Another flash, and a great waterspout, child of the hurricane, could be seen whirling up the river; another, and the waterspout had struck the ship, beat her down, crushed her!
Anthony's ears never forgot the shrieks of the drowning wretches flung from the ship into the water, nor the roar of the storm as, breaking through the forest in front of her, it tore its way across country. After a few dreadful moments a bright moon seemed to jump into the sky. All was clear and quiet again. The tropical storm had come and gone in the space of a few minutes. Both whites and blacks, turned from their purpose by the appalling accident, rushed to the salvage of the human wreckage. Many from the ship were hauled ashore; some were washed away. All were in distress. The square of the slave-mart was turned for the second time within the week into an outdoor hospital.
When the excited blacks had rushed from their attack to the rescue of the slaves caught in the rigging of the broken ship, the voodoo tried in vain to rally them to fighting-pitch. They were bent on getting out the drowning men, their brothers.
Then he secretly called aside his most devoted band of zealots. Pointing out the Chouacha and reminding them that the Indian had been the one they saw running through the lightning flash to set the town to arms, he swore them to eternal vengeance against all Indians and sent them scurrying back through the forest to the Chouachas' village.
Here the voodoo doctor's afrites caught the peaceful natives by surprise, butchered many of them, set their town on fire, and, returning in violent haste to New Orleans, tried for the second time to draw the negroes into battle. But it was too late. Some were in manacles, some in jail, and some meekly caring for the victims of the slave ship.
This attack on the Indian village made all Indians the enemies of the negroes for many generations; and since this hatred forbade the two races from uniting against the French, the voodoo's worst deed was the one which best protected the town from the possibility of other mutinies, for, whatever the negroes planned in revolt, the revengeful Indians defeated it. Anything the Indians proposed to do unlawfully the blacks told to the authorities for spite.
The voodoo's power was at an end.
He guessed that his intimates would be hanged (they promptly were) and that he himself would be subjected to some of the dreadful torturing punishments of that age. He preferred a dramatic taking-off. So in the cold gray dawn in the sight of the still waking populace, red, black, white, he ran out upon the rail of the slowly settling ship, sang his wailing conjurer's song, and, plunging Anthony's knife to its hilt in his heart, fell headlong into the Great River. Before the eyes of the whole town his body spun round and round as it sank.
Even to-day, when the dawn is cold after a storm in the full of the moon, there are times when some watchers think they see the ghost of the voodoo whirling in the eddy at that same place, a wicked ghost that has been hoodooed and can never get away from the scene of his crime nor rest in peace because the bad he tried to do to the three races of the Mississippi was turned by the fate of the slave ship into lasting good for them all.