A halt at a station brought a momentary silence, and right here arose again, clear and shrill, the chicken's cry.
Mammy was equal to the emergency. After glancing inquiringly up and down the coach, she exclaimed, aloud, "Some'h'n' in dis heah kyar soun' des like a vintrilloquer."
"That's just what it is," said an old gentleman opposite, peering around over his spectacles. "And whoever you are, sir, you've been amusing yourself for an hour."
Mammy's ruse had succeeded, and during the rest of the journey, although the chicken developed duly as to vocal powers, the only question asked by the curious was, "Who can the ventriloquist be?"
Evelyn could hardly maintain her self-control, the situation was so utterly absurd.
"I does hope it's a pullet," mammy confided later; "but I doubts it. Hit done struck out wid a mannish movemint a'ready. Muffly's eggs allus hatches out sech invig'rous chickens. I gwine in the dressin'-room, baby, an' wrop 'im up ag'in. Feel like he done kicked 'isse'f loose."
Though she made several trips to the dressing-room in the interest of her hatchling, mammy's serene face held no betrayal of the disturbing secret of her bosom.
At last the journey was over. The train crept with a tired motion into the noisy depot. Then came a rattling ride over cobble-stones, granite, and unpaved streets; a sudden halt before a low-browed cottage; a smiling old lady stepping out to meet them; a slam of the front door—they were at home in New Orleans.
Madame Le Duc seemed to have forgotten nothing that their comfort required, and in many ways that the creole gentlewoman understands so well she was affectionately and unobtrusively kind. And yet, in the life Evelyn was seeking to enter, Madame could give her no aid. About all these new ideas of women—ladies—going out as bread-winners, Madame knew nothing. For twenty years she had gone only to the cathedral, the French Market, the cemetery, and the Chapel of St. Roche. As to all this unconventional American city above Canal Street, it was there and spreading (like the measles and other evils); everybody said so; even her paper, L'Abeille, referred to it in French—resentfully. She believed in it historically; but for herself, she "never travelled," excepting, as she quaintly put it, in her "acquaintances"—the French streets with which she was familiar.
The house she had selected was a typical old-fashioned French cottage, venerable in scaling plaster and fern-tufted tile roof, but cool and roomy within as uninviting without. A small inland garden surprised the eye as one entered the battened gate at its side, and a dormer-window in the roof looked out upon the rigging of ships at anchor but a stone's-throw away.