om, "my little old man, does this mean that you have come to the
end of all self-service?--that self is never going to be spelt with a
capital S any more? Will it be that way if I let you go?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, my son--God only knows whether I am wise or foolish,
but--you may go."

The boy smiled for the first time in weeks, then climbed half upon
the bed, buried his face in the priest's bosom, and sobbed as though
his heart had broken.

"It has broken," said the cure to himself as he clasped him tightly.
"It has broken--thank God!"

CHAPTER VII.

A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK.

In such and such a battle, in the last charge across a certain
cornfield, or in the hurried falling back through a certain wood, with
the murderous lead singing and hitting from yonder dark mass
descending on the flank, and the air full of imperious calls,
"Halt!"--"Surrender!" a man disappeared. He was not with those who
escaped, nor with the dead when they were buried, nor among the
wounded anywhere, nor in any group of prisoners. But long after the
war was over, another man, swinging a bush scythe among the overgrown
corners of a worm fence, found the poor remnant of him, put it
scarcely underground, and that was the end. How many times that
happened!

Was it so with 'Thanase? No. For Sosthene's sake the ex-governor had
taken much pains to correspond with officials concerning the missing
youth, and had secured some slender re-assurances. 'Thanase, though
captured, had not been taken to prison. Tidings of general surrender
had overhauled him on the way to it, near, I think, the city of
Baltimore--somewhere in that region, at any rate; and he had been
paroled and liberated, and had started penniless and on foot,
south-westward along the railway-tracks.

To find him, Bonaventure must set out, like him on foot,
south-eastward over some fifty miles of wagon-road to the nearest
railway; eastward again over its cross-ties eighty miles to _la
ville_, the great New Orleans, there to cross the Mississippi. Then
away northward, through the deep, trestled swamps, leagues and
leagues, across Bayou La Branche and Bayou Desair, and Pass Manchac
and North Manchac, and Pontchatoula River two or three times; and out
of the swamps and pine barrens into the sweet pine hills, with their
great resinous boles rising one hundred--two hundred feet overhead;
over meadows and fields and many and many a beautiful clear creek, and
ten or more times ove