The witch of bayou Pierre

I

Near the open door of a weatherbeaten log cabin in the land of many bayous a shriveled crone sat huddled in a short-legged hide bottom chair. Small piercing black eyes peering from deep bony sockets seemed to dart over and beyond a small clearing about the place, and to rest broodingly on the dank edges of the swamp. They looked resentfully at the tangled under-brush that crowded to the very rim of the sun-baked potato patch as if reaching out octupus tentacles to recapture this pitiful striv¬ ing toward civilization, and to drag back into somber boggy shadows.

The parchment like skin of the old woman was drawn across high cheek bones like hide stretched on pegs and dried by the sun. Lips caved in over toothless gums, worked and smacked continually. Quick bird-like movements of the weazened body proved that in spite of her years life in her was so unnaturally strong that it justified the name given her years ago, "The Witch of Bayou Pierre.”

It was the month of April back in the early days of Louisiana, and the hot sun that had flamed since early dawn with a heat known only to south¬ ern lowlands, was at last casting long lazy shadows across the cabin with its rickety gallery and honey¬ suckle vine. No clouds appeared in the hot brassy sky with promise of relief from the unusual heat that billowed in suffocating waves from the swamp and nearby canebrakes of the sluggish Bayou Pierre.

A slight movement within the cabin caused Madame Lisso to turn her hideous head with its quick bird-like twist, and ask in a weird unnatural voice.

"You, Asa?”

"Yah, man,” came the answer in a strange cracked voice not unlike that of the old witch, and a moment later a freakish relic of a man wound out of the door onto the slanting little gallery and seated himself in the shade of the honeysuckle. His joints seemed bent and twisted with some malicious intent, and the wooly white whiskers which covered his entire face and neck and met the wooly white hair on his head, made him resemble an old ram, as much as Madame Lisso, his mother, did a picked and dried sparrow. Both were so extremely odd that it was difficult to believe age alone could have made such scare-crows of them.

At the age of fifteen Madame Lisso, of French- Irish descent had arrived in Louisiana with a ship¬ ment of girls who had been sent from France for the purpose of supplying wives for the colonists.

Homely past description even then, to the surprise of the beauties who had snubbed her on the voyage over, she was led away by Rechard Lisso, the hand¬ somest and most debonaire Frenchman in the col¬ ony. Those who saw the unbelievable happen, de¬ clared there was witchcraft at the bottom of it. Thus, almost at the moment of her landing in this new country nearly a century ago, the name of witch had fallen upon this strange creature like a black mantle. Her weird appearance, and the many unexplainable happenings in or near the isolated cabin at the edge of the swamp, had deepened the belief in her uncanny powers. Indians had worn the little path deep coming for magic of the black art she practiced, while many of the settlers would ride miles out of their way to avoid meeting one of the Lisso family.

If the handsome Rechard was bewitched when he chose his ugly wife, the spell remained on him until death. Two children were born to this strange¬ ly mated pair. The son, grotesquely ugly as his mother, as a child was injured by a fall, from which he never fully recovered, and the years had fash¬ ioned him into this queer old man, now sitting in the shade of the honeysuckles. The little girl, Renee, born years later, inherited the dark loveliness of the Lisso women. Passionate love and thrust of a stranger ended her tempestuous life at the age of seventeen. Heart broken, the kindly old Rechard was soon laid to rest by her side.

Renee’s child was christened Sabine for the parish in which she was born, and from some throw-back in ancestry or, as many believed, from the witch blood in her veins, this child of a race of darkskinned, dark-eyed people, was of unbelievable blonde fairness. At sixteen she stood out in shining contrast to the Louisianians of that day, whose swarthy skins ranged from negro to the creamy complexions of the French and Spanish settlers. The unaccountable blue-eyed fairness of the witch’s grand-daughter had caused the ignorant to shun her, many to secretly fear her, and all to leave her alone save the Spanish family of Sepulvedor who lived several miles away on San Miguel Bayou.

The last red fingers of a vanished sun had faded, blotting out the still evening shadows, and a tropical twilight was deepening over the hard beaten path that led to the door of Madame Lisso’s cabin, when a slight figure sped through the woods toward the home of the old witch. There was fright in those speeding feet as if some fearful unseen thing glided in pursuit.

