Rainbow Landing: An Adventure Story

by Frank Lillie Pollock

Yet that far-away, foolish, and happy life dated only seven years back. It seemed twenty; but three of those years had been the life of a dog, of a wolf; and two of them had been spent in prison for a crime that was not, at least willingly, his own. He remembered well the day of his release, when he saw the aged and pallid face in the shop-front mirror, and barely recognized it as his own. He did not care. It was more effectual disguise, and he had already determined what he must do. Luckily he had a little cash now to help him—a small legacy of a thousand dollars left him during his imprisonment. With this he established his “gold reserve.”

McGibbon, he found, had ventured back to Melbourne to pick up the last profits from Lockwood’s once-flourishing business, which he had first inflated and then wrecked. Afterward he had gone with the plunder to Washington, and this was where Lockwood first took up the trail.

McGibbon was flush then; he spent his money freely, and he left his tracks in the capital, and afterward in Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Here the money must have run short, for he went to Smithfield, Illinois, where he became interested in a small printing concern, remained there six months, and left, leaving the printing shop bankrupt.

He left under a cloud, which for some time Lockwood could not pierce. His own money became exhausted. He had to seek work, and he took what he could get. He became an unskilled laborer; he was a department-store salesman. It never occurred to him to seek office work, or in his own field of real-estate dealing. When he had again accumulated a stake, he renewed the search, and eventually found that McGibbon had gone to Ohio.

But he was still a year behind his quarry’s movements. McGibbon had left Ohio, had gone west. In Colorado he was concerned in a sugar-beet factory, which had its safe blown open and several thousand dollars taken. The track was lost again. Lockwood fell into grievous straits in the West, but his determination only blackened and hardened. McGibbon moved East. Lockwood might have come up with him, but he was crushed under a motor car in St. Louis and in the hospital for six weeks. He found that his man had gone down the river, possibly to New Orleans. Lockwood followed to that city, and secured a job in a motor-sales establishment. He understood automobiles, and had a knack with machinery.

McGibbon, who now used another name, had left his mark unmistakably in New Orleans, where he had been tried on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. He had been acquitted, had left the city apparently, but all that had happened a year before Lockwood unearthed the facts. He spent months in fruitless investigation during the time he could spare from his work at the motor shop. Finally he imagined a clew leading to Pensacola and West Florida. Lockwood spent three months in a turpentine camp in the pine woods, returned to New Orleans, went to Mobile, and finally thought he had information of his man in Selma, up at the navigable head of the Alabama River.

The moon wheeled and sank low over the vast swamps as he sat half drowsily on his log, wondering at the strange chance that had cut his wanderings suddenly short. He could scarcely believe that the end was so near, that the forces accumulated for years were about to burst.

He tried to think out a detailed plan. It was useless. He would have to learn Hanna’s habitual movements, learn the geography of this wild country, plan his escape in advance. At the moment he had to admit that he did not feel equal to the situation. He felt none of the wild and vindictive exultation that he had anticipated. He felt merely empty and tired and anxious for rest and delay.

It was partly due to a sleepless night and lack of food, as he knew. But the moonlight had gone, and a gray dawn was breaking. The oak leaves looked cold and dead, dripping with heavy dew. The east began to glow and flare. Somewhere he heard a negro voice chanting weirdly. The South was waking up. He arose from his seat and began to walk slowly back toward the post office.

The Power house was still silent and asleep when he passed the gate again. It looked slightly dingy in the morning light, and its magic had gone. But when he reached the business settlement at the post office he found everything wide-awake. Smoke was rising from the stone outside chimneys of the three houses, and the two or three negro cabins in the background, a negro was chopping wood by the road, and the door of the postal station already stood wide open.