Just when they had eaten their supper together, and had seated themselves before the fire, and when the whirl and whistle of the wind was heard in the mad music of a river storm, a motorboat with its cut-out open ploughed up the river through the dead eddy and stopped to hail.
Jim Talum, a fisherman whose line of hoop nets filled the reach of Island No. 9 for eight or ten miles, was on his way to his tent which he had pitched at the head of Winchester Chute.
He tramped aboard, and welcomed a seat by the fire.
“’Lowed I’d drap in a minute,” he declared. “Powerful lonesome up on the chute where I got my tent. Be’n runnin’ my traps down the bank, yeah, an’ along of the chute, gettin’ rats. Yo’ trappin’?”
“No, just tripping,” Terabon replied. “I was down to New Madrid this morning.”
“I’m just up from there. Ho law! Theh’s one man I’d hate to be down below. I expect yo’ve hearn tell of them Despard riveh pirates? No! Well, they’ve come drappin’ down ag’in, an’ they landed into New 135 Madrid yestehd’y evenin’. Likely they ’lowed to raid some commissary down b’low—cayn’t tell what they did ’low to do. But they picked good pickin’s down theh! Feller come down lookin’ fo’ a woman, hisn’s I expect. Anyhow, he’s a strangeh on the riveh. He’s got a nice power boat, an’ likely he’s got money. If he has, good-bye! Them Despards’d kill a man for $10. One of ’em, Hilt Despard’s onto the bo’t with him, pretendin’ to be a sport, an’ they’ve drapped out. The rest the gang’s jes’ waitin’ fo’ the wind to lay, down b’low, an’ down by Plum P’int, some’rs, Mr. Man’ll sudden come daid.”
The fisherman had been alone so much that the pent-up conversation of weeks flowed uninterruptedly. He told details; he described the motorboat; he laughed at the astonishment the man would feel when the pirates disclosed their intentions with a bullet or knife; and he expected, by and by, to hear the story of the tragedy through the medium of some whiskey boater, some river gossip coming up in a power boat.
For an hour he babbled and then, as precipitately as he had arrived, he took his departure. When he was gone, Nelia Crele turned to Terabon with helpless dismay. Augustus Carline was worthless; he had been faithless to her; he had inflicted sufferings beyond her power of punishment or forgiveness.
“But he’s looking for me!” she recapitulated, “and he doesn’t know. He’s a fool, and they’ll kill him like a rat! What can I do?”
Obviously there was nothing that she could do, but Lester Terabon rose instantly.