The keen ears of Madame Lisso caught the sound of the swiftly running feet; her bleak talon hands ceased their nervous twining around each other. Perched upon the edge of her chair she became alert, her sharp ears, trained to distinguish noises of the swamp . . . night noises . . . and sounds by day, caught a difference in the message of the dark¬ ening woods. A strange look crossed her horrid face, and with her uncanny sixth sense she half rose, clutching her shriveled breast. Stark terror sped those flying feet tonight. Once before during the past month the same difference had reached her listening ears, and now as she hurriedly rose and scurried to meet the flying girl, an icy hand seemed to clutch her heart. Her old eyes fixed piercingly on her granddaughter, as she bounded over the block step with tiny moccasined feet that hardly tipped it. Sabine’s breath was coming in gasps as she clutched at the old woman.

"Quick! In the house, granny. Get in! He is out there again. He is there now. I saw his eyes watching me from the bushes.”

She dragged the old witch inside the room and flew about closing the tiny shutters and the back door to the shed room where old Asa slept. Madame Lisso hopped about like a bird. She poked her head out of the door and whispered in her weird way to Asa half asleep in his chair.

"Whist! Git a pine-knot an fetch it quick, son.”

Like one of the wild things he had lived among all his life, the old woodsman caught the warning in his mother’s voice, and swiftly glided to the woodpile in the yard and back with his long arms filled with pineknots. As he entered the room the door was quickly closed and the plank fastening shot into place. He went to the huge mud fire¬ place and stirring the ashes, uncovered the red coals upon which he placed the rich knot that smoked a moment, then caught, lighting the room with its leaping blaze. The sudden brightness made the old man blink with the astigmatic blindness of one long accustomed to darkness.

The girl Sabine made a beautiful picture in that crude room with its rough homemade furniture, smoked herb-hung rafters, and walls on which were all the queer things the old witch used in her artful machinations. The firelight played over her fairy¬ like face and braided hair which hung in ropes of molten gold to the hem of her short homespun dress. Great eyes surprisingly blue between black lashes, were fixed with frozen terror on the closed door as if waiting,—waiting,—dreading for it to open and reveal the object of her terror. The pine-knot fell apart with a crack that sounded like an exploding bomb and the girl started nervously.

"Set down, chile,” said the old woman, reaching out with her claw-like hands and drawing her to a chair. Then she perched herself in the chimney corner. Her eyes disappeared far back in their bony sockets as she mouthed and mumbled in the strange voice nature had given her.

"Ma pore leetle chile, pestered by tha varment, tha black imp of satan. SnophT aroun’ ma cabin, ferritin’ out ma secrets. Lavin’ tracks in ma gar¬ den. Alack-a-day, ma pore ole self. Plague take tha spawn uv satan, half-breed brat uv er squaw. I’ll ram er toad down the black throat uv ’im. Pore ole me, pore ole witch. Did dast lay dirty hands on ye ”

"No, oh, no, granny. He was in the bushes. His eyes were watching me.”

Sabine’s voice was keyed high with nervousness. Her frightened eyes constantly travelled from the closed door to the little shuttered window, then back to her grandmother and Asa nodding in the chimney corner.

"He started trackin’ ye then?’

"Yes, granny. I felt him coming after me through the shadows. He is out there now—I can feel it.”

"Guydo an’ Marcelena had cum es fur es tha fork wid ye?”

"Yes, they had left me just a few minutes when I felt the eyes. I looked to one side—ough! Where could I hide? Oh, granny, shall I ever escape from the terror of the Trail?”

A terrible shudder ran over the slender body and the fair child-face, drained of blood, looked pinched in the firelight.

"Ye felt the evil eyes nigh tha ole ironwood tree?”

"Yes, granny.”

