The trouble at Pinelands A detective story
for lunch or dinner--often late--and again he would not return until
midnight or later. Then he would stumble in, half drunk. He never
returned again in the condition which had disgraced Dorothy’s wedding
day; he was always able to navigate after a fashion, and he made no
great disturbance getting to his room. But every night he had been
drinking; that was not hard to know.
Once or twice Peter and I waited up for him; then we gave up in disgust.
Curiously it was Miss Christie, the somnolent nurse, who used to doze
the evenings through on the couch, it was this girl who never failed to
sit up against Somers’ erratic appearances. “Go to bed if you like,” she
would say, “I’ll wait. He--he might need somebody. And I remember, if
the rest of you don’t, that he’s doing this for _you_!”
Miss Christie, too, had altered greatly. I saw the change in her from
day to day. Whether it was Doctor Somers’ pills or some more subtle
medicament, she grew more vivid, more alive. Her bovine calm altered;
she yawned no more; life seemed to have taken on newer, fresher colors
to her. No longer did she doze the evenings away; and in the mornings
she appeared at breakfast as fresh and alert as Dorothy, not dull and
somnolent, as a fortnight ago. She lost flesh; her overplump figure grew
willowy. Her round face changed, and with the passing of its superfluous
flesh grew shapelier. It was as though some delicate, spiritual chisel
were at work, carving new planes of beauty, bringing out clearly the
rare loveliness her moments of deep feeling had hitherto promised.
I rhapsodize, no doubt, and rhapsodies are out of place, coming from a
battered, disillusioned old rheumatic. But I cannot exaggerate the
change wrought in Anne Christie. Even in that time of deep
discouragement the miracle impressed me. She was no longer stolid,
unresponsive; a new mobility curved her lips, a new light shone in her
violet eyes; a new animation imbued her fair face, as her expression
changed constantly with each nuance of thought, and her delicate color
ebbed and flowed charmingly.
“I’ll wait up for the doctor!” she insisted. “He’s doing this for you,
but look at what he’s done for _me_. I feel so much better in every way;
it’s wonderful! And I’m grateful, if you-all aren’t!”
And so the time passed until the meeting of the Carabas County grand
jury for July was only one day off; and still nothing more was done for
Lewis. It was settled that his case should be considered first; and I
could see nothing ahead of him but an indictment.
That evening Doctor Somers appeared in time for supper; and, for once,
he was cold sober. He left the flivver at the curb, climbed the broad
steps wearily and entered the big sitting room, where I sat with Dorothy
and Peter.
“Oh, lordy!” he groaned, thrusting his long, lean legs straight out
before him. “I’m done up. But it’s over now, thank goodness!”
He did look tired. His sallow face was almost colorless; his thin cheeks
were hollower than ever, and his eyes were sunk deep into their sockets.
Even his arms and legs seemed thinner, if that were possible. Miss
Christie came in, her color a trifle higher than usual. Her eyes
brightened at sight of Somers, I thought, and I wondered if she had
heard him enter. The doctor looked her over critically. “You’re
improving,” he drawled, with impersonal approval. “I knew thyroid was
what you needed.”
The girl stood silent, eyes downcast, her cheeks pink.
“Well,” continued Somers, and paused to yawn. “It’s over now. If we
ought to get a bit of action to-morrow, as I hope, I shan’t have to
drink any more of Satterfield’s beastly liquor. You know”--with one of
those sudden changes of subject so characteristic of him--“they put
chewing tobacco into this moonshine down here--and concentrated lye, to
give it a bead. Bah! And I’m through with Minnie, too--shan’t have to
listen to her giggle any more atall!”
He looked vastly relieved at the prospect; and so, I thought, did Miss
Christie.
“But,” protested Dorothy maliciously, “that’s not quite kind, is it?
Here you’ve been making love to that girl for a week and more; you’ve
engaged her young affections, and now you’re going to jilt her!”
“Yes,” declared Somers, in his characteristic drawl, half whimsically,
half bitterly, “I’m a fine figure of a lover, ain’t I? Handsome, robust,
and muscular!” His eyes traveled down over the lank, skinny length of
him. “I’m a handsome devil, what?”
“You are _so_!” exclaimed Anne Christie. Then she bit her lip, and a hot
flush dyed her face to the very roots of her fair hair.
“But you may set your mind at rest, Mrs. Parker,” Somers went on,
mercifully ignoring Anne’s confusion. “It’s me that’s jilted, not the
fair Minnie. A burly person, named Conover, has cut me out. You see, he
owns a real car, and I only had a borrowed flivver. Minnie won’t miss
me. And I’ve found out what I wanted to--all I hoped to, at any rate.
Peter, do you want to go out scouting with me to-morrow?”
“It’s about time something was done!” exclaimed Dorothy. “The grand jury
meets to-morrow!”
CHAPTER XXI
AN ILLICIT ENTERPRISE
Next morning, very early indeed, we three men set out in Lewis’ faithful
little car, for I refused to be left behind.
“Maybe I am old,” I protested, “and I know I’m rheumatic; but I can keep
up with you fellows yet. I’m just as much interested in getting Lewis
out of jail as you possibly can be.”
Somers accepted my company rather ungraciously, commandeered the field
glasses, which Peter had brought back from France, and his army
automatic. “For,” he explained, “we might have trouble.”
