it, oaks or walnuts, planted with symmetry. Within a hundred yards he came to a pair of heavy gateposts, from which a broken gate hung askew. He looked within and stopped, taken aback.
Fifty yards within, at the end of a long and wide drive, stood a great house, fronted with a Colonial portico, looking like pure marble in the moonlight. The earth of the drive was of silver-white sand. The faintest haze of mist hung in the air, transfiguring the breathless scene to magic. Not a leaf stirred on the trees. It was a spectacle of black and silver and marble, half theatrical, half ghostly, but seeming wholly unreal, as if it might vanish at a breath.
CHAPTER II
RESPITE
The sheer unearthly beauty of the spectacle was so thrilling and unexpected that Lockwood stepped back, breathless. A sense of deep peace that was as strange and poignant as pain sank into his heart. He felt himself and his grim purpose to be a blot on this exquisite earth.
But this was certainly where McGibbon lay, or Hanna, as he called himself now. This was certainly the Powers’ place. There was no light at any window, no sound or movement anywhere about the place. Afraid of being seen from the house, he moved a little way up the road, and sat down on a fallen tree trunk. The live-oak leaves were silvery and still overhead, and a whip-poor-will reiterated its monotonous and musical cry among the deep leaves.
But memory had broken the enchantment of the night for Lockwood. To meet McGibbon on the river had been the last thing he expected, still less to find him landing in this wilderness of swamp, bayou, and pine forest. He had traced the man to Mobile from New Orleans, from Pensacola, and had heard a rumor that he might be in Selma. He had taken the boat instead of the train; it was cheaper, and he was short of money, and for money his poverty had proved his fortune.
It was a three years’ trail that had come to an end here at Rainbow Landing, a trail that had led from Virginia to Washington, and halfway across the continent, and south to the Gulf Coast. The search was all he had to live for—if he could signify by the name of Life the wretched and ruined years which seemed all that were left to him.
He was not the first man who has been ruined by a business associate, but it is not often that the ruin is so complete and sweeping. Looking back now, Lockwood was continually filled with an increasing amazement that anybody could ever have been so incredibly trusting, so almost criminally young as he had been.