ly now and then disturbed by the call
or whir of the summer duck, the dismal ventriloquous note of the
rain-crow, or the splash of a dead branch falling into the clear but
lifeless bayou.

The pack of Cuban hounds that howl from Don Jose's kennels cannot snuff
the trail of the stolen canoe that glides through the sombre blue vapors
of the African's fastnesses. His arrows send no telltale reverberations
to the distant clearing. Many a wretch in his native wilderness has
Bras-Coupe himself, in palmier days, driven to just such an existence,
to escape the chains and horrors of the barracoons; therefore not a whit
broods he over man's inhumanity, but, taking the affair as a matter of
course, casts about him for a future.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE STORY OF BRAS-COUPE, CONTINUED

Bras-Coupe let the autumn pass, and wintered in his den.

Don Jose, in a majestic way, endeavored to be happy. He took his senora
to his hall, and under her rule it took on for a while a look and
feeling which turned it from a hunting-lodge into a home. Wherever the
lady's steps turned--or it is as correct to say wherever the proud tread
of Palmyre turned--the features of bachelor's-hall disappeared; guns,
dogs, oars, saddles, nets, went their way into proper banishment, and
the broad halls and lofty chambers--the floors now muffled with mats of
palmetto-leaf--no longer re-echoed the tread of a lonely master, but
breathed a redolence of flowers and a rippling murmur of
well-contented song.

But the song was not from the throat of Bras-Coupe's "_piti zozo_."
Silent and severe by day, she moaned away whole nights heaping
reproaches upon herself for the impulse--now to her, because it had
failed, inexplicable in its folly--which had permitted her hand to lie
in Bras-Coupe's and the priest to bind them together.

For in the audacity of her pride, or, as Agricola would have said, in
the immensity of her impudence, she had held herself consecrate to a
hopeless love. But now she was a black man's wife! and even he unable
to sit at her feet and learn the lesson she had hoped to teach him. She
had heard of San Domingo; for months the fierce heart within her silent
bosom had been leaping and shouting and seeing visions of fire and
blood, and when she brooded over the nearness of Agricola and the
remoteness of Honore these visions got from her a sort of mad consent.
The lesson she would have taught the giant was Insurrection. But it was
too late. Lett