* * * * *

"Well!" said St. Pierre after a long silence. Claude and he were out on the swollen Mississippi pulling with steady leisure for the home-side shore, their skiff pointed half to and half from the boiling current. The sun was gone; a purple dusk wrapped either low bank; a steamboat that had passed up stream was now, at the turning of the bend, only a cluster of soft red lights; Venus began to make a faint silvery pathway across the waters. St. Pierre had the forward seat, at Claude's back. The father looked with fond perplexity at the strong young shoulders swinging silently with his own, forward and backward in slow, monotonous strokes, and said again:

"Well? Whass matter? Look like cat got yo' tongue. Makin' new mash-in?" Then in a low dissatisfied tone—"I reckon somet'in' mighty curious." He repeated the last three words in the Acadian speech: "Tcheuque-chose bien tchurieux."

"Yass," replied the son, "mighty strange. I tell you when we come at home."

He told all. Recounted all his heart's longings, all his dreams, every least pang of self-reproach, the idealization of Marguerite, and the finding of that ideal incarnated in one who was and yet seemed not to be, or rather seemed to be and yet was not, Marguerite. And then he went on to re-assure his father that this could never mean marriage, never mean the father's supplanting. A man could worship what he could never hope to possess. He would rather worship this than win such kind as he would dare woo.

He said all these things in a very quiet way, with now and then a silent pause, and now and then a calm, self-contained tone in resuming; yet his sentences were often disconnected, and often were half soliloquy. Such were the only betrayals of emotion on either side until Claude began to treat—in the words just given—his father's own heart interests; then the father's eyes stood brimming full. But St. Pierre did not speak. From the first he had listened in silence and he offered no interruption until at length Claude came to that part about the object of his regard being so far, so utterly, beyond his reach. Then—

"Stop! Dass all foolishness! You want her? You kin have her!"

"Ah, papa! you dawn't awnstand! What I am?"

"Ah, bah! What anybody is? What she is? She invanted bigger mash-in dan you? a mo' better corn-stubbl' destroyer and plant-corner?" He meant corn-planter. "She invant a more handier doubl'-action pea-vine rake? What she done mak' her so gran'? Naw, sir! She look fine in de face, yass; and dass all you know. Well, dass all right; dass de 'Cajun way—pick 'em out by face. You begin 'Cajun way, for why you dawn't finish 'Cajun way? All you got do, you git good saddle-hoss and ride. Bom-bye you see her, you ride behind her till you find where her daddy livin' at. Den you ride pas' yondah every day till fo', five days, and den you see de ole man come scrape friend wid you. Den he hass you drop round, and fus' t'ing you know—adjieu la calege!"

Claude did not dispute the point, though he hardly thought this case could be worked that way. He returned in silent thought to the question, how to find Madame Beausoleil. He tried the mail; no response. He thought of advertising; but that would never do. Imagine, "If Madame Beausoleil, late of Vermilionville, will leave her address at this office, she will hear of something not in the least to her advantage." He couldn't advertise.

It was midday following the eve of his confession to his father. For the last eleven or twelve days, ever since he had seen that blessed apparition turn with the two young friends into Canal Street out of Bourbon—he had been venturing daily, for luncheon, just down into Bourbon Street, to the Christian Women's Exchange. Now, by all the laws of fortune he should in that time have seen in there at least once or twice a day already, the face he was ever looking for. But he had not; nor did he to-day. He only saw, or thought he saw, the cashier—I should say the cashieress—glance crosswise at him with eyes that seemed to him to say:

"Fool; sneak; whelp; 'Cajun; our private detectives are watching you."

Both rooms and the veranda were full of ladies and gentlemen whose faces he dared not lift his eyes to look into. And yet even in that frame there suddenly came to him one of those happy thoughts that are supposed to be the inspirations of inventive genius. A pleasant little female voice near him said:

"And apartments up-stairs that they rent to ladies only!" And instantly the thought came that Marguerite and her mother might be living there. One more lump of bread, a final gulp of coffee, a short search for the waiter's check, and he stands at the cashieress's desk. She makes change without looking at him or ceasing to tell a small hunchbacked spinster standing by about somebody's wedding. But suddenly she starts.

"Oh! wasn't that right? You gave me four bits, didn't you? And I gave you back two bits and a picayune, and—sir? Does Madame who? Oh! yes. I didn't understand you; I'm a little deaf on this side; scarlet fever when I was a little girl. I'm not the regular cashier, she's gone to attend the wedding of a lady friend. Just wait a moment, please, while I make change for these ladies. Oh, dear! ma'am, is that the smallest you've got? I don't believe I can change that, ma'am. Yes—no—stop! yes, I can! no, I can't! let's see! yes, yes, yes, I can; I've got it; yes, there! I didn't think I had it." She turned again to Claude with sisterly confidence. "Excuse me for keeping you waiting; haven't I met you at the Y. M. C. A. sociable? Well, you must excuse me, but I was sure I had. Of course I didn't if you was never there; but you know in a big city like this you're always meeting somebody that's ne-e-early somebody else that you know—oh! didn't you ask me—oh, yes! Madame Beausoleil! Yes, she lives here, she and her daughter. But she's not in. Oh! I'm sorry. Neither of them is here. She's not in the city; hasn't been for two weeks. They're coming back; we're expecting them every day. She heard of the death of a relative down in Terrebonne somewhere. I wish they would come back; we miss them here; I judge they're relatives of yours, if I don't mistake the resemblance; you seem to take after the daughter; wait a minute."

Some one coming up to pay looked at Claude to see what the daughter was like, and the young man slipped away, outblushing the night sky when the marshes are afire.

The question was settled; settled the wrong way. He hurried on across Canal Street. Marguerite had not been, as he had construed the inaccurate statement, in the city for two weeks. Resemblances need delude him no longer. He went on into Carondelet Street and was drawing near the door and stairway leading to his friend's studio and his own little workroom above it, when suddenly from that very stairway and door issued she whom, alas! he might now no longer mistake for Marguerite, yet who, none the less for lessening hope, held him captive.



CHAPTER XIV.

WHO SHE WAS.

For a moment somewhat more than her profile shone upon Claude's bewildered gaze.

"I shall see her eye to eye at last!" shouted his heart within: but the next moment she turned away, and with two companions who came across the same threshold, moved up the street, and, at the nearest corner, vanished. Her companions were the American lady and the artist. Claude wheeled, and hurried to pass around the square in the opposite direction, and, as he reached the middle of its third side, saw the artist hand them into the street-car, lift his hat, and return towards the studio. The two men met at the foot of the stairs. The Spaniard's countenance betrayed a restrained elation.

"You goin' see a picture now," he said, in a modestly triumphant tone. "Come in," he added, as Claude would have passed the studio door.

They went in together. The Spaniard talked; Claude scarcely spoke. I cannot repeat the conversation literally, but the facts are these: A few evenings before, the artist had been one of the guests at a musical party given by a lady whose name he did not mention. He happened—he modestly believed it accidental—to be seated beside the hostess, when a young lady—"jung Creole la-thy," he called her—who was spending a few days with her, played the violin. The Spaniard's delicate propriety left her also nameless; but he explained that, as he understood, she was from the Teche. She played charmingly—"for an amateur," he qualified: but what had struck him more than the music was her beauty, her figure, her picturesque grace. And when he confessed his delight in these, his hostess, seemingly on the inspiration of the moment, said:

"Paint her picture! Paint her just so! I'll give you the order. Not a mere portrait—a picture." And he had agreed, and the "jung" lady had consented. The two had but just now left the studio. To-morrow a servant would bring violin, music-rack, etc.; the ladies would follow, and then—

"You hear music, anyhow," said the artist. That was his gentle way of intimating that Claude was not invited to be a looker-on.

On the next day, Claude, in his nook above, with the studio below shut from view by the curtain of his inner window, heard the ladies come. He knows they are these two, for one voice, the elder, blooms out at once in a gay abundance of words, and the other speaks in soft, low tones that, before they reach his ear, run indistinguishably together.

Soon there comes the sound of tuning the violin, while the older voice is still heard praising one thing and another, and asking careless questions.

"I suppose that cotton cloth covers something that is to have a public unveiling some day, doesn't it?"

Claude cannot hear the answer; the painter drops his voice even below its usual quiet tone. But Claude knows what he must be saying; that the cloth covers merely a portrait he is finishing of a young man who has sat for it to please a wifeless, and, but for him, childless, and fondly devoted father. And now he can tell by the masculine step, and the lady's one or two lively words, that the artist has drawn away the covering from his (Claude's) own portrait. But the lady's young companion goes on tuning her instrument—"tink, tink, tink;" and now the bow is drawn.

