Luke Redman started when he heard this remark, and an expression of great satisfaction settled on his scowling face. I noticed, too, that after we left the bayou he began to cast stealthy glances around him, as if he were looking for some one; and once I saw his gaze fastened earnestly upon a cluster of bushes which grew on a neighboring ridge, running parallel with the one we were following.
I scrutinized the thicket closely, and would have been willing to declare that I saw a coonskin cap, under which were a pair of eyes regarding us intently. But the cap vanished at the very moment I caught sight of it, and believing that I had been mistaken, I said nothing about it to my companions.
In less than half an hour after we left our old camp, night began to settle down upon us, and before we had accomplished another mile, it was so dark that we could scarcely distinguish one another’s features.
The storm had all the while been increasing in fury, and now the rain and sleet came down in torrents, and it was not many minutes before we were all drenched to the skin. The cold and darkness grew more intense, and, to add to the unpleasantness of our situation, we reached the end of the ridge at last, and from that point our way lay across a bottom ten miles wide, which was covered with mud and ice, thickets of cane and blackberry briers, and studded with cypress knees, which rendered our progress slow and laborious.
“Duke,” said Sandy, at length—and I could tell by the tones of his voice that he was shaking with the cold—“strike up a whistle. It is so dark we can’t see to foller you.”
“I am too nearly frozen to whistle,” replied Duke. “It is all I can do to talk. That isn’t the worst of it, either. I am afraid we are lost.”
Now, getting lost was something that did not trouble us in the least, for a surer guide than Duke Hampton was not to be found in the country. His “bump of locality” was largely developed, and any place he had once visited he could find again on the darkest of nights. He sometimes laughingly said that he possessed owl’s eyes, and I have thought it was so, for it made not the slightest difference, as far as his traveling was concerned, whether it was high noon or midnight.
He once more urged his unwilling horse forward, and for two long, dreary hours we stumbled about in the darkness, the rain and sleet beating furiously in our faces, and every bone in our bodies aching with the cold.
During all this time no one spoke except Luke Redman, who abused and threatened us steadily for an hour, scarcely stopping to take breath; then, suddenly changing his tone, he entreated us to untie his hands, and, finding that we paid no attention to him, he solemnly declared that he was freezing to death, and relapsed into silence.
I began to think I was freezing also, and when I could no longer endure the cold, I proposed to our fellows to abandon the idea of riding to the settlement that night, and strike for our camp on Black Bayou—the one our negroes had built on the day we went into the woods to watch our turkey-trap.