The Golden Pears/Chapter 5
V
Old Durm Clinchell swallowed hard when he considered the fact that had been imparted to him over the telephone. Lunmer Andrest had calmly put his hired desperado and bushwhacker in jail, and had pocketed a big reward for doing so! It sounded unbelievable, and if he had not recognized Sheriff Ferris's voice Clinchell would have had his doubts.
Instead of taking the emphatic hint to leave, the shanty-boater was hanging on. It was bad enough to have to take notice of a poor white river-rat, but to have the river-rat actually resist the mandate of a man who picked a thousand acres of cotton and who sold timber rights from a thousand acres every year—that was intolerable!
Clinchell saw now that he must use something besides force. He couldn't kill Lunmer Andrest, and he couldn't hire a man, offhand, to run him out of the country. Some other method must be adopted.
He gave the subject hours of thought between the common tasks which fell upon his hands in consequence of his lack of bookkeepers and clerical helpers. He had to reckon up the work of his pickers, the output of his gin, the cut of his sawmill, and a dozen other things, balancing his own little red book from the reports of his mill foreman, gin boss, and overseer.
His own record did not always tally with the freight receipts handed to him by his agent at the junction of his tap-line with the main railroad. Sometimes he had fifty thousand feet more lumber than he had counted on, and sometimes he fell short a few bales of cotton.
But the annual balance was in his favor, and his income was so large that he found a good deal of difficulty in knowing where to place it all. Usually he bought bonds or mortgages, or added to his holdings of land. He owned several outlying plantations, some back on the hills, where they raised corn and fruit, and some down the river, near Helena. He had purchased some lands away out West, too, but he didn't know very much about them, except that he guessed they weren't of much account. For ready money he depended on two banks of which he was president; but he didn't know much about banking, and was satisfied to know that his check would be honored, despite its rather uncertain penmanship.
Old Clinchell found many things to attend to, but now, between his tasks, he gave his spare time over to Lunmer Andrest. The more he thought about the shanty-boater, the angrier grew his thoughts and the calmer his expression. Time for explosive outbursts had gone by when a young scoundrel like Andrest outwitted him and put him under peace bonds, and then took in a friendly bushwhacker and obtained the reward!
Having ridden his favorite mule out to the sawmill and seen a particularly fine white-oak log sawed, he turned across to the cotton-gin and measured the lint to see whether it was running as long as the standard. He stopped at the tap-line road warehouse and sent a darky to the roof to patch it, because a rain would leak through into the sixty or seventy bales of cotton that were waiting to be shipped. On his way home, he stopped to give a sick mule colt some physic.
When he arrived at the horse-block, and a hostler took the mule he rode, he asked:
"Where's Sue Belle, Timber?"
"Ah don' know, suh!"
"She gone away?"
"Yas, suh—onto that black man mule; an' sho, that mule was a kickin' snorts—yas, suh!"
"Down or up?"
"Down, suh—down the St. Francis Trace."
Clinchell growled and climbed the mound to his mansion. He went up into the cupola on top and took a pair of binoculars from their case. Throwing down the windows all around, he looked down the St. Francis Trace toward the edge of the plantation-field. No one was in sight in that direction; the cotton-pickers, west of the mansion, were working steadily, and through his glasses he could see the overseer watching the weighing of bags of plucked cotton.
From the cupola Clinchell could see into every part of the great clearing in the swamp. He could see, with the glasses, into the woods on the lower lands surrounding the plantation. Over the tops of the trees, in four or five directions, he could see films of smoke, indicating where cabins were located out in the wooded swamp. The big, black cloud of smoke over the sawmill gave reason for the scream of the saws as they bit into the logs.
Looking from point to point, he turned his glasses again to the St. Francis Trace and searched the woods there. Sue Belle always rode around as she pleased. Her father told himself now that she had gone down to Furlent's, five or six miles away, to talk to the Furlent girls, or to the Widow Mendin's. That was what he wished to believe. What he did not wish to believe was that she had ridden down to strike across to the St. Francis River, where Andrest had moored his shanty-boat.
Clinchell knew what had happened to Andrest's boat. Morlung had reported it, and the sheriff had told of Andrest's vengeance on the marauder. The shanty-boater never would have taken Morlung in for the reward alone; something had gone wrong somewhere, and now Morlung was in jail, and there was no telling how much he had told of Clinchell's part in the affair. If he had talked too much—
The old planter whistled under his breath. People were apt to talk too much sometimes. Old Clinchell's early life had been milestoned, so to speak, by injudicious conversations, his own and other people's. If Morlung had been fooled and bulldozed into telling too much, there was no telling what the law of the case would be. It might involve the fifty-thousand-dollar bond, to make up for any damages done to the feelings and property of Lunmer Andrest, if the young man pressed the point.
"He'd ought to be satisfied with the reward!" Clinchell reflected, but he knew that people were very seldom satisfied with what they had in hand.
Thus his mind ran from pillar to post, while he turned in his big swivel-chair to watch the fields, the woods, and the birds circling above the woods. This was his favorite resting-place. Here he did most of his pencil figuring, while he had the very acres under his eye.
