Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1951

by The Haunts of Drowning Creek (v1. 1)

  Once or twice they came upon other boats, and their hearts pounded with excitement. But in each case these were swarthy fishermen. Indian dwellers of the creek, who nodded silent greetings and watched them pass.

  Noon came, and they redoubled their watchfulness. They all felt hungry, but they could not pause to cook a hot meal. Instead they idled under shady leaves at the side of the stream, opened a can of field peas and brought out a handful of dried fruit. Driscoll contributed the last of his box of crackers, and they drank water from the canteens to wash down this haphazard cold lunch. Between bites they studied the map once again.

  “What time is it?” asked Jebs.

  “One o'clock exactly,” replied Randy, “and we ought to be close to our turn-off.”

  “Right,” seconded Driscoll. “I know the stream is bound to have changed course over all these years, but look here.” He held out the map. “See this big smooth curve, just above the side branch? That’s probably stayed about where it was. And we've been on a curve that's a lot like it. I judge we've nearly floated all the way around.”

  They ate the last bites of food, and paddled on.

  Almost at once, Driscoll raised his paddle to signal, and pointed to the right. Randy and Jebs again came close to him.

  “See that little creek?” said Driscoll. “Floating out from between those trees.”

  “It looks right narrow,” commented Jebs. “I wonder if it’s the one we’re looking for.”

  “It’s the one, all right,” said Randy. “See what’s floating out of it.”

  Toward them emerged bits of leafy foliage. Randy scooped some of it close with his paddle and picked it up.

  “This was cut,” he announced. “They’re clearing a way up the stream. Do we follow them, or don’t we?”

  “We follow them,” said Jebs.

  SEVEN

  UNSEEN TERROR

  THEY had made up their minds, but still they paused. They looked at each other, and at the mouth of the side stream, half choked with reeds and crowded on either side with trees and bushes.

  “Do we take both boats?” asked Jebs.

  “I don’t think we’d better,” said Randy. “I think we ought to set this luggage ashore somewhere, and all get into the canoe together.”

  “Why go to the trouble of unloading your gear,” put in Driscoll. “This gum-tree dugout of mine is just as fast and just as easy.”

  “It doesn’t have any seats in it,” objected Jebs.

  “That’s a good point about it,” said Randy quickly. “Now then, suppose we’re up that little branch and meet our pals coming back? The way the seats are fixed here in the canoe, there’s only one end that can go forward. We’d be sort of mouse-trapped.”

  “Randy’s right, as he usually is,” approved Driscoll. “I don’t have any seats in my dugout. All we’d need to do is spin around on our heels and start paddling in the opposite direction.”

  “Okay, okay,” agreed Jebs. “But that talk about meeting up with that pair doesn’t sharpen me up any on wanting to go after them.” Belying his own words, he reached into the bottom of the canoe for the hand axe. “I’ll just take this along. I might be able to disgust somebody if he got rough.”

  Randy and Jebs paddled to the left side of the stream, where a low-drooping tree trailed its heavy- leafed branches to the very surface of the water. In the hollow behind this natural screen of foliage they tethered the canoe. Driscoll had followed close, and they transferred his tarpaulin and quilt to the canoe. From their food sack they took a tin of corned beef, the package of bacon, and some potatoes and corn meal, which they stowed in a brown paper sack. Driscoll picked up a flashlight as well, and Randy and Jebs put their canteens into the dugout.

  “That truck will have to do us if we stay past supper time,” Randy said. “We want to travel as light as possible.”

  “And as quiet as possible,” added Jebs.

  “Jump in, both of you,” said Driscoll. “It’ll be crowded, but we can all three ride in here.”

  “No,” objected Jebs. “We’d better not poke up that little branch without a scout up front. Randy, get in with Driscoll. I’ll slide ahead and be an advance guard.”

  Driscoll slid into the bow of the dugout and Randy, paddle in hand, assumed stem position. Jebs swam across from where the canoe was hidden, and raised his chunky body up in shallow water at the mouth of the tributary stream. He peered up its course, listened, then beckoned with a sweep of his sturdy arm. As the dugout approached, he waded up the smaller stream ahead of it.

