“Wouldn’t know,” said Doyle. “Tell me how to get there.”
The old man found a paper sack underneath the counter, fished a stub pencil out of his vest pocket and wet it carefully with his tongue. He smoothed out the sack with a liver-spotted hand and began drawing painfully.
“You cross the bridge and take this road—don’t take that one to the left, it just wanders up the river—and you go up this hollow and you reach a steep hill and at the top of it you turn left and it’s just a mile to Metcalfe’s place.”
He wet the pencil again and drew a rough rectangle.
“The place lies right in there,” he said. “A sizeable piece of property. Metcalfe bought four farms and threw them all together.”
Back at the car Mabel was waiting irritably.
“So you was wrong all the time,” she greeted Doyle. “He hasn’t got a farm.”
“Just a few miles from here,” said Doyle. “How is the rolla doing?”
“He must be hungry again. He’s banging on the trunk.”
“How can he be hungry? I bought him all of them bananas just a couple hours ago.”
“Maybe he wants company. He might be getting lonesome.”
“I got too much to do,” said Doyle, “to be holding any rolla’s hand.”
He climbed into the car and got it started and pulled away into the dusty street. He clattered across the bridge and instead of keeping up the hollow, as the storekeeper had directed, turned left on the road that paralleled the river.
If the map the old man had drawn on the sack was right, he figured, he should come upon the Metcalfe farm from the rear by following the river road.
Gentle hills turned into steep bluffs, covered with heavy woods and underbrush. The crooked road grew rougher. He came to a deep hollow that ran between two bluffs. A faint trail, a wagon-road more than likely, unused for many years, angled up the hollow.
Doyle pulled the car into the old wagon road and stopped. He got out and stood for a moment, staring up the hollow.
“What you stopping for?” asked Mabel.
“I’m about,” Doyle told her, “to take Metcalfe in the rear.”
“You can’t leave me here.”
“I won’t be gone for long.”
“And there are mosquitos,” she complained, slapping wildly.
“Just keep the windows shut.”
He started to walk away and she called him back.
“There’s the rolla back there.”
“He can’t get at you as long as he’s in the trunk.”
“But all that banging he’s doing! What if someone should go past and hear all that banging going on?”
“I bet you there ain’t been anyone along this road within the last two weeks.”
Mosquitos buzzed. He waved futile hands at them.
“Look, Mabel,” he pleaded, “you want me to pull this off, don’t you? You ain’t got nothing against a mink coat, have you? You don’t despise no diamonds?”
“No, I guess I don’t,” she admitted. “But you hurry back. I don’t want to be here alone when it’s getting dark.”
He swung around and headed up the hollow.
The place was green—the deep, dead green, the shabby, shapeless green of summer. And quiet—except for the buzzing of mosquitos. And to Doyle’s concrete-and-asphalt mind there was a bit of lurking terror in the green quietness of the wooded hills.
He slapped at mosquitos again and shrugged.
“Ain’t nothing to hurt a man,” he said.
It was rough traveling. The hollow slanted, climbing up between the hills, and the dry creek bed, carpeted with tumbled boulders and bars of gravel, slashed erratically from one bluff-side to the other. Time after time, Doyle had to climb down one bank and climb up the other when the shifting stream bed blocked his way. He tried walking in the dry bed, but that was even worse—he had to dodge around or climb over a dozen boulders every hundred feet.
The mosquitos grew worse as he advanced. He took out his handkerchief and tied it around his neck. He pulled his hat down as far as it would go. He waged energetic war—he killed them by the hundreds, but there was no end to them.
He tried to hurry, but it was no place to hurry. He was dripping wet with perspiration. He wanted to sit down and rest, for he was short of wind, but when he tried to sit the mosquitos swarmed in upon him in hateful, mindless numbers and he had to move again.
The ravine narrowed and twisted and the going became still rougher.
He came around a bend and the way was blocked. A great mass of tangled wood and vines had become wedged between two great trees growing on opposite sides of the steep hillsides.
There was no possibility of getting through the tangle. It stretched for thirty feet or more and was so thickly interlaced that it formed a solid wall, blocking the entire stream bed. It rose for twelve or fifteen feet and behind it rocks and mud and other rubble had been jammed hard against it by the boiling streams of water that had come gushing down the hollow in times of heavy rain.
Clawing with his hands, digging with his feet, Doyle crawled up the hillside to get around one end of the obstruction.
He reached the clump of trees against which one end of it rested and hauled himself among them, bracing himself with aching arms and legs. The mosquitoes came at him in howling squadrons and he broke off a small branch, heavy with leaves, from one of the trees, and used it as a switch to discourage them.
He perched there, panting and sobbing, drawing deep breaths into his lungs. And wondered, momentarily, how he’d ever managed to get himself into such a situation. It was not his dish, he was not cut out for roughing it. His ideas of nature never had extended any further than a well-kept city park.
And here he was, in the depths of nowhere, toiling up outlandish hills, heading for a place where there might be money trees—row on row of money trees.
“I wouldn’t do it,” he told himself, “for nothing less than money.”
He twisted around and examined the tangle of wood and vines and saw, with some astonishment, that it was two feet thick or more and that it carried its thickness uniformly. And the uphill side of it was smooth and slick, almost as if it had been planed and sanded, although there was not a tool mark on it.
He examined it more closely and it was plain to see that it was no haphazard collection of driftwood that had been built up through the years, but that it was woven and interlaced so intricately that it was a single piece—had been a single piece even before it had become wedged between the trees.
Who, he wondered, could have, or would have, done a job like that? Where would the patience have been mustered and the technique and the purpose? He shook his head in wonderment.
He had heard somewhere about Indians weaving brush together to make weirs for catching fish, but there were no fish in this dry stream bed and no Indians for several hundred miles.
He tried to figure out the pattern of the weaving and there was no pattern that he could detect. Everything was twisted and intergrown around everything else and the whole thing was one solid mass.
Somewhat rested and with his wind at least partially restored, he proceeded on his way, trailing a ravaging cloud of mosquitos in his wake.
It seemed now that the trees were thinning and that he could see blue sky ahead. The terrain leveled out a bit and he tried to hurry, but racked leg muscles screamed at him and he contented himself with jogging along as best he could.
He reached more level ground and finally broke free into a clearing that climbed gently to the top of a grassy knoll. Wind came out of the west, no longer held back by the trees, and the mosquitos fell away, except for a small swarm of diehards that went part way up the knoll with him.