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