"I'll take care of that. Let's try for Jamie's field."
Durell got up and went back to the seat beside Deirdre. She was awake. Her gray eyes were clear and warm. She smiled and turned to face him and looked at him with an intent gravity.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing. Everything."
"Riddles?"
"I feel good. Why should I feel good? Calvin is dead and we're in terrible trouble. But somehow I feel it will be all right."
"You know what your brother John is, don't you?"
"He's like a stranger. Yes, I know."
"Will you help me turn him in?"
"Yes. For Calvin's sake." She paused. "I don't want to talk about it. I've been thinking of you. The way you looked when you saw me in that barn. When you first came in, you looked terrible. It was frightening. Then you saw me and you changed."
"I was worried about you. I thought they had killed you."
"And it mattered that much?"
"That's a leading question."
"I feel as if I've known you forever, Sam. It's strange. There was a boy, once. He was killed in Korea. I never stopped thinking about him, and I didn't want any more of that. It hurt too much when I lost him. It was a nightmare. But now I feel better about it. You made me feel better. I think I was turning into a spinster and rejecting the world, and now I don't feel like a spinster at all." She looked away from him and flushed. "Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Do you feel it, too?"
"Yes."
"Say it, Sam."
"No."
She kissed him. Her mouth was soft and fragile and warm and clinging. "I don't care. I saw how you looked at me in that barn. It's enough for now."
Chapter Sixteen
There was no rain now, but Feener had trouble locating the field. The port engine was erratic. Twice he swept down the torrential reach of the Mississippi, checking landmarks, his young freckled face one vast scowl as he consulted the map on his knee. Durell tried to remember when he had been back to the bayous last. Four years? Maybe five. No matter. It was after midnight, and the third of July had begun.
Lights flickered at last to the left, a definite pattern that blinked twice and then shone steadily. Feener banked the plane that way. He looked worried. He circled several times. He shook his head. "We got another two hours' fuel. You think we ought to try this, Mr. Durell? I don't know this Jamie. I don't like the way Olsen acted. But that port motor needs looking at."
"We might as well find out the worst right now," Durell said.
The port motor banged and shot out a streamer of flame and Feener suddenly snapped off switches with quick, precise motions. His face was white. The flame spurted farther toward the tail, then abruptly died. The prop stopped spinning. The plane dipped, slued, steadied on one engine.
"No choice," Feener said.
"Let's go down. We're lucky."
They landed smoothly. The field was simply a cleared area on the edge of a dark bayou, surrounded by towering live oaks and water on three sides. There was no hangar. To the left, dimly visible under the makeshift field lights, was a fishing camp of half a dozen rickety shacks, with a pier and several pirogues tied up to the shore. The night was thick with humid heat. The familiar noises of swamp and bayou edged in upon the sluggish air when Feener cut the motor.
Nobody came to greet them.
The floodlights blinked and went out. Darkness swooped over the field except for the dim lights shining in one wooden shack that was larger than the others, presumably the proprietor's house. Feener got out of the plane and Durell helped Deirdre down. Something splashed in the bayou fifty feet away. The Spanish moss on the oaks made a dark, heavy curtain all around them. There was a smell of mud and decay and stagnant water in the torpid air.
The field was empty, dark. Metal cooled on the plane with sharp crackling noises. Nobody showed up.
"You better stay here while I look," Feener muttered.
The pilot walked toward the lighted cabin before Durell could object. His thin figure was briefly outlined against the rectangle of an open doorway, then was gone.
Durell waited.
The bayou chuckled, groaned, clacked, gurgled.
The single shot ripped everything apart.
It was followed by a high thin scream, and then Feener's shout. "Run! That bastard Olsen…"
Durell grabbed Deirdre's hand and they ran. He had no choice of direction. They ran toward the black, glimmering edge of the bayou. Two shots slammed after them. Nothing came near. Then another. Durell heard the whine and slap of air against his head as if someone had boxed his ear, and he grabbed Deirdre and slid recklessly down the embankment toward the dock where the pirogues were tied up. Someone shouted from the cabins. Durell looked at Deirdre's startled white face. "All right?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"Get in the pirogue."
