At dawn next morning, he started for a tour round the farms to try and learn particulars of his son. It seemed that neither Mathurin nor the man had had the least suspicion of André's flight; they had neither seen nor heard the slightest thing.
Thus Toussaint Lumineau went to make inquiries among the old and new friends frequented by André during the last few months, sons of farmers, gooseherds, or sailors. For three whole days he scoured the Marais from Saint Gervais to Fromentière, from Sallertaine to Saint Gilles. Those he asked knew but little, or were unwilling to betray confidence. All agreed in stating that André had often talked of making his fortune across the sea where the land was new and fertile. The best informed went on to say:
"Last Sunday he said good-bye to several of us, myself among the number. He told me he was off to South America, where, for a mere nothing, he would get a farm of seventy-four acres of virgin soil; but I do not remember the name of the place where he was going."
On the evening of the third day, when, having had this information, the farmer returned home, he found the cripple sitting by the fireside.
"Mathurin," he said, "you ought still to have some of those books where countries are sketched out, you know what I mean?"
"Geography books? Yes, there must be some left from old schooldays. Why?"
"I want to look at America," replied the old man. "It is there that your brother is going they all say."
Dragging himself to the chest, from under the clothes at the bottom the cripple brought forth a handful of school books, which had belonged to one or other of them as boys, and came back with a little elementary atlas, on the cover of which was written in a beginner's large handwriting: "This book belongs to Lumineau André, son of Lumineau Toussaint, of La Fromentière, Commune of Sallertaine, Vendée." The father stroked his hand over the writing, as if to caress it.
"It was his," he said.
Mathurin opened the atlas. It was all to pieces; the maps were rounded at the corners from wear, crumpled or torn, the edges frayed. The cripple's fingers turned the pages gingerly, and stopped at a map covered with ink-blots in which the two Americas, united by their isthmus, in deep orange colour, looked like a pair of huge spectacles. The two men bent over it. "This is South America," said Mathurin. "And here is the sea."