A Free Man Of Color Part 15

"Did he?" January settled onto the other chair, straddling it backward. The table was a litter of plumes, lace, and silk flowers, hurtfully reminiscent of Ayasha. The apricot silk gown lay spread over the divan in the front parlor, gleaming softly in the light of the French doors. "I wonder. And what he approved of when Angelique was alive, and what he'll countenance now, are two different things. Do you have anything of Angelique's? Something that could pa.s.s as a souvenir, something she wanted him to have?"

"With her mother selling up everything that would bring in a picayune? Here." Dominique got to her feet and rustled over to the sideboard, returning with a pair of fragile white kid gloves. "She and I wore the same sizes, down to shoes and gloves-I know, because she borrowed a pair of my shoes once when a rainstorm caught her and never returned them, the b.i.t.c.h. These should pa.s.s for hers."

"Thank you." He slipped them into his pocket. "What do I owe you for them?"

"Goose." She waved the offer away. "It'll give Henri something to get me on my next birthday. Why is it men never know what to buy a woman? He has me do the shopping when he needs to buy gifts for his mother and sisters. Not that he ever tells them that, of course."

"You sure he isn't having some other lady buy the presents he gives you?" suggested January mischievously.

Dominique drew herself up. "Benjamin," she said, with great dignity, "no woman, even one who wished me ill, would have suggested that he buy me the collected works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau." woman, even one who wished me ill, would have suggested that he buy me the collected works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau."

"I abase myself," apologized January humbly. "One more thing." He took from his breast pocket the envelope and handed it to her. "I should be back Sunday. I'll come for this then. If I'm not-if I don't-take this to Lieutenant Shaw at the Calabozo immediately."

And if worse came to worst, he added mentally, hope to h.e.l.l somebody-your Henri, or Livia, or somebody-would be able to come up with the $1,500 it would take to buy me out of slavery. hope to h.e.l.l somebody-your Henri, or Livia, or somebody-would be able to come up with the $1,500 it would take to buy me out of slavery.

If they could find me.

As he had predicted, the crowd at the public masquerade held in the Theatre d'Orleans was far larger than that at the quadroon ball going on next door, and far less well behaved.

The temporary floor had been laid as usual above the seats in the Theatre's pit, stretching from the lip of the stage to the doors. Bunting fluttered from every pillar and curtain swag, and long tables of refreshments had been set out under the eye of waiters to which-both John Davis, the owner of both buildings, and the master of ceremonies had informed the musicians in no uncertain terms-only the attending guests would have access. In the vast route of people bustling and jostling around the edges of the room or performing energetic quadrilles in the center, January recognized again all the now-familiar costumes: Richelieu, the dreadful blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe, Henry VIII-sans wives-the laurel-crowned Roman. The Roman was accompanied by a flaxen, flat-bosomed, and rather extensively covered Cleopatra, and some of the other American planters and businessmen by their wives, but they were far fewer, and the Creole belles evident were of the cla.s.s referred to by the upper-cla.s.s Creoles as chacas: shopgirls, artisans, grisettes.

The young Creole gentlemen were there in force, however, flirting with the chaca girls as they'd never have flirted with the gently bred ladies of their own station. Augustus Mayerling, who for all his expertise with a saber seemed indeed to be a surprisingly peaceable soul, had to step in two or three times to throw water on incipient blazes. Other fencing masters were not so conscientious. There were noticeably more women than men present, at least in part because the Creole gentlemen had a habit of disappearing down the discreetly curtained pa.s.sageway to the Salle d'Orleans next door, where, January knew, the quadroon ball was in full swing. Occasionally, if there was a lull in the general noise level, he could catch a drift of its music.

Philippe Decoudreau was on the cornet again. January winced.

He didn't hear them often, and less so as the evening progressed. In addition to the din of the crowd, the hollow thudding of feet on the suspended plank floor and the noise of the orchestra-augmented for the evening by a guitar, two flutes, and a badly played clarinette-the clamor in the streets was clearly audible. The heavy curtains of olive-green velvet were hooped back and the windows open. Maskers, Kaintucks, wh.o.r.es, sailors, and citizens out for a spree thronged and paraded through the streets from gambling hall to cabaret to eating house, calling to one another, singing, blowing flour in one anothers' faces, ringing cowbells, and clashing cymbals. There was a feverish quality to the humid air. Fights and scuffles broke out between the dances, sometimes lasting all the way out of the hall to the checkroom where pistols, swords, and sword-canes had been deposited.

