They walked on, talking of the singular occurrences which had checkered their two lives, until the sun was sinking into the bosom of the Mississippi, and until they found themselves at a considerable distance from the city.
In order to regain New Orleans by a shorter route, they struck into a wood that bordered the river.
The sun was fading behind the trunks of the trees, and the wood was lonely as some primeval forest.
They had walked for some little distance, when they came suddenly upon the figure of a negro, reclining at the foot of an immense American oak.
He started to his feet as they approached, and Paul recognized the man with whom he had that morning struggled, Tristan, the slave belonging to the late Don Juan.
The negro glared at him with a savage expression in his distended eyeballs.
"It is you," he cried, "you—you! You haunt me wherever I go. I had come here to die."
"To die?"
"Yes. I have poison here," he said, clutching at some object in the breast of his shirt. "I overheard all this morning, and I should have been your ruin, had you not overpowered me. I would have burnt the evidence of your birth. I would have prevented your union with Camillia Moraquitos—with her I love?"
"You are mad, Tristan."