Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the hatchet, chopping out a burial-place in an oblong space near the tree between the palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil with his hands. It was a long and painful task for his weak and sore body; but at length it was ended, and bringing out the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth over it, and left it to its rest.

The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises when he entered the cypress hollow again. He heard them dully, with torpid indifference. The tree seemed strangely empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the block, watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he arranged the embers so that they would outlast the night to keep away the wild beasts; and then throwing himself upon the heap of moss where the corpse had lain, he sank away in a dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the screaming and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon.

V.

He woke with the feeling that he had dropped off and slept a minute, but at the same instant gazing with stiff and smarting eyes through the brown dusk of the hollow, he was confused at seeing the palmetto leaves at the entrance plainly visible, and of a deep, cool green. He knew now that it was broad day, and that he had slept long. Raising himself suddenly, a mass of cramping stitches wrenched his frame, and made him gasp with pain. He remained for a minute supporting himself on his hands, and then slowly and painfully arose. Refreshed in mind by his slumber, he was even worse off in body than when he had lain down. His limbs were stiff, and every joint and muscle ached. His wrists and ankles were much swollen where the ropes of the bucking had cut them. He felt as if he had been switched all over with nettles, from the stings and scratches of the thorns and briers through which he had travelled. His face pained him especially, the atoms of glass still smarting in the cuts, and all its wounds and bruises sore and burning. Worse than all to his sense at that moment were the weight and chafe of the accursed collar. His flesh was raw with it. It hurt him so much that almost the first thing he did was to tie one of the pieces of cotton cloth around his neck for the edge of the iron to rest on. Relieved somewhat by this, he began to limp to and fro, gasping and panting at every step with pain.

After a few minutes of this exercise, he felt a little easier, and stopped walking to examine the paddle. It convinced him that Nancy must have a boat somewhere, and the pilfered articles he had found in the hollow confirmed his belief. To get away from the swamp was his fixed purpose, and in that land of streams, if he could only find Nancy’s boat, he might avoid the loathsome and dangerous journey across the morass.

Nancy’s boat, he thought, must be a periagua, and the question was, where did she keep it. Crawling out of the tree to commence a search for it, he saw it right at the base of the trunk under the palmettoes. But Nancy’s periagua was a canoe! A canoe of buffalo hide on a frame of slender wattles. Had she purloined it from the Indians in the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and had it been a present to them from some visiting tribe from Texas or the Indian Territory? For all the boats Antony had ever seen among them were periaguas. At all events here it was, and elated with its discovery, the fugitive instantly brought forth the paddle, the hatchet, the bowie-knife, the corn, the tin pan, and the matches, and placed them in it. Going in again to see if there was anything else that might serve him in his flight, he saw an end of dyed cotton cloth hanging out from the couch of moss. With a pull out it came—an old blue cotton gown. Turning over the moss, he uncovered an old blue flannel shirt, an old pair of grey trowsers, a jean jacket torn up the back, a slipper and one stocking. Rejoiced that Nancy’s purloinings had furnished him with a change of clothes, he put the gown, shirt and trowsers into the canoe, and lifting the latter, plunged out through the palmettoes into the forest.

A thrill of alarm shot through him as he saw by the sunlight that it was late in the afternoon. So accustomed had he been in the enforced habits of plantation life to rise at daybreak, that on waking in the hollow he naturally thought he had awakened at the usual morning hour. He shuddered now with the consciousness that so much time had been lost, when the dogs, guided by some professional expert at man-hunting, might be coming straight toward him. That Lafitte would, in his burning lust for vengeance, hunt the swamp for weeks to find him, he had no doubt, and he must at once speed away.

He stood for a moment debating which direction to take, when looking down he happened to see a spot where the earth had been harrowed by the claws of some wild beast, and upon the scratches was the distinct imprint of a naked foot. It came to him at once that this was a footmark Nancy had made going up from the water, and he at once resolved to pursue a track, in a bee-line from the heel of the print. Limping along painfully with the canoe on his shoulders and cautiously, for by the sudden slipping and rustling in the grass and herbage he knew that snakes were around him, suddenly his heart and blood jumped, and he sprang backward with a leap that shot a flood of wrenching pangs through his whole frame. He had nearly stepped upon a rattlesnake which lay in a faint glimmer of sunshine on a strip of thinly tufted earth. The sluggish reptile quivered slightly throughout its mottled length, and lifting its head with venom in its sparkling eyes and devilish yawning jaws, sounded its rattle and swiftly slid from view. Antony shuddered, and the old dark fancy that he was in Hell flickered through his mind. Trembling in spite of himself at every buzzard that flew from his path, or small animal that crossed it, and feeling that everything was watching him, and that the multitudinous chatter of the birds that filled the forest was concerning him, he went on his way. Soon he came to the pools, and beating the moccasins from his path, arrived at a shoal of black mire, and a narrow bayou. A fallen tree lay with its branches dipped in the stream, half way across; a rotten log floated in the water; stumps and snags projected here and there; waifs of moss, slivers of branches, broken boughs, leaves, flowers, and bits of forest debris floated idly on the shining surface or among the shadows.

Hurriedly casting off his foul rags, the fugitive washed himself with the old gown, and put on the shirt and trowsers. Then laying the canoe on the water, where it lightly danced, he cautiously got in, grasped the paddle in the middle, and plying the blades first on one side and then on the other, shot slowly off with a beating heart up the dull stream.