"Why, how singular!" exclaims the elder lady. "Why, my dear, come here and see! Somebody has got your eyes! Why, he's got your whole state of mind, a reduplication of it. And—I declare, he looks almost as good as you do! If—I"—

The voice stops short. There is a moment's silence in which the unseen hearer doubts not the artist is making signs that yonder window and curtain are all that hide the picture's original, and the voice says again,—

"I wish you'd paint my picture," and the violin sounds once more its experimental notes.

But there are other things which Claude can neither hear, nor see, nor guess. He cannot see that the elder lady is already wondering at, and guardedly watching, an agitation betrayed by the younger in a tremor of the hand that fumbles with her music-sheets and music-stand, in the foot that trembles on the floor, in the reddened cheek, and in the bitten lip. He may guess that the painter sits at his easel with kindling eye; but he cannot guess that just as the elder lady is about to say,—

"My dear, if you don't feel"—the tremor vanishes, the lips gently set, and only the color remains. But he hears the first soft moan of the tense string under the bow, and a second, and another; and then, as he rests his elbows upon the table before him, and covers his face in his trembling hands, it seems to him as if his own lost heart had entered into that vibrant medium, and is pouring thence to heaven and her ear its prayer of love.

Paint, artist, paint! Let your brushes fly! None can promise you she shall ever look quite like this again. Catch the lines,—the waving masses and dark coils of that loose-bound hair; the poise of head and neck; the eloquent sway of the form; the folds of garments that no longer hide, but are illumined by, the plenitude of an inner life and grace; the elastic feet; the ethereal energy and discipline of arms and shoulders; the supple wrists; the very fingers quivering on the strings; the rapt face, and the love-inspired eyes.

Claude, Claude! when every bird in forest and field knows the call of its mate, can you not guess the meaning of those strings? Must she open those sealed lips and call your very name—she who would rather die than call it?

He does not understand. Yet, without understanding, he answers. He rises from his seat; he moves to the window; he will not tiptoe or peep; he will be bold and bad. Brazenly he lifts the curtain and looks down; and one, one only—not the artist and not the patroness of art, but that one who would not lift her eyes to that window for all the world's wealth—knows he is standing there, listening and looking down. He counts himself all unseen, yet presently shame drops the curtain. He turns away, yet stands hearkening. The music is about to end. The last note trembles on the air. There is silence. Then someone moves from a chair, and then the single cry of admiration and delight from the player's companion is the player's name,—

"Marguerite Beausoleil!"

Hours afterward there sat Claude in the seat where he had sunk down when he heard that name. The artist's visitors had made a long stay, but at length they were gone. And now Claude, too, rose to go out. His steps were heard below, and presently the painter's voice called persuadingly up:—

"St. Pierre! St. Pierre! Come, see."

They stood side by side before the new work. Claude gazed in silence. At length he said, still gazing:

"I'll buy it when 'tis finish'."

But the artist explained again that it was being painted for Marguerite's friend.

"For what she want it?" demanded Claude. The Spaniard smiled and intimated that the lady probably thought he could paint. "But at any rate," he went on to say, "she seemed to have a hearty affection for the girl herself, whom," he said, "she had described as being as good as she looked." Claude turned and went slowly out.

When at sunset he stood under the honey-locust tree on the levee where he was wont to find his father waiting for him, he found himself alone. But within speaking distance he saw St. Pierre's skiff just being drawn ashore by a ragged negro, who presently turned and came to him, half-lifting the wretched hat that slouched about his dark brows, and smiling.

"Sim like you done fo'got me," he said. "Don't you 'member how I use' live at Belle Alliance? Yes, seh. I's de one what show Bonaventure de road to Gran' Point'. Yes, seh. But I done lef' dah since Mistoo Wallis sole de place. Yes, seh. An' when I meet up wid you papa you nevva see a nigger so glad like I was. No, seh. An' likewise you papa. Yes, seh. An' he ass me is I want to wuck fo' him, an' I see he needin' he'p, an' so I tu'n in an' he'p him. Oh, yes, seh! dass mo' 'n a week, now, since I been wuckin' fo' you papa."

They got into the skiff and pushed off, the negro alone at the oars.

"Pow'ful strong current on udder side," he said, pulling quietly up-stream to offset the loss of way he must make presently in crossing the rapid flood. "Mistoo Claude, I see a gen'leman dis day noon what I ain't see' befo' since 'bout six year' an' mo'. I disremember his name, but——"

"Tarbox?" asked Claude with sudden interest.

"Yes, seh. Dass it! Tah-bawx. Sim like any man ought to 'member dat name. Him an' you papa done gone down de canal. Yes, seh; in a pirogue. He come in a big hurry an' say how dey got a big crevasse up de river on dat side, an' he want make you papa see one man what livin' on Lac Cataouache. Yes, seh. An you papa say you fine you supper in de pot. An' Mistoo Tah-bawx he say he want you teck one hoss an' ride up till de crevasse an' you fine one frien' of yose yondah, one ingineer; an' he say—Mistoo Tah-bawx—how he 'low to meet up wid you at you papa' house to-morrow daylight. Yes, seh; Mistoo Tah-bawx; yes, seh."



CHAPTER XV.

CAN THEY CLOSE THE BREAK?

The towering cypresses of the far, southern swamps have a great width of base, from which they narrow so rapidly in the first seven or eight feet of their height, and thence upward taper so gradually, that it is almost or quite impossible for an axe-man, standing at their roots, to chop through the great flare that he finds abreast of him, and bring the trees down. But when the swamps are deep in water, the swamper may paddle up to these trees, whose narrowed waists are now within the swing of his axe, and standing up in his canoe, by a marvel of balancing skill, cut and cut, until at length his watchful, up-glancing eye sees the forest giant bow his head. Then a shove, a few backward sweeps of the paddle, and the canoe glides aside, and the great trunk falls, smiting the smooth surface of the water with a roar that, miles away, reaches the ear like the thunder of artillery. The tree falls: but if the woodsman has not known how to judge and choose wisely when the inner wood is laid bare under the first big chip that flies, there are many chances that the fallen tree will instantly sink to the bottom of the water, and cannot be rafted out. One must know his craft, even in Louisiana swamps. "Knowledge is power."

When Zosephine and Mr. Tarbox finished out that Sunday twilight walk, they talked, after leaving the stile behind, only on business. He told her of having lately been, with a certain expert, in the swamps of Barataria, where he had seen some noble cypress forests tantalizingly near to navigation and market, but practically a great way off, because the levees of the great sugar estates on the Mississippi River shut out all deep overflows. Hence these forests could be bought for, seemingly, a mere tithe of their value. Now, he proposed to buy such a stretch of them along the edge of the shaking prairie north of Lake Cataouache as would show on his part, he said, "caution, but not temerity."

He invited her to participate. "And why?" For the simple reason that the expert, and engineer, had dropped the remark that, in his opinion, a certain levee could not possibly hold out against the high water of more than two or three more years, and that when it should break it would spread, from three to nine feet of water, over hundreds of square miles of swamp forests, prairies tremblantes, and rice and sugar fields, and many leagues of railway. Zosephine had consented; and though Mr. Tarbox had soon after gone upon his commercial travels, he had effected the purchase by correspondence, little thinking that the first news he should hear on returning to New Orleans would be that the remotely anticipated "break" had just occurred.

And now, could and would the breach be closed, or must all Barataria soon be turned into, and remain for months, a navigable yellow sea? This, Claude knew, was what he must hasten to the crevasse to discover, and return as promptly to report upon, let his heart-strings draw as they might towards the studio in Carondelet Street and the Christian Women's Exchange.



CHAPTER XVI.

THE OUTLAW AND THE FLOOD.

What suffering it costs to be a coward! Some days before the crevasse occurred, he whom we know as the pot-hunter stood again on the platform of that same little railway station whence we once saw him vanish at sight of Bonaventure Deschamps. He had never ventured there since, until now. But there was a new station agent.

His Indian squaw was dead. A rattlesnake had given her its fatal sting, and the outcast, dreading all men and the coroner not the least, had, silently and alone, buried her on the prairie.

The train rolled up to the station again as before. Claude's friend, the surveyor, stepped off with a cigar in his mouth, to enjoy in the train's momentary stay the delightful air that came across the open prairie. The pot-hunter, who had got rid of his game, ventured near his former patron. It might be the engineer could give him work whereby to earn a day's ready money. He was not disappointed. The engineer told him to come in a day or two, by the waterways the pot-hunter knew so well, across the swamps and prairies to Bayou Terrebonne and the little court-house town of Houma. And then he added:

"I heard this morning that somebody had been buying the swamp land all around you out on Lake Cataouache. Is it so?"

The Acadian looked vacant and shook his head.

"Yes," said the other, "a Madame Beausoleil, or somebod—What's the matter?"

"All aboard!" cried the train conductor.