  The new waterway was narrow—not much wider than a double bed, as Jebs muttered over his shoulder. But it was navigable. Plain on either side was the evidence that the thickest part of the matted and crisscrossed vegetation had been hacked away.

  “That's so they can tool their own boat up,” decided Driscoll. “Look how thick and swampy the country is grown up on both sides. The ground’s low and damp, and you couldn’t force your way through those woods without a bulldozer. If they’re clearing a passage along this stream, they’ll be slowed up a lot. They’ll save us the same kind of work.”

  “And we’d better not come up on them too fast,” advised Randy, almost in a whisper. “They weren’t more than, say, forty minutes ahead of us at the mouth of the branch. That’s my guess, anyway.” “But we’ll hear them hacking, and maybe talking,” contributed Jebs. “I’ll keep wading ahead for a while. Then one of you can spell me off if you want to.”

  Up the little water course they moved, Jebs in advance with the axe in his hand. Driscoll had cleared his machete from its sheath like a cutlass, and it lay beside his knee in the bottom of the dugout. They moved with the utmost of caution and silence, eyes and ears wide for indication of other human beings.

  Before they had traveled many yards, they came to where a log had fallen straight across their way. Coming up to it, they could see that several up-thrusting branches had been hacked away from the prone trunk, and with relative ease they hoisted their dug- out across and resumed paddling on the far side. Foliage met over their heads, shutting out the sky.

  “This is a nice, cosy, little tunnel for snakes to drop down on our necks,” observed Randy in a sober undertone.

  “Not too big a chance,” replied Driscoll. “Our fellow travelers up there ahead probably scared most of the snakes out of the branches.”

  “Not so loud, fellows,” begged Jebs from up ahead.

  The progress up this new, narrow stream continued to be slow and laborious. At one point the water dwindled to shallows no more than ankle deep, and the dugout had to be lifted and carried some distance beyond. Jebs replaced Driscoll at the bow, and Driscoll waded ahead for a while. Later, he traded places with Randy. It was Randy, moving carefully through knee-deep water, who heard a crashing, whacking sound in front of him.

  At once he turned, waded back several paces, and held up his hand to signal a halt. Driscoll and Jebs dug in their paddles and stopped the dugout. Their faces showed that they, too, had heard the noise. Even as they listened, it came to their ears again, mingled this time with the sound of a man’s grumbling voice.

  Randy leaned close to Driscoll in the bow. “There they are,” he said as softly as he could manage. “They can’t be very far from us. They’re cutting some brush, I think.”

  “We’d better slip forward and have a look,” said Driscoll at once.

  Randy crawled back along the dugout’s length and whispered to Jebs instructions to stay with the dugout. Driscoll stepped out into the water, his machete in hand. He and Randy moved forward, careful not to splash or slip as they rounded the bend.

  Just ahead of them the stream ran straight for fifty yards or so. The two boys squatted low in the water and peered through a matlike criss-crossing of coarse water weeds. They saw what they were looking for.

  Up ahead lay a dugout, something like Driscoll’s in design and size, but painted a drab gray. In it sat a man in a gaudy-figured sports shirt, such as vacationists w
ear at a beach. On his head was a solar helmet of the type issued to the army for summer wear. He had a paddle in his hand, thrust against a bank of the stream to keep the boat from drifting backward. Beyond him, in the stream itself, stood another man. This fellow was powerfully broad across the shoulders, and swung an axe with heavy strokes against a stout sapling that slanted out across the water. He wore old farm clothes—a battered felt hat, a khaki shirt, and dungaree pants rolled up to his brawny thighs to keep them from getting wet.

  As Driscoll and Randy watched, a final strong and skillful stroke of the axe brought the sapling down. The axe-man stooped, picked up the severed piece, and shoved it violently out of the way among the thick brush to one side. Then he turned back to replace the axe in the gray dugout.

  “I know who that lug is,” said Driscoll in Randy’s ear. “That’s that man Pullis, the one who was in the cafe with me at Wagram. It’s the way I figured—he took the map.”

