the bucket was white-knuckled, as if she were clenching it. “Yes,” she went on, softly almost as if talking to herself. “Yes. I might.”
That was all there was to it. In a minute she returned to her scrubbing and I went on back to the camp.
* * *
It was late. I lay on the bedroll near the still faintly glowing remains of the campfire and looked up at the night sky through the openings in the trees. I had been there a long time, sleepless, waiting, and had watched the constellations swing as the hours dragged by, and had strained my ears toward all the night sounds of the swamp. I heard the deep bass garo-o-om, garo-o-om of the bullfrogs out at the edge of the lake and the whippoorwills calling far away in the night and once in a while a faint whisper in the leaves overhead as a small breeze stirred. I rolled over on my side and held my watch out toward the embers of the fire. It was almost midnight.
There hadn’t been any use trying to make myself break camp and go on home that afternoon. I knew I didn’t have any business here, waiting for a man’s wife to come up this way just in the hope of seeing her again, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. I knew it was a foolish and very dangerous thing to do, but I had to see her. Why did her husband let her go swimming around late at night alone in an immense swamp full of old snags and weeds and water moccasins? Did he know it? Or didn’t he care? Who was he, anyway, and why did his face look familiar? Who was she, in fact? She was just as foreign to the swamp as he was. And why had there been that clear and unmistakable but still unnamed tension in the air both times I had been up there? I went around and around with the same old questions, hour after hour, getting no nearer to an answer than I had ever been.
Suddenly I raised myself on an elbow and listened. Was that the sound I had heard, or imagined I had heard, the other night? It came again, a quiet ripple on the water and a rhythmic swishing that could have been an arm swinging forward and sliding into the water, I sat up. I was sure I heard it now, coming from up the lake, between here and the bend.
I got up and walked down to the boat. The surface of the lake was dark and still and powdered with stars, and I could see nothing except the black loom of the tree wall along the other shore. I stood still and then heard her quite plainly. Turning in the direction from which the sound came, I studied the darkness intently, and in a moment I could see the reflected stars heave drunkenly and drown in the broken surface. She was almost abreast of where I was.
“Hello,” I said quietly. I took out a cigarette and lit it, knowing she would see the flame of the match. After the light went out I was totally blind for a moment and couldn’t tell whether she was going on by or not.
Then, suddenly, I heard a splash right in front of me and there she was not ten feet beyond the boat, her head and shoulders out of the water as she stood up.
“Hello,” I said again.
“Mr. Marshall?” she asked. “You’re up late.”
“Yes. I was hoping you might come by.
“Why?” I couldn’t see her face at all, just the white blur of it under the bathing cap.
“I just wanted to talk to you. Why don’t you come ashore and have a cup of coffee with me? I’ve got some made.”
She didn’t answer for a moment. “Well,” she said hesitantly at last, “all right.”
She waded ashore and we went up to the fare. I handed her a towel and she dried her arms and legs while I pushed the coffee bucket up against the embers. I threw a couple of small sticks on the fire, and when they caught and flared up the flames highlighted her face and the lines of her figure.
“Don’t you want to take off the cap?” I asked. She shook her head. “It’s all right.” I was squatting down, poking at the fire, and I looked up at her. “Please do.”