Two – three – four long tapering objects slued through the maiden cane and slid with a surface crash into the water. Those were the young gators, the ones that retreated to the water at the sight or sound of anything new.
Two bumps like the knots on a floating log rose above the surface and gave the man in the skiff a malignant stare. Still stalling, one hand on the pole, the other resting on his carbine, Shad murmured a warning. "You son-o-bitch. Got me a gun here. You come at me and I'll kindly blow a hole through your flat head."
Shad didn't want to get anything started that he couldn't handle. But he wanted to land on the hummock and scale that cypress; maybe get a sight on the direction the Money Plane had taken after it had struck the tree. Other gators, little ones, were nosing around in the water now. But it was the big fellow with the mean eyes that Shad watched with wary suspicion. The gator opened its great jaws, trailing long riffles of silver water, and hissed. Shad stared at the large crooked teeth and the beefy lump of tongue and for a sickening moment vividly saw himself caught in that trap. A tingling sensation of dread needled up the back of his legs and petered out in his buttocks.
The bull gator closed its jaws with a steel-spring snap, lowered its head from sight. Shad felt it was just as well. He removed his hand from the carbine, straightened up, and looked up at the ragged cypress.
There couldn't be any doubt that the round something in the fork was a landing wheel from the Money Plane. He could see the hub metal now and the tyre tread. "It shore didn't just roll in here on its own and up that tree," he said. "Money Plane done put it there, and that's a frozen fact."
The cypress trunk was snapped high on the north and low on the south side, so he figured the Money Plane had been heading south in its glide. He looked across the slough, trying to spot further evidence of a crash path. But it was hopeless. A bog land of lush maiden cane and dead stumps covered five acres of slough, and beyond that was a thicket of catciaws, hurrahs and pin-downs; farther on stood the tangled, moss-hung, vine-draped wall of cypress, sycamore and titi. All right, but it couldn't do any harm to explore south. He started stobbing across the slough into a prairie of water grass and log litter.
He skirted the skiff alongside a trampled mudbank, not liking the look of it, watching the skyline. Everywhere was gators.
Shad spotted a broken tupelo along the bank, and though anything might have caused the break, decided to investigate. You don't go to venture nothing and you shore God goan gain just that. He ran the skiff ashore, and taking his carbine, stepped onto the bank.
The ground was semi-solid, quivering under his weight. He scowled, bringing the gun to port-arms, smelling the musk again. More goddam gator ground. He studied the numerous small openings in the tall thicket, knowing them for gator tunnels – escape passages.
"Gator hole right smack behind there, shore's mud's soft," he whispered. He stalled, his mind dragging up shorings of courage to his queasy guts. If he tried to push on through the thicket he might be cutting a gator off from the water, and that was bad. He tsked a chipped tooth and started across the peaty earth in a half-crouch. Venture nothing and gain just that. He had to see what was beyond the thicket.
It worked out just as he'd pessimistically thought it might. He went toward the nearest tunnel, nearly bending himself double at the thorny entrance, and paused. The soggy ground trembled again and he heard a gator grunting. Instinctively he threw himself sideways as a swollen she-gator charged down the passage at him. Its paws scrabbled on the leaves and twigs; its jaws were apart. Shad started to level the carbine when he realized that the gator wasn't looking right or left. It slammed past him like a runaway wagon, its short stumpy legs chopping furiously at the muck, and went aflop in the slough, disappearing.
Somewhere beyond the thicket a bull gator uttered a loud roar, which, from its harshness and reverberation, resembled distant thunder. Shad held his breath, listening. Far off, a limpkin wailed its lost-child cry, then stopped.
Shad put his lower lip between his teeth and went into the passage on hands and knees, the gun pointing the way.
"Look out, boys," he warned. "I'm coming at you all. Got me to see what's in your homestead; and if one of you gets it in your brainbox to come at me, I'll purely blow your snout clean through your backside."
He made a fast, frantic crawl of it, catclaw briars snagging at him every inch of the way, and pushed out onto more muck. He was on a shelf so low and boggy that when he stood, the brown water rose over the soles of his boots. It was a water prairie, land-locked with forest, draped with strangler-fig vine as fat as fire hoses, and jungled with thick bamboo-like stalks of cane. The massive trunks of sevenhundred-year-old cypresses thrust skyward, so high their tufted crowns rubbed across patches of blue sky. A few rays of brilliant sunlight lanced through to the watery floor where a shadow-still pool sported jutting cypress knees – "breathers" some folks called them. The grey mossbeard, hanging in streamers, stirred slightly. And then he saw it. Across the prairie and half-hung in the matted jungle wall, nose-down, crumpled tail and rudder up – the Money Plane.
He sucked in breath, bringing a hand to his mouth to rub it absently, staring. Eighty-thousand dollars. One hundred per cent of eight-thousand dollars waiting for him across the pool. "Yah, hay," he breathed.
He had looked for the Money Plane for so long, had dreamed of it in the long tossing nights so often, that now when he'd found it at last it left him momentarily incapable of directing his own will. Like the slough, everything inside of him seemed to have stopped. He knew he should shout, bang off his gun, kick his heels and do himself a cakewalk there in the mud. But he didn't.
The spell broke as the surface of the pond splintered quietly and a bull gator brought its flat head dear of the water. Shad watched the monster spread into a floating prone. And it was a monster, far and away the largest he'd ever seen. He judged it would go for fifteen feet, easy. The gator nosed shoreward, propelled by its long laterallycompressed tail.
"Uh-uh," Shad grunted. "Cain't have us none of that."
He glanced across the pond again at the distant Money Plane. It looked like a crumpled grey bird hung in a tree. How to get there without a skiff? The pond proved to be not a true pond but a swollen place in the waterway. Not so damn good. He moved away from the gator, slogging along the bank.
Unwittingly, he stumbled through a stand of cane and into a gator nest. The reeds had been beaten down for half an acre around, and the curious little obtuse cones of mud and grass that housed the gator eggs looked like a jungle vifiage for Pigmies. Instantly there was a great yelping and whining as hordes of little foot-long gators came swarming from their huts.
Shad kicked off the first batch of four that made a voracious charge at his ankles, and leaped back toward the cane. The little devils, twisting and yapping, scrabbled across the marshy ground after him with a fury that was almost unbelievable. They were nightmarish, appearing to be six inches of jaw and six of tail, supported by crooked little spider legs. Then an outraged roar that drowned all other sound broke over the slough, and Shad saw coming from the water on a run, a mama-gator.
Shad beat a hasty retreat, not stopping until he was back to the shelf fronting the thicket. He was well aware that he had marched himself into a ticklish situation. The gator is generally disposed to retire from man – providing the gator has been frequently disturbed by, and has a standing acquaintance with, man. In situations or locales where they have seldom or never been bothered by men, it was a different story. Then they could show a ferocity and perseverance that was downright alarming.