iguel and
Mateo, looked out upon the thundering and flashing of the monstrous
tide. The wind had fallen, and the gray air was full of gulls. Behind
the cheniere, back to the cloudy line of low woods many miles away,
stretched a wash of lead-colored water, with a green point piercing it
here and there--elbow-bushes or wild cane tall enough to keep their
heads above the flood. But the inundation was visibly
decreasing;--with the passing of each hour more and more green patches
and points had been showing themselves: by degrees the course of the
bayou had become defined--two parallel winding lines of dwarf-timber
and bushy shrubs traversing the water toward the distant
cypress-swamps. Before the cheniere all the shell-beach slope was piled
with wreck--uptorn trees with the foliage still fresh upon them,
splintered timbers of mysterious origin, and logs in multitude, scarred
with gashes of the axe. Feliu and his comrades had saved wood enough
to build a little town,--working up to their waists in the surf, with
ropes, poles, and boat-hooks. The whole sea was full of flotsam. Voto
a Cristo!--what a wrecking there must have been! And to think the
Carmencita could not be taken out!

They had seen other luggers making eastward during the morning--could
recognize some by their sails, others by their gait,--exaggerated in
their struggle with the pitching of the sea: the San Pablo, the
Gasparina, the Enriqueta, the Agueda, the Constanza. Ugly water,
yes!--but what a chance for wreckers! ... Some great ship must have
gone to pieces;--scores of casks were rolling in the trough,--casks of
wine. Perhaps it was the Manila,--perhaps the Nautilus!

A dead cow floated near enough for Mateo to throw his rope over one
horn; and they all helped to get it out. It was a milch cow of some
expensive breed; and the owner's brand had been burned upon the
horns:--a monographic combination of the letters A and P. Feliu said
he knew that brand: Old-man Preaulx, of Belle-Isle, who kept a sort of
dairy at Last Island during the summer season, used to mark all his
cows that way. Strange!

But, as they worked on, they began to see stranger things,--white dead
faces and dead hands, which did not look like the hands or the faces of
drowned sailors: the ebb was beginning to run strongly, and these were
passing out with it on the other side of the mouth of the
bayou;--perhaps they had been washed into the marsh during the night,
when the