_ AU LARGE CHAPTER VIII. THE SHAKING PRAIRIE
Manifestly it was a generous overstatement for Claude's professional friend to say that Claude had outgrown his service. It was true only that by and by there had come a juncture in his affairs where he could not, without injustice to others, make a place for Claude which he could advise Claude to accept, and they had parted with the mutual hope that the separation would be transient. But the surveyor could not but say to himself that such incidents, happening while we are still young, are apt to be turning-points in our lives, if our lives are going to have direction and movement of their own at all.
St. Pierre had belted his earnings about him under the woollen sash that always bound his waist, shouldered his rifle, taken one last, silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few moments with his hand in Bonaventure's above one green mound in the churchyard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster's care, and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer's party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went away; but no temptation that they could invent could stay him from following Claude. Father and son went in one direction, and the camp in another.
I must confess to being somewhat vague as to just where they were. I should have to speak from memory, and I must not make another slip in topography. The changes men have made in Southern Louisiana these last few years are great. I say nothing, again, of the vast widths of prairie stripped of the herds and turned into corn and cane fields: when I came, a few months ago, to that station on Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad where Claude first went aboard a railway-train, somebody had actually moved the bayou, the swamp, and the prairie apart!
However, the exact whereabouts of the St. Pierres is not important to us. Mr. Tarbox, when in search of the camp he crossed the Teche at St. Martinville, expected to find it somewhere north-eastward, between that stream and the Atchafalaya. But at the Atchafalaya he found that the work in that region had been finished three days before, and that the party had been that long gone to take part in a new work down in the _prairies tremblantes_ of Terrebonne Parish. The Louisiana Land Reclamation Company,--I think that was the name of the concern projecting the scheme. This was back in early February, you note.
Thither Mr. Tarbox followed. The "Album of Universal Information" went along, and "did well." It made his progress rather slow, of course; but one of Mr. Tarbox's many maxims was, never to make one day pay for another when it could be made to pay for itself, and during this season--this Louisiana campaign, as he called it--he had developed a new art,--making each day pay for itself several times over.
"Many of these people," he said,--but said it solely and silently to himself,--"are ignorant, shiftless, and set in their ways; and even when they're not they're out of the current, as it were; they haven't headway; and so they never--or seldom ever--see any way to make money except somehow in connection with the plantations. There's no end of chances here to a man that's got money-sense, and nerve to use it." He wrote that to Zosephine, but she wrote no answer. A day rarely passed that he did not find some man making needless loss through ignorance or inactivity; whereupon he would simply put in the sickle of his sharper wit, and garner the neglected harvest. Or, seeing some unesteemed commodity that had got out of, or had never been brought into, its best form, time, or place, he knew at sight just how, and at what expense, to bring it there, and brought it.
"Give me the gains other men pass by," he said, "and I'll be satisfied. The saying is, 'Buy wisdom;' but I sell mine. I like to sell. I enjoy making money. It suits my spirit of adventure. I like an adventure. And if there's any thing I love, it's an adventure with money in it! But even that isn't my chief pleasure: my chief pleasure's the study of human nature.
'The proper study of mankind is man.
* * * * *
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.'"
This spoiling of Assyrian camps, so to speak, often detained Mr. Tarbox within limited precincts for days at a time; but "Isn't that what time is for?" he would say to those he had been dealing with, as he finally snapped the band around his pocket-book; and they would respond, "Yes, that's so."
And then he would wish them a hearty farewell, while they were thinking that at least he might know it was his treat.
Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of Terrebonne, he passed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing finally under the blossoming orange-trees of Terrebonne Bayou far down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party that Claude was not with him.
"He didn't leave us; we left him; and up to the time when we left he hadn't decided where he would go or what he would do. His father and he are together, you know, and of course that makes it harder for them to know just how to move."
The speaker was puzzled. What could this silk-hatted, cut-away-coated, empearled, free lance of a fellow want with Claude? He would like to find out. So he added, "I may get a letter from him to-morrow; suppose you stay with me until then." And, to his astonishment, Mr. Tarbox quickly jumped at the proposition.