"Do you see Peralta?" asked January worriedly at one point, dabbing the sweat from his face and scanning the crowd. The press of people raised the temperature of the room to an ovenlike stifle, a circ.u.mstance that didn't seem to affect the dancers in the slightest degree. Almost no breeze stirred from the long windows and the air was heavy with the smells of perfume, pomade, and uncleaned costumes.

Hannibal, white with fatigue and face running with sweat, swept the room with his gaze, then shook his head. "Doesn't mean he isn't here," he pointed out. His hoa.r.s.e, boyish voice was barely a thread. "He might be in the lobby-I went out there a few minutes ago, it's like a coaching inn at Christmas. Or he might be next door."

Or in Davis's gambling rooms up the street, thought January. Or at some elegant private ball. Or riding back to Bayou Chien Mort tonight, to make sure no one comes asking awkward questions about his son. Or at some elegant private ball. Or riding back to Bayou Chien Mort tonight, to make sure no one comes asking awkward questions about his son.

In the cathedral, where he'd gone to make his Lenten confession early and pray desperately for the success of his journey, January had been tormented by the conviction that Peralta would walk in and see him, recognize him, somehow know what his plans were. It irritated him that he should feel like a criminal in his search for the justice that the law should be giving him gratis. Confession and contrition and the ritual of the Ma.s.s had calmed his fears for a time, but as the evening progressed and Peralta did not make an appearance, like scurrying rats the fears returned.

The band occupied a dais set on the stage, and with the temporary floor slightly below even that level, January had a good view of the dancers. Dr. Soublet was there, arguing violently with another physician who seemed to think six pints of blood an excessive amount to abstract from a patient in a week.

Though the buffet tables were situated on the opposite side of the room from the windows, Henri Viellard-duly garbed as a sheep-seemed to have chosen gourmandise over fresh air; he patted his forehead repeatedly with a succession of fine linen handkerchiefs but refused to abandon proximity to the oysters, tartlets, meringues, and roulades. In his fluffy costume he bore a more than pa.s.sing resemblance to a bespectacled meringue himself, with an apricot silk bow about his neck. His sisters, January noticed, were likewise clothed as fanciful animals: a swan, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse (that was the little one who looked like she'd escaped from the convent to attend), and something which after long study he and Hannibal agreed probably had to be a fish.

"Which I suppose makes Madame Viellard a farmer's wife," concluded January doubtfully.

"Or Mrs. Noah," pointed out Hannibal. "All she needs is a little boat under her arm."

He glimpsed both William Granger and Jean Bouille, moving with calculated exactness to remain as far as possible from one another while still occupying the same large room. As Uncle Bichet had remarked, Bouille's wife did seem to disappear up to the screened private theater boxes every time Bouille vanished down the pa.s.sageway to the Salle next door. When the dance concluded and Granger and Bouille led their respective partners toward the buffet in courses that threatened to intersect, the master of ceremonies scurried to intercept Bouille before another disaster could occur.

While Monsieur Davis's eye was elsewhere, January rose from the piano and moved discreetly along the wall to the buffet. He didn't like the white look around Hannibal's mouth, or the way he had of leaning inconspicuously against the piano as he played. He looked bled out, the flesh around his eyes deeply marked with pain, and the watered laudanum, January suspected, was not doing him very much good. As he drew close to the buffet Mayerling caught his eye, signaled him to stay where he was, and wandered over himself to collect a gla.s.s of champagne and one of the strong mola.s.ses tafia, then strolled back up to the stage as January returned to his place at the piano.

"I wanted to thank you again for standing physician the other day," said the fencing master. "You behold your compet.i.tion."

Soublet and his adversary had reached the shouting stage and were brandishing their canes: It was obviously only a matter of time until they named their friends.

"Maybe not being able to practice in this city is what the preachers call a blessing in disguise," said January.

"And a fairly thin disguise at that. You know Granger is now claiming that he deloped-fired into the air-and Bouille is hinting to everyone he thinks will listen that his opponent flinched aside at the last moment-in other words, dodged out of cowardice, surely one of the most foolish things to do under the circ.u.mstances since most pistols will throw one direction or the other, especially at fifty feet."

He nodded toward Bouille, deep in conversation with Monsieur Davis, who was steering him in the direction of a group of Creole businessmen and their wives. "So now we can only hope to keep them apart for the evening. After tomorrow, of course, they will both be sober more of the time."

