# Diamond Tolls/Chapter 19

CHAPTER XIX
STORIT, the little river rat, who had at one time run a whisky boat on the lower river, lived in a "hog pen on a raft," to call it according to the vernacular. His home was, in fact, a scow twenty feet long, four feet wide, and twenty inches deep. The stern of the boat to within five feet of the bow was covered by a tent canvas nearly five feet higher than the gunwales to the peak. The canvas was old, but it had been painted with white lead and tar and fish-net waterproofing, so that it did not leak a drop.
In this rag cabin were a number of things which accorded well with Storit's position in society. The bunk was a shallow box nearly seven feet long, thirty inches wide, and filled with corn leaves. On the bunk were some old blankets.
A soap box filled with cooking utensils rested next to the flap that opened out into the bow. Hanging along the ridge pole were little bags and chunks of smoked meat, thus carefully placed out of the way of the mice which would enter into the boat and build their nests and rear their families in spite of Storit's ​constant efforts to trap them and drive them out with maledictions.
There were two oil stoves and parts of a third one in the corner opposite the kitchen box. Besides these oil stoves were old and rusty oilcans, two containing glass bottles—household oil cans. A third contained kerosene. Over the oil stoves were sections of several patches, for every once in a while, during the painful cooking operations, there would be a flare up. Storit would lose some of his whiskers, some of his hair, and some of his eyebrows. Nevertheless, he always had managed to save his canvas from burning, probably because some of the waterproofing which he spread on the canvas was partly waterproof—an asphalt composition, say.
Thus Storit lived in tatters and rags, a glittering-eyed human reptile at one time and a whipped cur at another. He was a little man of shrunken figure and shrunken mind, but in the late years he also had been a feeble-minded man in addition to his paucity of ideas and narrowness of vision—feeble in the sense that at times he had no control over himself, clouded by visions and streaks of perversity, during which periods he acted but without knowing what he did, nor could he remember what took place during those spells.
His spells exasperated him a good deal. There ​was one hiatus which he could not account for, though he recalled it very well. He was at his ease down the Mississippi in a comfortable little cabin-boat. He remembered that he was in Ozark Bend, just below Arkansaw Old Mouth, and some of the boys had been joshing him about the widow Jellson who lived at Bohvar Landing, and who would have made him an admirable wife, as he considered. That was along in November.
Then, right at that very moment, a spell seized him, and the next he knew, he was sitting in a leaky old skiff just below Davenport, Iowa, floating down a very trifling kind of Mississippi River, with a raw, cold spring wind blowing and snow banks unthawed in the shade of the woods along the banks. This was early in May.
He had lost at least six months, and when he managed to beat his way down to the lower Mississippi he had been gone two years! He had lost not less than eighteen months of his life, where he did not know. Worse yet, he had lost his cabin-boat, and he was reduced to a hog pen on a raft, which he had managed to find and steal and construct little by little.
But in spite of these aberrations, he never forgot one thing. That was the thing which started him on these strange peregrinations, and which always prevented him from struggling up out of his lowly estate. ​Time had been when he was quite a smart kind of a fellow, with as slick clothes as the next man's, when he lived in a big cabin-boat and kept a hired man to cook, tend bar, and other things, for his trade was selling whisky from Evansville to below Red River. He had been slick at that business, too, and none knew the safe landings and the dangerous landings any better than he.
Never had a planter's party shot him up, because he knew enough to run in, make his sales, and slip on down the river before the field hands could attract the attention of the Overseer or, worse yet, the Planter.
There remained fixed in Storit's mind a picture of the ease and glory of his condition. He remembered vividly a thousand incidents which showed him how important he had been in those old days. Among the other things were his diamonds. He had worn three rings on one hand and two on the other hand, all diamond rings, and the cheapest one worth four hundred dollars. He had had a diamond stud in his shirt bosom which was his glory, for it represented the savings of a whole year of profitable whisky business.
A sting in the memories of those days were the warnings which he had received from men and women to the effect that he ought to look out, or those diamonds would surely draw trouble down some dark and lonesome bend, or at some black landing.
​"I took cyar of myse'f," he whimpered. "I carried a gun—I was plumb watchful. If it'd be'n done fair—hit couldn't of be'n done."
He had never turned his back on any man. He had kept his customers the other side of the bar. He hired a man for bartender only after the most careful and persistent inquiry. He never trusted his help beyond a certain point.
Then he hired a mere youth who seemed a treasure and who was the fastest man to fill the glasses, the surest man with the change, the swiftest man at making a landing, and the quickest one to make his getaway. This man was true and faithful, apparently, and he went forth into the cotton fields, and brought down whole crews of pickers to patronize his bar. The very excellence of the man made his bitterness the greater, now that he recalled what had happened.
One day, as they were dropping down a bend going from landing to landing, Storit's fight went out. He was felled by a blow from behind. But as he went down, his fires glimmering, he received the impression that his bartender had struck him on the head a foul blow from which he could not possibly save himself, and for which he was utterly unprepared.
He came to in a hospital. What his ventures had been between the minute of the blow and his awakening he had no idea. He had been brought into ​Vicksburg by kindly shantyboaters, who left word that they had found him sitting on a sandbar, with buzzards sitting in a circle around him, listening to his talk.