  “How about his partner in the fancy shirt?” asked Randy.

  “I can’t see his face, but I reckon he’s that Ambrose fellow who was tagging along with Pullis. Quiet now, they’re moving again.”

  Pullis beckoned, and the one called Ambrose dug into the water with his paddle. The gray dugout slid forward, past the point where the obstructing sapling had grown, and Pullis got into the bow. They saw him move things in the bottom oi the craft. For a moment he lifted something shiny into view.

  “Looks as if they have a rifle with them,” observed Randy.

  “No, I think it’s a shotgun. I saw two barrels to it.” Pullis began to use a paddle, too. The gray boat moved on toward a higher stretch of the little channel, and out of sight around another upstream turn.

  Driscoll tapped Randy on the shoulder. “Look,” he said, “go back to Jebs. The two of you bring our boat up here, to this point. I’ll move ahead, as quiet and careful as I can manage to be. When you get to where we are now, stop and look upstream to where you can see me. I’ll signal whether to wait again or come along. Get the idea?”

  “Let me do the scouting,” offered Randy, but Driscoll shook his head emphatically.

  “No, I’m going to do it. This is my deal, and I want to take any raps that get rapped.”

  Randy hurried back downstream as swiftly as he could, and briefly related to Jebs all that had happened. They paddled along upstream to where Randy and Driscoll had paused to observe Pullis and Ambrose. Randy got out and stood up straight to see more clearly.

  Driscoll had moved well ahead, past the point where Pullis had chopped away the sapling. When he saw Randy he beckoned with his machete, and again waded along out of sight. Randy resumed his place in the dugout and helped Jebs paddle it along the straight, narrow stretch of water. As they approached Driscoll’s new position, they found him waiting. He gestured to a halt once more, and moved on around the next bend.

  Thus they proceeded in slow, cautious pursuit of Pullis and the younger man. Randy thought they might have gone a mile and a half up the creek. It was tedious work, for the stream curved here and there, sometimes almost doubling back upon itself, and it took more than two hours to progress so far. After their first minutes of worry and indecision, it became almost routine for all three of the boys; Driscoll would forge ahead for a number of yards, peer and listen, then wave for his friends to bring the dugout along. Twice they paused and listened to the sound of the axe, apparently chopping away brush or other growths that hampered the passage of the gray boat they followed.

  Finally Driscoll, appearing along the upstream channel, stood beckoning. At that moment the dug- out glided into a stretch of water where, to the left, a break came in the close phalanx of trees at the brink.

  At a distance, shadowed by tall and gnarly thickets all around it, they saw a house.

  Even in the shadows, it looked big, old, and tumbledown. The pillars in front meant a lofty porch, but the railings of that porch seemed all fallen away, and tangled up in brush and flowering vines. The roof, high up and flat, bore some sort of cupola arrangement. The branches and leafage that crowded around it were festooned with shreds and streamers of Spanish moss, waving gently, almost stealthily, in a puff of breeze.

  But the nearer ground was muddy and weed-tangled, and looked like a piece of treacherous bog. No approach from that point, at least no sensible approach.

  “Let’s churn on past here,” hissed Jebs nervously from behind Randy. “Anybody at that old owl incubator can see us.”

  “Okay.” Randy paddled, as swiftly as he could without splashing. They came up to where Driscoll stood, with more trees screening them from the house.

  “I guess we change trains here,” said Driscoll, in the soft undertone they had used so much that afternoon that it had become almost second nature. He waved the point of his machete toward where the gfhy dugout idled empty, in the water just ahead of him.

  “Did they go up to the house from here?” mumbled Jebs, stepping out of his rear position.

  “Yes, they must have. Did you two see it? Now do you believe that there’s a Chimney Pot House?” Driscoll nodded toward where the close-grown bushes showed evidence of bodies shoving violently through. “They must have found solid ground there, to make an approach on the place.”

  “And they must expect to have trouble of some kind,” added Randy, who had waded along to peer into the gray boat. “They’ve taken both their gun and the axe.”