Sabine paused in her nervous watching of door and shutter to look at her grandmother. It was strange how granny could always read things just as they happened before being told about them. But her thoughts were wiped from her mind as a sound, more felt than heard, brought all three up with a start. No one spoke. Old Asa who often lived in the woods for weeks at a time had caught the sound and sat with wooly head thrown back, lis¬ tening. The fire flickered eerily as the blaze began to die. The weird screech of a disturbed owl flap¬ ping its wings in flight over the cabin made the girl’s blood run cold. Turning stiff fright paralyzed necks, they looked through the door of the cabin into Asa’s shed-room. In the flickering light of the fire they saw the trapdoor in the floor of the shedroom open, and a man slowly crawl through it and rise to his feet. The figure advanced to the door¬ way, and leaning against it, calmly gazed at the silent little group.

"Buenos noches!” said Ocase Mataha in a deep gutteral voice.

In the silence Madame Lisso heard the impatient champ of horses and knew that outside waited members of the halfbreed’s bandit gang. Ocase’s keen black eyes, straight figure, black hair and red¬ dish complexion indicated his Indian blood as clearly as his poise, regularity of feature and normal cheek¬ bones betrayed his heritage from his white father.

"Good evening!” repeated the half-breed, his eyes traveling over the frightened Sabine.

"Mon Dieu!” screamed Madame Lisso, recover¬ ing the use of her cracked old voice. "Git, ye black savage devil. Lave us in peace, ye robber brat uv er squaw! What do ye mean by sneaking in on us like tha varment ye be? Git!”

"Quiet down, mammy. I am not here to kill you,” replied Ocase in a carefully enunciated Eng¬ lish which sounded strange on his tongue. "I fancy your granddaughter, and I mean to have her. She spurned my proposal on the trail so I must take what I want. I want her for my squaw. I come for her now!”

The old woman rose shakily and spat in the fire with startling vehemence.

"Niver will ye hev her, ye misbegotten son uv er white father,” she cried, "lave us this instant or I’ll put sich er spell on ye an yer gang asTl last ye ter yer dyin day! Git, afore I call tha dogs uv hell to drag ye away to yer destruction!”

The half-breed looked at her stolidly.

"Go frighten children with your threats, old woman!”

"Ye imupent brat uv er squaw, ye—”

With shaking hands Sabine motioned her grand¬ mother to be quiet.

"Don’t you see you are frightening my gran 9 - mereY 9 she said. "Please go!’*

"When I go, you go with me,” replied Ocase. "I have spoken to the priest and he awaits us. Come!”

With the easy springy step of a panther the In¬ dian crossed over to the girl and seized her by the arm.

"Oh, Gran 9 merel Asa! Don’t let him get me!” Sabine screamed, frantic with terror.

Ocase drew her with him and started toward the door. A flash of understanding lit Asa’s feeble brain. With the unexpected litheness of a cat he sprang from his chair and hurled himself snarling, biting and scratching, upon the Indian. Surprised at the suddenness of the attack Ocase staggered and released Sabine who ran screaming to her grandmother. Recovering himself, Ocase turned upon Asa and with a contemptuous push sent the old man crashing to the floor. Though stunned, Asa looked up in time to see the half-breed wrench Sabine from the clutching hands of his mother and turn again to the door. Into the half-crazed brain of the old man came but a single thought—kill, kill. Wobbling to his feet, he snatched up the over¬ turned bench and made toward the halfbreed, who was now fumbling with the bolt while Sabine strug¬ gled and kicked in his embrace.

"Brain him, Asa, brain him!” shrieked Madame Lisso.

Warned by her outcry, Ocase wheeled. Whipping out his revolver and grasping it firmly by the barrel, he brought the butt of it down upon the old mans’ skull with a crash that stretched him uncon¬ scious on the floor. With a cry of rage Sabine snatched the Indian’s hunting knife from its scab¬ bard and tried to bury it in his side. Ocase grinned wickedly and imprisoned the girl’s hands with an easy gesture. He thrust his face close to the tearfilled eyes of his captive.

"It’s lawful marriage I offer you,” he muttered, still speaking his careful English.

For answer Sabine bent her head and sank her teeth into his imprisoning hand.

"She-cat! Then Ill ’take what I want!”

Throwing her across his shoulder Ocase jerked open the door. The old woman flung herself for¬ ward to impede the exit of the bandit, but her feet became entangled in her long dress and she fell to the floor as Sabine, screaming, was borne away in the darkness toward Natchitoches.

