In spite of his outward determination, however, Joe was frightened himself. He knew better than his cousin what a dangerous exploit it would be to endeavor to track the river pirate down to his lair in that maze of swamp and bayou that was called the River Island. He sympathized with Sam. If he had been alone he might have given up the attempt, but he was ashamed to show fear before a negro, ashamed to propose retreat after his cousin’s confident speech.
“But we never kin cotch up with ’em ’fore night,” said Sam. “If dey started down ’fore day, dey’ll shore make de River Island ’fore we does.”
Joe perceived that this was probably true, and that if the houseboat once got into the labyrinth of the River Island it would be as hard to find as a rabbit in a blackberry-thicket. But they seemed to be in for it now, and there was no turning back.
The sun blazed down fiercely on the river, and sweat poured off the white faces and the black one as the boys drove the canoe down the current. But it was not till after two o’clock that, as they rounded a bend, the river seemed to split into two broad streams before them. Between the two channels lay a dense, unwholesome-looking swamp, a tangle of titi-shrubs and dead cypresses and vines and willows, all draped with gray curtains of Spanish moss.
“De River Island!” exclaimed Sam.
The River Island was only about twenty years old. Before that, it had been a peninsula formed by a great loop of the river; there were a few fields of corn and cotton in it, and perhaps a house or two. Then in one spring of exceptionally high water the river burst its banks, and tore a new channel for itself right across the neck of the peninsula. As the new channel was the shortest, it remained there, and the old channel shrunk to a muddy, shallow river, wandering sluggishly through a maze of bayous and lagoons. Part of the peninsula was permanently overflowed; the rest of it was a wilderness of forty or fifty square miles. For the most part it was marshy and cut up with bayous, but there were ridges of high land near the middle. Some mulatto hunters dwelt near its edge, for there were bears, deer, wildcats, and wild hogs on the island; but much of the place was impenetrable except in winter, and probably no man had any thorough knowledge of its intricacies.
The paddlers stopped, and the canoe drifted slowly down toward the forks of the river. On the right lay the new channel, which the steamboats used; on the left was the old channel, a dull, sluggish, shallow waterway, but almost certainly the one which the houseboat would have taken, for it led into the heart of the island. Innumerable bayous and lagoons were there, offering good hiding-places, whereas the new channel flowed between comparatively unbroken shores.
“Now keep your eyes peeled, boys!” Joe cautioned, “and dip your paddles easy. Blue Bob’s bound to be somewhere in here, and we’ve got to see him before he sees us.”
Moving scarcely faster than the current, the canoe floated silently into the old channel. The stream was perhaps a hundred feet wide, and seldom more than four or five feet deep. The marks where the full river had once flowed here, in a channel of three times the present width, were still faintly to be seen, and the old river-bed laid bare was now a dense jungle of wet-loving shrubs, tied and twisted together with masses of creepers. The ground was a soft morass; every tall tree was draped with Spanish moss, and a heavy smell of decay of stagnation permeated the hot air.
“Those pirates must be immune to malaria if they live here!” Bob muttered.