Durm Clinchell swallowed hard when he considered the fact that had been imparted to him over the telephone. Lunmer Andrest had calmly put his hired desperado and bushwhacker in jail, and had pocketed a big reward for doing so! It sounded unbelievable, and if he had not recognized Sheriff Ferris's voice Clinchell would have had his doubts.
Instead of taking the emphatic hint to leave, the shanty-boater was hanging on. It was bad enough to have to take notice of a poor white river-rat, but to have the river-rat actually resist the mandate of a man who picked a thousand acres of cotton and who sold timber rights from a thousand acres every year—that was intolerable!
Clinchell saw now that he must use something besides force. He couldn't kill Lunmer Andrest, and he couldn't hire a man, offhand, to run him out of the country. Some other method must be adopted.
He gave the subject hours of thought between the common tasks which fell upon his hands in consequence of his lack of bookkeepers and clerical helpers. He had to reckon up the work of his pickers, the output of his gin, the cut of his sawmill, and a dozen other things, balancing his own little red book from the reports of his mill foreman, gin boss, and overseer.
His own record did not always tally with the freight receipts handed to him by his agent at the junction of his tap-line with the main railroad. Sometimes he had fifty thousand feet more lumber than he had counted on, and sometimes he fell short a few bales of cotton.
But the annual balance was in his favor, and his income was so large that he found a good deal of difficulty in knowing where to place it all. Usually he bought bonds or mortgages, or added to his holdings of land. He owned several outlying plantations, some back on the hills, where they raised corn and fruit, and some down the river, near Helena. He had purchased some lands away out West, too, but he didn't know very much about them, except that he guessed they weren't of much account. For ready money he depended on two banks of which he was president; but he didn't know much about banking, and was satisfied to know that his check would be honored, despite its rather uncertain penmanship.
Old Clinchell found many things to attend to, but now, between his tasks, he gave his spare time over to Lunmer Andrest. The more he thought about the shanty-boater, the angrier grew his thoughts and the calmer his expression. Time for explosive outbursts had gone by when a young scoundrel like Andrest outwitted him and put him under peace bonds, and then took in a friendly bushwhacker and obtained the reward!
Having ridden his favorite mule out to the sawmill and seen a particularly fine white-oak log sawed, he turned across to the cotton-gin and measured the lint to see whether it was running as long as the standard. He stopped at the tap-line road warehouse and sent a darky to the roof to patch it, because a rain would leak through into the sixty or seventy bales of cotton that were waiting to be shipped. On his way home, he stopped to give a sick mule colt some physic.
When he arrived at the horse-block, and a hostler took the mule he rode, he asked:
"Where's Sue Belle, Timber?"
"Ah don' know, suh!"
"She gone away?"
"Yas, suh—onto that black man mule; an' sho, that mule was a kickin' snorts—yas, suh!"
"Down or up?"
"Down, suh—down the St. Francis Trace."
Clinchell growled and climbed the mound to his mansion. He went up into the cupola on top and took a pair of binoculars from their case. Throwing down the windows all around, he looked down the St. Francis Trace toward the edge of the plantation-field. No one was in sight in that direction; the cotton-pickers, west of the mansion, were working steadily, and through his glasses he could see the overseer watching the weighing of bags of plucked cotton.
From the cupola Clinchell could see into every part of the great clearing in the swamp. He could see, with the glasses, into the woods on the lower lands surrounding the plantation. Over the tops of the trees, in four or five directions, he could see films of smoke, indicating where cabins were located out in the wooded swamp. The big, black cloud of smoke over the sawmill gave reason for the scream of the saws as they bit into the logs.