Hours later when dark clouds had blown up and the wind howled against the cabin a shrunken old woman sat staring into the gray embers on her hearth. Had Ocase carried Sabine before a priest for lawful wedding or had he ... .

Her long fingers laced and unlaced in her lap.

"The seventeenth!” she murmured. "The seven¬ teenth. I’ll send him and his gang to hell for the doings of this seventeenth.”

Asa sat weeping beside the dying fire, his beard and hair stiff with drying blood. Puzzled he watched his mother seize a bit of charred wood from the ashes and in wavering black letters write the figure seventeen on the board above the fireplace.

"The seven teen th!” repeated Madame Lisso as she formed the figures.

"Seventeenth, seventeenth,” repeated Asa as he rose and stumbled off to the shedroom.

II

In 1788 the first rumblings of the storm that was to become the French Revolution began to disturb the calm of Europe. Ancient dynasties sat appar¬ ently secure on their thrones; landed aristocrats frolicked their privileged way through endless court gayeties; wealthy middle classes continued to buy and sell, and amass riches. The first faint murmurs of the cyclone were almost unheeded. A year later the hurricane broke in all its fury. Reverberations from the storm center swept from Paris in ever broadening circles until the entire continent was involved in the clash of ideas, the war of irrecon¬ cilable political systems, the destruction of aristo¬ crats, the volcanic fall of ancient dynasties and the sudden rise of new.

Spain no less than France entered upon three de¬ cades of unprecedented turmoil, suffering and war. Many a grandee of Madrid and noble of Paris, lost life and property in the almost universal cataclysm. Early in the titanic disturbance that raged in Europe Don Leon Francesco Sepulvedor, his for¬ tune destroyed and his ancient patrimony wrecked, 13 cast longing eyes to America. Perhaps within its deep forests he might find the peace which had deserted Europe; on its broad virgin acres he might recoup the fortunes so depleted by the exigency of the time. In Spanish America he might recover all he had lost in old Spain. Therefore, early in the 1790’s Don Leon left Madrid, with Amata his young French wife, and their two children, Guydo, a boy of seven, and Marcelena, a smiling babe of less than a year, he sailed across the Atlantic to New Orleans.

Fired by the tales that he heard of the beautiful bayou country, the productivity of its soil, and the wealth to be gained in the cultivation of indigo, tobacco and rice, the intrepid Spaniard with his family journeyed northward over the Spanish Trail. Undeterred by the dangers of the country, un¬ daunted by the reported depredations of bandits, and unfrightened by the unsettled state of the country, Don Leon pushed to Natchitoches, the oldest Spanish town in that section of Louisiana. This old settlement on the Red River pleased him. Some distance beyond Natchitoches, in Sabine Parish, near the little fort of Spanish Town the adventuring Don settled and built himself a log cabin.

His new home was on the Bayou San Miguel within a stone’s throw of a branch of the Spanish Trail. Originally a one-roomed hut, the Don had added to the structure a$ the years passed and suc¬ cess came to crown his efforts. Spanish to the very core he saw Louisiana shuffled back and forth between France and Spain as a pawn in the polit¬ ical game played by Napoleon. And now, in his advancing old age he had lived to witness the en¬ tire territory of Louisiana pass into the possession of the United States by act of the Corsican tyrant.

A few days before Christmas, 1803, William C. C. Claiborne, late Governor of the Mississippi Territory, hoisted the American flag over the Cabildo in New Orleans. By this act the United States took formal possession of the Louisiana Ter¬ ritory. In March of the next year Congress passed an act which provided for the government of the newly acquired lands. The northern part, which embraced Missouri, the only inhabited section north of New Orleans, was made the District of Louisiana; the southern portion, which roughly em¬ braced what is now the state of Louisiana, was called the Territory of Orleans and placed under the temporary administration of the President of the United States, who was authorized to exercise all the military, civil and judicial powers previously exercised by the officers of the French and Spanish governments.

