Chapter VI: In the Massacre Swamp

“We goes fo’ miles up dis levee to de Massacre swamp, niggers,” Mobile panted, as he ran. “Den faller de hog-path two miles to de ole Kerlerac plantation house. I knows dis country like I knows de insides of a white man’s hen-coop. Trot, niggers, trot!”

When the Federal soldiers visited the State of Louisiana during the Civil War, they carried guns and ammunition, but they did their best fighting and won their greatest victories and wrought their most extensive devastation with water--muddy river water.

Invading the State, they cut the levees of the Red, Atchafalaya, and Mississippi Rivers, and then let the snows melting on the loyal northern hills pour their floods and do their destructive work.

Because of this method of warfare, Louisiana was the last State to begin to recover from the effects of the Civil War.

Her agricultural enterprises absolutely require the protection of the river levees; prostrated financially, the State had no money to rebuild when peace was declared what war had destroyed.

Mobile, followed by Pap Curtain and Mustard Prophet, was going straight to a spot which indicated after half a century one of the effects of this mode of warfare.

The Kerlerac plantation house was a three-story building erected of stone conveyed, literally, from the ends of the earth, for the building material had been brought as ballast in the sailing vessels which landed with empty bottoms at the Kerlerac plantation to receive the products of her soil.

Yearly, during and after the war, the June floods had swept across that plantation, the water standing from four to forty feet deep above every inch of its soil.

The old plantation house, surrounded by its stately lawns and shaded by its colossal evergreen oaks, was abandoned, and now after sixty years the stone ruins stood in the midst of an almost impenetrable swamp and cypress trees nearly as large around as a man’s body grew in the center of the building, their branches protruding above where the roof had been.

The first gray streaks of dawn showed in the sky when Mobile led his panting and exhausted followers between the walls of this old house and allowed them a moment’s rest.

“Don’t take too long to blow, brudders!” Mobile warned them, his own tongue hanging out like a hot dog’s, his mouth spread wide, showing a gold front tooth. “Ef de white folks follers us, dey’ll come right straight to dis here house an’ start deir hunt from here. I knows ’em!”

“Whut you fetch us here fer, den?” Pap Curtain inquired indignantly.

“Us niggers is got to hab some money,” Mobile informed him, “an’ I knows whar a white man has hid some. Less git it, an’ ’vide up, an’ scoot!”

He walked through the briars and underbrush, stumbling among the fallen stones, to a certain corner; then motioning for silence, he listened.

“Dat mought be wind,” he muttered uneasily. “Den again, it mought be a steamboat puffin’ up de river. Den, agin, it moughtn’t.”

Raising a large stone, he kicked at the dirt underneath, then suddenly ceased his operations and listened.

Then in the dim light his face became ashen, turning a scar upon his cheek white, and his heart thumped like a drum. He let the rock fall back upon the treasure, and motioned to Pap and Mustard to follow, leading them four times around the walls and crisscross through the center and then back to the entrance.

“Listen, niggers!” Mobile chattered. “My Gawd, listen!”

Far across the swamp they could hear distinctly a steady repetition of three short sounds followed by a long, lowing bellow like a bull: “_Ow, ow, ow! Oo-oo-oo-o!_”

“Whut’s dat?” Mustard asked.

“_Nigger dogs!_” Mobile cried with a voice like a sob. “_Bloodhounds!_”

An uncontrollable sobbing seized the negro and his fright was pitiable. Mustard and Pap, having no experience with such dogs, looked at him uncomprehendingly.

Finally, Mobile dropped to the ground and listened. Then rising, he announced:

“A whole pack, niggers--dogs an’ men! We’ll never git outen dis swamp alive--dem dam’ dogs’ll gnaw our bones! Come on, less see kin we make it to de Massacre Bayou!”

They started on a straight line, running side by side.

Then within a hundred yards they faced a slough as large as a lake, no one knew how deep with mud and water. Taking a long detour around this, they looked back and in two miles of running, still found themselves in plain sight of the Kerlerac plantation house.

“Dat’s de las’ big puddle, niggers,” Mobile informed them. “Now go straight an’ wade eve’ything you come to!”

The ingenuity of the Spanish inquisition devised no tortures comparable to the possibilities of pain arising from a forced flight through a Louisiana jungle.

