me 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.

CHAPTER II.

CLAUDE.

Of the party that had come in the Sicilian's boat four were men and
one a young woman. She was pretty; so pretty, and of such restful
sweetness of countenance, that the homespun garb, the brand-new
creaking gaiters, and a hat that I dare not describe were nothing
against her. Her large, soft, dark eyes, more sweetly but not less
plainly than the attire, confessed her a denizen of the woods.

Not so the man who seemed to be her husband. His dress was rustic
enough; and yet you would have seen at once that it was not the
outward circumstance, but an inward singularity, that had made him and
must always keep him a stranger to the ordinary ways of men. There was
an emotional exaltation in his face as he hastily led his companions
with military directness to the ticket window. Two others of the men
were evidently father and son, the son barely twenty years of age, the
parent certainly not twice as old; and the last of the group was a
strong, sluggish man of years somewhat near, but under, fifty.

They bought but one ticket; but, as one may say, they all bought it,
the youngest extricating its price with difficulty from the knotted
corner of his red handkerchief, and the long, thin hand of the leader
making the purchase, while the eyes of the others followed every
movement with unconscious absorption.

The same unemotional attentiveness was in their forms as their slow
feet drifted here and there always after the one leader, their eyes on
his demonstrative hands, and their ears drinking in his discourse. He
showed them the rails of the track, how smooth they were, how they
rested on their cross-ties, and how they were spiked in place always
the same width apart. They crowded close about him at the
telegraph-window while he interpreted with unconscious originality the
wonders of electricity. Their eyes rose slowly from the window up and
out along the ascending wires to where they mounted the poles and
eastward and westward leaped away sinking and ris