The Law of the Land, Emerson Hough [best beach reads of all time TXT] 📗
- Author: Emerson Hough
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“Meantime, it was part of your scheme, as I now see, to keep Miss Lady away from her friends, to poison her against those friends. You had to live, and you were a lawyer, or a sort of a lawyer. You got hold of these judgment claims against the railroad which discharged me. You told this girl that I stole those claims. You know you lied. For a time you deluded this poor girl, poisoning her mind, killing her nature with your deceit. None the less, you left behind you open proofs, ready-made for your own undoing. Why, this very name, this stage name of Louise Loisson, was banner enough to bring her real friends to her side. But you didn’t know, did you, Mr. Decherd, that I had read the little book, and that I knew the Loisson history? I said it was by chance I found the book. I am ready now to say it was by fate—by justice. It’s like the fetish mark on the church-door— that negro church in the woods—like the sign on Delphine’s handkerchief. Guilt always leaves a sign. Justice always finds some proof.
“Now, I have a message from Colonel Blount. Here it is. He says, ‘Louise Loisson our Miss Lady.’ He has found out something, too, at the other end of the line, hasn’t he, Decherd? Notice, he says, ‘our Miss Lady.’ She is ours, not yours. I am going to take her along with me, back to the Big House, and to her friend, Colonel Blount. He says, ‘Watch out for Decherd.’ I am watching out for him. He also says that they have caught the leader who has been making all the trouble up there in the Delta, near the Big House plantation.”
“Delphine!” gasped Decherd, from tightened lips, a pale horror now written on every feature. “Has she talked?”
“Yes, Delphine! You were able to guess that, were you, Decherd? Thank you. You were right. I do not know whether or not Delphine has talked. But whether she has or not, there will presently be no chance for you. You are at the end of your string, Decherd.
“And now, get up,” said Eddring to him sharply, rising. “Get up, you damned hound, you liar, you thief, you cur. This boat’s not big enough for you and me. The world will be barely big enough for a little while, if you’re careful. We are not afraid of you, now that we know you. Go back to Mrs. Ellison, if you like. You can’t go back to Delphine now, and you can’t speak to Miss Lady again. She is our Miss Lady. You can’t stay on this boat tonight, where that girl is.”
“So you—you’re trying to cut in?” began Decherd.
Eddring did not answer.
He caught Decherd by the collar, wrenched the revolver from his pocket and pushed him down the stair, then dragged him along the lower deck. They passed a line of sleeping deck-hands too stupid to observe them. Dragging astern of the boat, high between the two long diverging lines of the rolling wake, there rode a river skiff at the end of its taut line.
“Those lights below are at the ferry, eight miles from town,” said Eddring. “Get into the boat.”
“For God’s sake, can’t you get them to slow down?” whined Decherd; but Eddring shook his head. Decherd let himself over the rail of the lower deck, and for an instant the strained line bade fair to hold his weight. Then his feet and legs dropped into the water as he and the boat approached. Desperately he clambered on, and so fell panting and dripping into the bow of the skiff. A moment later the boat and its huddled occupant dropped back into the night, tossing in the wake of the churning wheels.
From above there came pouring down the somber flood of Messasebe, bearing tribute of his wilderness, in part made up of broken, worthless and discarded things.
Eddring gazed after the disappearing boat. He was relaxed, silent, worn. The grip of a great loneliness seized upon him. What had he gained? Why had he interfered? The world about him seemed void and vacant. He felt himself, no less than the other man, a worthless and discarded thing—a bit of flotsam on the flood of fate.
“As to the law, Captain Wilson,” said Eddring, to the master of the Opelousas Queen the following morning, as he sat in the cabin; “I’m a lawyer myself, and I want to tell you, the law is a strange thing. It will, and it won’t. It can, and it can’t. It does, and it doesn’t. It’s blind, crosseyed and clear-sighted all at the same time. It offers a precedent for everything, right or wrong. Now, as you say, it is unlawful for us to stop the delivery of these mails. I know it—big penalty for non-delivery. But let’s talk it over a little.”
The Opelousas Queen was now plowing steadily upstream, far above Baton Rouge, meeting the crest of the greatest flood she had ever known in all her days upon the turbid waterway. Her master now, surly but none the less interested, out of sheer curiosity in this strange visitor, sat looking at him without present speech.
“Are you a married man, Captain Wilson?” said Eddring. “Have a cigar with me, won’t you?”
“What difference is it to you?” said Wilson, waving aside the courtesy.
“Yes; but are you?”
“Wife died six years ago,” said Wilson, gruffly. The muscles ridged up along his jaw as he closed his lips tightly.
“Any children?” said Eddring.
“Daughter, eighteen years old; and a beauty, if I do say it.”
