“Concedo libre y seguro paeaporte a Don David Ritchie para que pase a la Nueva Orleans por Agna.  Pido y encargo no se le ponga embarazo.”

A few days more and we were running between low shores which seemed to hold a dark enchantment.  The rivers now flowed out of, and not into the Mississippi, and Xavier called them bayous, and often it took much skill and foresight on his part not to be shot into the lane they made in the dark forest of an evening.  And the forest,—­it seemed an impenetrable mystery, a strange tangle of fantastic growths:  the live-oak (chene vert), its wide-spreading limbs hung funereally with Spanish moss and twined in the mistletoe’s death embrace; the dark cypress swamp with the conelike knees above the yellow back-waters; and here and there grew the bridelike magnolia which we had known in Kentucky, wafting its perfume over the waters, and wondrous flowers and vines and trees with French names that bring back the scene to me even now with a whiff of romance, bois d’arc, lilac, grande volaille (water-lily).  Birds flew hither and thither (the names of every one of which Xavier knew),—­the whistling papabot, the mournful bittern (garde-soleil), and the night-heron (grosbeck), who stood like a sentinel on the points.

One night I awoke with the sweat starting from my brow, trying to collect my senses, and I lay on my blanket listening to such plaintive and heart-rending cries as I had never known.  Human cries they were, cries as of children in distress, and I rose to a sitting posture on the deck with my hair standing up straight, to discover Nick beside me in the same position.

“God have mercy on us,” I heard him mutter, “what’s that?  It sounds like the wail of all the babies since the world began.”

We listened together, and I can give no notion of the hideous mournfulness of the sound.  We lay in a swampy little inlet, and the forest wall made a dark blur against the star-studded sky.  There was a splash near the boat that made me clutch my legs, the wails ceased and began again with redoubled intensity.  Nick and I leaped to our feet and stood staring, horrified, over the gunwale into the black water.  Presently there was a laugh behind us, and we saw Xavier resting on his elbow.

“What devil-haunted place is this?” demanded Nick.

“Ha, ha,” said Xavier, shaking with unseemly mirth, “you have never heard ze alligator sing, Michie?”

“Alligator!” cried Nick; “there are babies in the water, I tell you.”

“Ha, ha,” laughed Xavier, flinging off his blanket and searching for his flint and tinder.  He lighted a pine knot, and in the red pulsing flare we saw what seemed to be a dozen black logs floating on the surface.  And then Xavier flung the cresset at them, fire and all.  There was a lashing, a frightful howl from one of the logs, and the night’s silence once more.