"The fellow turned pale," said the surveyor, as he resumed his seat in the smoking-car and the landscape began again to whirl by.

The pot-hunter stood for a moment, and then slowly, as if he stole away from some sleeping enemy, left the place. Alarm went with him like an attendant ghost. A thousand times that day, in the dark swamp, on the wide prairie, or under his rush-thatch on the lake-side, he tortured himself with one question: Why had she—Zosephine—reached away out from Carancro to buy the uncultivable and primeval wilderness round about his lonely hiding-place? Hour after hour the inexplicable problem seemed to draw near and nearer to him, a widening, tightening, dreamlike terror, that, as it came, silently pointed its finger of death at him. He was glad enough to leave his cabin next day in his small, swift pirogue—shot-gun, axe, and rifle his only companions—for Terrebonne.

It chanced to be noon of the day following, when he glided up the sunny Terrebonne towards the parish seat. The shores of the stream have many beauties, but the Acadian's eyes were alert to any thing but them. The deep green, waxen-leaved casino hedges; the hedges of Cherokee rose, and sometimes of rose and casino mingled; the fields of corn and sugar-cane; the quaint, railed, floating bridges lying across the lazy bayou; the orange-groves of aged, giant trees, their dark green boughs grown all to a tangle with well-nigh the density of a hedge, and their venerable trunks hairy with green-gray lichens; the orange-trees again in the door-yards, with neat pirogues set upon racks under their deep shade; the indescribable floods of sunlight and caverns of shadow; the clear, brown depths beneath his own canoe; or, at the bottom, the dark, waving, green-brown tresses of water-weeds,—these were naught to him.

But the human presence was much; and once, when just ahead of him he espied a young, sunbonneted woman crouching in the pouring sunshine beyond the sod of the bayou's bank, itself but a few inches above the level of the stream, on a little pier of one plank pushed out among the flags and reeds, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle, he stopped the dip of his canoe-paddle, and gazed with growing trepidation and slackening speed. At the outer end of the plank, the habitual dip of the bucket had driven aside the water-lilies, and made a round, glassy space that reflected all but perfectly to him her busy, young, downcast visage.

"How like"—Just then she lifted her head. He started as though his boat had struck a snag. How like—how terribly like to that young Zosephine whose ill-concealed scorn he had so often felt in days—in years—long gone, at Carancro! This was not, and could not be, the same—lacked half the necessary years; and yet, in the joy of his relief, he answered her bow with a question, "Whose was yonder house?"

She replied in the same Acadian French in which she was questioned, that there dwelt, or had dwelt, and about two weeks ago had died, "Monsieur Robichaux." The pot-hunter's paddle dipped again, his canoe shot on, and two hours later he walked with dust-covered feet into Houma.

The principal tavern there stands on that corner of the court-house square to which the swamper would naturally come first. Here he was to find the engineer. But, as with slow, diffident step he set one foot upon the corner of the threshold, there passed quickly by him and out towards the court-house, two persons,—one a man of a county court-room look and with a handful of documents, and the other a woman whom he knew at a glance. Her skirts swept his ankles as he shrank in sudden and abject terror against the wall, yet she did not see him.

He turned and retreated the way he had come, nothing doubting that only by the virtue of a voodoo charm which he carried in his pocket he had escaped, for the time being, a plot laid for his capture. For the small, neatly-robed form that you may still see disappearing within the court-house door beside the limping figure of the probate clerk is Zosephine Beausoleil. She will finish the last pressing matter of the Robichaux succession now in an hour or so, and be off on the little branch railway, whose terminus is here, for New Orleans.

When the pot-hunter approached Lake Cataouache again, he made on foot, under cover of rushes and reeds taller than he, a wide circuit and reconnoissance of his hut. While still a long way off, he saw, lighted by the sunset rays, what he quickly recognized as a canoe drawn half out of the water almost at his door. He warily drew nearer. Presently he stopped, and stood slowly and softly shifting his footing about on the oozy soil, at a little point of shore only some fifty yards away from his cabin. His eyes, peering from the ambush, descried a man standing by the pirogue and searching with his gaze the wide distances that would soon be hidden in the abrupt fall of the southern night.

The pot-hunter knew him. Not by name, but by face. The day the outlaw saw Bonaventure at the little railway station this man was with him. The name the pot-hunter did not know was St. Pierre.

The ambushed man shrank a step backward into his hiding-place. His rifle was in his hand and he noiselessly cocked it. He had not resolved to shoot; but a rifle is of no use until it is cocked. While he so stood, another man came into view and to the first one's side. This one, too, he knew, despite the soft hat that had taken the place of the silk one; for this was Tarbox. The Acadian was confirmed in his conviction that the surveyor's invitation for him to come to Houma was part of a plot to entrap him.

While he still looked the two men got into the canoe and St. Pierre paddled swiftly away. The pot-hunter let down the hammer of his gun, shrank away again, turned and hurried through the tangle, regained his canoe, and paddled off. The men's departure from the cabin was, in his belief, a ruse. But he knew how by circuits and short cuts to follow after them unseen, and this he did until he became convinced that they were fairly in the Company Canal and gliding up its dark colonnade in the direction whence they had evidently come. Then he returned to his cabin and with rifle cocked and with slow, stealthy step entered it, and in headlong haste began to prepare to leave it for a long hiding-out.

He knew every spot of land and water for leagues around, as a bear or a fox would know the region about his den. He had in mind now a bit of dry ground scarce fifty feet long or wide, deeply hidden in the swamp to the north of this lake. How it had ever happened that this dry spot, lifted two or three feet above the low level around it, had been made, whether by some dumb force of nature or by the hand of men yet more untamable than he, had never crossed his thought. It was beyond measure of more value to him to know, by what he had seen growing on it season after season, that for many a long year no waters had overflowed it. In the lake, close to his hut, lay moored his small centerboard lugger, and into this he presently threw his few appliances and supplies, spread sail, and skimmed away, with his pirogue towing after.

His loaded rifle lay within instant reach. By choice he would not have harmed any living creature that men call it wrong to injure; but to save himself, not only from death, but from any risk of death, rightful or wrongful, he would, not through courage, but in the desperation of frantic cowardice, have killed a hundred men, one by one.

By this time it was night; and when first the lugger and, after it was hidden away, the pirogue, had carried him up a slender bayou as near as they could to the point he wished to reach, he had still to drag the loaded pirogue no small distance through the dark, often wet and almost impenetrable woods. He had taken little rest and less sleep in his late journeyings, and when at length he cast himself down before his fire of dead fagots on the raised spot he had chosen, he slept heavily. He felt safe from man's world, at least for the night.

Only one thing gave him concern as he lay down. It was the fact that when, with the old woods-habit strong on him, he had approached his selected camping ground, with such wariness of movement as the dragging pirogue would allow, he had got quite in sight of it before a number of deer on it bounded away. He felt an unpleasant wonder to know what their unwilling boldness might signify.

He did not awake to replenish his fire until there were only a few live embers shining dimly at his feet. He rose to a sitting posture; and in that same moment there came a confusion of sound—a trampling through bushes—that froze his blood, and robbed his open throat of power to cry. The next instant he knew it was but those same deer. But the first intelligent thought brought a new fear. These most timid of creatures had made but a few leaps and stopped. He knew what that meant! As he leaped to his feet the deer started again, and he heard, to his horror,—where the ground had been dry and caked when he lay down,—the plash of their feet in water.

Trembling, he drew his boots on, made and lighted a torch, and in a moment was dragging his canoe after him in the direction of the lugger. Presently his steps, too, were plashing. He stooped, waved the torch low across the water's surface, and followed the gleam with his scrutiny. But he did so not for any doubt that he would see, as he did, the yellow flood of the Mississippi. He believed, as he believed his existence, that his pursuers had let the river in upon the swamp, ruin whom they might, to drive him from cover.

Presently he stepped into the canoe, cast his torch into the water, took his paddle, and glided unerringly through a darkness and a wild tangle of undergrowth, large and small, where you or I could not have gone ten yards without being lost. He emerged successfully from the forest into the open prairie, and, under a sky whose stars told him it would soon be day, glided on down the little bayou lane, between walls of lofty rushes, up which he had come in the evening, and presently found the lugger as he had left her, with her light mast down, hidden among the brake canes that masked a little cove.

The waters were already in the prairie. As he boarded the little vessel at the stern, a raccoon waddled in noiseless haste over the bow, and splashed into the wet covert of reeds beyond. If only to keep from sharing his quarters with all the refuge-hunting vermin of the noisome wilderness, the one human must move on. He turned the lugger's prow towards the lake, and spread her sails to the faint, cool breeze. But when day broke, the sail was gone.