  “What’ll we do with our own boat?” asked Jebs.

  Standing close together in the brown water, the three boys conferred in swift, solemn whispers. They decided to hoist their dugout to the bank, downstream from the enemy craft, and hide it there. That way, as Jebs pointed out, they could let Pullis and Ambrose head down without suspecting the near presence of watchers or, if Pullis and Ambrose discovered them ashore, they could hurry the boat into the water and start away. Randy and Driscoll lifted the dugout up and Jebs, the sturdily muscled one of the trio, pulled it on to the bank and thrust it benind some broad-leafed, tropical-looking shrubbery. A few branches broken and thrown on top completed the camouflage. Finally, they mounted the shore at the point where the bushes showed traces of human passage.

  In single file they moved, Driscoll again in the lead, then Jebs, then Randy. They did their best to keep quiet. Driscoll moved branches away from in front of them, and instead of letting them snap back he eased them into the hands of Jebs, who in turn eased them back into Randy’s grasp. Underfoot the ground was wet and slippery, the mud instep-deep in some places. But, before they had come many yards, Driscoll came to an abrupt halt. Jebs almost bumped into him, and Randy into Jebs.

  Driscoll had paused on the very edge of the great belt of bushes. Trees grew thickly beyond. Through the openwork pattern made by the stems, the boys could see part of the house.

  It looked dull, dirty gray, patched here and there with a decayed-looking black, like a house that had not been painted since the morning of time. The pillars at its front looked bigger than the tree trunks, but the roof and cupola could not be seen for the masses of upper leafage between the boys and the house. Shrubs, brush and sprawling vines obscured its general outline. It was like something in an old, gloomy illustration for some grim volume of murder stories.

  “That will be Chimney Pot, all right,” breathed Driscoll tautly.

  Just then, the silent, damp air of the swampy woods was rent with a deafening explosion, and another. At almost the same instant, two figures came racing back from the house, straight toward the bushes.

  Ambrose, younger and fighter than Pullis, was running like a rabbit. The loose tail of his gay shirt stood out behind him with the speed of his flight, like a wind-blown banner. Pullis, hurrying behind, carried the shotgun. Both were looking backward over their shoulders as they ran, or they might have seen Driscoll, who had moved almost clear of the cover.

  But, with a single lucky inspiration, all three boys hurled themselves flat on the ground and lay there in the mud among the bushes. Even as they d
id so, both men plunged in among the rattling branches and twigs, and paused there, so close that they seemed to stand almost within reach of the flattened listeners.

  “Wh-what was it?” Ambrose stammered. His voice sounded young and almost painfully frightened.

  “Don’t know,” replied Pullis, gruffly and shakily. “And I don’t think I want to find out.”

  “It—it was true all the time!” said Ambrose shakily. “That haunt yarn, I mean—only worse than anybody ever told!”

  Then came a click of metal. Pullis must have pulled open the breech of his shotgun to reload it.

  “Did you see the size of the thing?” quavered Ambrose. “Listen, I’m getting out of here. Clear out.”

  “Wait a second,” said Pullis, but Ambrose was already crashing away in the direction of the stream.

  “Wait,” called Pullis again, and moved after his companion.

  EIGHT

  THE RUINED HOUSE

  RANDY, rearmost of the three ground-hugging boys, lifted his head an inch or so and tried to look over his shoulder as he lay. Close to the ground, the twigs were not so thick on the bushes, and he could make out two pairs of fast-moving feet, hurrying away toward the stream where the gray dugout waited. They vanished. After a moment or two, Randy heard a busy, splashing sound. The men were getting into their boat and using the paddles, as fast as their arms could manage.

  Still the boys waited, motionless save for the somersaulting thud-thud of their hearts. They wanted Pullis and Ambrose to be well out of the vicinity.

  Randy counted sixty in his mind. Then he caught Jebs by a thick ankle and gave it a slight tug.

  “What’s up?” whispered Jebs.

  “I think we can get out of here now,” Randy replied. “Nudge Driscoll and tell him that. They’ve gone away downstream.”