The day was as brilliant as a washed window. Nature had scrubbed her house.
Margy sat on the middle thwart, facing forward; Shad was right behind her, standing with the stob. They had left the river an hour ago, and now were well on their way up Mink Creek heading for Tarramand Lake. It was roundabout and they were going to have a haul-tail time of it in the water lettuce and palm bogs; but it was safer than going directly to Breakneck.
Getting a skiff hadn't been any problem at all. Margy had gone along to Sutt's Landing and rowed off in her pa's boat. No one had paid her any mind. Getting a rifle had been something else again. She had slipped up to her folks' place and had taken Bell's carbine and a box of ammo. Shad had said, 'Fine,' and hadn't thought anything more of it. Now the carbine was up in the bow and he might just as well heave it overboard for all the good it was going to do him.
The first gator they had seen was just as they were entering Mink Creek. He was a lazy, minding-his-own business type of bull, but he was big and Shad hadn't wanted to be caught napping.
'Hand me the carbine,' he'd said. 'Where you got the ammo?'
'Here,'she'd replied, and had lifted a small canvas pouch.
'What you got in there?' he'd wondered.
'Nothing much. Just the box of bullets and some things.'
'What things?'
'Just things.'
Shad reached and picked the pouch from her hand.
There wasn't much; the ammo box, a carefully folded and freshly laundered nightie and Dorry's half-empty bottle of Sin's Dream.
Margy's head was down. He could see her cheeks were red.
He pulled his grin off and said, 'Bet it smells mighty nice.
Then he had looked at the ammo. Then at the carbine. Then at the ammo again.. 30 carbine.. 30-06 ammo.
But it wasn't her fault. She didn't know anything about guns and calibres. So he didn't let on that she had made a mistake. The milk was spilt and what could you do about it?
A place like Breakneck had a stately solitude that gave it an imposing beauty; the lake was deep, the water clean, the fishing fair, and gators had never favoured it as a place to set up housekeeping.
Tarramand Lake had nothing to recommend it. It wasn't really a lake; it was just big and the swampers tagged that name on it as a reference. It was a prairie, so shallow a man could wade across most of it. Stobbing a skiff across was another matter. A bitch of one. When the pickerelweed and the water lettuce weren't holding you up, then it was the submerged log litters humping under the flat bottom and rearing the bow a foot out of the water, and if you didn't think so much of that, then there was the God-awful cypress knees rising here, there, every damn where like tank traps.
It was well into afternoon by the time they reached Tusca Creek, and after two hours there Shad threw in the towel for the day He hid the skiff in maiden cane, picked up their belongings and led Margy through the hurrah thicket onto a pine island.
'You sit tight right here, honey,' he ordered. 'I'm going to scout around a little. They's a hut somewhere hereabout, and if'n I find hit we'll spend the night there.'
She agreed and it was that simple. He went off feeling pretty good. She just up and left her life in his keeping. What he said was law. Yeah, it was a good feeling to have someone to care for, to protect. He looked back from the low lying palmettos. She was standing with the tall swamp pines rising behind her, and she waved.
It was the long, hushed hour of twilight when he returned. He was grinning with confidence and he told her about it as they walked.
'I found the hut first – just half-mile along here. Then I scouted t'other side of the creek and found an old skinny looking waterway I think we kin git the skiff down. Should take us into Money Plane Creek. We'll have a crack at her first thing in the morning.'
His euphoria took on a never-never aspect, and he looked up and around with wondering eyes. The swamp, the sameness of it, the way it was becoming a part of them because they were together, gave him an unrealistic feeling.
'Funny,' he said compulsively 'Now that I don't see 'em – Jort and the others – it's like they don't exist fer me.'
'Don't say that,' Margy said sharply.
'What?'
She trembled. 'When you took off an hour ago I went to feeling that
He took her hand and squeezed it. What she had just imparted to him touched him as nothing else ever had. But the responsibility that went with it was frightening.
She was childlike about the hut. Like a little girl playing house in a pup tent. She whisked out the dirt floor with a palmetto frond, and brought in an armload of pine needles to lay a fresh bed, and then picked up the old deerskin pouch and showed it to him.
'You see this?'
'Yeah. Hit's Holly's.'
'Holly? Oh – your brother's.' She looked through the doorway at a far reaching bay studded savanna. 'What you reckon become of him?'
'Dead. If he ain't then he must a turned wild.'
'But he couldn't stay out here fer four years and him coo-coo!'
Shad scratched at his chin. 'Dunno, Margy. I've heered of it happening afore. Old-timers tell of a Yankee boy went to got lost in here during the Civil War. Ever'body figured he was dead right off, but then one day in the '70s old Jim Dawes' granddaddy seen him wandering around out here. All naked he was and bearded, and his hide as tough as gator-skuts, but he still had that funny little mashed down cap them Yankees wore on his head.
'Story goes old Granddaddy Dawes give him a shout. Didn't do no good though. Yankee fella looks up all wild eyed and takes off into the titi. Granddaddy Dawes wasn't about to go after him, because he says that wild Yankee had a club with him the size of a sycamore trunk.
'Other people seen him from time to time too, least they'd say they did. I wouldn't know. Nobody never mentions him no more.'
Margy shivered and gave a little laugh. 'Mebbe them kind a people never die. Mebbe he's still in here – somewhere.'
'Uh-huh. Mebbe. Mebbe him and Holly's teamed up.'
Then they let the subject go; both aware that they were only stalling. He looked at her. After a moment she lowered her eyes.
'Margy -' he whispered.
She didn't look up. She held out her hand.
Outside and all around them it was a night of the first age. It was like the creation of the earth all over again. A gang of night-feeding ducks took off across the moon with a great batter of noise, and everything else continued its pattern.
In the morning he found one of his markers.
He was heading for home base now. He knew it. There was the big prairie with the log litter on the right, and there was where the land picked up again, the gator ground. It was the end of the rainbow.
'We're's almost there, Margy.' He said it reverently.
She sat on the center thwart, facing him as he stobbed, watching him. She looked off to her left and shivered. Something that was too refined for the senses to understand touched her and her blood chilled, as though hostile shadow had fallen over her. But there was no shadow. Water, tules, silt, titi -.
'Shad,' she said. 'If something should go wrong -' she turned back to him, 'if mebbe somebody beat you to that money er -'
He held back on the pole, staring at her, his eyes narrow and warm. 'What in hell's name you talking about?' he demanded. 'Ain't nobody beating me to that money. That's