Far and wide lay the pale green leagues of reeds and bulrushes, with only here and there a low willow or two beside some unseen lagoon, or a sinuous band of darker green, where round rushes and myrtle bushes followed the shore of some hidden bayou. The waters of the lake were gleaming and crinkling in tints of lilac and silver stolen from the air; and away to the right, and yet farther to the left, stood the dark phalanxes of cypress woods.

Thus had a thousand mornings risen on the scene in the sight of the outlaw. Numberless birds fluttered from place to place, snatching their prey, carolling, feeding their young, chattering, croaking, warbling, and swinging on the bending rush. But if you looked again, strange signs of nature's mute anguish began to show. On every log or bit of smaller drift that rain-swollen bayous had ever brought from the forest and thrown upon their banks some wild tenant of the jungle, hare or weasel, cat, otter, or raccoon, had taken refuge, sometimes alone, but oftener sharing it, in common misery and silent truce, with deadly foes. For under all that expanse of green beauty, the water, always abundant, was no longer here and there, but everywhere.

See yonder reed but a few yards away. What singular dark enlargement of stem is that near its top, that curious spiral growth?—growth! It is a great serpent that has climbed and twined himself there, and is holding on for the life he loves as we love ours. And see! On a reed near by him, another; and a little farther off, another; and another—and another! Where were our eyes until now? The surface of the vast brake, as far as one can see such small things, is dotted with like horrid burdens. And somewhere in this wild desolation, in this green prospect of a million deaths waiting in silence alike for harmful and harmless creatures, one man is hiding from all mankind.



CHAPTER XVII.

WELL HIDDEN.

Of all the teeming multitudes of the human world, the pot-hunter knows not one soul who is on his side; not one whom he dare let see his face or come between him and a hiding-place. The water is rising fast. He dare not guess how high it will come; but rise as it may, linger at its height as it may, he will not be driven out. In his belief a hundred men are ready, at every possible point where his foot could overstep the line of this vast inundation, to seize him and drag him to the gallows. Ah, the gallows! Not being dead—not God's anger—not eternal burnings; but simply facing death! The gallows! The tree above his head—the rope around his neck—the signal about to be spoken—the one wild moment after it! These keep him here.

He has taken down sail and mast. The rushes are twelve feet high. They hide him well. With oars, mast, and the like, he has contrived something by which he can look out over their tops. He has powder and shot, coffee, salt, and rice; he will not be driven out! At night he spreads his sail and seeks the open waters of the lake, where he can sleep, by littles, without being overrun by serpents; but when day breaks, there is no visible sign of his presence. Yet he is where he can see his cabin. It is now deep in the water, and the flood is still rising. He is quite sure no one has entered it since he left it. But—the strain of perpetual watching!

When at dawn of the fifth day he again looked for cover in the prairie, the water was too high to allow him concealment, and he sought the screen of some willows that fringed the edge of the swamp forest, anchoring in a few rods' width of open water between them and the woods. He did not fear to make, on the small hearth of mud and ashes he had improvised in his lugger, the meagre fire needed to prepare his food. Its slender smoke quickly mingled with the hazy vapors and shadows of the swamp. As he cast his eye abroad, he found nowhere any sign of human approach. Here and there the tops of the round rushes still stood three feet above the water, but their slender needles were scarcely noticeable. Far and near, over prairie as over lake, lay the unbroken yellow flood. There was no flutter of wings, no whistle of feathered mate to mate, no call of nestlings from the ruined nests. Except the hawk and vulture, the birds were gone. Untold thousands of dumb creatures had clung to life for a time, but now were devoured by birds of prey and by alligators, or were drowned. Thousands still lived on. Behind him in the swamp the wood-birds remained, the gray squirrel still barked and leaped from tree to tree, the raccoon came down to fish, the plundering owl still hid himself through the bright hours, and the chilled snake curled close in the warm folds of the hanging moss. Nine feet of water below. In earlier days, to the northward through the forest, many old timbers rejected in railway construction or repair, with dead logs and limbs, had been drifted together by heavy rains, and had gathered a covering of soil; canebrake, luxurious willow-bushes, and tough grasses had sprung up on them and bound them with their roots. These floating islands the flood, now covering the dense underbrush of the swamp, lifted on its free surface, and, in its slow creep southward, bore through the pillared arcades of the cypress wood and out over the submerged prairies. Many a cowering deer in those last few days that had made some one of these green fragments of the drowned land a haven of despair, the human castaway left unharmed.

Of all sentient creatures in that deluge he was suffering most. He was gaunt and haggard with watching. The thought of pursuit bursting suddenly around him now fastened permanently upon his imagination. He feared to sleep. From the direction of the open water surprise seemed impossible; but from the forest! what instant might it not ring with the whoop of discovery, the many-voiced halting challenge, and the glint of loaded Winchester? And another fear had come. Many a man not a coward, and as used to the sight of serpents as this man, has never been able to be other than a coward concerning them. The pot-hunter held them in terror. It was from fear of them that he had lighted his torch the night of his bivouac in the swamp. Only a knowledge of their ordinary haunts and habits and the art of avoiding them had made the swamp and prairie life bearable. Now all was changed. They were driven from their dens. In the forest one dared not stretch forth the hand to lay it upon any tangible thing until a searching glance had failed to find the glittering eye and forked tongue that meant "Beware!" In the flooded prairie the willow-trees were loaded with the knotted folds of the moccasin, the rattlesnake, and I know not how many other sorts of deadly or only loathsome serpents. Some little creatures at the bottom of the water, feeding on the soft white part of the round rush near its root, every now and then cut a stem free from its base, and let it spring to the surface and float away. Often a snake had wrapped himself about the end above the water, and when this refuge gave way and drifted abroad he would cling for a time, until some less forlorn hope came in sight, and then swim for it. Thus scarce a minute of the day passed, it seemed, but one, two, or three of these creatures, making for their fellow-castaway's boat, were turned away by nervous waving of arms. The nights had proved that they could not climb the lugger's side, and when he was in her the canoe was laid athwart her gunwales; but at night he had to drop the bit of old iron that served for an anchor, and the very first night a large moccasin—not of the dusky kind described in books, but of that yet deadlier black sort, an ell in length, which the swampers call the Congo—came up the anchor-rope. The castaway killed it with an oar; but after that who would have slept?

About sunset of the fifth day, though it was bright and beautiful, the hunter's cunning detected the first subtle signs of a coming storm. He looked about him to see what provision was needed to meet and weather its onset. On the swamp side the loftiest cypresses, should the wind bring any of them down, would not more than cast the spray of their fall as far as his anchorage. The mass of willows on the prairie side was nearer, but its trees stood low,—already here and there the branches touched the water; the hurricane might tear away some boughs, but could do no more. He shortened the anchor-rope, and tried the hold of the anchor on the bottom to make sure the lugger might not swing into the willows, for in every fork of every bough was a huge dark mass of serpents plaited and piled one upon another, and ready at any moment to glide apart towards any new shelter that might be reached.

While eye and hand were thus engaged, the hunter's ear was attentive to sounds that he had been hearing for more than an hour. These were the puff of 'scape-pipes and plash of a paddle-wheel, evidently from a small steamer in the Company Canal. She was coming down it; that is, from the direction of the river and the city.

Whither was she bound? To some one of the hundred or more plantations and plantation homes that the far-reaching crevasse had desolated? Likely enough. In such event she would not come into view, although for some time now he had seen faint shreds of smoke in the sky over a distant line of woods. But it filled him with inward tremors to know that if she chose to leave the usual haunts of navigation on her left, and steam out over the submerged prairies and the lake, and into the very shadow of these cypresses, she could do it without fear of a snag or a shallow. He watched anxiously as the faint smoke reached a certain point. If the next thin curl should rise farther on, it would mean safety. But when it came it seemed to be in the same place as the last; and another the same, and yet another the same: she was making almost a straight line for the spot where he stood. Only a small low point of forest broke the line, and presently, far away, she slowly came out from behind it.



CHAPTER XVIII.

THE TORNADO.

The Acadian stooped at once and with a quick splash launched his canoe. A minute later he was in it, gliding along and just within the edge of the forest where it swept around nearly at right angles to the direction in which the steamboat was coming. Thus he could watch the approaching steamer unseen, while every moment putting distance between himself and the lugger.

The strange visitor came on. How many men there were on her lower deck! Were they really negroes, or had they blackened their faces, as men sometimes do when they are going to hang a poor devil in the woods? On the upper deck are two others whose faces do not seem to be blackened. But a moment later they are the most fearful sight of all; for only too plainly does the fugitive see that they are the same two men who stood before the doorway of his hut six days before. And see how many canoes on the lower deck!

