_ AU LARGE CHAPTER I. THE POT-HUNTER
The sun was just rising, as a man stepped from his slender dug-out and drew half its length out upon the oozy bank of a pretty bayou. Before him, as he turned away from the water, a small gray railway-platform and frame station-house, drowsing on long legs in the mud and water, were still veiled in the translucent shade of the deep cypress swamp, whose long moss drapings almost overhung them on the side next the brightening dawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang the farthest two or three of a few flimsy wooden houses and a saw-mill with its lumber, logs, and sawdust, its cold furnace and idle engine.
As with gun and game this man mounted by a short, rude ladder to firmer footing on the platform, a negro, who sat fishing for his breakfast on the bank a few yards up the stream, where it bent from the north and west, slowly lifted his eyes, noted that the other was a white man, an Acadian, and brought his gaze back again to hook and line.
He had made out these facts by the man's shape and dress, for the face was in shade. The day, I say, was still in its genesis. The waters that slid so languidly between the two silent men as not to crook one line of the station-house's image inverted in their clear dark depths, had not yet caught a beam upon their whitest water-lily, nor yet upon their tallest bulrush; but the tops of the giant cypresses were green and luminous, and as the Acadian glanced abroad westward, in the open sky far out over the vast marshy breadths of the "shaking prairie,"[5] two still clouds, whose under surfaces were yet dusky and pink, sparkled on their sunward edges like a frosted fleece. You could not have told whether the Acadian saw the black man or not. His dog, soiled and wet, stood beside his knee, pricked his ears for a moment at sight of the negro, and then dropped them.
[5] The "shaking prairie," "trembling prairie," or
_prairie tremblante_, is low, level, treeless delta
land, having a top soil of vegetable mould overlying
immense beds of quicksand.
It was September. The comfortable air could only near by be seen to stir the tops of the high reeds whose crowding myriads stretched away south, west, and north, an open sea of green, its immense distances relieved here and there by strips of swamp forest tinged with their peculiar purple haze. Eastward the railroad's long causeway and telegraph-poles narrowed on the view through its wide axe-hewn lane in the overtowering swamp. New Orleans, sixty miles or more away, was in that direction. Westward, rails, causeway, and telegraph, tapered away again across the illimitable hidden quicksands of the "trembling prairie" till the green disguise of reeds and rushes closed in upon the attenuated line, and only a small notch in a far strip of woods showed where it still led on toward Texas. Behind the Acadian the smoke of woman's early industry began to curl from two or three low chimneys.
But his eye lingered in the north. He stood with his dog curled at his feet beside a bunch of egrets,--killed for their plumage,--the butt of his long fowling-piece resting on the platform, and the arm half outstretched whose hand grasped the barrels near the muzzle. The hand, toil-hardened and weather-browned, showed, withal, antiquity of race. His feet were in rough muddy brogans, but even so they were smallish and shapely. His garments were coarse, but there were no tatters anywhere. He wore a wide Campeachy hat. His brown hair was too long, but it was fine. His eyes, too, were brown, and, between brief moments of alertness, sedate. Sun and wind had darkened his face, and his pale brown beard curled meagre and untrimmed on a cheek and chin that in forty years had never felt a razor.
Some miles away in the direction in which he was looking, the broadening sunlight had struck and brightened the single red lug-sail of a boat whose unseen hull, for all the eye could see, was coming across the green land on a dry keel. But the bayou, hidden in the tall rushes, was its highway; for suddenly the canvas was black as it turned its shady side, and soon was red again as another change of direction caught the sunbeams upon its tense width and showed that, with much more wind out there than it would find by and by in here under the lee of the swamp, it was following the unseen meanderings of the stream. Presently it reached a more open space where a stretch of the water lay shining in the distant view. Here the boat itself came into sight, showed its bunch of some half-dozen passengers for a minute or two, and vanished again, leaving only its slanting red sail skimming nautilus-like over the vast breezy expanse.
Yet more than two hours later the boat's one blue-shirted, barefoot Sicilian sailor in red worsted cap had with one oar at the stern just turned her drifting form into the glassy calm by the railway-station, tossed her anchor ashore, and was still busy with small matters of boat-keeping, while his five passengers clambered to the platform.
The place showed somewhat more movement now. The negro had long ago wound his line upon its crooked pole, gathered up his stiffened fishes from the bank, thrust them into the pockets of his shamelessly ragged trousers, and was gone to his hut in the underbrush. But the few amphibious households round about were passing out and in at the half-idle tasks of their slow daily life, and a young white man was bustling around, now into the station and now out again upon the platform, with authority in his frown and a pencil and two matches behind his ear. It was Monday. Two or three shabby negroes with broad, collapsed, glazed leather travelling-bags of the old carpet-sack pattern dragged their formless feet about, waiting to take the train for the next station to hire out there as rice harvesters, and one, with his back turned, leaned motionless against an open window gazing in upon the ticking telegraph instruments. A black woman in blue cotton gown, red-and-yellow Madras turban, and some sportsman's cast-off hunting-shoes minus the shoe-strings, crouched against the wall. Beside her stood her shapely mulatto daughter, with head-covering of white cotton cloth, in which female instinct had discovered the lines of grace and disposed them after the folds of the Egyptian fellah head--dress. A portly white man, with decided polish in his commanding air, evidently a sugar-planter from the Mississippi "coast" ten miles northward, moved about in spurred boots, and put personal questions to the negroes, calling them "boys," and the mulattress, "girl."
The pot-hunter was still among them; or rather, he had drawn apart from the rest, and stood at the platform's far end, leaning on his gun, an innocent, wild-animal look in his restless eyes, and a slumberous agility revealed in his strong, supple loins. The station-agent went to him, and with abrupt questions and assertions, to which the man replied in low, grave monosyllables, bought his game,--as he might have done two hours before, but--an Acadian can wait. There was some trouble to make exact change, and the agent, saying "Hold on, I'll fix it," went into the station just as the group from the Sicilian's boat reached the platform. The agent came bustling out again with his eyes on his palm, counting small silver.
"Here!" But he spoke to the empty air. He glanced about with an offended frown.
"Achille!" There was no reply. He turned to one of the negroes: "Where's that 'Cajun?" Nobody knew. Down where his canoe had lain, tiny rillets of muddy water were still running into its imprint left in the mire; but canoe, dog, and man had vanished into the rank undergrowth of the swamp. _