e received went its
way for something that left him dingy and threadbare. He now made a
lively acquaintance with his landlord, as, indeed, with every soul in
the neighborhood, and told all his adventures in Mexican prisons and
Cuban cities; including full details of the hardships and perils
experienced jointly with the "long gentleman" who had married
Mademoiselle, and who was no Mexican or Cuban, but a genuine
Louisianian.

"It was he that fancied me," he said, "not I him; but once he had fallen
in love with me I hadn't the force to cast him off. How Madame ever
should have liked him was one of those woman's freaks that a man mustn't
expect to understand. He was no more fit for her than rags are fit for a
queen; and I could have choked his head off the night he hugged me round
the neck and told me what a suicide she had committed. But other fine
women are committing that same folly every day, only they don't wait
until they're thirty-four or five to do it.--'Why don't I like him?'
Well, for one reason, he's a drunkard!" Here Kookoo, whose imperfect
knowledge of English prevented his intelligent reception of the story,
would laugh as if the joke came in just at this point.

However, with all Monsieur's prattle, he never dropped a word about the
man he had been before he went away; and the great hair-trunk puzzle was
still the same puzzle, growing greater every day.

Thus the two rooms had been the scene of some events quite queer, if not
really strange; but the queerest that ever they presented, I guess, was
'Sieur George coming in there one day, crying like a little child, and
bearing in his arms an infant--a girl--the lovely offspring of the
drunkard whom he so detested, and poor, robbed, spirit-broken and now
dead Madame. He took good care of the orphan, for orphan she was very
soon. The long gentleman was pulled out of the Old Basin one morning,
and 'Sieur George identified the body at the Treme station. He never
hired a nurse--the father had sold the lady's maid quite out of sight;
so he brought her through all the little ills and around all the sharp
corners of baby-life and childhood, without a human hand to help him,
until one evening, having persistently shut his eyes to it for weeks and
months, like one trying to sleep in the sunshine, he awoke to the
realization that she was a woman. It was a smoky one in November, the
first cool day of autumn. The sunset was dimmed by the smoke of burning
prairies, the ai