While the steamer is yet half a mile away from the hidden lugger, her lamps and fires and their attendant images in the water beneath glow softly in the fast deepening twilight, and the night comes swiftly down. The air is motionless. Across the silent waste an engine bell jangles; the puff of steam ceases; the one plashing paddle-wheel at the stern is still; the lights glide more and more slowly; with a great crash and rumble, that is answered by the echoing woods, the anchor-chain runs out its short measure, and the steamer stops.

Gently the pot-hunter's paddle dipped again, and the pirogue moved back towards the lugger. It may be that the flood was at last numbing his fear, as it had so soon done that of all the brute-life around him; it was in his mind to do something calling for more courage than he had ever before commanded in his life, save on that one day in Carancro, when, stung to madness by the taunts of a brave man, and driven to the wall, he had grappled and slain his tormentor. He had the thought now to return, and under cover of the swamp's deep outer margin of shadow, silently lift into the canoe the bit of iron that anchored the lugger, and as noiselessly draw her miles away to another covert; or if the storm still held back, even at length to step the mast, spread the sail, and put the horizon between him and the steamer before daybreak. This he had now started to do, and would do, if only courage would hold on and the storm hold off.

For a time his canoe moved swiftly; but as he drew near the lugger his speed grew less and less, and eye and ear watched and hearkened with their intensest might. He could hear talking on the steamer. There was a dead calm. He had come to a spot just inside the wood, abreast of the lugger. His canoe slowly turned and pointed towards her, and then stood still. He sat there with his paddle in the water, longing like a dumb brute; longing, and, without a motion, struggling for courage enough to move forward. It would not come. His heart jarred his frame with its beating. He could not stir.

As he looked out upon the sky a soft, faint tremor of light glimmered for a moment over it, without disturbing a shadow below. The paddle stirred gently, and the canoe slowly drew back; the storm was coming to betray him with its lightnings. In the black forest's edge the pot-hunter lingered trembling. Oh for the nerve to take a brave man's chances! A little courage would have saved his life. He wiped the dew from his brow with his sleeve; every nerve had let go. Again there came across the water the very words of those who talked together on the steamer. They were saying that the felling of trees would begin in the morning; but they spoke in a tongue which Acadians of late years had learned to understand, though many hated it, but of which he had never known twenty words, and what he had known were now forgotten—the English tongue. Even without courage, to have known a little English would have made the difference between life and death. Another glimmer spread dimly across the sky, and a faint murmur of far-off thunder came to the ear. He turned the pirogue and fled.

Soon the stars are hidden. A light breeze seems rather to tremble and hang poised than to blow. The rolling clouds, the dark wilderness, and the watery waste shine out every moment in the wide gleam of lightnings still hidden by the wood, and are wrapped again in ever-thickening darkness over which thunders roll and jar, and answer one another across the sky. Then, like a charge of ten thousand lancers, come the wind and the rain, their onset covered by all the artillery of heaven. The lightnings leap, hiss, and blaze; the thunders crack and roar; the rain lashes; the waters writhe; the wind smites and howls. For five, for ten, for twenty minutes,—for an hour, for two hours,—the sky and the flood are never for an instant wholly dark, or the thunder for one moment silent; but while the universal roar sinks and swells, and the wide, vibrant illumination shows all things in ghostly half-concealment, fresh floods of lightning every moment rend the dim curtain and leap forth; the glare of day falls upon the swaying wood, the reeling, bowing, tossing willows, the seething waters, the whirling rain, and in the midst the small form of the distressed steamer, her revolving paddle-wheels toiling behind to lighten the strain upon her anchor-chains; then all are dim ghosts again, while a peal, as if the heavens were rent, rolls off around the sky, comes back in shocks and throbs, and sinks in a long roar that before it can die is swallowed up in the next flash and peal.

The deserted lugger is riding out the tornado. Whirled one moment this way and another that, now and again taking in water, her forest-shelter breaks the force of many a gust that would have destroyed her out in the open. But in the height of the storm her poor substitute for an anchor lets go its defective hold on the rushy bottom and drags, and the little vessel backs, backs, into the willows. She escapes such entanglement as would capsize her, and by and by, when the wind lulls for a moment and then comes with all its wrath from the opposite direction, she swings clear again and drags back nearly to her first mooring and lies there, swinging, tossing, and surviving still,—a den of snakes.

The tempest was still fierce, though abating, and the lightning still flashed, but less constantly, when at a point near the lugger the pirogue came out of the forest, laboring against the wind and half-filled with water. On the face of the storm-beaten man in it each gleam of the lightning showed the pallid confession of mortal terror. Where that frail shell had been, or how often it had cast its occupant out, no one can ever know. He was bareheaded and barefooted. One cannot swim in boots; without them, even one who has never dared learn how may hope to swim a little.

In the darkness he drew alongside the lugger, rose, balanced skilfully, seized his moment, and stepped safely across her gunwale. A slight lurch caused him to throw his arms out to regain his poise; the line by which he still held the canoe straightened out its length and slipped from his grasp. In an instant the pirogue was gone. A glimmer of lightning showed her driving off sidewise before the wind. But it revealed another sight also. It was dark again, black; but the outcast stood freezing with horror and fright, gazing just in advance of his feet and waiting for the next gleam. It came, brighter than the last; and scarcely a step before him he saw three great serpents moving towards the spot that gave him already such slender footing. He recoiled a step—another; but instantly as he made the second a cold, living form was under his foot, its folds flew round his ankle, and once! twice! it struck! With a frantic effort he spurned it from him; all in the same instant a blaze of lightning discovered the maimed form and black and red markings of a "bastard hornsnake," and with one piercing wail of despair, that was drowned in the shriek of the wind and roar of the thunder, he fell.

A few hours later the winds were still, the stars were out, a sweet silence had fallen upon water and wood, and from her deck the watchmen on the steamer could see in the north-eastern sky a broad, soft, illumination, and knew it was the lights of slumbering New Orleans, eighteen miles away.

By and by, farther to the east, another brightness began to grow and gather this light into its outstretched wings. In the nearest wood a soft twitter came from a single tiny bird. Another voice answered it. A different note came from a third quarter; there were three or four replies; the sky turned to blue, and began to flush; a mocking-bird flew out of the woods on her earliest quest for family provision; a thrush began to sing; and in a moment more the whole forest was one choir.

What wonderful purity was in the fragrant air; what color was on the calm waters and in the deep sky; how beautiful, how gentle was Nature after her transport of passion! Shall we ever subdue her and make her always submissive and compliant? Who knows? Who knows what man may do with her when once he has got self, the universal self, under perfect mastery? See yonder huge bull-alligator swimming hitherward out of the swamp. Even as you point he turns again in alarm and is gone. Once he was man's terror, Leviathan. The very lions of Africa and the grizzlies of the Rockies, so they tell us, are no longer the bold enemies of man they once were. "Subdue the earth"—it is being done. Science and art, commerce and exploration, are but parts of religion. Help us, brothers all, with every possible discovery and invention to complete the conquest begun in that lost garden whence man and woman first came forth, not for vengeance but for love, to bruise the serpent's head. But as yet, both within us and without us, what terrible revolts doth Nature make! what awful victories doth she have over us, and then turn and bless and serve us again!

As the sun was rising, one of the timber-cutters from the steamer stood up in his canoe about half a mile away, near the wood and beside some willows, and halloed and beckoned. And when those on the steamer hearkened he called again, bidding them tell "de boss" that he had found a canoe adrift, an anchored boat, and a white man in her, dead.

Tarbox and St. Pierre came in a skiff.

"Is he drowned?" asked Mr. Tarbox, while still some distance off.

"Been struck by lightnin' sim like," replied the negro who had found the body.—"Watch out, Mistoo Tah-bawx!" he added, as the skiff drew near; "dat boat dess lousy wid snake'!"

Tarbox stood up in the skiff and looked sadly upon the dead face. "It's our man," he said to St. Pierre.

"Dass what I say!" exclaimed the negro. "Yes, seh, so soon I see him I say, mos' sholy dass de same man what Mistoo Tah-bawx lookin' faw to show him 'roun' 'bout de swamp! Yes, seh, not-instandin' I never see him befo'! No, seh.—Lawd! look yondeh! look dat big bahsta'd hawn-snake! He kyant git away: he's hu't! Lawd! dass what kill dat man! Dat man trawmp on him in de dark, and he strack him wid his hawny tail! Look at dem fo' li'l' spot' on de man' foot! Now, Mistoo Tah-bawx! You been talk' 'bout dem ah bahsta'd hawn-snake not pizen! Well, mos' sholy dey bite ain't pizen; but if dat hawn on de een of his tail dess on'y tetch you, you' gone! Look at dat man! Kill' him so quick dey wa'n't time for de place to swell whah he was hit!" But Tarbox quietly pointed out to St. Pierre that the tiny wounds were made by the reptile's teeth.

