“Are you?” he asked.

Father Antoine stared at him, not as an angry white man stares, but with head thrown back and mouth partly open, in the manner of his race.  Then, with the unreasoned impetuousness of a charging bull, he turned and flung shoreward down the pier.  The cripple, groaning still, crawled to Simpson’s feet and sat there.

“Pauvre garcon!” repeated Simpson dully. “Pauvre garcon!”

Suddenly the boy stopped groaning, swung Simpson’s kit-bag on his shoulder, and sidled up the pier.  His right leg bent outward at the knee, and his left inward; his head, inclined away from his burden, seemed curiously detached from his body; his gait was a halting sort of shuffle; yet he got along with unexpected speed.  Simpson, still dazed, followed him into the Grand Rue—­a street of smells and piled filth, where gorged buzzards, reeking of the tomb, flapped upward under his nose from the garbage and offal of their feast.  Simpson paused for a moment at the market-stalls, where negroes of all shades looked out at him in a silence that seemed devoid of curiosity.  The cripple beckoned him and he hurried on.  On the steps of the cathedral he saw Father Antoine, but, although the priest must have seen him, he gave no sign as he passed.  He kept to what shade there was.  Presently his guide turned down a narrow alley, opened a dilapidated picket gate, and stood waiting.

“Maman!” he called. “Oh!  Maman!”

Simpson, his curiosity faintly stirring, accepted the invitation of the open gate, and stepped into an untidy yard, where three or four pigs and a dozen chickens rooted and scratched among the bayonets of yucca that clustered without regularity on both sides of the path.  The house had some pretensions; there were two stories, and, although the blue and red paint had mostly flaked away, the boarding looked sound.  In the yard there was less fetor than there had been outside.

“Maman!” called the boy again.

A pot-lid clashed inside the house, and a tall negress, dressed in a blue-striped Mother Hubbard, came to the door.  She stared at Simpson and at the boy.

“Qui?” was all she said.

The boy sidled nearer her and dropped the bag on the threshold.

“Qui?” she said again.

Simpson waited in silence.  His affairs had got beyond him somehow, and he seemed to himself but the tool of circumstance.  It did occur to him, though dimly, that he was being introduced to native life rather quickly.

The cripple, squatting with his back against the bag, launched into a stream of patois, of which Simpson could not understand a word.  Gestures explained somewhat; he was reenacting the scenes of the last half hour.  When he had finished, the negress, not so hostile as she had been but by no means friendly, turned to Simpson and looked at him a long time without speaking.  He had all he could do not to fidget under her gaze; finally, she stood aside from the door and said, without enthusiasm: