ith a question, "Whose was yonder house?"

She replied in the same Acadian French in which she was questioned,
that there dwelt, or had dwelt, and about two weeks ago had died,
"Monsieur Robichaux." The pot-hunter's paddle dipped again, his canoe
shot on, and two hours later he walked with dust-covered feet into
Houma.

The principal tavern there stands on that corner of the court-house
square to which the swamper would naturally come first. Here he was to
find the engineer. But, as with slow, diffident step he set one foot
upon the corner of the threshold, there passed quickly by him and out
towards the court-house, two persons,--one a man of a county
court-room look and with a handful of documents, and the other a woman
whom he knew at a glance. Her skirts swept his ankles as he shrank in
sudden and abject terror against the wall, yet she did not see him.

He turned and retreated the way he had come, nothing doubting that
only by the virtue of a voodoo charm which he carried in his pocket he
had escaped, for the time being, a plot laid for his capture. For the
small, neatly-robed form that you may still see disappearing within
the court-house door beside the limping figure of the probate clerk is
Zosephine Beausoleil. She will finish the last pressing matter of the
Robichaux succession now in an hour or so, and be off on the little
branch railway, whose terminus is here, for New Orleans.

When the pot-hunter approached Lake Cataouache again, he made on foot,
under cover of rushes and reeds taller than he, a wide circuit and
reconnoissance of his hut. While still a long way off, he saw, lighted
by the sunset rays, what he quickly recognized as a canoe drawn half
out of the water almost at his door. He warily drew nearer. Presently
he stopped, and stood slowly and softly shifting his footing about on
the oozy soil, at a little point of shore only some fifty yards away
from his cabin. His eyes, peering from the ambush, descried a man
standing by the pirogue and searching with his gaze the wide distances
that would soon be hidden in the abrupt fall of the southern night.

The pot-hunter knew him. Not by name, but by face. The day the outlaw
saw Bonaventure at the little railway station this man was with him.
The name the pot-hunter did not know was St. Pierre.

The ambushed man shrank a step backward into his hiding-place. His
rifle was in his hand and he noiselessly cocked it. He had not
resolved to shoot; but a ri