THE SHAKING PRAIRIE.
Manifestly it was a generous overstatement for Claude's professional
friend to say that Claude had outgrown his service. It was true only
that by and by there had come a juncture in his affairs where he could
not, without injustice to others, make a place for Claude which he
could advise Claude to accept, and they had parted with the mutual
hope that the separation would be transient. But the surveyor could
not but say to himself that such incidents, happening while we are
still young, are apt to be turning-points in our lives, if our lives
are going to have direction and movement of their own at all.
St. Pierre had belted his earnings about him under the woollen sash
that always bound his waist, shouldered his rifle, taken one last,
silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few
moments with his hand in Bonaventure's above one green mound in the
churchyard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster's care,
and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a
perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer's
party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went
away; but no temptation that they could invent could stay him from
following Claude. Father and son went in one direction, and the camp
in another.
I must confess to being somewhat vague as to just where they were. I
should have to speak from memory, and I must not make another slip in
topography. The changes men have made in Southern Louisiana these last
few years are great. I say nothing, again, of the vast widths of
prairie stripped of the herds and turned into corn and cane fields:
when I came, a few months ago, to that station on Morgan's Louisiana
and Texas Railroad where Claude first went aboard a railway-train,
somebody had actually moved the bayou, the swamp, and the prairie
apart!
However, the exact whereabouts of the St. Pierres is not important to
us. Mr. Tarbox, when in search of the camp he crossed the Teche at St.
Martinville, expected to find it somewhere north-eastward, between
that stream and the Atchafalaya. But at the Atchafalaya he found that
the work in that region had been finished three days before, and that
the party had been that long gone to take part in a new work down in
the _prairies tremblantes_ of Terrebonne Parish. The Louisiana Land
Reclamation Company,--I think that was the name of the concern
projecting the scheme. This was back in early February, you note.
Thither Mr. Tarbox followed. The "Album of Universal Information" went
along, and "did well." It made his progress rather slow, of course;
but one of Mr. Tarbox's many maxims was, never to make one day pay for
another when it could be made to pay for itself, and during this
season--this Louisiana campaign, as he called it--he had developed a
new art,--making each day pay for itself several times over.
"Many of these people," he said,--but said it solely and silently to
himself,--"are ignorant, shiftless, and set in their ways; and even
when they're not they're out of the current, as it were; they haven't
headway; and so they never--or seldom ever--see any way to make money
except somehow in connection with the plantations. There's no end of
chances here to a man that's got money-sense, and nerve to use it." He
wrote that to Zoséphine, but she wrote no answer. A day rarely passed
that he did not find some man making needless loss through ignorance
or inactivity; whereupon he would simply put in the sickle of his
sharper wit, and garner the neglected harvest. Or, seeing some
unesteemed commodity that had got out of, or had never been brought
into, its best form, time, or place, he knew at sight just how, and at
what expense, to bring it there, and brought it.
"Give me the gains other men pass by," he said, "and I'll be
satisfied. The saying is, 'Buy wisdom;' but I sell mine. I like to
sell. I enjoy making money. It suits my spirit of adventure. I like an
adventure. And if there's any thing I love, it's an adventure with
money in it! But even that isn't my chief pleasure: my chief
pleasure's the study of human nature.
'The proper study of mankind is man.
* * * * *
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.'"
This spoiling of Assyrian camps, so to speak, often detained Mr.
Tarbox within limited precincts for days at a time; but "Isn't that
what time is for?" he would say to those he had been dealing with, as
he finally snapped the band around his pocket-book; and they would
respond, "Yes, that's so."
And then he would wish them a hearty farewell, while they were
thinking that at least he might know it was his treat.
Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of
Terrebonne, he passed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing
finally under the blossoming orange-trees of Terrebonne Bayou far
down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party
that Claude was not with him.
"He didn't leave us; we left him; and up to the time when we left he
hadn't decided where he would go or what he would do. His father and
he are together, you know, and of course that makes it harder for them
to know just how to move."
The speaker was puzzled. What could this silk-hatted, cut-away-coated,
empearled, free lance of a fellow want with Claude? He would like to
find out. So he added, "I may get a letter from him to-morrow; suppose
you stay with me until then." And, to his astonishment, Mr. Tarbox
quickly jumped at the proposition.
