great rush of the sea came. Then the three men left the water,
and retired to higher ground to scan the furrowed Gulf;--their
practiced eyes began to search the courses of the sea-currents,--keen
as the gaze of birds that watch the wake of the plough. And soon the
casks and the drift were forgotten; for it seemed to them that the tide
was heavy with human dead--passing out, processionally, to the great
open. Very far, where the huge pitching of the swells was diminished by
distance into a mere fluttering of ripples, the water appeared as if
sprinkled with them;--they vanished and became visible again at
irregular intervals, here and there--floating most thickly
eastward!--tossing, swaying patches of white or pink or blue or black
each with its tiny speck of flesh-color showing as the sea lifted or
lowered the body. Nearer to shore there were few; but of these two
were close enough to be almost recognizable: Miguel first discerned
them. They were rising and falling where the water was deepest--well
out in front of the mouth of the bayou, beyond the flooded sand-bars,
and moving toward the shell-reef westward. They were drifting almost
side by side. One was that of a negro, apparently well attired, and
wearing a white apron;--the other seemed to be a young colored girl,
clad in a blue dress; she was floating upon her face; they could
observe that she had nearly straight hair, braided and tied with a red
ribbon. These were evidently house-servants,--slaves. But from
whence? Nothing could be learned until the luggers should return; and
none of them was yet in sight. Still Feliu was not anxious as to the
fate of his boats, manned by the best sailors of the coast. Rarely are
these Louisiana fishermen lost in sudden storms; even when to other
eyes the appearances are most pacific and the skies most splendidly
blue, they divine some far-off danger, like the gulls; and like the
gulls also, you see their light vessels fleeing landward. These men
seem living barometers, exquisitely sensitive to all the invisible
changes of atmospheric expansion and compression; they are not easily
caught in those awful dead calms which suddenly paralyze the wings of a
bark, and hold her helpless in their charmed circle, as in a nightmare,
until the blackness overtakes her, and the long-sleeping sea leaps up
foaming to devour her.

--"Carajo!"

The word all at once bursts from Feliu's mouth, with that peculiar
guttural snarl of the "