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Updated: May 25, 2025
Only now, when he turned up Cote Blanche Bay, some hundred miles west of the Mississippi passes, to make the last twenty miles of swamp channel to his landing, he faced his old problem. Summer long the water hyacinths were a pest to navigation on the coastal bayous, but this June they were worse than Tedge had ever seen.
Tedge turned from his bow seat to look past the oarsman's head at the engineman. "Yeh knowed " "This Rogers, he was tryin' to get off the burnin' wreck and he fell, somehow or " "The oil tank blew, and a piece o' pipe took him," grunted Tedge. "I tried to drag him out o' the fire Gawd knows I did, didn't I, Crump?" Crump nodded scaredly.
The ripples of the beaching had vanished; obscurely, undramatically as she had lived, the Marie Louise sat on the bar to choke in her own fetid fumes. Tedge clambered to the upper deck and hurried to his bunk in the wheelhouse. There were papers there he must save the master's license, the insurance policy, and a few other things.
He clung to them dumbly, his face so close to the surface that the tall spiked flowers smiled down but they drifted inexorably with a faint, creaking music, leaf on leaf. Tedge opened his eyes to a flicker of myriad lights. The sound was a roaring now like the surf on the reefs in the hurricane month; or the thunder of maddened steers above him across this flowery sea meadow.
The lone passenger smoked idly and watched the gaunt cattle staggering, penned in the flat, dead heat of the foredeck. Tedge cursed him, too, under his breath. Milt Rogers had asked to make the coast run from Beaumont on Tedge's boat. Tedge remembered what Rogers said he was going to see a girl who lived up Bayou Boeuf above Tedge's destination.
Whoever the fugitive, he was hopeless with the oars. The skiff swung this way and that, and a strong man at its stern could hurl it and its occupant bottom-side up in Au Fer Pass. Tedge, swimming in Au Fer Pass, his fingers to the throat of this unknown marauder! There'd be another one go and nothing but his hands Bill Tedge's hands that the shrimp camps feared. Just hold him under that was all.
Tedge merely stared, expectantly awaiting the blow. And when it came he was malevolently disappointed. A mere slithering along over the sand, a creak, a slight jar, and she lay dead in the flat, calm sea it was ridiculous that that smooth beaching would break an oil tank, that the engine spark would flare the machine waste, leap to the greasy beams and floors.
Yes, the sea was with Tedge, and the rivers, too; the flood waters were lifting the lilies from their immemorable strongholds and forcing them out to their last pageant of death. The three castaways slept in the warm sand. It was an hour later that some other living thing stirred at the far end of Au Fer reef. A scorched and weakened steer came on through salt pools to stagger and fall.
He lowered his head and swam bull-like into the drift; and when he knew the pressure ahead was tightening slowly to rubbery bands, forcing him gently from his victim, Tedge raised his voice in wild curses. He fought and threshed the lilies, and they gave him cool, velvety kisses in return.
The Texas man began driving desperately on the oars. He heard the heavy rush of the skipper's feet in the deepening water. Tedge's voice became a bull-like roar as the depth began to check him. To his waist, and the slow skiff was but ten yards away; to his great shoulders, and the clumsy oarsman was but five. And with a yell of triumph Tedge lunged out swimming.
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