Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story

by Frank Lillie Pollock

The canoe went some distance downstream and then came back, reëntering the bayou mouth. He lost sight of the torch glare. Both shores were invisible, and there was nothing around him but the gray wall of fog and the suck and gurgle of the treacherous currents.

To his surprise he felt bottom suddenly. He thought he must have been carried shoreward, but it proved to be a sand bar, with about three feet of water over it. He stood up gladly to rest. He was an excellent and strong swimmer, but the weight of the gold belt was coming at last to make itself felt.

He meant to gain the shore some way downstream where he could lie in the woods till daylight. Then he could find his way to a road, a house, where he could hire a horse, a mule, or a car to take him either to Craig’s camp or a railway station. But he was puzzled by the currents, which seemed to set in opposite directions at the ends of the sand bar. He knew how treacherous are the shifts and eddies of the Alabama; but, selecting his direction at last, he waded deep and swam again.

For perhaps half an hour he struggled with the river, floating, swimming, once clinging to a floating log and drifting for some way. Darkness and fog made him feel lost in an illimitable ocean, but at last he touched bottom again, and detected the faint loom of trees against the dark sky. He waded forward, stumbled against a cypress trunk. The river was high, and a foot of water was running over the roots of the shore growths.

He felt his way ahead, splashing among the trees. The water grew shallow, gave place to mud, and he ran into a dense thicket of tough shrubs, tangled together with bamboo vines, spiky with thorns, and growing right out of the deep ooze. It was perfectly impenetrable. He had to sheer away to the right till he seemed to discern a break in the barrier. The ground was soft and full of bog-holes. Now and again he went to his knees, once to his hips, and he remembered tales he had heard of bottomless pits in these river swamps, where stray hogs and men had disappeared.

But after escaping the human wolves of the house boat, he could not believe that he was destined to fall into a death-trap in the swamp. But it was impossible to keep any straight course. He zigzagged and turned where he felt footing, picking a route by instinct and feeling. The whole swamp resounded with the croaking and piping and thrumming of frogs; they fell silent at his splashing steps, and started again when he had gone by; and all the treetops were streaked and starred with the greenish-yellow flicker of innumerable fireflies.

Huge rotten logs collapsed in a welter of wet slush as he trod on them. He blundered into a wide slough of liquid mud, and floundered out again. Most of all he was afraid of the moccasin snakes that must swarm in such a place; but he comforted himself with the thought that the moccasin is not a fighter like the rattlesnake, but makes for water at any disturbance.

He was bound to come to dry land if he kept straight ahead. But it was impossible to keep straight ahead. Turned back at one place by a dense jungle of massed titi and palmetto, he was checked at another by a belt of mud so deep that he dared not try to wade. He stumbled through a screen of clinging vines and fell into water to his waist, and, pulling himself out, he discerned a broad lagoon, its extent uncertain in the darkness.

He dared not try to cross it. It occurred to him that he had best make his way back to the river shore and swim downstream till he came to a higher landing place. As he thought of it, he discovered that he had no longer any idea in which direction the river lay.

He had made so many turnings that he had turned himself around. All ways looked alike now, in that gloom and tangle. He might be going parallel with the river, and the shore swamps would never end.