He lay silent, considering; then:  “I was old enough to remember, but not old enough to understand what I understood later. . . .  Do you want to know how my mother died?”

Celia’s lips moved in amazed assent.

“Then I will tell you. . . .  They had guards north, east, and west of us.  They had gone mad with fright; the whole land was quarantined against us; musket, flintlock, shotgun, faced us through the smoke of their burning turpentine.  I was only a little lad, but the horror of it I have never forgotten, nor my mother’s terror—­not for herself, for me.”

He lay on his side, thin hands clasped, looking not at Celia but beyond her at the dreadful scene his fancy was painting on the wall of his mother’s room: 

“Often, at night, we heard the shots along the dead line.  Once they murdered a man behind our water garden.  Our negroes moaned and sobbed all day, all night, helpless, utterly demoralised.  Two were shot swimming; one came back dying from snake bite.  I saw him dead on the porch.

“I saw men fall down in the street with the black vomit—­women, also—­and once I saw two little children lying dead against a garden wall in St. Catharine’s Alley.  I was young, but I remember.”

A terrible pallor came into his wan face.

“And I remember my mother,” he said; “and her pleading with the men who came to the house to let her send me across the river where there was no fever.  I remember her saying that it was murder to imprison children there in Silver Bayou; that I was perfectly well so far.  They refused.  Soldiers came and went.  Their captain died; others died, we heard.  Then my mother’s maid, Alice, an octoroon, died on the East Gallery.  And the quarters went insane that day.

“When night came an old body-servant of my grandfather scratched at mother’s door.  I heard him.  I thought it was Death.  I was half dead with terror when mother awoke and whispered to me to dress in the dark and to make no sound.

“I remember it perfectly—­remember saying:  ’I won’t go if you don’t, mother.  I’d rather be with you.’  And I remember her saying:  ’You shall not stay here to die when you are perfectly well.  Trust mother, darling; Jerry will take you to Sainte Jacqueline in a boat.’

“And after that it is vaguer—­the garden, the trench dug under the north wall—­and how mother and I, in deadly fear of moccasins, down on all fours, crept after Jerry along the ditch to the water’s edge——­”

His face whitened again; he lay silent for a while, crushing his wasted hands together.

“Celia, they fired on us from the levee.  After that I don’t know; I never knew what happened.  But that doctor at Silver Bayou said that I was found a mile below in a boat with the first marks of the plague yellowing my skin.  Celia, they never found my mother’s body.  It is not true that she died of fever at Silver Bayou.  She fell under the murderous rifles of the levee guard—­gave her life trying to save me from that pest-stricken prison.  Jerry’s body was found stranded in the mud twenty miles below.  He had been shot through the body. . . .  And now you know how my mother died.”