Shortly afterwards Mr. Blennerhasset and his wife made their appearance, escorting my fellow travellers to the river bank and down to the boat itself. I hastened to add my adieus to the others, and the tactful couple, seeing that I was impatient to be under way, cut short what had threatened to be a protracted parting.
With repeated last calls of farewell and wavings of hat and handkerchief, we swung out into the current and drifted swiftly away from our over-hospitable host and hostess. A few minutes carried us below the cultivated upper portion of the island, and I noticed Don Pedro eying the wooded remainder with a peculiar intentness. Afterwards I was told that certain of the huge cypresses shadowed a bayou, in which at the time we passed there were already being collected boats and munitions for the flotilla that was to form the nucleus of Colonel Burr's ill-starred expedition.
"We swung out into the current and drifted swiftly away"
Of this and the nefarious plans since charged to that great dreamer, I then had not the remotest suspicion, and soon turned my attention from the pondering señor.
Scattered up and down the midchannel for three miles or more was a string of barges, flats, and keelboats, laden with flour, lumber, and other up-river products, for the market at New Orleans. Like ourselves, they were coming down from the higher shipping-ports with the Spring fresh.
At my request, Alisanda kept within the house, until, by a vigorous bit of sculling, I had sent our craft beyond earshot of the nearest of these barges. The huge, clumsy craft, which must have been upwards of four hundred tons burden, was manned by the usual crew of twenty-five or thirty rowdy, drunken rivermen, whose ribaldry and rude jests were unfitted for the ears of a gentlewoman.