"Thompsonian dog!" screamed Dr. Soublet, his opponent evidently favoring the do-it-oneself herbalist school of that well-known Yankee doctor.

"Murderer!" shrieked the Thompsonian dog, and the two men fell upon each other in a welter of kicking, flailing canes, and profanity.

"Birds in their little nests agree," sighed Hannibal, draining the tafia, sighed Hannibal, draining the tafia, "And 'tis a shameful sight When children of one family Fall out, and chide, and fight."

Monsieur Davis and half a dozen others hustled the combatants from the room.

Mayerling remained where he was, shaking his head in a kind of amazement. Hannibal picked up his violin again, playing to cover the chatter of the crowd; the music was frail as honey candy, but with an edge to it like gla.s.s.

"I never saw the point of dueling, myself." January turned back to the keyboard. His hands followed the trail the violin set, a kind of automatic embellishment that could be done without thinking. "It might be different were I allowed to give challenges, or accept them, but I don't think so."

"Of course not," said the Prussian in surprise. "You have your music. You are an intelligent man, and an educated one. You are seldom bored. It is all from boredom, you know," he went on, looking out into the room again. "It is like the Kaintucks in the Swamp or the Irish on Tchoupitoulas Street. They have nothing to do, so they get into fights or look for reasons to get into fights. They are not so very different from the Creoles."

He shook his head wonderingly.

"...It's not like she's got room to be so d.a.m.n choosy," said a man's voice, beside one of the boxes on the stage. "If Arnaud sinned he must have had his reasons. No man whose wife is making him happy goes straying like that."

There was a murmur of agreement. January turned his head sharply, saw that it was the Jack of Diamonds, Charles-Louis Trepagier, and another man, shorter than he but with the same st.u.r.dy, powerful build. The shorter man wore the gaudy costume of what Lord Byron probably had conceived a Turkish pasha to look like, ballooning pistachio-colored trousers, a short vest of orange and green, an orange-and-green turban with a purple gla.s.s jewel on it the size of an American dollar. An orange mask hid his face, orange slippers his feet, a long purple silk sash that had clearly started its life as a lady's scarf wrapped two or three times around his waist.

"It isn't like she hasn't had offers," added another of the Trepagier clan resentfully. "Good ones, too-I don't mean trash like McGinty. She thinks she's too good..."

"Too good! That's a laugh!" The stranger threw back his head with a bitter bark. He leaned closer, lowering his voice but not nearly enough. "If the woman's turned you down it's because she's got a lover hidden somewhere. Has had, since she shut Arnaud out of her bed. I've even heard she's put on a mask and come dancing."

"At public b.a.l.l.s?"

"Public b.a.l.l.s, certainly," said the pasha. He nodded back over his shoulder toward the discreet doorway of the pa.s.sage to the Salle. "And other places, maybe not so public."

"Sir..."

January hadn't even seen Mayerling move. The young fencing master slipped through the crowd like a bronze fish, a dangerous glitter of blue-and-black jewels like dragon scales, his big, pale hands resting folded on the gems of his belt buckle. Behind the modeled leather of his mask, his hazel eyes were suddenly deadly chill.

"I a.s.sume," said Mayerling, "that you are speaking third-hand gossip about someone whom none of you knows. Certainly no gentleman would bandy any woman's name so in a public place."

The Trepagier boys regarded him in alarmed silence. In his five years in New Orleans the Prussian had only fought three duels, but in each he had killed with such scientifically vicious dispatch, and such utter lack of mercy, as to discourage any further challenges. The wolf-pale eyes traveled from their clothing to their faces, clearly recognizing, clearly identifying.

"This is fortunate, since I only duel with gentlemen," Mayerling went on quietly. He turned to regard the pasha in green. "Should I happen to find," he said, as if he could see the face behind the garish satin of the mask, "that a woman's name is being spoken by those whose blood would not dishonor my sword, then of course, as a gentleman, I should have no choice but to avenge that lady's honor and put a halt to that gossip in whatever way seemed best to me."

The yellow gaze swept them like a backhand cut. There was no cruelty in it, only a chill and terrifying strength. January could almost see the line of blood it left.

"I trust that I make myself clear?"

The pasha opened his mouth to speak. The Jack of Diamonds reached out, put a hand on his pink silk arm. To Mayerling, he said, "It was, of course, a woman of the lower cla.s.ses of whom we spoke, a chaca shopkeeper who betrayed her husband, nothing more."

