Chapter V: Among Thieves

Hitch did not know how long he lay in the ditch after he had been awakened. He tried to remember where he was and how he got there, but he was half asleep and wholly confused, and the task was too great for him.

What woke him up completely was a long, shrill whistle, followed by four pistol-shots in rapid succession.

Hitch sprang to his feet and started running down the gulley, but he stumbled in the dark and fell headlong.

Three more pistol-shots cracked in the still night air, a man screamed, and Hitch sprang up and started again. He stumbled and fell a second time.

Over in the far end of the big lumber yard a second whistle shrilled, the call of a night watchman, followed by the _crack! crack! crack!_ of an automatic pistol. Then the big mill whistle roared its warning through the town and reverberated down the river and echoed from the woods, and deafened and terrified Hitch Diamond by its sinister call to the people of Sawtown to rouse themselves.

From the great number of little houses where the employees of the mill lived men issued forth, brandishing firearms and calling to each other as they ran. The electric lights in the mill flashed up, and in a brief time an immense crowd had congregated.

Hitch could hear their excited questions and answers.

“What’s the matter?”

“Commissary store has been robbed and night watchman killed!”

“Who did it?”

“A nigger!”

“No! Two niggers!”

There was a moment of silence while the crowd considered this. Then a roar:

“Find them niggers and mob ’em! Come on!”

“Spread out, men! Cover the yard! Look everywhere!”

Hitch Diamond turned his back on that crowd and started in the opposite direction at full speed, running in the dark, with no notion where he was going. He got an idea when he plunged into the mill-pond up to his neck.

“Dis here is sloppy wuck!” he grunted as he climbed out of there.

He began to skirt the edge of the pond, and found to his alarm that he was following the curve which led him back to the lighted mill. He heard the sound of running feet; a flash-light shot its rays across the mill-pond, and Hitch departed from the water’s edge with all possible speed.

He found one of the long alleys between the lumber piles in the yard and sprinted down the sawdust trail at a lively gait.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he found the entrance of the alley filled with men who were coming toward him with incredible swiftness. The employees of the mill were familiar with all the main thoroughfares and by-paths of the yard, while Hitch had to feel his way to some extent, and his progress was necessarily slow.

A revolver spat fire and lead at him, a fusillade followed, a big lumber-stack rose like a mountain before the frightened negro, and he fell against it with both hands outspread.

He found something that he had never noticed in a lumber yard before--that strips of wood were thrust between the layers of lumber to give a circulation of air and prevent the lumber from rotting.

These little gaps made it possible for him to climb, and he scrambled up the pile like a big baboon and lay on the top, panting like the exhaust of an engine.

His pursuers passed the pile on the path below, and Hitch began to breathe easier.

In a moment a light flashed from a big lumber-pile fifty feet away and several feet higher than the pile he was on. A watchman was whipping about him with a dark lantern, searching the top of the lumber.

Hitch Diamond dropped over the side and hit the sawdust trail again. He ran down a little by-path, skinning his elbows upon the projecting planks and stubbing his bare toes against all kinds of obstacles, until he fell over something and tumbled onto something with a clatter like the roll of a snare-drum.

A man loomed up before him not twenty feet away and said “Ho!” in a frightened voice.

Hitch got up and went away from that place with astonishing speed.

Then the watchman on the lumber-pile threw the rays of his dark lantern down into the runway just as Hitch passed, and the terrified negro ran full into the glare.

Three pistol-shots splintered the wood around him as he ran on; the watchman’s sharp voice called to the man-hunters, and in a second, hundreds of men had turned and were converging toward the spot where Hitch Diamond was running around a lumber-pile like a trapped rabbit.

“Guard the runways, men!” the watchman’s voice ordered sharply. “I’ll flash the light into the alleys for you!”

The watchman began to leap from pile to pile, throwing the rays of his dark lantern down into each corridor, and coming constantly closer to where Hitch Diamond was hiding.

“My Gawd!” Hitch chattered as he looked up at the fantastic, mountainous pile beside which he was crouched.

Salvation came with the thought that the pile he stood beside was higher than the one on which the watchman stood. He began to climb, hand over hand, praying that the light would not reach him before he could attain the summit.

By the mercy of Heaven he rolled onto the top of the lumber just as the watchman, on a pile twenty feet below him, flashed the glare into the corridor where Hitch had stood a moment before.

Hitch was blowing like a bellows, streams of perspiration poured down his body, and his giant frame shook like the body of a man with an ague.

Days of dissipation in New Orleans, a drunken spree just a few hours before, nothing to eat since breakfast, half an hour of violent exercise running and climbing lumber, and a fright which clutched at his heart, weakening and almost suffocating him--all of these things were handicaps for Hitch Diamond in the effort he was making to escape.

He knew that capture meant certain death. Capture was not even necessary--a flash of light, a well-directed pistol-shot, and his career was ended.

Suddenly his soul was filled with terror.

Twenty men had mounted the lumber-piles and were moving across the tops, lashing the lumber with their lights, driving everything before them as a woman shoos a lot of chickens. Below him, on the ground, men were standing at the end of each main thoroughfare, and were lashing them with light, while one man was walking down each by-path!

The searching party had organized, and was moving with perfect precision to cover the entire yard.

“Good-by, fair worl’!” Hitch Diamond mourned as he crawled to the edge of the lumber and looked down. “’Tain’t no hope fer pore old Hitchie onless I kin hop offen dis lumber atter dat man is done passed down in de alley.”

But the men on the ground had foreseen that possibility, and were measuring their progress down the by-paths by the progress of the men on the lumber-piles.

Seeing this, Hitch Diamond’s heart turned to lead, his blood to water, and his giant frame seemed to crumble like chalk. Already he felt himself mortally stricken and dying.

He caught himself trying to speak, to utter words of encouragement to himself, but his teeth clicked together like castanets, and his whispered words fell upon terror-deafened ears.

He sprang to his feet and stood glaring at the approaching lights like some great beast trapped in a jungle. Unconsciously he shut his fingers tight, his hands forming two immense iron fists.

That unconscious action made a man of him again! Those iron fists were the fists of a prize-fighter--Hitch Diamond, the Tickfall Tiger! Courage flowed through his veins like some magic liquor.

“Hitch never th’ows up de sponge!” he growled. “I fights to de eend!”