Driftwood (Spears)/Chapter 18

IBLEY CARRUTH stirred uneasily in his bed, and sprang up, suddenly awakened; for the door of his room was being pounded. It was still a black night, and for a moment he stood confused by his strange surroundings, not knowing what was happening or where he was.

"Sib! Sibley!" his father’s voice cried. "Come out! Jep’s found!"

In three minutes the youth emerged, fully dressed, into the hallway, and a minute or two later he and Mr. and Mrs. Carruth hurried along the hotel corridor and down to police headquarters. A telephone message had summoned them there with word that Crimson and Jimmy wanted them to come to the rescue of Jep and the baby.

"Oh! What a darling baby!" Mrs. Carruth cried when she saw Driftwood in Jep’s lap, looking about with wide owl-eyes. Then Jep yielded the small refugee to Mrs. Carruth with a smile that was a little wan.

"They were with a fisherman," Crimson said. "We found ’em directly. Jep said it’d be the best way to come and face the music. He’s the doctor!"

"It is, too!" Mr. Carruth declared. "What have you heard? What do they want him for so strong?"

"It’s New Madrid," the police captain replied. "We’ve had messages from there and along up-stream for days. Wire service is pretty bad. There’s so much water in the overflow that we can’t quite make out what they’re saying. But they said for sure, ‘Hold him!’"

"That means—?"

"We’ll have to look after the two of them. Of course, they’ll be all right. The boy tells a straight story, Mr. Carruth. If there’s anything we can do for you, why of course—"

"I think the best thing would be to give them something to eat."

"They’ve had all they want!"

"Then they’d better go to sleep," Mrs. Carruth declared.

"They can go to the dormitory; you can see for yourself it’s all right!" said the police captain.

"And we’ll be around the first thing in the morning, Jep!" Mrs. Carruth promised. "The little darling! What do you call him?"

"Driftwood," answered Jep.

"What a name for such a baby!" she cried. "The idea!"

"He’ll like it when he’s a little older," the police captain smiled.

"A good nickname’s half a boy’s life!" Mr. Carruth declared, and the four youngsters laughed—Sib, Jimmy and Jep because they understood the remark, and Driftwood because he saw that the others were amused.

"You’ll be comfortable. You won’t worry?" Mrs. Carruth asked keenly, and Jep looked at her bravely.

"I’ll be all right," he said. "We’ll stick together, Driftwood and me."

"Good boys!" The men smiled.

That was all they could do that night. Crimson, the Carruths, and Jimmy left Jep and Driftwood at Police Headquarters. It seemed best to have it so, although Mr. Carruth could have found in Memphis a dozen men to come to headquarters to give bond. The few hours’ delay seemed unimportant in view of the countless things they had already experienced and endured. They were too happy to be exacting or particular.

Jep was glad to keep the baby with him, to care for him, and to put him to bed in the comfortable crib provided for him. He would not even let the police matron do anything for Driftwood.

"Likely I mightn’t have another chance!" he gulped as he tucked the baby in, in the long warm nightie from the police emergency supply.

Before nine o’clock the next morning they were all together again. No word had come to Memphis from New Madrid. Nettleton had reported wire service interrupted, and a crew of linemen had gone out into the overflow from a camp station north of Faragould on the Texas road, to establish direct wire communication over the flood. But stringing wires and repairing breaks in an overflow through a wilderness, by motor-launches and skiffs, is a precarious and uncertain operation. They had a good wire to Little Rock, if that would do any good. But what they wanted was New Madrid!

Sibley and Jimmy went down to the wharf, where they took their launch up to the forks at the junction of Ash Slough with Wolf River, the Memphis shanty-boat town, and moored it in Crimson’s fleet of ferry, livery, and other boats. The exciting activities of many flood days had now settled into the difficult waiting for the solution of the mystery of the reward increase. The hundred-dollar reward was due to the desire of a woman to adopt an attractive baby, but the thousand-dollar addition to the reward could not be explained in the same way. They worried over the ominous threat.

At least Jep had kept his trust. They would stay with him till the questions raised were answered. Driftwood was a great baby, and Mr. Carruth had procured one of the best attorneys in Memphis to look into the right and wrong of the affair and to advise what it would be best to do.

"No crime is apparent, whatever the charge," the lawyer declared. "The question of the responsibility of the youth Jepson Veraine is all the issue there is, and in view of your guarantee, Mr. Carruth, I don’t see where any one could deprive the three youths of their first claim to the baby, Driftwood, who was found in the river flotsam. The thousand-dollar reward—we’ll have to have details about that!"

