His mind—­his occasional transient meditation—­was the more comfortable because he was one of those few who had coolly and unsentimentally allowed Honore Grandissime to sell their lands.  It continued to grow plainer every day that the grants with which theirs were classed—­grants of old French or Spanish under-officials—­were bad.  Their sagacious cousin seemed to have struck the right standard, and while those titles which he still held on to remained unimpeached, those that he had parted with to purchasers—­as, for instance, the grant held by this Capitain Jean-Baptiste Grandissime—­could be bought back now for half what he had got for it.  Certainly, as to that, the Capitain might well have that quietude of mind which enabled him to find occupation in perfecting the edge of his penknife and trimming his nails in the dark.

By and by he put up the little tool and sat looking out upon the prospect.  The time of greatest probability had not come, but the voudou might choose not to wait for that; and so he kept watch.  There was a great stillness.  The cocks had finished a round and were silent.  No dog barked.  A few tiny crickets made the quiet land seem the more deserted.  Its beauties were not entirely overlooked—­the innumerable host of stars above, the twinkle of myriad fireflies on the dark earth below.  Between a quarter and a half-mile away, almost in a line with the Cherokee hedge, was a faint rise of ground, and on it a wide-spreading live-oak.  There the keen, seaman’s eye of the Capitain came to a stop, fixed upon a spot which he had not noticed before.  He kept his eye on it, and waited for the stronger light of the moon.

Presently behind the grove at his back she rose; and almost the first beam that passed over the tops of the trees, and stretched across the plain, struck the object of his scrutiny.  What was it?  The ground, he knew; the tree, he knew; he knew there ought to be a white paling enclosure about the trunk of the tree:  for there were buried—­ah!—­he came as near laughing at himself as ever he did in his life; the apothecary of the rue Royale had lately erected some marble headstones there, and—­

“Oh! my God!”

While Capitain Jean-Baptiste had been trying to guess what the tombstones were, a woman had been coming toward him in the shadow of the hedge.  She was not expecting to meet him; she did not know that he was there; she knew she had risks to run, but was ignorant of what they were; she did not know there was anything under the fig-tree which she so nearly and noiselessly approached.  One moment her foot was lifted above the spot where the unknown object lay with wide-stretched jaws under the leaves, and the next, she uttered that cry of agony and consternation which interrupted the watcher’s meditation.  She was caught in a huge steel-trap.

Capitain Jean-Baptiste Grandissime remained perfectly still.  She fell, a snarling, struggling, groaning heap, to the ground, wild with pain and fright, and began the hopeless effort to draw the jaws of the trap apart with her fingers.