"The coroner's verdict will probably be 'privation and exposure,'" said he softly; "but it ought to be, 'killed by fright and the bite of a harmless snake.'"

On his murmured suggestion, St. Pierre gave orders that, with one exception, every woodsman go to his tree-felling, and that the lugger and canoe, with the dead man lying untouched, be towed by skiff and a single pair of oars to the head of the canal for inquest and burial.

"I'll go with him," said Tarbox softly to St. Pierre. "We owe him all we're going to get out of these woods, and I owe him a great deal more." When a little later he was left for a moment without a hearer, he said to the prostrate form, "Poor fellow! And to think I had her message to you to come out of this swamp and begin to live the life of a live man!"

The rude funeral moved away, and soon the woods were ringing with the blow of axes and the shout and song of black timber-men as gayly as though there never had been or was to be a storm or a death.



CHAPTER XIX.

"TEARS AND SUCH THINGS."

Marguerite and her friend had no sooner taken their seats to drive home from the studio the day the sketch was made than Marguerite began a perfect prattle. Her eyes still shone exaltedly, and leaped and fell and darkened and brightened with more than the swift variety of a fountain in the moonlight, while she kept trying in vain to meet her companion's looks with a moment's steady regard.

Claude was found! and she trembled with delight. But, alas! he had heard her passionate call and yet stood still; had looked down upon her in silence, and drawn again the curtain between them. She had thought until the last moment, "He will come; he will confront us as we pass out the door—will overtake us at the foot of the stairs—on the sidewalk—at the carriage window." But it had not been so; and now they were gone from the place; and here sat this friend, this gay, cynical knower of men's and women's ways, answering her chatter in short, smiling responses, with a steady eye fixed on her, and reading, Marguerite believed, as plainly as if it were any of the sign-boards along the rattling street, the writing on her fluttering heart. And so, even while she trembled with strange delight, pain, shame, and alarm pleaded through her dancing glances, now by turns and now in confusion together, for mercy and concealment. But in fact, as this friend sat glancing upon the young face beside her with secret sympathy and admiration, it was only this wild fear of betrayal that at length betrayed.

Reaching the house, the street door was hardly shut behind them when Marguerite would have darted up to her chamber; but her friend caught her hands across the balustrade, and said, with roguery in her own eyes:

"Marguerite, you sweet rowdy—"

"W'at?"

"Yes, what. There's something up; what is it?"

The girl tried to put on surprise; but her eyes failed her again. She leaned on the rail and looked down, meanwhile trying softly to draw away up-stairs; but her friend held on to one hand and murmured:

"Just one question, dearie, just one. I'll not ask another: I'll die first. You'll probably find me in articulo mortis when you come down-stairs. Just one question, lovie."

"W'at it is?"

"It's nothing but this; I ask for information." The voice dropped to a whisper,—"Is he as handsome as his portrait?"

The victim rallied all her poor powers of face, and turned feebly upon the questioner:

"Po'trait? Who?" Her voice was low, and she glanced furtively at the nearest door. "I dawn't awnstan you." Her hand pulled softly for its freedom, and she turned to go, repeating, with averted face, "I dawn't awnstan you 't all."

"Well, never mind then, dear, if you don't understand," responded the tease, with mock tenderness. "But, ma belle Creole—"

"Je suis Acadienne."

"You're an angel, faintly disguised. Only—look around here—only, Angelica, don't try to practise woman's humbug on a woman. At least, not on this old one. It doesn't work. I'll tell you whom I mean." She pulled, but Marguerite held off. "I mean," she hoarsely whispered,—"I mean the young inventor that engineer told us about. Remember?"

Marguerite, with her head bowed low, slowly dragged her hand free, and moved with growing speed up the stairs, saying:

"I dawn't know what is dat. I dawn't awnstan you 't all." Her last words trembled as if nigh to tears. At the top of the stairs the searching murmur of her friend's voice came up, and she turned and looked back.

"Forgive me!" said the figure below. The girl stood a moment, sending down a re-assuring smile.

"You young rogue!" murmured the lady, looking up with ravished eyes. Then she lifted herself on tiptoe, made a trumpet of both little hands, and whispered:

"Don't—worry! We'll bring it out—all right!"

Whereat Marguerite blushed from temple to throat, and vanished.

The same day word came from her mother of her return from Terrebonne, and she hastened to rejoin her in their snug rooms over the Women's Exchange. When she snatched Zosephine into her arms and shed tears, the mother merely wiped and kissed them away, and asked no explanation.

The two were soon apart. For Marguerite hungered unceasingly for solitude. Only in solitude could she, or dared she, give herself up to the constant recapitulation of every minutest incident of the morning. And that was ample employment. They seemed the happenings of a month ago. She felt as if it were imperative to fix them in her memory now, or lose them in confusion and oblivion forever. Over them all again and again she went, sometimes quickening memory with half-spoken words, sometimes halting in long reverie at some intense juncture: now with tingling pleasure at the unveiling of the portrait, the painter's cautionary revelation of the personal presence above, or Claude's appearance at the window; now with burnings of self-abasement at the passionate but ineffectual beseechings of her violin; and always ending with her face in her hands, as though to hide her face even from herself for shame that with all her calling—her barefaced, as it seemed to her, her abject calling—he had not come.

"Marguerite, my child, it is time for bed."

She obeyed. It was all one, the bed or the window. Her mother, weary with travel, fell asleep; but she—she heard the clock down-stairs strike, and a clock next door attest, twelve—one—two—three—four, and another day began to shine in at the window. As it brightened, her spirits rose. She had been lying long in reverie; now she began once more the oft-repeated rehearsal. But the new day shone into it also. When the silent recital again reached its end, the old distress was no longer there, but in its place was a new, sweet shame near of kin to joy. The face, unhidden, looked straight into the growing light. Whatever else had happened, this remained,—that Claude was found. She silently formed the name on her parted lips—"Claude! Claude! Claude! Claude!" and could not stop though it gave her pain, the pain was so sweet. She ceased only when there rose before her again the picture of him drawing the curtain and disappearing; but even then she remembered the words, "Don't worry; we'll bring it out all right," and smiled.

When Zosephine, as the first sunbeam struck the window-pane, turned upon her elbow and looked into the fair face beside her, the eyes were closed in sleep. She arose, darkened the room, and left it.



CHAPTER XX.

LOVE, ANGER, AND MISUNDERSTANDING.

The city bells had sounded for noon when the sleeper opened her eyes. While she slept, Claude had arrived again at his father's cottage from the scene of the crevasse, and reported to Tarbox the decision of himself and the engineer, that the gap would not be closed for months to come. While he told it, they sat down with St. Pierre to breakfast. Claude, who had had no chance even to seek sleep, ate like a starved horse. Tarbox watched him closely, with hidden and growing amusement. Presently their eyes fastened on each other steadily. Tarbox broke the silence.

"You don't care how the crevasse turns out. I've asked you a question now twice, and you don't even hear."

"Why you don't ass ag'in?" responded the younger man, reaching over to the meat-dish and rubbing his bread in the last of the gravy. Some small care called St. Pierre away from the board. Tarbox leaned forward on his elbows, and, not knowing he quoted, said softly,—

"There's something up. What is it?"

"Op?" asked Claude, in his full voice, frowning. "Op where?—w'at, w'at is?"

"Ah, yes!" said Tarbox, with affected sadness. "Yes, that's it; I thought so.

'Oh-hon for somebody, oh hey for somebody.'"

Claude stopped with a morsel half-way to his mouth, glared at him several seconds, and then resumed his eating; not like a horse now, but like a bad dog gnawing an old bone. He glanced again angrily at the embodiment of irreverence opposite. Mr. Tarbox smiled. Claude let slip, not intending it, an audible growl, with his eyes in the plate. Mr. Tarbox's smile increased to a noiseless laugh, and grew and grew until it took hopeless possession of him. His nerves relaxed, he trembled, the table trembled with him, his eyes filled with tears, his brows lifted laboriously, he covered his lips with one hand, and his abdomen shrank until it pained him. And Claude knew, and showed he knew it all; that was what made it impossible to stop. At length, with tottering knees, Mr. Tarbox rose and started silently for the door. He knew Claude's eyes were following. He heard him rise to his feet. He felt as though he would have given a thousand dollars if his legs would but last him through the doorway. But to crown all, St. Pierre met him just on the threshold, breaking, with unintelligent sympathy, into a broad, simple smile. Tarbox laid one hand upon the door for support, and at that moment there was a hurtling sound; something whizzed by Tarbox's ear, and the meat-dish crashed against the door-post, and flew into a hundred pieces.