"But Feener…"
"Gone. Get in!" he said harshly.
She moved carefully onto the rickety dock. Footsteps grated, pounded across the field toward the edge of the chenière. Quick, careful, crafty. Durell tried to guess how many men there were. Four. Maybe five. He had his gun ready, but the three shots that had slammed after them came from a rifle. He thought of Olsen's hostile attitude. The network had been alerted to look for them. He made himself breathe deeply and regularly. He listened. There were soft whisperings, a curse, a muffled order.
"Durell!"
A strange voice, harsh in the still swamp, shattering the hot dark night. The pirogue bumped the sagging dock behind him, but he did not look back at Deirdre.
"Come out of there, Durell! We can talk business!"
He felt a moment's despair. He had covered more than a thousand miles, but the telephone wires had sung their siren warning far ahead of him. Soft laughter came from the shadowed field. Abruptly the rifle crashed and mud jumped only inches from his leg. Deirdre called softly from the pirogue. Durell slid down to the dock and ran along it as she pulled the narrow boat into the reeds along shore. The pirogue rocked perilously as he threw himself in. A handgun crashed, and water stung his face. Then he had a paddle in his hand and he drove the needleshaped craft hard, with competent, remembered strokes, through the reeds parallel to the embankment. Clearing the dock, he saw the knees of old cypress trees and swung that way, and when the ghostly roots formed a web around him he picked up his gun and looked back. A dim shape stood on the dock, rifle leveled. He fired. The man screamed and fell into the water.
Deirdre whispered, "No, Sam. No!"
"They want to kill us," he grated. The words were rust in his throat. Blood hammered in him. The pirogue floated easily among the massive cypress roots. They thrust up from the black water like drowning hands.
Her voice was calm. "Do you know where we are?"
"A rough idea. Not far from where I was raised. Twenty miles, perhaps."
"We'll have to hide for the night. There's nothing else we can do. Tomorrow we can figure out what to do."
He looked at her gratefully. She was calm. She gave him a steadying strength. When he picked up the paddle, she leaned toward him in the pirogue, smiling, and her lips brushed his.
"I love you, Sam."
* * *
He had been paddling for only a few minutes when he heard the motorboat behind them. The channel was choked with reeds, overhung with moss that trailed on the surface of the water. The tortuous passage twisted away from the narrow end of the bayou. Insects sang, hummed, fed upon them. The pulse of the boat motor wakened flat echoes through the hot, misted darkness. Now the quick flicker of a spotlight probed the swamp. It passed overhead and sliced through the trees and the black shapes of three sleeping buzzards stirred and took off with a giant thrashing of angry wings. Deirdre shuddered. Durell drove the pirogue ahead with hard strokes. Sweat ran down his face and down his chest and belly.
Light suddenly flickered on the water beside them, and a man shouted. A narrow opening appeared to th
e right and Durell took the chance that the watery slot was not a dead end. He twisted the boat into it. Foliage and moss fell like a curtain behind them.
The narrow channel widened into a shallow pond where even the pirogue scraped bottom. Water hyacinth choked the way and Deirdre leaned forward over the prow and tore the vegetation aside with her hands. It was hard, sweaty, gasping work. It was incredibly hot. The pond yielded to another channel, another slough, another pond. Durell looked back. The light was gone. The beat of the motor was only a faint pulse through the dark mist. He stopped paddling.
"We'd better rest. They can't follow us now."
Without the faint stir of air created by their passage, the heat closed in like a heavy fog. Durell looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was two o'clock in the morning. He felt the heavy weight of exhaustion upon him. Then he was startled as the pirogue rocked and Deirdre slid impulsively between his knees and her arms came around his waist. Her hair was disheveled and plucked at by trailing vines, and he felt the soft richness of her body against him and a stirring began, deep inside him.
