“Adjieu.” The men were bedraggled, and so wet one could not make out the color of the dress. One could hardly call it a uniform, and pretty certainly it was not blue.
“Adjieu,” responded Bonaventure, with some alarm; but the spokesman smiled re-assuringly. He pointed far away south-westward, and asked if a certain green spot glimmering faintly through the rain was not Chaouache’s île; and Bonaventure, dumb in the sight of his prayer’s answer, nodded.
“And how do you get there?” the man asks, still in Acadian French; for he is well enough acquainted with prairies to be aware that one needs to know the road even to a place in full view across the plain. Bonaventure, with riot in his heart, and feeling himself drifting over the cataract of the sinfullest thing that ever in his young life he has had the chance to do, softly lays down his wood, and comes to the corner of the galérie.
It is awful to him, even while he is doing it, the ease with which he does it. If, he says, they find it troublesome crossing the marshy place by Numa’s farm,—le platin à coté d’ l’habitation à Numa,—then it will be well to virer de bord—go about, et naviguer au large—sail across the open prairie. “Adjieu.” He takes up his fagots again, and watches the spattering squad trot away in the storm, wondering why there is no storm in his own heart.
They are gone. Sosthène, inside the house, has heard nothing. The tempest suffocates all sounds not its own, and the wind is the wrong way anyhow. Now they are far out in the open. Chaouache’s île still glimmers to them far ahead in the distance, but if some one should only look from the front window of its dwelling, he could see them coming. And that would spoil the fun. So they get it into line with another man’s grove nearer by, and under that cover quicken to a gallop. Away, away; splash, splash, through the coolées, around the maraises, clouds of wild fowl that there is no time to shoot into rising now on this side, now on that; snipe without number, gray as the sky, with flashes of white, trilling petulantly as they flee; giant snowy cranes lifting and floating away on waving pinions, and myriads of ducks in great eruptions of hurtling, whistling wings. On they gallop; on they splash; heads down; water pouring from soaked hats and caps; cold hands beating upon wet breasts; horses throwing steaming muzzles down to their muddy knees, and shaking the rain from their worried ears; so on and on and on.
The horse-hair halter was nearly done. The breakfast was smoking on the board. The eyes of the family group were just turning toward it with glances of placid content, when a knock sounded on the door, and almost before father or son could rise or astonishment dart from eye to eye, the door swung open, and a man stood on the threshold, all mud and water and weapons, touching the side of his cap with the edge of his palm and asking in French, with an amused smile forcing its way about his lips:—
“Can fifteen of us get something to eat, and feed our horses?”
Chaouache gave a vacant stare, and silently started toward the holsters that hung from the bedpost; but the stranger’s right hand flashed around to his own belt, and, with a repeater half drawn, he cried:
“Halt!” And then, more quietly, “Look out of the door, look out the window.”
Father and son looked. The house was surrounded.