Upon the flowing
water the light lay like an immutable sheen, seemingly a part of the
flowing current, an endless stream of molten silver. Fishes, snakes
and nocturnal animals broke and rippled the sheen of the water's
surface. A huge, sharp fin ripping the silver before the tug's bows
told of a tarpon strayed far inland with the tide. An otter's head,
round and hard, jutted up, looked round, dove again.
In the magic light and shading, the tubby lines of the little tug were
softened and altered; its paint-cracked deck and wheelhouse silvered
and mellowed. The twin wire cables stretching back to the tow became
two glistening silver ropes. At their ends, cavernous gloomy and grimy
despite the moonlight, wallowed the high bulky hull of the ditcher's
scow.
To Roger Payne, standing beside White in the little wheelhouse, the
mournful chuckle of the Southern nightingale, as it sounded time after
time from the cavernous darkness of the jungle shore seemed to strike
at him personally with a note of knowing mockery. The weirdness and
the elusiveness of the scene seemed the inevitable ending of the
strange day. On the rippling water the moonbeams twinkled like silvery
fairy sprites at play; and in the junglelike woods on the shores yawned
great caverns of darkness, their evil suggestiveness only heightened by
the bars of light shooting down through the matted leaves.
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