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Updated: June 1, 2025
Zoséphine! ma vieille! ma vieille!" one long moan and sigh, and the finest horseman, the sweetest musician, the bravest soldier, yes, and the best husband, in all Carancro, was dead. Poor old Sosthène and his wife! How hard they tried, for days, for weeks, to comfort their widowed child! But in vain.
"Adjieu," said the young centaur; and Sosthène replied from the creaking calèche, "Adjieu, 'Thanase," while the rider bestowed his rustic smile upon the group. Madame Sosthène's eyes met his, and her lips moved in an inaudible greeting; but the eyes of her little daughter were in her lap. Bonaventure's gaze was hostile.
Dawn't ondstand dat little fellah; he love flower' like he was a gal." "He ought to go to school," said the ex-governor. And Sosthène, half to himself, responded in a hopeless tone: "Yass." Neither Sosthène nor any of his children had ever done that. War it was. The horsemen grew scarce on the wide prairies of Opelousas.
Then Madame Sosthène saw two things at once: that the guess was a good one, and that Zoséphine had bidden childhood a final "adjieu." The daughter felt Bonaventure's eyes upon her. He was standing only a step or two away. She gave him a quick, tender look that thrilled him from head to foot, then lifted her brows and made a grimace of pretended weariness.
From what the curé is saying we gather that Sosthène has bought this very small dwelling from a neighbor, and is moving it to land of his own.
They are gone. Sosthène, inside the house, has heard nothing. The tempest suffocates all sounds not its own, and the wind is the wrong way anyhow. Now they are far out in the open. Chaouache's île still glimmers to them far ahead in the distance, but if some one should only look from the front window of its dwelling, he could see them coming. And that would spoil the fun.
But away in the night Madame Sosthène, hearing an unwonted noise, went to Bonaventure's bedside and found him sobbing as if his heart had broken. "He has had a bad dream," she said; for he would not say a word. The curé of Vermilionville and Carancro was a Creole gentleman who looked burly and hard when in meditation; but all that vanished when he spoke and smiled.
The evening the speaker left for home on his leave of absence 'Thanase was still in camp, but was to start the next morning. It was just after Sunday morning mass that Sosthène and Chaouache, with their families and friends, crowded around this bearer of tidings. "Had 'Thanase been in any battles?" "Yes, two or three." "And had not been wounded?"
The next day the wind came hurtling over the plains out of the north-west, bitter cold. The sky was all one dark gray. At evening it was raining. Sosthène said, as he sat down to supper, that it was going to pour and blow all night. Chaouache said much the same thing to his wife as they lay down to rest.
"You think so?" said Sosthène, but not as if he doubted. "Yes; it is certain now that Zoséphine will always remain the Widow 'Thanase." From College Point to Bell's Point, sixty miles above New Orleans, the Mississippi runs nearly from west to east. Both banks, or "coasts," are lined with large and famous sugar-plantations.
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