Now Storit had one set purpose in mind. That was to find the scoundrel who had betrayed his confidence and stolen his diamonds—equal crimes. Every once in a while someone would tell him the man was on the river, and he would go seeking him, only to lose track of him—or lose track of himself. It was difficult to move up and down the river, chasing rumours. He had his living to make, anyhow.
Making a living was a tremendous business. He would go hunting for birds' eggs, to eat. He would creep up to the hole of a rabbit, and watch in the moonlight, to seize the little animal with his hands. He gathered hickory nuts at Columbus and other famous hickory groves. Sometimes he lived for days at a time on pecans. He fished some, too, and he foraged in drift piles for clothes to wear. Cornfields supplied him with some sustenance. When he was feeling well, he picked cotton, or even hoed cotton, but a good deal of the time his head hurt and he could not work. He had lucky hauls, sometimes, taking ropes from fleets or boats or government works. He sometimes ventured to steal a skiff or something of that kind.
One night, when he had tried to steal a skiff, a scoundrel frightened him terribly, having taken an air ​advantage of him. The scoundrel had slept in his skiff, under a canvas tarpaulin, and when Storit had the skiff actually in his possession, what did that lurking scoundrel do but hold him up in the fog, and try to shoot him.
Storit had told the man a good story, or something, he could not recall just what. The man had been thrown off his guard, Storit remembered, and Storit escaped into the fog and paddled away out of sight. It was that might he had heard the river spirits laughing, and when he had time to think it over, that laugh heartened Storit up considerably.
Accordingly, paddling up the river to where he had hidden his rag-house shantyboat, he started down the river in pursuit of the man who had played on him the scurvy trick of sleeping in a skiff. He followed that man down, waiting his chance and biding his time. Fortune favoured him with a bag of cob corn which had fallen off a river steamer, and a lot of canned goods which had rolled up on a sandbar from a wreck. He even had been able to catch a wounded goose and find two or three ducks which had been lost by hunters.
The man he was following tried to fool him by getting into a shantyboat in the eddy at Yankee Bar. Storit almost got him there, but just when he was ready to nab him at the next venture ashore the fellow slipped out into the eddy and went on down the ​river in the shantyboat, so Storit took up the chase again.
Thus Storit followed his man down, keeping his boat in sight, and ducking in and out sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. He would teach that kind of folks not to trifle with him. He certainly would—and taking his time, watching his chance, Storit held to the chase. And then one day the shantyboat was blown into a bayou.
This served Storit's purpose, of course. But someone else was chasing down, about that time. The other pursuit bothered Storit, who did not know its intent. He hung back ready to turn back, or run in, or play the rôle of innocent spectator, according to the time and opportunity.
His eyes, river-keen and perhaps of preternatural sight, picked up the motorboat that started up the river and then stopped and drifted down. That incident, meaning much or little, compelled him to wait, and his waiting was rewarded. The boat returned in a day or two, and this night it landed below his own boat, and the man climbed up the bank and started sneaking down toward the bayou.
Storit, animal and human, too, followed him. Something in the man's figure, something in his gait, something in the silhouette he made against the black night, awakened vague memories in Storit's mind. ​He crept closer, and when the skulker stood in the gloom above the shantyboat, Storit was trying with all his senses to discover what there was about this stranger to make him seem so interesting—perhaps familiar.
The door of the cabin-boat opened, and the light flooded out into the dark. Storit saw the man's body clearly outlined against the light, rifle, head, body, and all. Then he recognized him.
"He hit me. He stoled my diamonds!" Storit thought, hotly. "Hit's that slick White Collar Dan—I'll git 'im!"
He sprang at the bush-whacker, who turned his face to look over his shoulder. Storit landed upon his head with the piece of railroad iron which he carried in his hand. He followed the blow with other blows, and having broken the victim down, Storit caught the fellow by the collar, picked up his rifle, and dragged him back through the dark woods down the river bank to the gasolene launch which Gost had moored there.
Storit dragged the body on board, cast off the lines, and pulled out into the current. He fumbled around with the motor, till he had started it—he had stolen motorboats in his time—and drove up the river to his own poverty-struck craft, which he towed out and down the river, at full speed, seeking a hiding place.
When he had made a few miles he rifled the dead ​man, and found money, a watch, and other treasures. He stripped the corpse and threw it overboard,
"Theh!" he said. "I knowed I'd git that man sometime. Lawse. They don't any man want to treat Mr. Storit mean, no, suh! If they does, they gits what's comin' to them. Hi-i! This yeahs a dandy little motorboat. Ha! Ha!"
He began to pace up and down the narrow cockpit. He looked over his shoulder. He no longer steered the craft, though the motor was still going. Something had gone wrong with his head again.
With a loud cry, a rattling laugh, he ran aft, leaped up on the stern lightly, and curving into the air, he plunged deep into the river. He rose like an alligator gar and began to swim with long, fine strokes. He struck out of the current into an eddy, and climbed the bank to enter the woods.
He went through the woods till he arrived at the levee. There he tramped toward the south, singing. At the first town he went down into the streets and stopping a man, asked for two bits to buy something to eat. He was wandering around town when the sheriff, in a ferry launch, towed a gasolene boat and a hog pen on a raft down to the landing.
A crowd looked at the two boats curiously, for the gasolene boat's cockpit was stained with blood. As the sheriff declared:
​"If I know the signs, boys, sunthin' shore happened, yes, sir."
Among the spectators was Storit.
"Yes, sir!" Storit echoed. "Sunthin' must of happened."