The river, still running at almost crest height, and destined to remain in flood for upward of two months before the crisis definitely passed and the wave ran out into the Gulf, kept all the lines of communication breaking one after another. Steamers could not run regularly, because of the jeopardy of drift, the lack of car goes, and the difficulty of making landings. The touching of a levee by the bow of a steamer might break open the barrier and let the flood through.

Railroads were out almost everywhere in the bottoms. Some lines were several feet underwater, and others were cut through their fills; and even places like Cairo, not distant from high land, were a week without train service. Tap-line reads out in the timber bottoms would have to be abandoned for a month, or perhaps two months. Even the telephone and telegraph lines were cut by the washing out of poles, resulting in the breaking of wires, or at least their inundation. Places ordinarily within two or three hours of one another, now were separated by wild torrents, and it was easier to go two hundred miles around than twenty miles across.

Sibley went to the district headquarters of the River Commission in Memphis, to get a government document which Mr. Kalas said he would find there, and which Sibley needed. The document was a roll of fourteen-foot water way survey maps, showing the topographical contours of the river bottoms and adjacent ridges.

"So you’re Sibley Carruth?" a man said to him. "You did good work in the rescue at Reelfoot and back from New Madrid. Kalas said you saved him days of time, taking him down the line when everything and everybody else was busy. As soon as he’s escorted the flood into the Gulf he’ll have time to find your place in the government work."

"What!" Sibley stared with wide-eyed surprise.

"Oh, the Government just has to take on those who make a specialty of any kind of work the way you’ve studied the Mississippi River. You’re the kind we can train up to know the real inwardness of the Old Boy!"

With his big roll of maps under his arm, Sibley went to the hotel in a dream. He hardly knew what he did. Instead of letting him drop out and disappear, they were going to take him right into that great force of workmen who were, step by step, bend by bend, reach by reach, taking hold of the Mississippi and controlling it.

Just that way, probably, Kalas had been enlisted years before, away back in the eighties or nineties, and he had grown up with the commission, broadened with it; dredging crossings one season; laying out levee rights of way another; surveying head-water streams another; attending to irksome office details—compiling statistics, drafting maps, making records so that what the commission learned every one might know for the reading.

As he walked along, Sibley saw opening before him the way of his future, for which unknowingly he had been getting ready.

He found that Jep and Driftwood had come over to the hotel with Jimmy and his parents, reward or no reward. No word had yet come from New Madrid that would explain matters, but the responsibility of Mr. Carruth had been established by men who knew him, and the attorney had provided the legal way for the present to keep Driftwood with them. In any event, there would be no more flight, no more questionable procedure; for now the matter was one in which the courts would show the way. Jep had found the friends and advisers he had needed and sought.

"No wonder people wanted to adopt him!" Mrs. Carruth exclaimed, when she found that Driftwood was as adorable in disposition as he was attractive in appearance. She envied Jep the cry of delight with which the baby greeted him when he appeared after telling the attorney all there was to tell about his experiences at New Madrid.

The boys all went to the motion-picture theater that afternoon, and saw a play with shooting, daring escapes, and great horsemanship in desert, mountains, and forests. The three watched it with calm, unthrilled interest. Sibley noticed that one of the men carried his rifle around cocked and liable to go off and kill somebody unintentionally. The carelessness was of a kind of which no hero would in fact be guilty.

"And that fellow tied the villain up with a granny-knot he could slip out of in two minutes," Jimmy declared with a sniff.

Jep made no comment. If he could follow the thread of the story he did not say so. He had many things to think of, and he gazed with darkening thoughts at the scenes of artificial life. He was living his own great romance of youth; he had to endure doubt and anxiety which were worse than he had ever known before, as he could do nothing, and must await the outcome.

Then the news-service film pictures were thrown on the screen, and through the camera lens they saw the Mississippi flood. That they had experienced themselves. They had seen the refugees in their flight, and the overflow at its worst. The running drift; the cattle helpless on a mound, up to their knees in water, doomed! the men carrying cotton bags full of dirt to build up the levees; the fight around a sand-boil to well it in, were all comprehensible and wholly natural to them.

Then they saw a motor-boat coming down the flood, and it rounded up to land at a levee.

"Why—it’s Kalas!" Sibley exclaimed.

"And you—me—us!" Jimmy cried out.

The picture was broken for a legend:

"Why, I didn’t see them taking it!" Sibley said.

