And so he was tramping once more—toward Carancro. And never before with such determined eagerness. Nothing could turn him about now. Once a train came in sight in front of him just as he had started across a trestle-work; but he ran forward across the open ties, and leaped clear of the track on the farther side, just when another instant would have been too late. He stood a moment, only half-pausing among the palmettos and rushes as the hurtling mass thundered by; then pushed quickly into the whirling dust of the track and hurried on between the clicking rails, not knowing that yonder dark, dwindling speck behind was bearing away from him strange tidings from the curé.
The summer was coming on; the suns were hot. There were leagues on leagues of unbroken shaking prairie with never a hand-breadth of shade, but only the glowing upper blue, with huge dazzling clouds moving, like herds of white elephants pasturing across heavenly fields, too slowly for the eye to note their motion; and below, the far-reaching, tremulous sheen of reed and bulrush, the wet lair of serpent, wild-cat, and alligator. Now and then there was the cool blue of sunny, wind-swept waters winding hither and thither toward the sea, and sometimes miles of deep forest swamp through which the railroad went by broad, frowzy, treeless clearings flanked with impassable oozy ditches; but shade there was none.
Nor was there peace. Always as he strode along, something he could not outgo was at his side, gaunt, wounded, soiled, whispering: “Turn back; turn back, and settle with me,” and ever put off with promises—after that fashion as old as the world—to do no end of good things if only the one right thing might be left undone.
And so because there were no shade, no peace, and no turning back, no one day’s march made him stronger for the next; and at length, when he came to the low thatch of a negro-cabin, under the shadow of its bananas he sank down in its doorway, red with fever.
There he had to stay many days; but in the end he was up and on his way again. He left the Atchafalaya behind him. It was easier going now. There was shade. Under his trudging feet was the wagon-road along the farther levee of the Teche. Above him great live-oaks stretched their arms clad in green vestments and gray drapings, the bright sugar-cane fields were on his left, and on his right the beautiful winding bayou. In his face, not joy, only pallid eagerness, desire fixed upon fulfilment, and knowledge that happiness was something else; a young, worn face, with hard lines about the mouth and neck; the face of one who had thought self to be dead and buried, and had seen it rise to life again, and fallen captive to it. So he was drawing near to Carancro. Make haste, Bonaventure!
CHAPTER IX.
THE WEDDING.
A horse and buggy have this moment been stopped and are standing on a faint rise of ground seven miles out beyond the south-western outskirt of Carancro. The two male occupants of the vehicle are lifting their heads, and looking with well-pleased faces at something out over the plain. You know the curé?—and the ex-governor.
In the far distance, across the vast level, something that looks hardly so large on the plain as an ant on the floor, is moving this way across it. This is what the curé and his friend are watching. Open in the curé’s hand, as if he had just read it aloud again, is that last letter of Bonaventure’s, sent ahead of him from New Orleans and received some days ago. The governor holds the reins.