The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh | Page 5

larger level that seemed

as illimitable as the bay. The strong breath of the ocean lying just
beyond the bar and estuary they were now facing came to them salt and
humid as another tide. The nearer expanse of open water reflected the
after-glow, and lightened the landscape. And between the two
wayfarers and the horizon rose, bleak and startling, the strange outlines
of their home.
At first it seemed a ruined colonnade of many pillars, whose base and
pediment were buried in the earth, supporting a long parallelogram of
entablature and cornices. But a second glance showed it to be a
one-storied building, upheld above the Marsh by numberless piles
placed at regular distances; some of them sunken or inclined from the
perpendicular, increasing the first illusion. Between these pillars, which
permitted a free circulation of air, and, at extraordinary tides, even the
waters of the bay itself, the level waste of marsh, the bay, the surges of
the bar, and finally the red horizon line, were distinctly visible. A railed
gallery or platform, supported also on piles, and reached by steps from
the Marsh, ran around the building, and gave access to the several
rooms and offices.
But if the appearance of this lacustrine and amphibious dwelling was
striking, and not without a certain rude and massive grandeur, its
grounds and possessions, through which the brother and sister were still
picking their way, were even more grotesque and remarkable. Over a
space of half a dozen acres the flotsam and jetsam of years of tidal
offerings were collected, and even guarded with a certain care. The
blackened hulks of huge uprooted trees, scarcely distinguishable from
the fragments of genuine wrecks beside them, were securely fastened
by chains to stakes and piles driven in the marsh, while heaps of broken
and disjointed bamboo orange crates, held together by ropes of fibre,
glistened like ligamented bones heaped in the dead valley. Masts, spars,
fragments of shell-encrusted boats, binnacles, round-houses and galleys,
and part of the after-deck of a coasting schooner, had ceased their
wanderings and found rest in this vast cemetery of the sea. The legend
on a wheel-house, the lettering on a stern or bow, served for mortuary
inscription. Wailed over by the trade winds, mourned by lamenting
sea-birds, once every year the tide visited its lost dead and left them

wet with its tears.
To such a spot and its surroundings the atmosphere of tradition and
mystery was not wanting. Six years ago Boone Culpepper had built the
house, and brought to it his wife--variously believed to be a gypsy, a
Mexican, a bright mulatto, a Digger Indian, a South Sea princess from
Tahiti, somebody else's wife--but in reality a little Creole woman from
New Orleans, with whom he had contracted a marriage, with other
gambling debts, during a winter's vacation from his home in Virginia.
At the end of two years she had died, succumbing, as differently stated,
from perpetual wet feet, or the misanthropic idiosyncrasies of her
husband, and leaving behind her a girl of twelve and a boy of sixteen to
console him. How futile was this bequest may be guessed from a brief
summary of Mr. Culpepper's peculiarities. They were the development
of a singular form of aggrandizement and misanthropy. On his arrival
at Logport he had bought a part of the apparently valueless Dedlow
Marsh from the Government at less than a dollar an acre, continuing his
singular investment year by year until he was the owner of three
leagues of amphibious domain. It was then discovered that this
property carried with it the WATER FRONT of divers valuable and
convenient sites for manufactures and the commercial ports of a noble
bay, as well as the natural embarcaderos of some 'lumbering' inland
settlements. Boone Culpepper would not sell. Boone Culpepper would
not rent or lease. Boone Culpepper held an invincible blockade of his
neighbors, and the progress and improvement he despised--granting
only, after a royal fashion, occasional license, revocable at pleasure, in
the shape of tolls, which amply supported him, with the game he shot
in his kingfisher's eyrie on the Marsh. Even the Government that had
made him powerful was obliged to 'condemn' a part of his property at
an equitable price for the purposes of Fort Redwood, in which the
adjacent town of Logport shared. And Boone Culpepper, unable to
resist the act, refused to receive the compensation or quit-claim the
town. In his scant intercourse with his neighbors he always alluded to it
as his own, showed it to his children as part of their strange inheritance,
and exhibited the starry flag that floated from the Fort as a flaunting
insult to their youthful eyes. Hated, feared, and superstitiously shunned
by some, regarded as a madman by others, familiarly known as 'The

Kingfisher