"Yeh?" Tedge turned from his bow seat to look past the oarsman's head at the engineman. "Yeh knowed----"
"This Rogers, he was tryin' to get off the burnin' wreck and he fell, somehow or----"
"The oil tank blew, and a piece o' pipe took him," grunted Tedge. "I tried to drag him out o' the fire--Gawd knows I did, didn't I, Crump?"
Crump nodded scaredly. The black oarsman's eyes narrowed and he crouched dumbly as he rowed. Tedge was behind him--Tedge of the _Marie Louise_ who could kill with his fists. No, Hogjaw knew nothing--he never would know anything.
"I jest took him on out o' kindness," mumbled Tedge. "I got no license fer passenger business. Jest a bum I took on to go and see his swamp girl up Des Amoureaux. Well, it ain't no use sayin' anything, is it now?"
A mile away the wreck of the _Marie Louise_ appeared as a yellow-red rent in the curtain of night. Red, too, was the flat, calm sea, save northerly where a sand ridge gleamed. Tedge turned to search for its outlying point. There was a pass here beyond which the reefs began once more and stretched on, a barrier to the shoal inside waters. When the skiff had drawn about the sand spit, the reflecting waters around the _Marie_ had vanished, and the fire appeared as a fallen meteor burning on the flat, black belt of encircling reef.
Tedge's murderous little eyes watched easterly. They must find the other side of the tidal pass and go up it to strike off for the distant shrimp camps with their story of the end of the _Marie Louise_--boat and cargo a total loss on Au Fer sands.
Upon the utter sea silence there came a sound--a faint bawling of dying cattle, of trampled, choked cattle in the fume and flames. It was very far off now; and to-morrow's tide and wind would find nothing but a blackened timber, a swollen, floating carcass or two--nothing more.
But the black man could see the funeral pyre; the distant glare of it was showing the whites of his eyes faintly to the master, when suddenly he stopped rowing. A drag, the soft sibilance of a moving thing, was on his oar blade. He jerked it free, staring.
"Lilies, boss--makin' out dis pass, too, lilies--"
"I see 'em--drop below 'em!" Tedge felt the glow of an unappeasable anger mount to his temples. "Damn 'em--I see 'em!"