Beyond the first clump of trees he passed the door of a squalid shack where dogs yapped at his heels and a frightened black woman wrapped her skirts about a child that screamed when it saw him. After he had driven the curs away with a stick, he went on more slowly. The morning was growing hot, and a desperate thirst possessed him. He thought of stopping at one of the negro cabins and asking for a drink, but the sight of the unspeakable filth around them decided him against it. After all, he was almost there. He could stand another ten minutes. As he neared the town, the path ran through a dense clump of scrub willows that reached from the levee almost back to the foot of the bluff. Tad prudently slipped into this willow thicket as he drew close to the landing, and squirmed forward till he could command a view of the big dock, the street, and the flatboats beyond. His first glance told him it was lucky he had reconnoitered. For in addition to the handful of negroes who were rolling bales and barrels in the sleepy sunshine, he saw three horses tied to the rail before a corner tavern, and three men with hats pulled low over their faces, lounging in the shadows. One sat on the tavern veranda, watching the street. One patrolled the landing in leisurely fashion. And one stood idly under a tree with his eye on the movements of the flatboatmen. If Murrell was one of them--and Tad thought the tall figure on the landing was he--he had changed horses since daybreak. The famous three-stocking sorrel was not among the mounts at the hitching-rail. All this was a blow to Tad’s hopes. Where he had expected to reach the haven of the _Katy Roby_ in another moment or two, he saw that he might now have to wait for hours. His thirst was becoming almost unbearable. The whole inside of his mouth and his tongue felt parched and swollen. Mosquitoes in myriads came to sing their shrill refrain around his head, and other pests, he knew, would soon discover his hiding-place. At last he could stand the torture of sitting still no longer. He got to his feet, peering through the willow branches. There, not a hundred yards away, he could see Allen standing on the forward deck of the flatboat, smoking his pipe and looking up the town’s main street as if he were waiting for some one. If only he could signal him in some way! But there were the three grim watchers--desperate men, as Tad knew--who would not hesitate to use their pistols with a fifty-thousand-dollar prize in sight. It might cost his friends their lives if he showed himself. He had thought of swimming under the landing, but there would still be a sixty-foot stretch of water to cross under the hawk eyes of that tall man, slouching in the shade of a pile of boxes. Still, he reflected, he could hardly be worse off in the water than dying a slow death by thirst and mosquitoes here.