The precise limits of the Louisiana Territory were not described in the Treaty of Cession. Con¬ sequently Spain and the United States found themselves in dispute over the ownership of that area lying between the Red and Sabine Rivers. This disputed section was called the Neutral Strip. To the south and west of this No-Man’s Land lay the domains of His Catholic Majesty of Spain; to the north and east extended the territories of the in¬ fant but lustily developing United States. Each nation recognized the value of the disputed area and each attempted to exercise sovereignty over it. American and Spanish troops marched and count¬ er-marched through the Neutral Strip. The agents of each country endeavored to win the allegiance of the scattered inhabitants to their respective flags.

Pending the settlement of the exact boundary between their possessions, Spain and the United States, as a compromise measure, agreed that Mar¬ cel De Soto, reputed a descendant of Hernandez De Soto, should exercise temporary governorship over the section until its final status should be de¬ termined.

With the political government too weak to adequately protect life and property, the Neutral Strip became the rendezvous of outlaws, maraud¬ ing Indians and half-breeds, who preyed almost at will upon the scattered inhabitants of the deep forests and swampy bayous. The quiet creeks, im¬ penetrable swamps, tangled canebrakes, and roll¬ ing hills offered shelter to the lawbreakers, and as a result, the area between the Red and Sabine Rivers became a center of outlawry.

In 1803-04 there was no more beautiful section in all Louisiana than this Neutral Strip. It was a land of bayous, those meandering waterways, half creek and half lake, which lay like gleaming jewels amid the forests. Through the jungle of the Neutral Strip from Natchitoches on the Red River, to San Antonio, Texas, ran the wavering Spanish Trail. Colorful even in the beginning, this lonely old trail of blood and romance owed its tortuous route to the stealthy gliding of savage feet in the days before the gallant De Soto was buried in the rolling waters of the great river he discovered. With the coming of France and Spain to this country, the old trail took on added glamor as over it passed French noble and Spanish grandee, each striving to add to the crown of his sovereign a new American jewel. Behind them came ad¬ venturer and priest, coureur de boh and trapper, settler and Indian half-breed to write deeper the marks of the trail, and to paint with their violent contrasts, the colorful pageantry which history was unfolding in this section. The marks of this famous Trail, or trace as the roads were then called, date back as far as the second decade of the eighteenth century and are still to be found in many places where the natural beauty of Louisiana has been spared by the destroying hand of civilization.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, how¬ ever, the Spanish Trail was in its prime. Then along this artery flowed all the life of the period. Pack train or mules out of the Spanish Southwest trotted along the Trail toward the mighty Miss¬ issippi and the port of New Orleans; traveler and adventurer, putting the river at their backs, passed over the Trail in the opposite direction to the great south and southwest where adventure lurked. And along the way skulked the bandit ready to rob and to kill.

Beyond Natchitoches the Trail snaked its way southward toward New Orleans. It wound its sinuous curves along the banks of great swamps where mighty oaks, festooned in gray Spanish moss, gazed pensively, like monks in trailing robes, at their reflections in bayou and creek. Back and forth it bent through canebrake and swamp, mean¬ dering before the doors of the humble cabins of the settlers in remote parishes and then disappear¬ ing in the gloom of the forest.

It was to this land of beauty and romance that Don Leon brought his little family. Though he hid himself away in the wilderness Don Leon had not neglected the education of his two children. He taught them himself, and from his lips Guydo and Marcelena learned to speak perfect Spanish and English. Their mother, not to be outdone, taught them the beautiful tongue of her beloved France. Thus, almost immured in the deep forest, the young Sepulvedors were as highly educated as any children of their rank either in New Orleans or Madrid. Lest his growing daughter suffer from lack of companionship, Don Leon had in¬ vited Madame Lisso, his nearest neighbor some miles away on the Bayou Pierre, to let her grand¬ daughter, Sabine, attend the school he taught. And it was in the home of the Sepulvedors that the little Creole beauty gained a knowledge of books and of English and Spanish. Day after day for several years she had appeared dancing along the path to the Sepulvedor home, like a golden but¬ terfly flitting through the forest wildness and in¬ to the hearts and lives of the proud Spanish family on the Bayou San Miguel.

