Suddenly back behind there in the darkness a shriek
split the night like a sudden flash of flame—a
great ringing scream that cracked and swelled and
stopped. With one wild effort the man hurled himself
out the door and plunged through the darkness.
Panting and cursing, he flashed his huge revolver—“bang!
bang! bang!” it cracked into the night.
The sweat poured from his forehead; the terror of
the swamp was upon him. With a struggling and
tearing in his throat, he tripped and fell fainting
under the silent oaks.
Twenty
The Silver Fleece, darkly cloaked and girded, lay
in the cotton warehouse of the Cresswells, near the
store. Its silken fibres, cramped and close,
shone yellow-white in the sunlight; sadly soiled, yet
beautiful. Many came to see Zora’s twin
bales, as they lay, handling them and questioning,
while Colonel Cresswell grew proud of his possession.
The world was going well with the Colonel. Freed
from money cares, praised for his generalship in the
cotton corner, able to entertain sumptuously, he was
again a Southern gentleman of the older school, and
so in his envied element. Yet today he frowned
as he stood poking absently with his cane at the baled
Fleece.
This marriage—or, rather, these marriages—were
not to his liking. It was a mesalliance
of a sort that pricked him tenderly; it savored grossly
of bargain and sale. His neighbors regarded it
with disconcerting equanimity. They seemed to
think an alliance with Northern millions an honor
for Cresswell blood, and the Colonel thumped the nearer
bale vigorously. His cane slipped along the iron
bands suddenly, and the old man lurching forward,
clutched in space to save himself and touched a human
hand.
Zora, sitting shadowed on the farther bale, drew back
her hand quickly at the contact, and started to move
away.
“Who’s that?” thundered the Colonel,
more angry at his involuntary fright than at the intrusion.
“Here, boys!”
But Zora had come forward into the space where the
sunlight of the wide front doors poured in upon the
cotton bales.
“It’s me, Colonel,” she said.
He glared at her. She was taller and thinner
than formerly, darkly transparent of skin, and her
dark eyes shone in strange and dusky brilliance.
Still indignant and surprised, the Colonel lifted his
voice sharply.
“What the devil are you doing here?—sleeping
when you ought to be at work! Get out! And
see here, next week cotton chopping begins—you’ll
go to the fields or to the chain-gang. I’ll
have no more of your loafing about my place.”
Awaiting no reply, the Colonel, already half ashamed
of his vehemence, stormed out into the sunlight and
climbed upon his bay mare.
