ething--any thing--take 'Thanase beyond reach.

Instead of this 'Thanase got well, and began to have a perceptible
down on his cheek and upper lip, to the great amusement of Zosephine.

"He had better take care," she said one day to Bonaventure, her eyes
leaving their mirth and expanding with sudden seriousness, "or the
conscript officer will be after him, though he is but sixteen."

Unlucky word! Bonaventure's bruised spirit seized upon the thought.
They were on their way even then _a la chapelle_; and when they got
there he knelt before Mary's shrine and offered the longest and most
earnest prayer, thus far, of his life, and rose to his feet under a
burden of guilt he had never known before.

It was November. The next day the wind came hurtling over the plains
out of the north-west, bitter cold. The sky was all one dark gray. At
evening it was raining. Sosthene said, as he sat down to supper, that
it was going to pour and blow all night. Chaouache said much the same
thing to his wife as they lay down to rest. Farther away from Carancro
than many of Carancro's people had ever wandered, in the fire-lighted
public room of a village tavern, twelve or fifteen men were tramping
busily about, in muddy boots and big clanking spurs, looking to
pistols and carbines of miscellaneous patterns, and securing them
against weather under their as yet only damp and slightly bespattered
great-coats, no two of which were alike. They spoke to each other
sometimes in French, sometimes in English that betrayed a Creole
rather than an Acadian accent. A young man with a neat _kepi_ tipped
on one side of his handsome head stood with his back to the fire, a
sabre dangling to the floor from beneath a captured Federal overcoat.
A larger man was telling him a good story. He listened smilingly,
dropped the remnant of an exhausted cigarette to the floor, put his
small, neatly booted foot upon it, drew from his bosom one of those
silken tobacco-bags that our sisters in war-time used to make for all
the soldier boys, made a new cigarette, lighted it with the flint and
tinder for which the Creole smokers have such a predilection, and put
away his appliances, still hearkening to the story. He nodded his head
in hearty approval as the tale was finished. It was the story of
Sosthene, Chaouache, 'Thanase, and the jayhawkers. He gathered up his
sabre and walked out, followed by the rest. A rattle of saddles, a
splashing of hoofs, and then no sound was he