No letter came. But when the twenty-four hours had passed, the surveyor had taken that same generous--not to say credulous--liking for Mr. Tarbox that we have seen him show for St. Pierre and for Claude. He was about to start on a tour of observation eastward through a series of short canals that span the shaking prairies from bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des Allemands, so through Lake Ouacha into and up Barataria, again across prairie, and at length, leaving Lake Cataouache on the left, through cypress-swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans. He would have pressed Mr. Tarbox to bear him company; but before he could ask twice, Mr. Tarbox had consented. They went in a cat-rigged skiff, with a stalwart negro rowing or towing whenever the sail was not the best.
"It's all of sixty miles," said the engineer; "but if the wind doesn't change or drop we can sleep to-night in Achille's hut, send this man and skiff back, and make Achille, with his skiff, put us on board the Louisiana-avenue ferry-launch to-morrow afternoon."
"Who is Achille?"
"Achille? Oh! he's merely a 'Cajun pot-hunter living on a shell bank at the edge of Lake Cataouache, with an Indian wife. Used to live somewhere on Bayou des Allemands, but last year something or other scared him away from there. He's odd--seems to be a sort of self-made outcast. I don't suppose he's ever done anybody any harm; but he just seems to be one of that kind that can't bear to even try to keep up with the rest of humanity; the sort of man swamps and shaking prairies were specially made for, you know. He's living right on top of a bank of fossil shells now,--thousands of barrels of them,--that he knows would bring him a little fortune if only he could command the intelligence and the courage to market them in New Orleans. There's a chance for some bright man who isn't already too busy. Why didn't I think to mention it to Claude? But then neither he nor his father have got the commercial knowledge they would need. Now"--The speaker suddenly paused, and, as the two men sat close beside each other under an umbrella in the stern of the skiff, looked into Mr. Tarbox's pale-blue eyes, and smiled, and smiled.
"I'm here," said Mr. Tarbox.
"Yes," responded the other, "and I've just made out why! And you're right, Tarbox; you and Claude, with or without his father, will make a strong team. You've got no business to be canvassing books, you"--
"It's my line," said the canvasser, smiling fondly and pushing his hat back,--it was wonderful how he kept that hat smooth,--"and I'm the head of the line:
'A voice replied far up the height,
Excelsior!'
I was acquainted with Mr. Longfellow."
"Tarbox," persisted the engineer, driving away his own smile, "you know what you are; you are a born contractor! You've found it out, and"--smiling again--"that's why you're looking for Claude."
"Where is he?" asked Mr. Tarbox.
"Well, I told you the truth when I said I didn't know; but I haven't a doubt he's in Vermilionville."
"Neither have I," said the book-agent; "and if I had, I wouldn't give it room. If I knew he was in New Jersey, still I'd think he was in Vermilionville, and go there looking for him. And wherefore? For occult reasons." The two men looked at each other smilingly in the eye, and the boat glided on.
The wind favored them. With only now and then the cordelle, and still more rarely the oars, they moved all day across the lands and waters that were once the fastnesses of the Baratarian pirates. The engineer made his desired observations without appreciable delays, and at night they slept under Achille's thatch of rushes.
As the two travellers stood alone for a moment next morning, the engineer said:
"You seem to be making a study of my pot-hunter."
"It's my natural instinct," replied Mr. Tarbox. "The study of human nature comes just as natural to me as it does to a new-born duck to scratch the back of its head with its hind foot; just as natural--and easier. The pot-hunter is a study; you're right."
"But he reciprocates," said the engineer; "he studies you."
The student of man held his smiling companion's gaze with his own, thrust one hand into his bosom, and lifted the digit of the other: "The eyes are called the windows of the soul,--
'And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.'
"Have you tried to look into his eyes? You can't do it. He won't let you. He's got something in there that he doesn't want you to see."
In the middle of the afternoon, when Achille's skiff was already re-entering the shades of the swamp on his way homeward, and his two landed passengers stood on the levee at the head of Harvey's Canal with the Mississippi rolling by their feet and on its farther side the masts and spires of the city, lighted by the western sun, swinging round the long bend of her yellow harbor, Mr. Tarbox offered his hand to say good-by. The surveyor playfully held it.
"I mean no disparagement to your present calling," he said, "but the next time we meet I hope you'll be a contractor."
"Ah!" responded Tarbox, "it's not my nature. I cannot contract; I must always expand. And yet--I thank you.
"'Pure thoughts are angel visitors. Be such
The frequent inmates of thy guileless breast.'
"Good luck! Good-by!"
One took the ferry; the other, the west bound train at Gretna. _