The book-agent ran like a deer for a hundred yards and fell grovelling upon the turf, the laugh still griping him with the energy of a panther's jaws, while Claude, who, in blind pursuit, had come threshing into his father's arms, pulled his hat over his eyes and strode away towards the skiff ferry. As Mr. Tarbox returned towards the cottage, St. Pierre met him, looking very grave, if not displeased. The swamper spoke first.

"Dass mighty good for you I was yondah to stop dat boy. He would 'a' half-kill' you."

"He'd have served me ex-actly right," said the other, and laughed again. St. Pierre shook his head, as though this confession were poor satisfaction, and said,—

"Dass not safe—make a 'Cajun mad. He dawn't git mad easy, but when he git mad it bre'k out all ove' him, yass. He goin' feel bad all day now; I see tear' in his eye when he walk off."

"I'm sorry," said Tarbox sincerely, and presently added, "Now, while you look up a picked gang of timber-men, I'll see if I can charter a little stern-wheel steamer, get that written permission from Madame Beausoleil to cut trees on her land, and so forth, and so forth. You'll hardly see me before bedtime again."

It was the first hour of the afternoon when Claude left his little workroom and walked slowly down to, and across, Canal Street and into Bourbon. He had spent the intervening hours seated at his work-table with his face in his hands. He was in great bitterness. His late transport of anger gave him no burdensome concern. Indeed, there was consolation in the thought that he should, by and by, stand erect before one who was so largely to blame, and make that full confession and apology which he believed his old-time Grande Pointe schoolmaster would have offered could Bonaventure ever have so shamefully forgotten himself. Yet the chagrin of having at once so violently and so impotently belittled himself added one sting more to his fate. He was in despair. An escaped balloon, a burst bubble, could hardly have seemed more utterly beyond his reach than now did Marguerite. And he could not blame her. She was right, he said sternly to himself—right to treat his portrait as something that reminded her of nothing, whether it did so or not; to play on with undisturbed inspiration; to lift never a glance to his window; and to go away without a word, a look, a sign, to any one, when the least breath or motion would have brought him instantly into her sacred presence. She was right. She was not for him. There is a fitness of things, and there was no fitness—he said—of him for her. And yet she must and would ever be more to him than any one else. He would glory in going through life unloved, while his soul lived in and on the phantom companionship of that vision of delight which she was and should ever be. The midday bells sounded softly here and there. He would walk.

As I say, he went slowly down the old rue Bourbon. He had no hunger; he would pass by the Women's Exchange. There was nothing to stop there for; was not Madame Beausoleil in Terrebonne, and Marguerite the guest of that chattering woman in silk and laces? But when he reached the Exchange doors he drifted in as silently and supinely as any drift-log would float into the new crevasse.

The same cashier was still on duty. She lighted up joyously as he entered, and, when he had hung his hat near the door, leaned forward to address him; but with a faint pain in his face, and loathing in his heart, he passed on and out into the veranda. The place was well filled, and he had to look about to find a seat. The bare possibility that she might be there was overpowering. There was a total suspension of every sort of emotion. He felt, as he took his chair and essayed to glance casually around, as light and unreal as any one who ever walked the tight-rope in a dream. The blood leaped in torrents through his veins, and yet his movements, as he fumbled aimlessly with his knife, fork, and glass, were slow and languid.

A slender young waitress came, rested her knuckles on the table, and leaned on them, let her opposite arm hang limply along the sidewise curve of her form, and bending a smile of angelic affection upon the young Acadian, said in a confidential undertone:

"The cashier told me to tell you those ladies have come."

Claude rose quickly and stood looking upon the face before him, speechless. It was to him exactly as if a man in uniform had laid a hand upon his shoulder and said, "You're my prisoner." Then, still gazing, and aware of others looking at him, he slowly sank again into his seat.

"She just told me to tell you," said the damsel. "Yes, sir. Have you ordered?"

"Humph?" He was still looking at her.

"I say, have you given your order?"

"Yass."

She paused awkwardly, for she knew he had not, and saw that he was trying vainly to make her words mean something in his mind.

"Sha'n't I get you some coffee and rolls—same as day before yesterday?"

"Yass." He did not know what she said. His heart had stopped beating; now it began again at a gallop. He turned red. He could see the handkerchief that was wadded into his outer breast-pocket jar in time with the heavy thump, thump, thump beneath it. The waitress staid an awful time. At last she came.

"I waited," she sweetly said, "to get hot ones." He drew the refreshments towards him mechanically. The mere smell of food made him sick. It seemed impossible that he should eat it. She leaned over him lovingly and asked, as if referring to the attitude, "Would you like any thing more?—something sweet?" His flesh crawled. He bent over his plate, shook his head, and stirred his coffee without having put any thing into it.

She tripped away, and he drew a breath of momentary relief, leaned back in his chair, and warily passed his eyes around to see if there was anybody who was not looking at him and waiting for him to begin to eat.

Ages afterward—to speak with Claude's feelings—he rose, took up his check, and went to the desk. The cashier leaned forward and said with soft blitheness:

"They're here. They're up-stairs now."

Claude answered never a word. He paid his check. As he waited for change, he cast another glance over the various groups at the tables. All were strangers. Then he went out. On the single sidewalk step he halted, and red and blind with mortification, turned again into the place; he had left his hat. With one magnificent effort at dignity and unconcern he went to the rack, took down the hat, and as he lowered it towards his head cast a last look down the room, and—there stood Marguerite. She had entered just in time, it seemed to him, but just too late, in fact, to see and understand the blunder. Oh, agony! They bowed to each other with majestic faintness, and then each from each was gone. The girl at the desk saw it and was dumb.



CHAPTER XXI.

LOVE AND LUCK BY ELECTRIC LIGHT.

Mr. Tarbox was really a very brave man. For, had he not been, how could he have ventured, something after the middle of that afternoon, in his best attire, up into Claude's workroom? He came to apologize. But Claude was not there.

He waited, but the young man did not return. The air was hot and still. Mr. Tarbox looked at his watch—it was a quarter of five. He rose and descended to the street, looked up and down it, and then moved briskly down to, and across, Canal Street and into Bourbon. He had an appointment.

Claude had not gone back to his loft at all. He was wandering up and down the streets. About four he was in Bienville Street, where the pleasure-trains run through it on their way out to Spanish Fort, a beautiful pleasure-ground some six miles away from the city's centre, on the margin of Lake Pontchartrain. He was listlessly crossing the way as a train came along, and it was easy for the habit of the aforetime brakeman to move him. As the last platform passed the crossing, he reached out mechanically and swung aboard.

Spanish Fort is at the mouth of Bayou St. John. A draw-bridge spans the bayou. On the farther, the eastern, side, Claude stood leaning against a pile, looking off far beyond West End to where the sun was setting in the swamps about Lake Maurepas. There—there—not seen save by memory's eye, yet there not the less, was Bayou des Acadiens. Ah me! there was Grande Pointe.

"O Bonaventure! Do I owe you"—Claude's thought was in the old Acadian tongue—"Do I owe you malice for this? No, no, no! Better this than less." And then he recalled a writing-book copy that Bonaventure had set for him, of the schoolmaster's own devising: Better Great Sorrow than Small Delight. His throat tightened and his eyes swam.

A pretty schooner, with green hull and new sails, came down the bayou. As he turned to gaze on her, the bridge, just beyond his feet, began to swing open. He stepped upon it and moved towards its centre, his eyes still on the beautiful silent advance of the vessel. With a number of persons who had gathered from both ends of the bridge, he paused and leaned over the rail as the schooner, with her crew looking up into the faces of the throng, glided close by. A female form came beside him, looking down with the rest and shedding upon the air the soft sweetness of perfumed robes. A masculine voice, just beyond, said:

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Claude started and looked up, and behold, Marguerite on the arm of Tarbox!

His movement drew their glance, and the next instant Mr. Tarbox, beaming apology and pouring out glad greetings, had him by the hand. Burning, choking, stammering, Claude heard and answered, he knew not how, the voice of the queen of all her kind. Another pair pressed forward to add their salutations. They were Zosephine and the surveyor.

Because the facilities for entertaining a male visitor were slender at the Women's Exchange, because there was hope of more and cooler air at the lake-side, because Spanish Fort was a pretty and romantic spot and not so apt to be thronged as West End, and because Marguerite, as she described it, was tired of houses and streets, and also because he had something to say to Zosephine, Mr. Tarbox had brought the pretty mother and daughter out here. The engineer had met the three by chance only a few minutes before, and now as the bridge closed again he passed Zosephine over to Claude, walked only a little way with them down a path among the shrubbery, and then lifted his hat and withdrew.

For once in his life Mr. G. W. Tarbox, as he walked with Marguerite in advance of Claude and her mother, was at a loss what to say. The drollness of the situation was in danger of overcoming him again. Behind him was Claude, his mind tossed on a wild sea of doubts and suspicions.

