“It has broken,” said the curé to himself as he clasped him tightly. “It has broken—thank God!”
CHAPTER VII.
A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK.
In such and such a battle, in the last charge across a certain cornfield, or in the hurried falling back through a certain wood, with the murderous lead singing and hitting from yonder dark mass descending on the flank, and the air full of imperious calls, “Halt!”—“Surrender!” a man disappeared. He was not with those who escaped, nor with the dead when they were buried, nor among the wounded anywhere, nor in any group of prisoners. But long after the war was over, another man, swinging a bush scythe among the overgrown corners of a worm fence, found the poor remnant of him, put it scarcely underground, and that was the end. How many times that happened!
Was it so with ’Thanase? No. For Sosthène’s sake the ex-governor had taken much pains to correspond with officials concerning the missing youth, and had secured some slender re-assurances. ’Thanase, though captured, had not been taken to prison. Tidings of general surrender had overhauled him on the way to it, near, I think, the city of Baltimore—somewhere in that region, at any rate; and he had been paroled and liberated, and had started penniless and on foot, south-westward along the railway-tracks.
To find him, Bonaventure must set out, like him on foot, south-eastward over some fifty miles of wagon-road to the nearest railway; eastward again over its cross-ties eighty miles to la ville, the great New Orleans, there to cross the Mississippi. Then away northward, through the deep, trestled swamps, leagues and leagues, across Bayou La Branche and Bayou Desair, and Pass Manchac and North Manchac, and Pontchatoula River two or three times; and out of the swamps and pine barrens into the sweet pine hills, with their great resinous boles rising one hundred—two hundred feet overhead; over meadows and fields and many and many a beautiful clear creek, and ten or more times over the winding Tangipahoa, by narrow clearings, and the old tracks of forgotten hurricanes, and many a wide plantation; until more than two hundred miles from the great city, still northward across the sinking and swelling fields, the low, dark dome of another State’s Capitol must rise amid spires and trees into the blue, and the green ruins of fortifications be passed, and the iron roads be found branching west, north, and east.
Thence all was one wide sea of improbability. Even before a quarter of that distance should have been covered, how many chances of every sort there were against the success of such a search!
“It is impossible that he should find him,” said the ex-governor.
“Well,”—the curé shrugged,—“if he finds no one, yet he may succeed in losing himself.” But in order that Bonaventure in losing himself should not be lost, the priest gave him pens and paper, and took his promise to write back as he went step by step out into the world.