free from its base, and let it
spring to the surface and float away. Often a snake had wrapped
himself about the end above the water, and when this refuge gave way
and drifted abroad he would cling for a time, until some less forlorn
hope came in sight, and then swim for it. Thus scarce a minute of the
day passed, it seemed, but one, two, or three of these creatures,
making for their fellow-castaway's boat, were turned away by nervous
waving of arms. The nights had proved that they could not climb the
lugger's side, and when he was in her the canoe was laid athwart her
gunwales; but at night he had to drop the bit of old iron that served
for an anchor, and the very first night a large moccasin--not of the
dusky kind described in books, but of that yet deadlier black sort, an
ell in length, which the swampers call the Congo--came up the
anchor-rope. The castaway killed it with an oar; but after that who
would have slept?

About sunset of the fifth day, though it was bright and beautiful, the
hunter's cunning detected the first subtle signs of a coming storm. He
looked about him to see what provision was needed to meet and weather
its onset. On the swamp side the loftiest cypresses, should the wind
bring any of them down, would not more than cast the spray of their
fall as far as his anchorage. The mass of willows on the prairie side
was nearer, but its trees stood low,--already here and there the
branches touched the water; the hurricane might tear away some boughs,
but could do no more. He shortened the anchor-rope, and tried the hold
of the anchor on the bottom to make sure the lugger might not swing
into the willows, for in every fork of every bough was a huge dark
mass of serpents plaited and piled one upon another, and ready at any
moment to glide apart towards any new shelter that might be reached.

While eye and hand were thus engaged, the hunter's ear was attentive
to sounds that he had been hearing for more than an hour. These were
the puff of 'scape-pipes and plash of a paddle-wheel, evidently from a
small steamer in the Company Canal. She was coming down it; that is,
from the direction of the river and the city.

Whither was she bound? To some one of the hundred or more plantations
and plantation homes that the far-reaching crevasse had desolated?
Likely enough. In such event she would not come into view, although
for some time now he had seen faint shreds of smoke in the sky over a
distant line of woods.