“And learn English, my boy; learn it with all speed; you will find it vastly, no telling how vastly, to your interest—I should say your usefulness. I am sorry I could not teach it to you myself. Here is a little spelling-book and reader for you to commence with. Make haste to know English; in America we should be Americans; would that I could say it to all our Acadian people! but I say it to you, learn English. It may be that by not knowing it you may fail, or by knowing it succeed, in this errand. And every step of your way let your first business be the welfare of others. Hundreds will laugh at you for it: never mind; it will bring you through. Yes, I will tell Sosthène and the others good-by for you. I will tell them you had a dream that compelled you to go at once. Adieu.” And just as the rising sun’s first beam smote the curé’s brimming eyes, his “little old man” turned his face toward a new life, and set forward to enter it.
“Have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named ’Thanase Beausoleil?”—This question to every one met, day in, day out, in early morning lights, in noonday heats, under sunset glows, by a light figure in thin, clean clothing, dusty shoes, and with limp straw hat lowered from the head. By and by, as first the land of the Acadians and then the land of the Creoles was left behind, a man every now and then would smile and shake his head to mean he did not understand—for the question was in French. But then very soon it began to be in English too, and by and by not in French at all.
“Sir, have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named ’Thanase Beausoleil?”
But no one had seen him.
Travel was very slow. Not only because it was done afoot. Many a day he had to tarry to earn bread, for he asked no alms. But after a while he passed eastward into a third State, and at length into the mountains of a fourth.
Meantime the weeks were lengthening into months; the year was in its decline. Might not ’Thanase be even then at home? No. Every week Bonaventure wrote back, “Has he come?” and the answer came back, “He is not here.”
But one evening, as he paced the cross-ties of a railway that hugged a huge forest-clad mountain-side, with the valley a thousand feet below, its stony river shining like a silken fabric in the sunset lights, the great hillsides clad in crimson, green, and gold, and the long, trailing smoke of the last train—a rare, motionless blue gauze—gone to rest in the chill mid-air, he met a man who suddenly descended upon the track in front of him from higher up the mountain,—a great, lank mountaineer. And when Bonaventure asked the apparition the untiring question to which so many hundreds had answered No, the tall man looked down upon the questioner, a bright smile suddenly lighting up the unlovely chin-whiskered face, and asked:
“Makes a fiddle thess talk an’ cry?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he hain’t been gone from hyer two weeks.”