A vine trailing the ground for hundreds of yards in some mysterious manner wraps three times around a man’s leg, trips him, and leaves him to struggle with a bond which he cannot unwrap, cannot break, and cannot cut with a sharp pocket-knife.

Wild rose vines with thorns like spear-points and barbed like a fishhook snag the garments and the skin, and, like Shylock, demand their pound of flesh. Hidden in every puddle of water, the hard, sharp cypress knees lie ambushed in the mud like bayonets to impale anything which falls upon them.

Overhead, thorn-armed vines and the drooping branches of the dreadful prickly ash hang down to retard man’s progress and augument his anguish.

In every damp spot the deadly moccasin lurks; by every decayed stump and root the venomous cottonmouth guards its den; insects thrashed up by the agitation of the grass and weeds rise like an Egyptian plague and blind the eyes and fill the nostrils and choke the throat.

And through it all, mud which bogs the runner to his knees; at every twenty steps a pool of water and mire, which may be shallow enough for a sparrow to wade without wetting his feathers, or as deep as a well; and poison ivy, growing waist high, saturating man’s garments with its vitriol juices, and burning the flesh as if the runner were wading in a caldron of boiling oil!

But the pursuing dog slips unhindered through the jungle, runs unmired through the mud, swims the pools of water, and stands howling underneath the tree where the fugitive has climbed to escape the canine’s tearing teeth.

In half an hour the negroes, scratched, torn, snagged, wounded, bleeding, mud-covered, half-naked, looking more like wild beasts than men, stood on the banks of the Massacre Bayou. Forty yards behind them a pack of ravening dogs bayed a red-hot trail.

“Swim it!” Mobile panted. “Git across dis creek, fer Gawd’s sake!”

They leaped into the stream and dragged their exhausted bodies up the opposite bank just as the raging dogs stopped at the water’s edge on the bank they had just left.

Mobile ran to a hickory sapling as large around as his arm.

“He’p me break dis off, men,” he screamed. “We got to fight ’em!”

With the strength of desperation, the three men wrenched at the sapling, snapped it off at the roots, broke it in a proper length for a club, and as quickly as possible selected and prepared two others like it.

“Look out, niggers!” Mobile howled. “Dey’s gittin’ ready to swim across! Kill eve’y dog as quick as his front feet touches the land on dis side. Whatever happens, git dem big, black, long-eared debbils fust!”

While he was speaking two of the bloodhounds leaped from the bank and came toward them, swerving not an inch before the threatening clubs.

Mobile stepped to the edge of the water and stood poised to strike, his crazed eyes glaring at one of the swimming dogs, the features of his face quivering with spasms of pain and exhaustion. Then the hickory descended, and the immense dog sank under the water with a startled grunt.

Mobile and Pap both ministered to the other bloodhound which followed its mate to the bottom of the bayou.

Then the whole pack, deer-dogs, fox-hounds, hog-dogs, and mongrels, making the swamp hideous with their howls and yelps, sprang into the stream.

The three negroes ran up and down the bank of the stream, striking with weary arms, kicking with feet as heavy as lead, sobbing, praying, cursing, raving--adding their insane voices to the noise of the hounds, making pandemonium of the silent, shadowy swamp.

At last the hound-pack, wearied by swimming and unable to effect a landing, turned back to the opposite shore in defeat.

“Saved!” Mobile sobbed. “Now, niggers, trot down this here bayou till we git to de public road!”

Ten minutes later, they fell in the dust of the public highway like monstrous worms or rather like raw, skinned cattle divested of their hides and their carcasses left as food for the carrion crows.

For a few minutes they were motionless, lying like dead men; then a consciousness of approaching danger roused them to renew their flight.

Rising totteringly to their feet, they breathed deeply, and started. Then all hope died.

From out of the high weeds on the side of the road, a deep-seamed, weather-tanned Spanish face appeared, and two fearless eyes held the gaze of the helpless negroes like a hypnotist.

“You niggers stop right there!” a quiet voice said.

It was Sheriff Ulloa, who knew the route of fugitive criminals, and had taken the precaution to guard the only outlet from the Massacre Swamp.

“Please, suh, boss, save us,” the negroes sobbed in a chorus.

“All right,” the sheriff said grimly. “Trot right down the center of this road and go back to the jail you got out of.”