“I reckon you love her some, don’t you, Captain? Thought a heap of your wife, too, maybe, didn’t you?”
Wilson half-rose, one hand upon his chair back, as he pounded on the table in front of him with the other. “Now look here, Mister Whoever-you-are, I’ve stood a lot of foolishness from you already,” said he, “but those are my matters, and not yours. Get on out of here.” Yet Eddring only looked at him smiling, and into his eyes there came a flash of pleasure.
“I’m mighty glad to hear you say those very words, Captain,” said he; “because now I know you’d do anything in the world to help a good girl out of trouble, or to keep her out of it. Now, about the law. I’m sure, Captain, you believe in the higher law—the supreme law— the chivalry of the southern man, don’t you?” Wilson waved him away again, but still gazed at him curiously. “Now listen, Captain,” Eddring persisted.
“I am listening,” blurted out Wilson. “Say, man, if I had your nerve, and what I know about poker on this river, I’d own the country.”
“But listen—”
“No. I just want to set here and admire you a few minutes before I tell the deck-hands to throw you into the river.”
“Captain,” said Eddring, pulling up his chair, “after I’m done with what I have on hand, you may throw me into the river, if you like. I don’t think it will make much difference. But now, don’t you think you’re running this boat. The real commander of this boat, Captain Wilson, is the supreme law of this land—that law under which the gentlemen of the South are bound at any time and all times to give courtesy and comfort to a woman when she needs them.” Wilson looked at him mutely, the muscles on his jaw straining up again. He jerked his head toward the aft state-rooms with a gesture of query. Eddring nodded.
“She’s a beauty, too,” said Wilson, sighing. “Reminds me of my own wife, the way she used to look—the way my own girl looks now. You’re a lucky man.”
“Captain Wilson, I don’t figure in this thing personally at all. But now I’ll tell you the whole story, and let you decide for yourself.”
He went on speaking slowly, evenly, gently, impersonally, telling what had been the case of Miss Lady upon the very night preceding; telling how great was the stress of events at the head of the Delta, very far away, and impossible now of access. He made no offer of pecuniary reward, but stated his case simply and asked his auditor to put himself in his own position.
As he spoke, the chair of Captain Wilson began to edge toward his own. In the eyes of the old steamboat man there came a glisten strange to them. His hand unconsciously reached out. “Stop!” he roared. “Give me your hand. The boat is yours! Of course she is.”
Eddring was silent, for there came a lump in his own throat, as he felt Wilson’s assuring hand clap him on the shoulder.
“You’re what I call a thoroughbred,” said the latter. “Man, can you play poker? You certainly can make a pair of deuces look like a full house. Get up an’ shake hands. You’re right. The boat’s yours. Uncle Sam can wait—the whole damned North American continent can wait—”
Eddring rose and took him by the hand.
“Well, that’s my case, Captain,” said he. “We’ve both one errand, and that’s to protect the white people of the Delta; and to get hold of the truth which will put this girl where she belongs. Public necessity is the greatest of all laws; unless it be the unwritten and general law which I know you’ve respected all your life.”
“Well, man—” Wilson broke into an uproarious laugh, “you certainly are the yellow flower of the forest. It’s mighty seldom I’ve laid down to a line of talk, but I ain’t ashamed to do it now. Here’s the boat, and we’ll run her express, as soon as we can get rid of the mail and passengers up above. Any river-man knows what levee-cutting means, and what it means if the niggers get out of hand. I’ll take you in—why, I know Cal Blount myself—and I couldn’t look my own daughter in the face again if I didn’t do just what you say.”
Between the cities of Memphis and Vicksburg there lies a great battle-ground. It has known encounters between red men and red, between red men and white, and has known the shock of arms when white has been arrayed against white. Most of all, it is a battle-ground yet to be, whereon perhaps there shall be waged a conflict between white and black. Always, too, it will be the battle-ground between civilized man and the relapsing savagery of nature; between man and the wilderness; between the white race and great Messasebe, Father of the Waters.
Father Messasebe is, after all, but weakly bound to the ways of commerce. His voice is always for the wild; his wish is for the ancient ways. Here in the far wild country—a part of which even to-day is a more trackless and a less known wilderness than any in the heart of our remotest mountain ranges—the great river reaches out a thousand clutching fingers for his own, claiming it as a home even now for his savagery; asking it, if not for a wild red race, then for the black one which may one day prove its savage successor.
Here is the reekingly rich soil of the great Delta—that name not meaning the wide marshes of the actual mouth of the Mississippi, but the fat accumulated soil of centuries caged in by that long, incurving dam of the hills which, far inland from the current of the swift waterway, begins at the head of the vast body of tangled Yazoo lands, and drops down, pinching
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