Three days later a long funeral cortége passed from the gates of the Levassour plantation and took its way along the dusty road toward the Catholic church of the settlement, some three miles off. In and out between the massive green walls of shining Cherokee rose-vines, which formed impenetrable barriers on either side of the way, wound the long line of old-fashioned chariots with black coachmen in queer, antiquated liveries, preceded by the tawdry French hearse with its numerous gilt devices and huge nodding plumes. The pitiless sun beat down upon them, and the blinding clouds of dust rose and choked them, but the mourners, both black and white, who formed the procession--and it was closed by a throng of weeping negroes on foot--were too much interested and absorbed in their melancholy task to feel either the one or the other, for such an occasion as this had never taken place in all that quiet country-side before. Inside of that hearse, in a snow-white coffin covered with flowers and gayly decorated with cut paper, silver crosses and waxen saints, reposed the mortal remains of Madame Hypolite Levassour, who had died at midnight thirty-six hours previously; and by her side in another coffin, more hastily contrived, lay the body of her well-beloved son-in-law and physician, Docteur Alphège Cherbuliez, who within six hours after her death had been killed by a shot-gun in the hands of an unknown assassin. Two negro men, Gérard Grôl and Pierre Lambas, had been arrested on strong suspicion, and were now in close confinement awaiting the trial which both knew would be short, sharp and swift, and administered by a judge who would not wait for legal proceedings to assist or confirm his decisions. Circumstantial evidence was strong against them, and the two unfortunate wretches were not more conscious that the sun was shining in heaven, making the narrow caboose in which they had been confined an unendurable, suffocating den of heat, than they were that when the dead were buried and grief was satisfied vengeance would make sudden and terrible work with them.