“Not a bit. Lang or Long, it’s all the same, and it’s all over now, and no harm done to anybody, except that we’re all out the money we might have got. But mind, not a word, now! Professional secrecy, you know.”
“Trust me,” said Lang. “I’m not proud of the affair.”
Carroll shook hands with him and went off, still laughing. Lang proceeded to make his few purchases, secured a room at a cheap hotel, where he made himself as presentable as he could, and had himself shaved. He thought of wiring to Eva Morrison, but reflected that he would surely see her the next day. He dined at the hotel, a much worse meal than he had been accustomed to aboard the Cavite, strolled about the street for an hour, and found himself dead weary.
He went to bed before nine o’clock, unstrung and exhausted. He would have to get up long before daylight, he knew, for he was determined to be at Rockett’s bungalow, “north of Persia,” from six to nine.
He needed sleep, but sleep would not come. By fits and starts he dozed, waking from nightmares of the wreck and horrible suggestions of incomprehensible peril, hearing again Rockett’s thick mutter in the darkness, feeling the heave of the drifting boat. Toward morning he did sleep soundly for an hour or two, awakening in terror that he had overslept, but a struck match showed him that it was hardly four o’clock by the dollar watch he had bought the evening before.
He got up wearily, feeling now that he could sleep forever. He dressed and went downstairs, and out upon the dead and deserted streets. An all-night lunch room provided him with breakfast, and, feeling a trifle refreshed, he boarded the west-bound inter-urban electric car that skirts the coast between Biloxi and New Orleans.
He was the only passenger, and he dozed again in his seat, until the conductor told him where to get off for Persia. The east was turning pale as he started up the road leading inland, a sandy road in the twilight, plunging apparently into a dense forest. It turned out merely a belt of swamp bordering a deep, narrow bayou, very likely the one which Carroll’s crew had ascended to reach Rockett’s dwelling. Beyond it the road ascended a little, and the air grew momentarily more transparent. The wayside objects came out ghostly, then solidly, trees, scattered shacks, trim bungalows at far intervals; then in the gray light Lang perceived a wayside store, shuttered and sleeping, with two or three small houses close by.
This must be Persia, and beyond it the dwellings grew more rare. There were strips of pine woods, stretches of peach orchard, fields of last fall’s cornstalks or cotton shrubs, silent and dewy in the pallid daybreak. Lang’s blood quickened and his spirits rose as he tramped on through the intense freshness of the air. Incredible possibilities rose in his mind; things that he might unearth at “six, nine and twelve o’clock,” and he glanced every few minutes at his watch to make sure that he was going to be in time.
He passed a belt of tall, long-leaf pines, stately as palms, a quarter of a mile of desolate, picked cotton bushes, and then he halted, with a sudden catch of his breath.
It must be the place. There was the iron fence, the two magnolia trees at the gate, the plantation of small orange trees, and, fifty feet back from the road, a trim brown bungalow with green doors and window casings as it had been described to him. All the blinds were drawn; it looked empty and dead. But, for that matter, so had all the houses he had passed.