All the time the hooker was in the gulf, the sky, although threatening, did not frown enough to cause the fugitives any uneasiness.  They were flying, they were escaping, they were brutally gay.  One laughed, another sang; the laugh was dry but free, the song was low but careless.

The Languedocian cried, “Caoucagno!” “Cocagne” expresses the highest pitch of satisfaction in Narbonne.  He was a longshore sailor, a native of the waterside village of Gruissan, on the southern side of the Clappe, a bargeman rather than a mariner, but accustomed to work the reaches of the inlet of Bages, and to draw the drag-net full of fish over the salt sands of St. Lucie.  He was of the race who wear a red cap, make complicated signs of the cross after the Spanish fashion, drink wine out of goat-skins, eat scraped ham, kneel down to blaspheme, and implore their patron saint with threats—­“Great saint, grant me what I ask, or I’ll throw a stone at thy head, ou te feg un pic.”  He might be, at need, a useful addition to the crew.

The Provencal in the caboose was blowing up a turf fire under an iron pot, and making broth.  The broth was a kind of puchero, in which fish took the place of meat, and into which the Provencal threw chick peas, little bits of bacon cut in squares, and pods of red pimento—­concessions made by the eaters of bouillabaisse to the eaters of olla podrida.  One of the bags of provisions was beside him unpacked.  He had lighted over his head an iron lantern, glazed with talc, which swung on a hook from the ceiling.  By its side, on another hook, swung the weather-cock halcyon.  There was a popular belief in those days that a dead halcyon, hung by the beak, always turned its breast to the quarter whence the wind was blowing.  While he made the broth, the Provencal put the neck of a gourd into his mouth, and now and then swallowed a draught of aguardiente.  It was one of those gourds covered with wicker, broad and flat, with handles, which used to be hung to the side by a strap, and which were then called hip-gourds.  Between each gulp he mumbled one of those country songs of which the subject is nothing at all:  a hollow road, a hedge; you see in the meadow, through a gap in the bushes, the shadow of a horse and cart, elongated in the sunset, and from time to time, above the hedge, the end of a fork loaded with hay appears and disappears—­you want no more to make a song.

A departure, according to the bent of one’s mind, is a relief or a depression.  All seemed lighter in spirits excepting the old man of the band, the man with the hat that had no pipe.