Yells and whoops and screams and wails came from Solly and Smart who realized that Mustard and Pap had escaped and who saw the reward for their capture slipping away, leaving themselves in durance. At the first screech, Rogers, the constable, who was sitting on a near-by door-step, ran to the jail and arrived just in time to empty his pistol at the fleeing forms of the three negroes as they passed under the last electric street light, and ran onto the protection levee at the river. Then the constable hastened back to the jail and became the recipient of some surprising misinformation from the wailing negroes in the prison. In an eager antiphony, they recited what they knew, snatching the sentences from each other’s lips: “Dem two niggers whut got away robbed de sto’ at Tickfall----” “An’ kilt dat Mister Skull whut owned it----” “De feller whut blows de cawnet-hawn done it----” “He brag his brags dat he done kilt mo’ coons dan he kin count----” “De monkey-faced tromboner hid behind de levee all mawnin’----” “An’ de cawnet-nigger axed eve’ybody did us know de tromboner befo’ de tromboner would come out----” “Ef you ketch ’em agin, Mister Rogers, does us niggers git de reward bill?” Mister Rogers, accompanied by the two negroes, left the jail in a trot and a few minutes later the constable pounded with his night-stick on the front door of Sheriff Ulloa’s home, demanding admittance on most important business. VI IN THE MASSACRE SWAMP. “We goes fo’ miles up dis levee to de Massacre swamp, niggers,” Mobile panted, as he ran. “Den faller de hog-path two miles to de ole Kerlerac plantation house. I knows dis country like I knows de insides of a white man’s hen-coop. Trot, niggers, trot!” When the Federal soldiers visited the State of Louisiana during the Civil War, they carried guns and ammunition, but they did their best fighting and won their greatest victories and wrought their most extensive devastation with water--muddy river water. Invading the State, they cut the levees of the Red, Atchafalaya, and Mississippi Rivers, and then let the snows melting on the loyal northern hills pour their floods and do their destructive work. Because of this method of warfare, Louisiana was the last State to begin to recover from the effects of the Civil War. Her agricultural enterprises absolutely require the protection of the river levees; prostrated financially, the State had no money to rebuild when peace was declared what war had destroyed. Mobile, followed by Pap Curtain and Mustard Prophet, was going straight to a spot which indicated after half a century one of the effects of this mode of warfare. The Kerlerac plantation house was a three-story building erected of stone conveyed, literally, from the ends of the earth, for the building material had been brought as ballast in the sailing vessels which landed with empty bottoms at the Kerlerac plantation to receive the products of her soil.