"Too busy to be posin’ around!" Jimmy suggested.

It was true: they had been so intent on making the landing and attending to their own work that they had not noticed the picture machine that had been set up in the crowd, among the levee-back material. A sensation of listless fatigue now seemed to overcome them, as they relaxed, little by little, from the intense strain of long-continued excitement.

Thus they waited to hear from New Madrid, and soon after ten o’clock on the following morning an automobile dashed up to the Natchez House, and a man and woman sprang from it, their faces white with excitement and expectancy. They reached the clerk’s office in a flash.

"Carruth?" the man demanded.

"Yes, in a moment," the clerk replied. "The reception room—if you will!"

A bell-boy rushed to the suite the Carruths occupied.

"Somebody from New Madrid!" he announced.

Mr. Carruth went downstairs, and immediately returned, followed by the strangers. They burst into the presence of Mrs. Carruth, Jep, and Driftwood.

Jep and the baby were playing on the floor, running tin trains around and under the structures built with wooden blocks. A cry from the woman made Driftwood sit up staring.

"Ma-ma!" he cried, throwing up both arms, and the woman, dropping on her knees, caught him to her, sobbing wildly. The man dropped beside them, patting both of them and biting his lips to keep from breaking down.

"My baby! My baby! My precious baby!" the woman cried, and the Carruths stole from the room.

Jep rose to his feet and stood looking at such happiness as he had never seen before; and then, unnoticed, he, too, turned and walked slowly out, his head bowed and his hands clenched.

There were claims to Driftwood greater than any he could advance. He went downstairs and out into the street, and down to the custom-house, where he could see the Mississippi flowing past, huge and majestic, a coiling, writhing, menacing thing; bringing much to countless people—not all evil, not all good—and to him a few strange and happy days, with now the greatest disappointment he had ever known.

"He’s such a good little kid!" he choked. "I’d ’a’ stole him from anybody; but, dog-gone it, you can’t take a baby from his own mother!"

He watched the river for a long time. The tense, gripping, lonely feeling that had made his heart ache at first gave way little by little to a better mood. His feeling of bitterness did not last, but yielded to the generosity that was ever foremost in his character. It seemed a hard thing to have to give up Driftwood, but after he had looked at the Mississippi for a while, and thought it over, he knew that what he had dreamed, could not possibly be.

He rose at last and walked slowly back to the hotel. He had thought it all out, given over the most delightful dream of his life, and was ready, now, to return to the old way of living.

When he entered the hotel, three bell-boys rushed to claim the honor of having found him, but he had, as usual, found himself. The clerk called the bell-boys off and Jep went up to the Carruths’ rooms alone.

He walked in, looking for his hat, really. But there swooped down upon him the woman who had snatched Driftwood from him. She threw her arms around him, greatly embarrassing him, as though she had not already caused him suffering enough for one day.

Then the man came, and patted him on the shoulder, hardly able to speak.

Jep didn’t see why they should make such a fuss over him, for of course they had a right to the kid, and they might as well take him and be done with it! But they not only wanted the baby: they declared that they must have Jep, too, now, and that astonished him. What for? Oh, because—and so on!

What followed couldn’t all be told on one page. After all, what had passed was only a kind of introduction to a lot of things that Jep, Sibley, Jimmy, and the rest had never dreamed of, but which became facts. And out of the river Driftwood had brought a whole train of events which would change what had seemed their destiny, more than the Mississippi will be changed after Slough Neck cuts off, or even if the banks of Atchafalaya River cave in and let the main river into the short cut to the Gulf.

"You dear boy! taking care of my baby for me!" Mrs. Brail said. "And just loving him so! He has never looked better in his life! And you didn’t let him catch cold, or anything! It’s splendid! And we’ll never forget—never cease to try to show our gratitude to you—you great, fine boys, you!"

She swept the three youths with a tender and happy glance that they never would forget. Mr. and Mrs. Brail were fine, like their son!

"You knew so much—so well what to do!" she said to Jep. "I believe you’d be a wonderful doctor—a baby-specialist!" she added, and at that the boy straightened up, fairly frightened to have his inmost heart laid bare to that startling mind-reader. "Oh, I knew it!" she laughed delightedly. "And you shall! You shall be. Sha’n’t he, dear?"

"Anything in the world that he wants, my girl!" her husband replied. "And the three shall divide the thousand-dollar reward, to start with!"

And Driftwood, waving his arms, laughed aloud.