CHAPTER VIII.
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.’”