While the wet lanterns swung on crazily in the trees along the way by which the bridegroom was to have borne his bride; while Madame Grandissime prepared an impromptu bridalchamber; while the Spaniard bathed his eye and the blue gash on his cheek-bone; while Palmyre paced her room in a fever and wild tremor of conflicting emotions throughout the night, and the guests splashed home after the storm as best they could, Bras-Coupe was practically declaring his independence on a slight rise of ground hardly sixty feet in circumference and lifted scarce above the water in the inmost depths of the swamp.

And amid what surroundings!  Endless colonnades of cypresses; long, motionless drapings of gray moss; broad sheets of noisome waters, pitchy black, resting on bottomless ooze; cypress knees studding the surface; patches of floating green, gleaming brilliantly here and there; yonder where the sunbeams wedge themselves in, constellations of water-lilies, the many-hued iris, and a multitude of flowers that no man had named; here, too, serpents great and small, of wonderful colorings, and the dull and loathsome moccasin sliding warily off the dead tree; in dimmer recesses the cow alligator, with her nest hard by; turtles a century old; owls and bats, raccoons, opossums, rats, centipedes and creatures of like vileness; great vines of beautiful leaf and scarlet fruit in deadly clusters; maddening mosquitoes, parasitic insects, gorgeous dragon-flies and pretty water-lizards:  the blue heron, the snowy crane, the red-bird, the moss-bird, the night-hawk and the chuckwill’s-widow; a solemn stillness and stifled air only now and then disturbed by the call or whir of the summer duck, the dismal ventriloquous note of the rain-crow, or the splash of a dead branch falling into the clear but lifeless bayou.

The pack of Cuban hounds that howl from Don Jose’s kennels cannot snuff the trail of the stolen canoe that glides through the sombre blue vapors of the African’s fastnesses.  His arrows send no telltale reverberations to the distant clearing.  Many a wretch in his native wilderness has Bras-Coupe himself, in palmier days, driven to just such an existence, to escape the chains and horrors of the barracoons; therefore not a whit broods he over man’s inhumanity, but, taking the affair as a matter of course, casts about him for a future.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE STORY OF BRAS-COUPE, CONTINUED

Bras-Coupe let the autumn pass, and wintered in his den.

Don Jose, in a majestic way, endeavored to be happy.  He took his senora to his hall, and under her rule it took on for a while a look and feeling which turned it from a hunting-lodge into a home.  Wherever the lady’s steps turned—­or it is as correct to say wherever the proud tread of Palmyre turned—­the features of bachelor’s-hall disappeared; guns, dogs, oars, saddles, nets, went their way into proper banishment, and the broad halls and lofty chambers—­the floors now muffled with mats of palmetto-leaf—­no longer re-echoed the tread of a lonely master, but breathed a redolence of flowers and a rippling murmur of well-contented song.