He carried in his pocket a great blueprint of the Dark Bend swamps, with all the township section and other land lines marked out, his own tracts surrounded by red ink. It was a large map, and there were dozens of parcels of land outlined in red ink. He knew the contents of every tract, and could describe the crop or the kind of timber on every one. Nothing escaped his eye, and very little ever slipped his memory as regards his property.
He hated young white men, for there was a great dread in his heart lest one of them might take Sue Belle from the mansion and out of his own life. He was determined that such a thing should never happen, consoling his conscience by the reflection that after he was dead she would have lots of money and plenty of time for getting married.
He believed heartily in the new-fangled idea that girls should not marry young. Sue Belle was only going on twenty. She ought not to gallivant around with young men. Any scoundrel that seemed really dangerous, before she was ten or fifteen years older—old Clinchell gritted his teeth and reached for his binoculars, to glance again at the place where the road entered the woods.
A flicker, a glimmer of black away deep among the big gum-tree trunks, warned him that some one was approaching with a black animal, and a little later he saw the animal. It was the black man mule which Sue Belle favored as a saddle-horse. The mule was trailing along behind two people on foot, looking first at one and then at the other, turning his wise head from side to side and waving his ears.
One of the persons was Sue Belle and the other was a man. Adjusting the focus of the glasses, old Clinchell glared at the two.
They stopped in the edge of the timber and talked to each other. The mule leaned up against a gum-tree and rested his head on the man's shoulder, which indicated a degree of familiarity maddening for Clinchell to behold. At intervals the man held something up for the mule to eat, and that accounted for the mule not kicking the man through an acre of landscape.
With shortening breath Clinchell watched the tryst. After nearly half an hour he saw Sue Belle put her arm around the man's neck and—but the glasses shook so that he couldn't see straight. When he had them braced against the side of the cupola, and steady again, the girl was riding across the open cotton-field on the roadway and the man had vanished from view.
That man, old Clinchell knew in his heart, was Lunmer Andrest, although he could not identify him with certainty, even with glasses, at that distance. He was so angry that he choked.
"Sue Belle with her arm around a man's neck!" he gasped. "Ain't she no more self-respect than that? I've been too easy with that gal!"
Then his anger turned upon Andrest.
"I got to git shet of that man! Peace bond or no peace bond, I'm going to send him away! What he wants is my money—but for that he wouldn't care none about that girl. Course he wouldn't. I'm a fool I didn't think of that before. Probably he'll be glad to go for a thousand dollars. If I'd only thought before he got that Morlung reward, likely he'd 'a' gone for five hundred, or two hundred. I expect five hundred looked the size of a bale of cotton when he set eyes onto it. Sho! Course he'll take money!"
The anxious father had drawn down out of sight in the cupola, so that his daughter would not suspect that he had seen her. He retreated to the corner room, where he kept his ready money and business papers in a safe, and enough books to give it the name of library, or private office, according to his notion. There he sat in a big leather chair, with his feet on the table and his coat on the floor, his hat on the open door, when his daughter ran bounding into the room.
"Hello, daddy!" she cried, throwing her arms around him and kissing him. "Now what have you on your mind? You going to shoot a sick mule with a broken leg, or did somebody lose a bale of cotton in a mud-hole, or what is it?"
"Nothing on my mind!" he ejaculated. "I'm all right—feeling fine!"
He laughed and threw his pipe upon a platter which served as a tobacco-tray. The platter had a picture of New Orleans on it, and an old French inscription, which indicated that it was part of the dinner-set of a governor-general of Louisiana, and it was worth a thousand dollars; but no one in the St. Francis swamps knew its value. A bowl from the same set was used to feed two pet spaniels out by the house kennel, and the teapot, with its nose broken off, was out in the chicken-coop.
Sue Belle asked her father what he wanted for supper.
"Why—let's see—let's have some fried ham and eggs," he suggested.
"Pshaw!" she exclaimed. "Ham and eggs! Is that all you can think of? I tell you—we'll have some fricasseed chicken and creamed potatoes."
The father sighed. He was always asking for ham and eggs, but he generally got some fancy stuff "all chewed up beforehand," as he said.
Sue Belle bounded away again. When she was out of hearing he opened the safe and drew out a cash-box containing bills in thick bricks. The bundles were wrapped around the middle with a narrow ribbon of paper, marked with figures, and at each end was a rubber band.
Old Clinchell meditated over the money for some time. He grinned sardonically as he made up a thousand dollars in bills and another thousand in gold, taking fifty twenty-dollar gold pieces from a drawer of the safe.
"Take a shanty-boater," he nodded complacently, "and he'll just naturally do anything in Gawd's World for money! I'll sure make it an object for that Andrest to get his hull caboodle out of this part of the country. I might 'a' knowed I couldn't drive him out. They live on bullets and getting shot up and kicked around!"
Clinchell put the two thousand dollars into his pocket and replaced the rest of his cash in the safe, which he closed and locked. He went down to the horse-block and shouted:
"Hey, Timber! Bring me my mule!"
A minute later Timber swung around the corner of the fence, leading a saddled mule on the run. The animal stopped at the horse-block, and Clinchell mounted with an agile spring.
"Git ap!" he called, and the mule started.
"Daddy! Daddy!" a shrill cry hailed him. "Where are you going? It's half after five, and supper's almost ready. Come back!"
Clinchell stopped the mule and stared up at the dining-room porch. There Sue Belle emerged from the screens and waved her hands at him, beckoning him to return. She ran down to the fence, treading recklessly through the flower-beds.
"It's time for supper!" she repeated. "You can't go away now! I don't want to eat supper alone!"
"Of course not," he mumbled, looking thoughtfully at his watch. "I declare I didn't know it was so late—why didn't you tell me. Timber? Hyar, take this mule, back, you!"
He swung down from the saddle, and Timber led the mule around to the stable mound, while Clinchell accompanied his daughter back into the house. She led him to the kitchen, where she made him wash his face and soap his hands, he protesting all the time like a sulky boy. She tied his cravat and combed his hair and goatee.
"There!" she declared at last. "You really are nice-looking, daddy!"
"We're going to have music to-night," she told him at the table. "I told the boys to come around and play by the front veranda. There's an itinerant over in the quarters with an accordion, and he plays beautifully."
"Play! Why don't he pick cotton and earn an honest living?" Clinchell demanded. "Those tramp players fill the hands' heads with fool notions."
"And teach the plantation players all the new songs and pieces! I just love to hear new music! They're coming, and I want you to hear them!"
The old planter suffered himself to be led around to the front veranda, where the plantation musicians and the wandering accordion-player sat under the little pavilion roof, out of the dew, and played and sang for two hours. Sue Belle gave them a handful of silver, and the little concert broke up.
Clinchell retired to his library-office and sat scowling at the floor. He was sorry for the delay in getting Andrest out of the country. He wondered how it happened that he had not thought to buy the scoundrel's departure before.
In the morning, immediately after breakfast, he rode down the trace on his way to carry out his new plan. He left the road and crossed to the St. Francis, where the river man's shanty-boat had been moored.
Not till he arrived at the Dark Bend eddy did he remember that the boat had been cut loose and sent drifting down the river. Now he rode down the bank, winding in and out in the underbrush and among the trees. Three miles down-stream he found the yellow boat moored to the bank of the eddy above Culler's Shoals.
He hailed, but no one answered him. The skiff was tied to the boat's stern, but the sassafras canoe was missing. Clinchell looked around with an appraising eye. On the bow deck of the shanty-boat were several broken-topped demijohns, with narrow slits, two inches long and less than a quarter of an inch wide, chipped in their sides. On the deck were some small wooden wedges.
The broken jugs stirred Clinchell's curiosity, and he dismounted from his mule to investigate. Putting them to his nose, he found that two demijohns smelled of the earth, one of stale molasses, and one of old vinegar. He tried to look into them, and succeeded in getting the light right for one. On the bottom he saw a number of round impressions.
He smashed the jug to see better, and there in the old molasses was a silver dollar. He pried it out and looked at it. The impressions in the bottom were unmistakable. The wooden wedges had evidently been corks for the chipped apertures.
"That scoundrel has saved up money," Clinchell told himself. "He's dug it up and run. He knowed he hadn't better stay around here with me after him, you bet! He's took to his heels—he didn't dast to stay even to sell his shanty-boat or skiff. He must have had right smart of money, too—all those jugs full, or 'most full. Well, it saved me a thousand, his going between days thataway—hue-e!"
Chuckling and nodding with satisfaction, Clinchell drove across to the river trace and returned to the plantation. His satisfaction made him beam with delight, and he handed Timber, the hostler, a silver dollar which was all stuck over with lint, tobacco-dust, aiid match-sticks from the planter's coat-pocket.
"Here's a dirty shanty-boat dollar," Chnchell said. "Wash it, and it 'll be good for something at the commissary!"
Timber grinned from ear to ear.
The old planter's satisfaction lasted till the following morning. Then Sheriff Ferris and one of his deputies stopped on their way up to the railroad, where they were to take the train to Mendova, to take charge of a man who had been "rewarded" from Deerport.
"I see Andrest's looking some into business," Ferris said in the course of the gossiping.
"What—looking into business?" Clinchell exclaimed.
"Yes, sir, he sure is. He come to town yesterday with more'n a hundred pounds of silver dollars and halves. He had just about all he could stagger under, they were so heavy. He took 'em to the bank and deposited 'em. Kind o' got the habit of depositing his money when he left the Morlung reward into it."
"Sho! A hundred pounds of silver dollars! Why, that's near to two thousand of 'em, isn't it?"
"Up to that, I expect. I didn't get to hear how much he deposited. Seems like he was plumb ignorant about banks, but they told him about interest, and investing, and money working, and he's enthusiastic."
"He—he come back up this way?" Clinchell managed to ask.
"Yes, sir; he 'lowed he'd haul his fish-nets same as usual to-day."
Clinchell made no comment. The sheriff asked about the cotton pick and then drove on. The planter retired to the cupola on his mansion, and sat there a long time without once looking through the binoculars.
"If I could bust that bank!" he muttered. "If only I could smash that pestering old bank—where'd he be? But I expect I'd better buy him!"