Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

Heading northward, the brown skiff yawed from right to left, and darted with an uncertain forward motion, trembling beneath him like a living thing that shared his agitation. Black banks of mud, pierced here and there with alligator holes, swamp grass, and pools, and luxuriant clumps and masses of strange many-colored flowering verdure, fallen trees and trees leaning to their fall, and trees uptowering in leafy pride, and the vine-enwreathed and flower-gemmed wilderness of massive trunks uplifting their vast moss-bearded and leaf-laden branches, spread and loomed in solemn and splendid confusion on either side as the boat lightly darted on its sinuous course. Alligators swam through the bayou, or plunged from floodwood, or raised themselves with brutal bellowings on the margin as it glided on. Cranes and bitterns fled away from the banks squawking and screaming; strange birds of gorgeous plumage flew rustling through the branches; scarlet-gilled black buzzards rose and soared with broad and steady wing; myriads of ducks and water-fowl of many kinds flapped and swam away continually before it. Paddled steadily forward, now on one side, now on the other, on sped the brown canoe, while the shadows grew inkier on the sombre water, and again under the red reflection of the sky, the dull bayou became a stream of blood.

Awed by the solemn desolation of the scene, the gloomy color of the water, the gathering darkness of the wooded fen, the motions and the voices all around; troubled at the thought of the long and perilous distance that stretched between him and his far bourn of safety; yet with a fearful joy and a sustaining hope within, the fugitive oared his swift darting skiff at length into the river he had swam last the day before. The red glow had died from sky and water, and the moon silvered greyly the stream as he paddled on between the black forest on either side. Heading his prow to the east, and plying his paddle vigorously, he flew lightly up the stream. Voices of bird and beast called and answered weirdly in the darkness of the black shores; trees towered and leaned in ambiguous sable shapes over the dusky stream, and watched him as he shot swiftly by; the solemn sky spread far above him like a doubtful thought, half-boding, yet clearing slowly into deep-withdrawn tranquillity, in the increasing lustre of the tawny moon. Overarched and palisaded by the phantom sentience of the hour, his dark skiff, gliding and darting with light tremors and waverings still held its way like a dumb intelligence over the mysterious water.

Hours went on, and save the scattered hooting and screeching of owls in the forest, and the occasional clacking of some vagrant bat whirling by, the moonlit night was still. Only once the fugitive oared his canoe in to the shore, where on a low projecting bluff under a great tree, he lit a small fire, and hastily parching some corn in the pan, ate a hurried meal. Then slaking the fire, he entered the canoe again, and paddled on.

An hour or two later he turned the skiff into a narrow bayou which debouched into the stream, thus changing his course to the north. His object was to gain the Red River, where he hoped to smuggle himself on board some steamboat, and getting to New Orleans, escape from the steamboat, and hide himself in the hold of some northern vessel. It was his former plan, and he still clung to it with tenacity, bitterly aware of its hazards and dangers, yet unable to think of a better. The bayou he was now in was very narrow, hemmed in on either side by the forest and the fen, and much obstructed by stumps, snags, fallen trees and lodgments of logs. To steer his course through these in the uncertain darkness, for the branches almost shut out the moonlight, was difficult, and several times he was obliged to clamber on the fallen timber, and pull the canoe over, or shove aside the huddled floodwood to clear a passage. But his efforts brought him at length to a sluggish stream, which he judged to be the Pacoudrie—the stream he had swam first in his escape the day before, but at a point several miles below the Lafitte plantation. He was now approaching dangerous ground, and his heart began to beat faster. Turning his prow eastward again, he paddled down the stream, looking for another debouching bayou. He soon came upon one, into which he turned, heading north, and through which his passage was as dark and impeded as before. He exerted himself to the utmost, and at last, heated and panting, he saw that he was leaving the morass, and that the moonlit ground, thinly scattered over with trees, and thickly covered with verdurous underwood, was gradually rising on either side of him. The bayou, too, grew deeper and less impeded, and presently he saw on his left, beyond a cluster of huge trees, the grain of a plantation, and further up, a mansion with outbuildings. Who lived there he did not know—he only knew that he was again in the region of his enemies. Light thrills shot through his heated blood, and the canoe yawed and trembled beneath him, as if conscious of danger. Paddling forward, he saw before him in the clear moonlight, for the trees on either side were thinly scattered now, a huge trunk fallen sheer across the stream, sloping down obliquely, with its crown of branches dipping in the water, and barring half the passage. From the other side, crossing the first trunk, a leafless tree, withered or blasted, had also fallen, and lay, dipped in the water, half way across, with its broken boughs sticking upward like jagged spikes or horns. Steering to the left of these, with the intention of shooting through the space under the large trunk, he gave three or four vigorous strokes of the paddle on either side of the skiff. The canoe darted forward, quivering with the impetus of the strokes—stopped suddenly with a tearing and griding shock, and yawed around, with the water welling up swiftly through its bottom. Antony, who was kneeling on one knee, had just time to spring up, catch at the trunk before him, and lift himself up on it. When he turned, the rim of the canoe was settling in the water. It had struck one of the jagged spikes just below the surface, which had ripped its bottom, and it had gone down forever.

Sitting on the tree, stupefied at this unexpected accident, Antony watched the circling ripples on the moonlit water where his boat had sunk, and thought with bitter regret that he was now without a single weapon to fight his way against any opposing white man, or to end his own existence, should the odds be against him. His hatchet had sunk with the boat, and his knife also. With a fierce imprecation, he rose, ran up the trunk, sprang ashore, and pausing only to wrench off a branch, and strip it of its leaves for a club to defend himself, rushed on through the underwood.

Heading to the northeast, he gained the plantation, and running over rows of corn and springing cotton-plant, pale in the paling moon, he struck upon a fenced road lying between the plantation, with another road diverging from it in the course he was travelling. Into the latter he turned, but afraid to take the open path, he kept within the fences and hedges skirting its side, ready if he saw anybody in the distance to hide in the rows, or if anybody came upon him, to fight till he was killed.

Rushing on, haggard with apprehension and desperate resolution, with his teeth set, his large nostrils dilated, and his glaring eyes roving warily about him, he came to a plantation divided from the one he was on by a hedge of the osage-orange, and with a similar hedge skirting the road. To break through this would be difficult, so he took the road and ran on, with the fresh wind of the coming morning blowing upon him, and increasing his fear with the thought of the new dangers the daybreak would bring. It was a large plantation, and it took him some time to arrive at its terminus, at which a road diverged from the one on which he was journeying. He reached this road, and there, clad in shabby light clothes, and coming down the path, not three yards distant from him, was a man!

Antony swung up his club, and stood with opened nostrils and glaring eyes, his black face alive with fierce courage. The man halted, and looked at him with a sullen scowl. In the blank pause all life seemed to have died from the air, and the moon lay faded in a vacant, sky, ghast and grey in the pale light of the morning. The man was a large, gaunt fellow, with a harsh and sallow taciturn face, but to the dark, half demented fancy of the fugitive, he dimly seemed a devil, and the place was still vaguely Hell.

“See here, nigger,” he said, in a stern, strident voice, “yer a runaway. There’s their name as owns yer on yer collar, and I know Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, want yer. I’m goin’ down in the first boat, and yer comin’ with me, right away, and no fuss. What yo’ say, nigger?”

He drew a revolver from his breast, and held it idly, watching the fugitive with a scowl. Sense flickered through the mind of Antony. Here was a chance to get safely down the river—beyond, a chance to give his captor the slip when he reached the city. He flung his club away.