"I told him," thought Tarbox, while the girl on his arm talked on in pretty, broken English and sprightly haste about something he had lost the drift of—"I told him I was courting Josephine. But I never proved it to him. And now just look at this! Look at the whole sweet mess! Something has got to be done." He did not mean something direct and openhanded; that would never have occurred to him. He stopped, and with Marguerite faced the other pair. One glance into Claude's face, darkened with perplexity, anger, and a distressful effort to look amiable and comfortable, was one too many; Tarbox burst into a laugh.

"Pardon!" he exclaimed, checking himself until he was red; "I just happened to think of something very funny that happened last week in Arkansas—Madame Beausoleil, I know it must look odd,"—his voice still trembled a little, but he kept a sober face—"and yet I must take just a moment for business. Claude, can I see you?"

They went a step aside. Mr. Tarbox put on a business frown, and said to Claude in a low voice,—

"Hi! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon the little dog laughed to see the sport and the dish ran away with the spoon you understand I'm simply talking for talk's sake as we resume our walk we'll inadvertently change partners—a kind of Women's Exchange as it were old Mother Hubbard she went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone but when she got there the cupboard—don't smile so broadly—was bare and so the poor dog had none will that be satisfactory?"

Claude nodded, and as they turned again to their companions the exchange was made with the grace, silence, and calm unconsciousness of pure oversight,—or of general complicity. Very soon it suited Zosephine and Tarbox to sit down upon a little bench beside a bed of heart's-ease and listen to the orchestra. But Marguerite preferred to walk in and out among the leafy shadows of the electric lamps.

And so, side by side, as he had once seen Bonaventure and Sidonie go, they went, Claude and Marguerite, away from all windings of disappointment, all shadows of doubt, all shoals of misapprehension, out upon the open sea of mutual love. Not that the great word of words—affirmative or interrogative—was spoken then or there. They came no nearer to it than this,—

"I wish," murmured Claude,—they had gone over all the delicious "And-I-thought-that-you's" and the sweetly reproachful "Did-you- think-that-I's," and had covered the past down to the meeting on the bridge,—"I wish," he murmured, dropping into the old Acadian French, which he had never spoken to her before,—"I wish"—

"What?" she replied, softly and in the same tongue.

"I wish," he responded, "that this path might never end." He wondered at his courage, and feared that now he had ruined all; for she made no answer. But when he looked down upon her she looked up and smiled. A little farther on she dropped her fan. He stooped and picked it up, and, in restoring it, somehow their hands touched,—touched and lingered; and then—and then—through one brief unspeakable moment, a maiden's hand, for the first time in his life, lay willingly in his. Then, as glad as she was frightened, Marguerite said she must go back to her mother, and they went.



CHAPTER XXII.

A DOUBLE LOVE-KNOT.

Spanish Fort—West End—they are well enough; but if I might have one small part of New Orleans to take with me wherever I may wander in this earthly pilgrimage, I should ask for the old Carrollton Gardens.

They lie near the farthest upper limit of the expanded city. I should want, of course, to include the levee, under which runs one side of the gardens' fence; also the opposite shore of the Mississippi, with its just discernible plantation houses behind their levee; and the great bend of the river itself, with the sun setting in unutterable gorgeousness behind the distant, low-lying pecan groves of Nine-mile Point, and the bronzed and purpled waters kissing the very crown of the great turfed levee, down under whose land side the gardens blossom and give forth their hundred perfumes and bird songs to the children and lovers that haunt their winding alleys of oleander, jasmine, laurestine, orange, aloe, and rose, the grove of magnolias and oaks, and come out upon the levee's top as the sun sinks, to catch the gentle breeze and see the twilight change to moonlight on the water.

One evening as I sat on one of the levee benches here, with one whose I am and who is mine beside me, we noticed on the water opposite us, and near the farther shore, a large skiff propelled with two pairs of oars and containing, besides the two rowers, half a dozen passengers.

Then I remembered that I had seen the same craft when it was farther down the stream. The river is of a typical character about here. Coming around the upper bend, the vast current sweeps across to this, the Carrollton side, and strikes it just above the gardens with an incalculable gnawing, tearing power. Hence the very high levee here; the farther back the levee builders are driven by the corroding waters the lower the ground is under them, and the higher they must build to reach the height they reached before. From Carrollton the current rebounds, and swinging over to the other shore strikes it, boiling like a witch's caldron, just above and along the place where you may descry the levee lock of the Company Canal.

I knew the waters all about there, and knew that this skiff full of passengers, some of whom we could see were women, having toiled through the seething current below, was now in a broad eddy, and, if it was about to cross the stream, would do so only after it had gone some hundred yards farther up the river. There it could cross almost with the current.

And so it did. I had forgotten it again, when presently it showed itself with all its freight, silhouetted against the crimson sky. I said quickly:

"I believe Bonaventure Deschamps is in that boat!"

I was right. The skiff landed, and we saw its passengers step ashore. They came along the levee's crown towards us, "by two, by two." Bonaventure was mated with a young Methodist preacher, who had been my playmate in boyhood, and who lived here in Carrollton. Behind him came St. Pierre and Sidonie. Then followed Claude and Marguerite; and, behind all, Zosephine and Tarbox.

They had come, they explained to us, from a funeral at the head of the canal. They did not say the funeral of a friend, and yet I could see that every one of them, even the preacher, had shed tears. The others had thought it best and pleasantest to accompany the minister thus far towards his home, then take a turn in the gardens, and then take the horse-cars for the city's centre. Bonaventure and Sidonie were to return next day by steamer to Belle Alliance and Grande Pointe. The thoughtful Tarbox had procured Bonaventure's presence at the inquest of the day before as the identifying witness, thus to save Zosephine that painful office. And yet it was of Zosephine's own motion, and by her sad insistence, that she and her daughter followed the outcast to his grave.

"Yes," she had said, laying one hand in Bonaventure's and the other in Sidonie's and speaking in the old Acadian tongue, "when I was young and proud I taught 'Thanase to despise and tease him. I did not know then that I was such a coward myself. If I had been a better scholar, Bonaventure, when we used to go to school to the cure together—a better learner—not in the books merely, but in those things that are so much better than the things books teach—how different all might have been! Thank God, Bonaventure, one of us was." She turned to Sidonie to add,—"But that one was Bonaventure. We will all go"—to the funeral—"we will all go and bury vain regrets—with the dead."

The influence of the sad office they had just performed was on the group still, as they paused to give us the words of greeting we coveted. Yet we could see that a certain sense of being very, very rich in happiness was on them all, though differently on every one.

Zosephine wore the pear-shaped pearl.

The preacher said good-day, and started down the steps that used to lead from the levee down across a pretty fountained court and into the town. But my friend Tarbox—for I must tell you I like to call him my friend, and like it better every day; we can't all be one sort; you'd like him if you knew him as I do—my friend Tarbox beckoned me to detain him.

"Christian!" I called—that is the preacher's real name. He turned back and met Tarbox just where I stood. They laid their arms across each other's shoulders in a very Methodist way, and I heard Tarbox say:

"I want to thank you once more. We've put you to a good deal of trouble. You gave us the best you had: I'll never forget what you said about 'them who through fear of death are all their life-time subject to bondage.' I wish you were a Catholic priest."

"Why?"

"So we could pay you for your trouble. I don't think you ought to take it hard if you get a check in to-morrow's mail."

"Thy money survive with thee," said the preacher. "Is that all you want me to be a priest for? Isn't there another reason?" His eyes twinkled. "Isn't there something else I could do for you—you or Claude—if I should turn priest?"

"Yes," said Tarbox, with grave lips, but merry eyes; "we've both got to have one."

In fact they had two. Yet I have it from her husband himself, that Madame Tarbox insists to this day, always with the same sweet dignity, that she never did say yes.

On the other hand, when Claude and Marguerite were kneeling at the altar the proud St. Pierre, senior, spoke an audible and joyously impatient affirmative every time either of them was asked a question. When the time came for kissing, Sidonie, turning from both brides, kissed St. Pierre the more for that she kissed not Claude, then turned again and gave a tear with the kiss she gave to Zosephine. But the deepest, gladdest tears at those nuptials were shed by Bonaventure Deschamps.



* * * * *



Transcriber's Note

Minor typographic errors have been corrected without note.

This work contains a lot of dialect, which includes unusual spelling and hyphenation. This has been retained as printed throughout.

A small portion of the text was obscured on page 90. With the context and available space, 'Claude had' would seem to be the most appropriate for the original, and has been used here. It now reads, "... four hands clasped together, Claude had learned, for ..."

The original text contained a small piece of music notation; this has not been preserved in this version, and is noted simply as [Music].

The single oe ligature has not been retained.

THE END