"We're not lost, are we?" she asked.
"We'll do better in the daylight. Don't be afraid."
"I'm not," she said. "Not when I'm with you."
Insects settled on them in thick swarms, now that the pirogue was motionless. He knew that by morning they might be half maddened by their bites. Backward, there was nothing except darkness and the faint luminescence of secret channels like fingers prodding at the hummocks of soggy land. Pursuit had ended.
He began paddling again to leave the insects behind. A dark mass loomed ahead, blacker than their surroundings. It was an old Indian mound, one of hundreds scattered through the delta country. Tall oaks were limned against the misty sky on the flattened top of the island. Durell grounded the pirogue on an old shell beach that once might have been the outermost reach of the delta.
"If there's a spring on top," he said, "we'll stay for the night."
He helped Deirdre up the embankment. There was fresh water. They drank quickly of the surprisingly clear, cold stream that bubbled up in a pool between the gloomy oaks. All about them in the dark, the life of the swamp was expressed in clicks and small shrieks and hummings and the occasional deeper grunt of a wild pig.
Deirdre was pale in the dim night. "Can they find us here?"
"Not likely. And we'll only blunder about in circles if we go on now."
"Good. Then we're safe."
"For tonight," Durell said.
"Tonight can be a lifetime for us," she said quietly. "I want to make it so, Sam."
He leaned toward her and folded her in his arms. There was wild beauty to her that made her look primitive and elemental. Her mouth was open, lips glistening. He held her tighter and felt her body tremble, pressed tightly against his. Their kiss was slow and searching and hungry. For just a moment, then, he thought of Lew Osbourn and Sidonie, but that was in another place and another time, and he knew that the girl in his arms was more important to him than anything else he had ever known.
Desire mounted, shook them both, became a storm that could not be denied as they came together in the darkness of the swamp that teemed and seethed with noisy life.
Chapter Seventeen
Durell awoke quietly in the chill wet dawn. The world was a vague, misty bowl surrounding the mound on which they had spent the night. Deirdre still slept. She lay with one arm across him, her face turned against his chest. Her breathing was soft and regular. He saw the scratches on her cheek, made by the brush, the smudge of mud on her chin, the stray strands of dark hair across her forehead.
Durell did not move. He let his mind drift backward, remembering the hours of the night. He knew that with Deirdre, as with him, this was not something casual, to be lived and forgotten. But when he looked at her now, she seemed remote and detached from him, strangely aloof, yet a child without defenses or strength. He watched the mist move in gray streamers through the moss hanging from the oak branches above. The sun was up, but it would be an hour before a stray beam could slant through the swamp foliage overhead. He knew how quickly the temperature would soar then, and when he considered where they were and the day that loomed ahead, he was touched by agony for her and what she might suffer.
When he looked at her again, her eyes were open, almost golden in the gray dawn, watching him. She smiled and nestled in the bend of his arm.
"Good morning, darling."
"Hello," he said.
"I love you, darling."
He kissed her. "Hungry?"
"Oh, yes. Ravenous. I'd like — let me see — a mango or a Persian melon, bacon and eggs done just so, lots of brioches and coffee, pots and pots of coffee. I think, though, I'll settle for a simple drink of water."
He grinned. "Coming right up."
"Do you have any idea where we are, Sam?"
"Paradise." he said.
She laughed. "Then I'm glad to be here."
"I'm glad, too," he said simply.
"Sure?"
"Never surer."
"Then where is Paradise?" she asked.
He laughed. "Twenty miles from nowhere. Let's go."
The pirogue was safely where he had left it. When they were through at the spring, had washed as best they could, Durell helped her into the narrow boat and shoved away from the mound. It was still cool and damp. Wild hibiscus and bougainvillea made splashes of color against the moving mists around them. He judged direction only by marking the most intense area of light as being in the east, and kept it on his right hand to head north. There was no sign of human life anywhere. They might have been alone in a primeval marshland at the very beginning of time.
