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 Cataouaché. 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--Zoséphine--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
Zoséphine 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
Zoséphine 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 Cataouaché 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.