United States or Iraq ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He watched a red star in the south. Crump looked about. No sail or light or coast guard about Au Fer at low tide not even a skiff could find the passages. He nodded cunningly: "She's old and fire-fitten. Tedge, I knowed yer mind I was always waitin' fer the word. It's a place fer it and yeh say yeh carry seven hundred on them cows? Boat an' cargo three thousand seven hundred "
Tedge remembered that girl a Cajan girl whom he once heard singing in the floating gardens while Tedge was battling and cursing to pass the blockade. He hated her for loving the lilies, and the man for loving her. He burst out again with his volcanic fury at the green and purple horde.
Tread water, and hold the throat beneath until its throbbing ceased. Tedge could; he feared no man. Another overhand stroke, and he just missed the wobbling stern of the light skiff. He saw the man start up and raise an oar as if to strike. Tedge laughed triumphantly. Another plunge and his fingers touched the gunwale.
Higher, firmer; and he turned to kick free of them. He saw the man in the boat poling uncertainly in the tide not six feet beyond him. And now, in open water, Tedge plunged on in fierce exultance. One stroke and the stars beyond the boatman became obscured; the swimmer struck the soft, yielding barrier of the floating islands.
He dived and came up through them; and then, staring upward, he saw the tall, purple spikes against the stars. And they were drifting they were sailing seaward to their death. He couldn't see the boat now for the shadowy hosts; and for the first time fear glutted his heart. It came as a paroxysm of new sensation Tedge of the Marie Louise who had never feared.
The wheezy exhaust coughed on; the belt flapped as the paddle wheel kept on its dead shove of the Marie's keel into the sand. Hogjaw had shouted and run forward. He was staring into the phosphorescent water circling about the bow when Crump raised his cry: "Fire amidships!" Tedge ran down the after-stairs. Sulphurously he began cursing at the trickle of smoke under the motor frame.
He didn't know what a Texas cowman could do with a boat on an alien and unknown shore, but he slipped into it, raised an oar, and shoved back from the sandy spit. At least he could drift off Au Fer's waterless desolation. Tedge would kill him to-morrow when he found him there; because he knew Tedge had fired the Marie for the insurance. So he poled slowly off. The skiff drifted now.
And then he dived; he would bring his back up against the flat bottom and twist his enemy's footing from under him. Then in the deep water Tedge lunged up for the flat keel, and slowly across his brow an invisible hand seemed to caress him.
Suddenly Tedge realized a vast malevolent pleasure he couldn't hope to gain from his perishing cargo; and he began to gloat at the agony spread below his wheelhouse window, and the cattleman's futile pity for them. "They'll rot on Point Au Fer! We'll heave the stink of them, dead and alive, to the sharks of Au Fer Pass! Drownin' cows in dyin' lilies "
Across it the bayou boat wheezed and thumped drearily, drowning the bellowing of the dying steers. Once the deckhand stirred and pointed. "Lilies, Cap'n pourin' from all the swamps, and dead ahead there now!" Scowling, Tedge held to the starboard. Yes, there they were a phalanx of flowers in the dusk. He broke into wild curses at them, his boat, the staggering cattle.
Word Of The Day