In the late evening Senorita Marcelena stood looking from her shuttered window into the deep¬ ening twilight, listening to the drip-drip of a slow rain which had begun on the night of the seven¬ teenth and still came down steadily from the low overhanging clouds. Darkness was falling early over the San Miguel woods, blotting out the cool amber lights that lay deep in the slumberous gray eyes of the senorita,—eyes made vastly darker by the inky lashes that matched the gleaming hair which lay on her head like blackest night. The beauty of the senorita was compelling, exotic, as tho the Latin blood of her illustrious Spanish an¬ cestors had concentrated in her veins to make this daughter of old Madrid a fair representative of them in the alien country to which she had been transplanted.

It was of Sabine the Senorita Marcelena thought as she stood at the little square window. Blackness descended first on the woods across the bayou, then crept quickly over the magnolias and oaks in the yard. The young girl was awakened from her dreaming by the entrance of her soft eyed lit¬ tle mother. The pale rays of the lighted candle in her hand showed her to be still of a petite pretti¬ ness in spite of long, hard years in the settlement. She held the candle high, searching the room with anxious eyes.

"Ah, there you are, mooning at the window. Father and Guydo have finished eating and wonder where you are hiding this long time.’*

"Ho-hum, madre mio , the end of another day and still it rains. Such a noise the bayou is making. I love the sound of it when it goes on rampage and rumbles as it does tonight. I dream the strang¬ est things. Sabine and Guydo hate rainy days and never, never will they go near the swamp when it is shady and dark. Amata, do you think Sabine will come tomorrow?”

"I think she will come. It is very wet in the woods, ma amie y only if the sun shines will she come.”

“But, Amata, favorito, the rain never keeps her away from us three days. She will come in the morning.”

“Well,, then, please, it is late child, come and eat your supper now.”

There was a deep, troubled look in Amata’s eyes as she turned and led the way for this child, a head taller than herself, with her queer moods so little understood by the tiny French woman.

They passed through an unceiled hallway which led to a large kitchen at the back of the house. There Don Leon sat smoking a cigar of homeraised tobacco, talking earnestly to his tall, dark¬ eyed son whose wet hunting clothes steamed in the heat of a bright wood fire. In the huge mud fireplace with its pots and ovens, Amata did the family cooking. Tonight she dished up a bount¬ eous supper of o’possum and potatoes, lye hominy and gumbo for her daughter. Marcelena sat down and ate, seemingly unnoticed by the two before the fire. The pounding of the slow rain on the roof of the homey old kitchen and the roaring of the overflowing bayou drowned the sound of their voices, and Marcelena again fell a-dreaming. Her strange eyes, with fires of passion in their gray depths, looked witching in the soft firelight as her thoughts drifted further and further away. In her preoccupation she failed to note the troubled glances cast in her direction by the family. She helped Amata clear the table and quickly left the room, much to the relief of the others who seemed laboring under an emotion which, by common consent, they strove to hide from her. As soon as the door closed behind her the old don leaned nearer Guydo.

"Did Pierre say he heard this at Spanish Town?”

"It was raining and thundering so I could scarce¬ ly catch his whispered words, father. I cannot recall, however, that he mentioned Spanish Town.”

"Well, if he had said he heard it at the fort I would be inclined to doubt the truthfulness of it. The fort is a hot-bed of gossip and lies. Every rumor good or bad, true or false, originates at Smith’s Tavern.”

The don’s Spanish blood was fired and his fine old eyes blazed with strong feeling.

"Peirre said it was whispered along the Spanish Trail, but no one dares go near enough to Madame Lisso, or Ocase either, to find out. They seem to fear one as much as the other.”

"I can hardly believe Madame Lisso with her keen intuition or whatever it is called, would al¬ low that Indian dog to outwit her in such a thing as this.”

Guydo looked at his father as if striving to ab¬ sorb some of the hope his words held, but something in his very soul seemed to say this terrible thing was true. The dark tragic look in his son’s eyes filled Don Leon with a passion of anger. He arose and strode back and forth about the kitchen, denouncing the country where such a thing could happen. At last he sat down, puff¬ ing and blowing, and swore.

"Dios! I shall write the governor if this last out¬ rage has been committed. We have reached the limit in Louisiana. We have no law or protection from this daring gang of outlaws, and yet there are the finest people in the world right here in Sabine Parish who are simply terrorized by the bloody trail this gang has made through our state.”