The Crucial Moment | Page 8

occupants could hear the great plantation-bell ringing like mad to summon forth into the midnight all available hands to save the levee, and, looking back presently, a hundred lanterns were seen flickering hither and thither, far down in the dusk--no illusion this, for all deltaic rivers are higher in the centre than their banks--where the busy laborers, with thousands of gunny-sacks filled with sand, were fighting the Mississippi, building a barricade to fence it from the rich spoils it coveted.
The packet, which, as it happened, was already overdue, had been telephoned by the officers at her last landing, and a number of men stood on the guards expectant. Hoxer had ceased to struggle. He looked up at the steamer, his pallid face and wide, distended eyes showing in the cabin lights, as the rowboat pulled alongside. Then as the sheriff directed him to rise, he stood up at his full height, stretched his manacled hands high above his head, and suddenly dived into deep water, leaving the boat rocking violently, and in danger of capsizing with the officers.
A desperate effort was made to recover the prisoner, alive or dead--all in vain. A roustabout on the deck declared that in the glare of the steamer's search-light, thrown over the murky waters, he was seen to come to the surface once, but if he rose a second time it must have been beneath the great bulk of the packet, to go down again to the death awaiting him in the deeps.
On the bank a little dog sat through sunshine and shadow in front of the door of the shack of the contractor of the levee-construction gang, and awaited his return with the patient devotion of his kind. Sometimes, as the padlock wavered in the wind, he would cock his head briskly askew, forecasting from the sound a step within. Sometimes the grief of absence and hope deferred would wring his humble heart, and he would whimper in an access of misery and limp about a bit. But presently he would be seated again, alertly upright, his eyes on the door, for the earliest glimpse of the face that he loved. When the overflow came at last the shacks of the construction gang were swept away, and the little dog was seen no more.

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