When Zoséphine and Mr. Tarbox finished out that Sunday twilight walk, they talked, after leaving the stile behind, only on business. He told her of having lately been, with a certain expert, in the swamps of Barataria, where he had seen some noble cypress forests tantalizingly near to navigation and market, but practically a great way off, because the levees of the great sugar estates on the Mississippi River shut out all deep overflows. Hence these forests could be bought for, seemingly, a mere tithe of their value. Now, he proposed to buy such a stretch of them along the edge of the shaking prairie north of Lake Cataouaché as would show on his part, he said, “caution, but not temerity.”
He invited her to participate. “And why?” For the simple reason that the expert, and engineer, had dropped the remark that, in his opinion, a certain levee could not possibly hold out against the high water of more than two or three more years, and that when it should break it would spread, from three to nine feet of water, over hundreds of square miles of swamp forests, prairies tremblantes, and rice and sugar fields, and many leagues of railway. Zoséphine had consented; and though Mr. Tarbox had soon after gone upon his commercial travels, he had effected the purchase by correspondence, little thinking that the first news he should hear on returning to New Orleans would be that the remotely anticipated “break” had just occurred.
And now, could and would the breach be closed, or must all Barataria soon be turned into, and remain for months, a navigable yellow sea? This, Claude knew, was what he must hasten to the crevasse to discover, and return as promptly to report upon, let his heart-strings draw as they might towards the studio in Carondelet Street and the Christian Women’s Exchange.
CHAPTER XVI.
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?”