No letter came. But when the twenty-four hours had passed, the
surveyor had taken that same generous--not to say credulous--liking
for Mr. Tarbox that we have seen him show for St. Pierre and for
Claude. He was about to start on a tour of observation eastward
through a series of short canals that span the shaking prairies from
bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des
Allemands, so through Lake Ouacha into and up Barataria, again across
prairie, and at length, leaving Lake Cataouaché on the left, through
cypress-swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans. He would
have pressed Mr. Tarbox to bear him company; but before he could ask
twice, Mr. Tarbox had consented. They went in a cat-rigged skiff, with
a stalwart negro rowing or towing whenever the sail was not the best.
"It's all of sixty miles," said the engineer; "but if the wind
doesn't change or drop we can sleep to-night in Achille's hut, send
this man and skiff back, and make Achille, with his skiff, put us on
board the Louisiana-avenue ferry-launch to-morrow afternoon."
"Who is Achille?"
"Achille? Oh! he's merely a 'Cajun pot-hunter living on a shell bank
at the edge of Lake Cataouaché, with an Indian wife. Used to live
somewhere on Bayou des Allemands, but last year something or other
scared him away from there. He's odd--seems to be a sort of self-made
outcast. I don't suppose he's ever done anybody any harm; but he just
seems to be one of that kind that can't bear to even try to keep up
with the rest of humanity; the sort of man swamps and shaking prairies
were specially made for, you know. He's living right on top of a bank
of fossil shells now,--thousands of barrels of them,--that he knows
would bring him a little fortune if only he could command the
intelligence and the courage to market them in New Orleans. There's a
chance for some bright man who isn't already too busy. Why didn't I
think to mention it to Claude? But then neither he nor his father have
got the commercial knowledge they would need. Now"--The speaker
suddenly paused, and, as the two men sat close beside each other under
an umbrella in the stern of the skiff, looked into Mr. Tarbox's
pale-blue eyes, and smiled, and smiled.
"I'm here," said Mr. Tarbox.
"Yes," responded the other, "and I've just made out why! And you're
right, Tarbox; you and Claude, with or without his father, will make
a strong team. You've got no business to be canvassing books, you"--
"It's my line," said the canvasser, smiling fondly and pushing his hat
back,--it was wonderful how he kept that hat smooth,--"and I'm the
head of the line:
'A voice replied far up the height,
Excelsior!'
I was acquainted with Mr. Longfellow."
"Tarbox," persisted the engineer, driving away his own smile, "you
know what you are; you are a born contractor! You've found it out,
and"--smiling again--"that's why you're looking for Claude."
"Where is he?" asked Mr. Tarbox.
"Well, I told you the truth when I said I didn't know; but I haven't a
doubt he's in Vermilionville."
"Neither have I," said the book-agent; "and if I had, I wouldn't give
it room. If I knew he was in New Jersey, still I'd think he was in
Vermilionville, and go there looking for him. And wherefore? For
occult reasons." The two men looked at each other smilingly in the
eye, and the boat glided on.
The wind favored them. With only now and then the cordelle, and still
more rarely the oars, they moved all day across the lands and waters
that were once the fastnesses of the Baratarian pirates. The engineer
made his desired observations without appreciable delays, and at night
they slept under Achille's thatch of rushes.
As the two travellers stood alone for a moment next morning, the
engineer said:
"You seem to be making a study of my pot-hunter."
"It's my natural instinct," replied Mr. Tarbox. "The study of human
nature comes just as natural to me as it does to a new-born duck to
scratch the back of its head with its hind foot; just as natural--and
easier. The pot-hunter is a study; you're right."
"But he reciprocates," said the engineer; "he studies you."
The student of man held his smiling companion's gaze with his own,
thrust one hand into his bosom, and lifted the digit of the other:
"The eyes are called the windows of the soul,--
'And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.'
"Have you tried to look into his eyes? You can't do it. He won't let
you. He's got something in there that he doesn't want you to see."
In the middle of the afternoon, when Achille's skiff was already
re-entering the shades of the swamp on his way homeward, and his two
landed passengers stood on the levee at the head of Harvey's Canal
with the Mississippi rolling by their feet and on its farther side the
masts and spires of the city, lighted by the western sun, swinging
round the long bend of her yellow harbor, Mr. Tarbox offered his hand
to say good-by. The surveyor playfully held it.
"I mean no disparagement to your present calling," he said, "but the
next time we meet I hope you'll be a contractor."
"Ah!" responded Tarbox, "it's not my nature. I cannot contract; I
must always expand. And yet--I thank you.
"'Pure thoughts are angel visitors. Be such
The frequent inmates of thy guileless breast.'
"Good luck! Good-by!"
One took the ferry; the other, the west bound train at Gretna.