"Even so," said Mayerling softly. "Such talk disturbs me. Perhaps you should study to ape gentlemen a little more closely-whoever you are."

None of them replied. Mayerling waited for a moment, giving them time to declare themselves gentlemen and offended, then turned his back and vanished into the crowd.

January leaned over, and touched Uncle Bichet on the shoulder. "Who was that?" he asked, the old man looked at him in some surprise.

"Just a couple of the Trepagier boys."

"No-with them."

The cellist turned his head to look, but the pasha was even then vanishing through the curtained doorway that led to the Salle d'Orleans, deep in conversation with the purple pirate.

The Trepagier brothers-there were at least four of them, two of whom were married and none of whom were boys at all-were bullying and insulting a much younger man who had dared flirt with a fl.u.s.tered and feathered damsel garbed as a gypsy, evidently secure in the knowledge that he would not dare challenge them, and they were correct.

Uncle Bichet shook his head, and glanced at the program card. "Those lazy folks been standing long enough," he said, and January turned, unwillingly, back to his music.

Sally, he thought. Whoever the green pasha was, he had to have spoken with the runaway servant girl Sally. Or he recognized Madame Trepagier at the ball Thursday night, either by her movement, stance, and voice-as he himself had done-or because she'd worn that silly Indian costume somewhere before.

And if that were the case, thought January with sudden bitterness, for a man attending a quadroon ball he had a lot of nerve criticizing a woman he recognized there. for a man attending a quadroon ball he had a lot of nerve criticizing a woman he recognized there.

The dancing lasted until nearly dawn. Technically Lent began at midnight, but there was no diminution of champagne, tafia, gumbo or pate, though having made his confession that afternoon January abstained all evening even when the opportunity presented itself. Eventually Xavier Peralta made his appearance, clothed in the red robe and scepter of a king with his cousin the chief of police still at his side. The waltzes and quadrilles grew wilder as the more respectable ladies took their departure, the fights and jostling more frequent. Everyone seemed determined to extract the final drops of pleasure from the Carnival season, to dance the soles off their shoes, to dally on the balconies above the torchlit river of noise surging along Rue Orleans.

Also, as the night wore on, more and more of the wealthier men disappeared for longer and longer periods of time. The Creole belles, though perhaps not of the highest society, stood abandoned along the wall, whispering among themselves and pretending not to care. Most of them, January suspected, would stop at home only long enough to wash off their rouge before attending early services in the cathedral. The American women whose husbands were still in attendance whispered about the half dozen or so whose men had "stepped out for a bit of air." Most of them appeared and disappeared a number of times, but the Roman soldier stayed gone. The deserted Cleopatra involved herself in an animated discussion with several other ladies but kept an eye on the door, and when the errant Roman at last returned, there was promise of bitter acrimony in her greeting.

They bring it on themselves, January thought, but he knew it wasn't that easy. Like everything else about New Orleans, it was a bittersweet tangle, and you could not run from it without leaving pieces of your torn-out heart behind.

No wonder everyone tried to dance and be gay, he thought, as he walked toward the livery stable in the tepid mists of predawn. Costumed maskers still reeled along the banquettes of Rue Orleans, and from every tavern music could be heard, bra.s.sy street bands and thumping drums. Under the flicker of the street lamps whooping Kaintucks pursued masked and laughing prost.i.tutes. The air, thick with the smell of the river, was also weighed with wine and whisky and tobacco and cheap perfume.

He collected his rented horse from a sleepy stable-hand and rode down to the levee, where the flatboat captain he'd contracted yesterday waited for him in the white ocean of mist that rose from the river. The river itself was very still, the levees on either side rising like ridges of mountains from the thinning vapors. Behind them in the last starlight the town dozed, exhausted at last.

There was only so much-deception financial and romantic, the monstrosity of slavery, and the waiting horrors of yellow fever-that could be masked behind the bright scrim of music, the taste of coffee and gumbo, the shimmer of the moonlight.

Mardi Gras was done. The greedy consumption of the last good food, the draining of the last of the wine, a final, wild coupling in the darkness before the penitential death of Lent.

He watched the dark sh.o.r.e of the west bank approaching with terror in his heart.

SIXTEEN.

Morning found him eight miles from the city, riding west along the levee with the rank trees and undergrowth of the batture at the foot of the slope on his left, the dark brown earth of fields on his right. In places they were rank with winter weeds, but as the sun first gilded, then cleared the writhing stringers of the Gulf clouds, groups of slaves could be seen threading their way along the paths, hoes on their shoulders, bare feet swirling the ground mists. Once a white man called to him in slurry New Orleans French and asked to see his papers, but when January produced them-and a receipt from Desdunes's Livery, to prove he hadn't stolen the horse-the patroller seemed to lose interest and barely gave them a glance.

