He has taken down sail and mast. The rushes are twelve feet high. They hide him well. With oars, mast, and the like, he has contrived something by which he can look out over their tops. He has powder and shot, coffee, salt, and rice; he will not be driven out! At night he spreads his sail and seeks the open waters of the lake, where he can sleep, by littles, without being overrun by serpents; but when day breaks, there is no visible sign of his presence. Yet he is where he can see his cabin. It is now deep in the water, and the flood is still rising. He is quite sure no one has entered it since he left it. But—the strain of perpetual watching!
When at dawn of the fifth day he again looked for cover in the prairie, the water was too high to allow him concealment, and he sought the screen of some willows that fringed the edge of the swamp forest, anchoring in a few rods’ width of open water between them and the woods. He did not fear to make, on the small hearth of mud and ashes he had improvised in his lugger, the meagre fire needed to prepare his food. Its slender smoke quickly mingled with the hazy vapors and shadows of the swamp. As he cast his eye abroad, he found nowhere any sign of human approach. Here and there the tops of the round rushes still stood three feet above the water, but their slender needles were scarcely noticeable. Far and near, over prairie as over lake, lay the unbroken yellow flood. There was no flutter of wings, no whistle of feathered mate to mate, no call of nestlings from the ruined nests. Except the hawk and vulture, the birds were gone. Untold thousands of dumb creatures had clung to life for a time, but now were devoured by birds of prey and by alligators, or were drowned. Thousands still lived on. Behind him in the swamp the wood-birds remained, the gray squirrel still barked and leaped from tree to tree, the raccoon came down to fish, the plundering owl still hid himself through the bright hours, and the chilled snake curled close in the warm folds of the hanging moss. Nine feet of water below. In earlier days, to the northward through the forest, many old timbers rejected in railway construction or repair, with dead logs and limbs, had been drifted together by heavy rains, and had gathered a covering of soil; canebrake, luxurious willow-bushes, and tough grasses had sprung up on them and bound them with their roots. These floating islands the flood, now covering the dense underbrush of the swamp, lifted on its free surface, and, in its slow creep southward, bore through the pillared arcades of the cypress wood and out over the submerged prairies. Many a cowering deer in those last few days that had made some one of these green fragments of the drowned land a haven of despair, the human castaway left unharmed.
Of all sentient creatures in that deluge he was suffering most. He was gaunt and haggard with watching. The thought of pursuit bursting suddenly around him now fastened permanently upon his imagination. He feared to sleep. From the direction of the open water surprise seemed impossible; but from the forest! what instant might it not ring with the whoop of discovery, the many-voiced halting challenge, and the glint of loaded Winchester? And another fear had come. Many a man not a coward, and as used to the sight of serpents as this man, has never been able to be other than a coward concerning them. The pot-hunter held them in terror. It was from fear of them that he had lighted his torch the night of his bivouac in the swamp. Only a knowledge of their ordinary haunts and habits and the art of avoiding them had made the swamp and prairie life bearable. Now all was changed. They were driven from their dens. In the forest one dared not stretch forth the hand to lay it upon any tangible thing until a searching glance had failed to find the glittering eye and forked tongue that meant “Beware!” In the flooded prairie the willow-trees were loaded with the knotted folds of the moccasin, the rattlesnake, and I know not how many other sorts of deadly or only loathsome serpents. Some little creatures at the bottom of the water, feeding on the soft white part of the round rush near its root, every now and then cut a stem free from its base, and let it spring to the surface and float away. Often a snake had wrapped himself about the end above the water, and when this refuge gave way and drifted abroad he would cling for a time, until some less forlorn hope came in sight, and then swim for it. Thus scarce a minute of the day passed, it seemed, but one, two, or three of these creatures, making for their fellow-castaway’s boat, were turned away by nervous waving of arms. The nights had proved that they could not climb the lugger’s side, and when he was in her the canoe was laid athwart her gunwales; but at night he had to drop the bit of old iron that served for an anchor, and the very first night a large moccasin—not of the dusky kind described in books, but of that yet deadlier black sort, an ell in length, which the swampers call the Congo—came up the anchor-rope. The castaway killed it with an oar; but after that who would have slept?
About sunset of the fifth day, though it was bright and beautiful, the hunter’s cunning detected the first subtle signs of a coming storm. He looked about him to see what provision was needed to meet and weather its onset. On the swamp side the loftiest cypresses, should the wind bring any of them down, would not more than cast the spray of their fall as far as his anchorage. The mass of willows on the prairie side was nearer, but its trees stood low,—already here and there the branches touched the water; the hurricane might tear away some boughs, but could do no more. He shortened the anchor-rope, and tried the hold of the anchor on the bottom to make sure the lugger might not swing into the willows, for in every fork of every bough was a huge dark mass of serpents plaited and piled one upon another, and ready at any moment to glide apart towards any new shelter that might be reached.
While eye and hand were thus engaged, the hunter’s ear was attentive to sounds that he had been hearing for more than an hour. These were the puff of ’scape-pipes and plash of a paddle-wheel, evidently from a small steamer in the Company Canal. She was coming down it; that is, from the direction of the river and the city.
Whither was she bound? To some one of the hundred or more plantations and plantation homes that the far-reaching crevasse had desolated? Likely enough. In such event she would not come into view, although for some time now he had seen faint shreds of smoke in the sky over a distant line of woods. But it filled him with inward tremors to know that if she chose to leave the usual haunts of navigation on her left, and steam out over the submerged prairies and the lake, and into the very shadow of these cypresses, she could do it without fear of a snag or a shallow. He watched anxiously as the faint smoke reached a certain point. If the next thin curl should rise farther on, it would mean safety. But when it came it seemed to be in the same place as the last; and another the same, and yet another the same: she was making almost a straight line for the spot where he stood. Only a small low point of forest broke the line, and presently, far away, she slowly came out from behind it.