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As he went, by day or night, in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid south-western rivers, where his "leaders" shied at the alligators asleep in the stage-road; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at silence; over red, reedy, slimy causeways; in cane-breaks and bayous; past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its teeth, and cracked its horsewhip; past rich plantations where the negroes sang afield, and the planter in the house-porch took off his hat to bow here, there, always, everywhere, with his cold, hard, pock-marked face, thin lips and spotted eye, Auburn Risque sat brooding behind the reins, computing, calculating, overreaching, waiting for his destiny to wrestle with Chance and bind it down while its pockets were picked.
I spent most of my time in rambling through the fields and along the Levee boating upon the river fishing in the bayous hunting through the cane-breaks and cypress-swamps, and occasionally killing time at a game of billiards, for every Louisiana village has its billiard salon. The society of Reigart, whom I now called friend, I enjoyed when his professional engagements permitted.
Beneath a tree, where at evening when the sun was low often had she sat watching the cows as home they came from the cane-breaks in the bottoms, they dug her grave; and from all about, from fern-fringed coves and knobs where the scrub oak grew, the people came, old men and women to pay their respects to this bit of another age, going home and the children, came wonderingly, curious, with pictures of witches in their fertile minds.
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