The man had to tuck his whip under his arm to take the papers. Down in the field below, the workers sang as they hoed, a steady-paced song in almost incomprehensible gombo, clearing the land for the new crop of cane.

January remembered that song from the plantation on which he had been born.

Since he had been back, he had been afraid to leave New Orleans, fearing for his liberty-fearing, too, the sight of the changes that had taken place as Americans took control of the land and that the whites would see him as a slave and perhaps make him one again. The smell of the earth and the sweat of the workers; the beat of the morning sun on the backs of his hands and the twitterings of birds in the oaks that surrounded the fields; the occasional drift, like pockets of lingering mist, of the field songs brought back to him his own days of slavery, of childhood, of innocence, a terrible mingling of sweetness and pain.

For thirty years, like Livia, he had pretended it wasn't he who'd been a slave. Now it came to him, as it hadn't in years, that he never knew what had become of his father.

Or of that child, he thought-that little boy running through the cane fields before first light or lying on the batture picking voice from voice in the chorus of the frogs when the sun went down.

For a time it seemed to him that he still didn't know.

He stopped frequently to rest the horse, knowing that there was no chance of trading for a fresh one between the city and Bayou Chien Mort. He cut overland to avoid the wide loop of the river past McDonoughville, pa.s.sed through swampy woods of cypress and hickory that hummed and creaked with insect life in the dense sun of the forenoon. The land here was soggy and crossed with marshes and bayous like green-brown gla.s.s under hushed but wakeful trees. Some time after noon he bought a bowl of gumbo and half a pone of corn bread for a picayune from a trapper whose cabin lay in a clearing among the marshes. The house was barely a shack and only with difficulty distinguishable from the byre that sheltered the single cow and the litter of pigs, but he knew, by the man's eyes, that had he asked to come in he would have been denied. They were Spanish, like the islenos islenos in the Terre des Boeufs to the south, and barely understood his French. From around a corner of the house half a dozen filthy, skinny children watched him, but no one said a word. in the Terre des Boeufs to the south, and barely understood his French. From around a corner of the house half a dozen filthy, skinny children watched him, but no one said a word.

Bayou Chien Mort itself lay some twenty-five miles southeast of New Orleans, in Plaquemines Parish, country that was still largely French where it was anything at all. In a way that made him feel more comfortable, for the small farmers and trappers of the backwoods here were less likely to kidnap a black man and sell him as a slave. The enterprise would have required far too much energy. He'd seen them in the market in New Orleans, simply clothed in homespun cotton striped red and blue, abysmally poor and surrounded by swarms of children who all seemed to bear names like Nono and Veve and Bibi, cheerfully selling powdered file and alligator hides and going away again without bothering, like the Americans did, to sample the delights of the big city. Even more than the Creoles, who despised them, these primitive trappers belonged to a world of their own, cut off from the rest of the world until even their language was almost obscure.

Nevertheless he felt safer among them than he would have in the more American north or west, though no black man traveling alone was truly safe. Even when he picked up the course of the river again he kept his distance from it, holding to a muddy trace through the silent stillness of the forest that lay behind the plantations. The river was far too heavily traveled for comfort, and the keelboat men-Nahum s.h.a.grue and his spiritual kin-were only a step above river pirates themselves and sometimes not even that.

He had hoped to stop and sleep at the heat of noon, but the execrable nature of the forest road slowed his progress, and as the sun's slant grew steeper he dared not halt for more than the hour or so needed from time to time to rest his horse. Once or twice he dozed after foddering the animal on the oats he'd brought-save for four hours after Hermann's ball he had not done more than nap in almost two days-but every time the wind brought him the hoot of a steamboat on the river he'd jerk awake in a sweat, fearing Xavier Peralta had canceled all the family breakfasts and Ash Wednesday dinners to hasten to his exiled son.

An hour or two before sunset he reached Chien Mort. He came at it from behind, seeing light where the trees thinned, and then beyond that the slightly mounded rows of a cleared field, short trenches cut along the centers of the rows to receive the half-fermented stalks of last year's cane.

They were well ahead on their work, he thought. According to his mother, Peralta usually remained at his chief residence-Alhambra-on Lake Pontchartrain. He must have an efficient overseer here.