He drove the panting flivver up the hill behind Fort House, then along
the main road toward Hokesville, ten miles away. Two miles outside the
village he turned abruptly to the left, into one of the innumerable
sandy tracks, which wound away through the stumps and scrub oaks on
either side. This country was all lumbered over, thirty years ago; for
miles our roads run through a bleak desert of oak saplings and dwarf
pines, too small even for firewood, with here and there a tall, lone,
half-dead pine tree, whose trunk bears the old scars of the
turpentiners, mourning the vanished forest, dying of loneliness for its
mates, who have long since been changed into houses and mine timbers and
the spars of ships.
It is a desolate country, which has been burned over and reburned, until
no grass will grow, and the pale sand lies naked and arid between the
scrub oaks and dwarf pines, or stretches for acres, black and
forbidding, with the ash of recent fires, which rises in choking clouds
at every step. Through it the main roads wind as through a wilderness,
though in the sand hills one finds the best land for peaches, tobacco,
or cotton, which our State affords. But the roads run over the hills,
and the arable land lies in bottoms, perhaps a quarter of a mile away.
The farmhouses are there, too, quite out of sight from the roads. To
reach them one must turn into a narrow, sandy track, such as ran on
before us now, winding between blackened stumps; a track
indistinguishable to the stranger from the dozens of tote roads made by
long gone lumbermen, which lead nowhere. It is a difficult country for
the motorist with engine trouble.
The road we followed brought us to no farmhouse. It wound on and on
among pine stumps and scrub oaks, swerving to dodge rotten logs here and
there, leading us through unexpected patches of vivid bloom, through
burnt-over areas, where the dust rose blindingly. At last it dipped into
a hollow, where tall pines still grew, untouched by the ax, and ran
across a creek--a “branch,” they call them here--through which the
flivver splashed vigorously and stopped abruptly on the rise of the hill
beyond.
Somers snapped off the ignition and clambered out. “Come on,” he said;
“we walk from here.”
He led the way up a steep, sandy slope, which gave treacherously beneath
our feet. Burrs clung to my trousers, and I clutched at brambles and
tore my hands. Then we came suddenly and simultaneously to the top of
the hill and the edge of the pine grove. Before us was a thin screen of
bushes and scrub oaks, and beyond that a wide, bare, rolling plain.
Below us was a small cornfield; and a quarter of a mile away I saw the
dark green of tobacco; but, for the most part, the ground was fallow,
covered thinly with bunch grass, already turning yellow in the July sun.
Near the tobacco field was a small, bare, log structure, its interstices
well plastered, a brick fireplace opening outward upon its hither side,
a drying house for tobacco, such as are scattered all over this State.
Save for that the plain was empty; it held no human habitation, nor any
sign of man.
“Humph!” said I. “What are we going to do here?”
Somers grinned. “Looks innocent enough, doesn’t it? A tobacco field and
a drying house; some cotton”--he pointed to a field beyond the tobacco,
which I had not noticed--“and a little of last year’s crop piled under a
shed. Bad year for cotton, you know; farmers are holding that in hopes
of another forty-cent market. But just you wait and watch!”
Even as he spoke I saw a team of mules emerge from the pines beyond the
clearing. They drew a creaking wagon loaded with something bulky; at
that distance I could not make out what it was.
Somers focused Peter’s field glasses. “One, two, five bales,” he
counted. “There’s money on that wagon, unk! What? Bales of cotton,
that’s what they are. But you watch!”
The wagon creaked slowly on; it seemed to crawl. I waited impatiently
for what seemed an hour, but was really fifteen minutes, I suppose. Then
the mules reached the drying house and stopped. I heard very faintly
that queer, crooning whistle our teamsters use instead of the Northern
“Whoa!”
The door of the log hut opened; two men emerged. “Who are they, man?” I
asked eagerly. “Here, give me the glass!”
“Wait!” ordered Somers. “Ralph Satterfield and Charlie Bates. I don’t
know the man on the wagon--some old chap with a long beard. Now they’re
beginning--now look!”
He thrust the glasses into my hands, and I focused them with trembling
fingers. Then the distant scene leaped into my eyes--the log house, the
mules, the men, almost lifesize. They had unloaded the wagon and were
cutting the wires, tearing the bales of cotton apart!
“What on earth?” I asked in a whisper. They seemed so close that I
feared they would hear me. “What are they doing? Ah-h!”
I could see now. The loose cotton of the first bale fell away, revealing
the rounded outlines of a keg--no, a full-sized barrel. “Is--is it----”
Somers nodded grimly. “It is! Whisky, a barrel in each bale. Worth two
thousand dollars a barrel at bootleg prices. They’re doing this by
wholesale, unk! Pinelands could never consume all that booze. They must
be shipping it North. I wonder, now, how they camouflage it on the next
lap?”
Peter reached impatiently after the glasses, but I put him back. “Wait,
just one minute, boy. I want to see.”
The back of that huge, booted stranger, who had driven the wagon, seemed
oddly familiar. Satterfield and Bates I recognized readily enough; they
faced me. But this other? I felt that I must know him, too; if he would
only turn!
“Ah-h-h!” I sighed. “I know him, too! Here, Peter.” I thrust the field
glasses at him and turned to Somers. “Man, I know that big fellow with
the whiskers! That’s Lafe Rutledge--Roaring Lafe, he calls himself. And
the last time I saw him, the only time I ever saw him, was on Doctor
Gaskell’s front porch, the day before the murder. He was shouting at the
maid that Gaskell had until sun-up to settle with him!”
“Humph!” said Doctor Somers. Then he drew us back, and we retreated