The girl's smile vanished; her eyes flashed lightning for an instant; the blood flew to her cheeks, and she bit her lip. "Why don't you, now while he cannot help himself--why don't you go to him and hit him square in the face, like"--her arm flew up, and she smote him with her sunbonnet full between the eyes--"like that!" She ran away, laughing joyously, while Bonaventure sat down and wept with rage and shame. Day by day he went about his trivial tasks and efforts at pastime with the one great longing that Zosephine would more kindly let him be her slave, and something--any thing--take 'Thanase beyond reach. Instead of this 'Thanase got well, and began to have a perceptible down on his cheek and upper lip, to the great amusement of Zosephine. "He had better take care," she said one day to Bonaventure, her eyes leaving their mirth and expanding with sudden seriousness, "or the conscript officer will be after him, though he is but sixteen." Unlucky word! Bonaventure's bruised spirit seized upon the thought. They were on their way even then _a la chapelle_; and when they got there he knelt before Mary's shrine and offered the longest and most earnest prayer, thus far, of his life, and rose to his feet under a burden of guilt he had never known before. It was November. 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. Sosthene 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. Farther away from Carancro than many of Carancro's people had ever wandered, in the fire-lighted public room of a village tavern, twelve or fifteen men were tramping busily about, in muddy boots and big clanking spurs, looking to pistols and carbines of miscellaneous patterns, and securing them against weather under their as yet only damp and slightly bespattered great-coats, no two of which were alike. They spoke to each other sometimes in French, sometimes in English that betrayed a Creole rather than an Acadian accent. A young man with a neat _kepi_ tipped on one side of his handsome head stood with his back to the fire, a sabre dangling to the floor from beneath a captured Federal overcoat. A larger man was telling him a good story. He listened smilingly, dropped the remnant of an exhausted cigarette to the floor, put his small, neatly booted foot upon it, drew from his bosom one of those silken tobacco-bags that our sisters in war-time used to make for all the soldier boys, made a new cigarette, lighted it with the flint and tinder for which the Creole smokers have such a predilection, and put away his appliances, still hearkening to the story. He nodded his head in hearty approval as the tale was finished. It was the story of Sosthene, Chaouache, 'Thanase, and the jayhawkers. He gathered up his sabre and walked out, followed by the rest. A rattle of saddles, a