Keeping to the woods, he rode along the edges of the cleared land to within sight of the house, identifying various outbuildings, landmarks, fields, and trying to memorize them as he had once memorized landmarks as a child. If anything went wrong he might need to orient himself in a hurry, and in the dark. There were fields of second-crop cane, just beginning to sprout bristles of dark, striped stalks-Batavia cane, which hadn't even been introduced in the country when he was a child-and fields whose turned earth told him by its pattern that it would soon be planted in corn.

Past those lay the levee, with its thick line of sycamores. A little band of woodland hid the home place from him, but he could see the brick dome and tower of the refinery, and beyond it, barely glimpsed past an orchard, the whitewashed wooden cabins of the slaves. The house itself and the overseer's cottage, the dovecotes and smokehouses and stables, all lay hidden among the darkness of gray-bearded oaks.

He clucked softly to the horse and moved along.

Between the cane fields and the corn lay a ridge of land, thick with nettles and peppergra.s.s. Two or three sycamores stood on it, left, January guessed, to provide shade to the workers when they stopped for nooning.

He reined around, picking his way along the edge of the cleared ground until he'd worked back to the trace once more. A few miles earlier he had seen another path leading back into the woods and smelled smoke among the trees where the land grew boggy. Patient retracing led him to the place again, and though it was farther from the Peralta fields than he liked, he didn't know the area and this was his best hope. The path was a seldom-used one and led into swamp and hackberry thickets along Bayou Chien Mort itself, but as the afternoon was dimming he found what he sought: a small house constructed of mud, moss, and cypress planks, its gallery overlooking the still water of a narrow bayou, its yard swarming with black-eyed, unkempt, barefoot children, descendants of Canadian French exiled here almost a hundred years earlier.

"Papa, he up the bayou, him," explained the oldest girl to January's question. The smoke he'd smelled an hour ago had been from her cook fire, the kitchen being also the main room of the little house, rich with the smells of onion, pepper, and crawfish. "But Val, he take a message to Peralta, if you want."

Val-fetched from the shed where he was sc.r.a.ping muskrat hides-proved to be fourteen, with black hair and the strange pale gray-green eyes the Acadians sometimes had. All the children grouped around the kitchen table while January wrote his message, marveling either at the fact that a black man could write or at the miracle of literacy itself; then they sat on the gallery with him while he ate some of the jambalaya the girl had been cooking ("It ain't sat long enough to be real good," the girl said.), and he left them marveling over the coins he gave them as he went on his way.

They reminded him of Ayasha's description of the Moroccan peasants who lived on the edge of the desert: They know their prayers They know their prayers, she had said, and how to tell genuine coin from the most convincing counterfeit. And that is all. and how to tell genuine coin from the most convincing counterfeit. And that is all.

He smiled. He wondered what she would have made of all this: the Spanish woodcutters, the Italian ice-cream vendors in the market, the strange, tiny colony of Tockos in the deep Delta who fished for oysters and sang Greek songs and occasionally drowned themselves when the moon was full, the Germans and the degraded remnants of the Choctaw and Natchez nations. There was supposed to be a colony of Chinese somewhere on the Algiers bank of the river.

And Africans, of course.

In the shifty dimness of twilight he sought out a place to hide the horse. He hadn't dared ask the children about such a thing directly, having represented himself as a man in too much of a hurry, and going in the wrong direction, to stop at the plantation himself. But he'd gathered that "Ti Margaux, up the bayou," had recently died, and there was no one occupying his house or barns. In the jungly stillness of the swamps it was anybody's guess which way "up the bayou" was-bayous flowed sometimes one way, sometimes another, and frequently lay eerily still under the dense green canopy of cypress and moss-but after considerable searching and backtracking January located the place, raised on stilts and built, like most of these small houses, of mud and cypress planks.

Already neighbors and family had carried away everything of any conceivable value, including about half the planks of its gallery roof. The barn had been likewise stripped, but its doors remained, at least. In gathering darkness January found a holey and broken bucket whose c.h.i.n.ks, once stopped with moss, didn't leak too badly while he carried up water for the horse. He rubbed the animal down, gave it fodder, and latched the door behind him, praying that no neighbors would be by to glean behind the earlier reapers. He didn't think so. The place looked comprehensively sacked.

Bedroll on his shoulder and Minou's kid gloves in his pocket, he set off once more for Chien Mort.

"Hey, who dat, settin' out in the dark?"