When he thought ahead, he realized there could be no definite plan of action to cope with the day. Somehow he had to reach McFee. His only concrete objective was to reach Bayou Peche Rouge, where his grandfather might provide some help.
Deirdre sat with her back to the bow, facing him. Her eyes were somber. "What are you thinking of, Sam?"
"You," he said. "And what may happen to us."
She looked around at the tangled swamp. "I wish we could stay here."
"We can't. We can't hide forever."
"I would like to."
The thought of the Three Belles and old Jonathan made him feel better, and he drove the paddle into the water with a stronger stroke.
He continued to use the back channels and lagoons, pushing northward. Once they heard a hunter's shots to the east, but it was impossible to find the right waterway through the maze of drifts, and the shots were not repeated. And although a tenderfoot in the delta country would have been hopelessly lost within the first half hour, traveling in circles or losing himself in the deep muck that could swallow a man with only a trace of bubbles to mark his passage, Durell had no fears. He knew this country and his course was set with confidence. His only concern was for Deirdre's comfort. As the heat of the day reached steamy thickness, he knew she was suffering from thirst and hunger.
He soon fell into a rhythm of paddling that was broken only when Deirdre spelled him briefly. The heat was suffocating, the insects a torment that reached new crescendos with each passing hour. By midmorning Durell knew his face was swollen with biles, and Deirdre sat in limp exhaustion, head bowed, stricken by the heat. Most of his efforts were against the sluggish downriver currents made by the main river channel, somewhere to the left. They passed through enormous cypress groves where the shadows of deep evening still prevailed, and now and then they entered vast muskeg reaches where the wild canes grew ten feet high and he marked the channel only by the bend of the vegetation that conformed with the current. They crossed ponds of blazing beauty, aflame with massed blossoms of hyacinth and wild orchids. The life of the swamp spoke noisily all about them, flickering with movement on every hand.
By ten o'clock the narrow waterway they followed suddenly debouched into a wide channel that was clearly used as a canal. The transition from deep marsh to open water
came as a shock as the blazing sunlight hit them without the protective foliage to ward off its sting. The pirogue drifted into midstream. Deirdre lifted her head and looked at Durell and smiled.
"It's all right." he said hoarsely.
"Are we there?"
"It will get better now." he said.
There were no boats in sight, no houses, until they went about half a mile upstream. The canal became choked with weeds and underwater grasses and narrowed where the embankment had washed into the water, undercut by spring floods. Durell knew they could expect no water traffic here. He glimpsed the shack ahead with a grateful surge of relief.
It was only a bayouman's camp, rickety and weathered, ready to collapse into the marshy ground. There was a small landing and, more important, a flat-bottomed rowboat with an old outboard motor. Nobody was in sight. Durell stopped paddling and felt the burn of aching muscles across his back. He saw Deirdre lick her dry, puffed lips. She straightened stiffly and fended off the bow of the pirogue as they came into the landing.
Nobody challenged them. There was only oiled paper over the windows of the shack, and no screens. The door was open. Inside there was a rusted oil stove, an iron cot with a thin straw mattress, a shelf holding canned food over the stove, a kerosene lamp.
There was a thick, rancid smell in the place, like that of an animal's lair.
He searched the place thoroughly. Somebody had slept here the night before, judging from the rumpled cot. Three cane fishing poles leaned against one wall. Durell surveyed the canned food, feeling hunger pangs in him, and as he reached for a can of soup to heat on the kerosene stove, a voice spoke from the doorway over Deirdre's quick gasp.
"Put it down, mister, and git."
Durell turned and saw a gaunt, bony man with an unkempt beard standing beside the girl, who shrank aside. The man wore a gray shirt and gray suspenders and the color of his skin was that of his clothes. He carried a new, shining Remington pump gun.
Durell said easily, "We've been lost in the swamp and haven't eaten since yesterday."
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