Wild is the river [antikvár]

WILD IS THE RIVER ONCE HE turned the corner out of Dauphine Street, the noise of the rioting faded until at last there was only dark silence broken faintly by a distant pistol shot or the scream of a brawling harlot. The street through which he walked, close against the house walls in the shadow, was like a passage through a city of the dead, with every shutter and door tightly barred and here and there a thin glowing sliver of light where some resentful, respectable Créole still remaining in the ravished city, sat watching and listening, plotting perhaps against the invaders. The echo of his footsteps ricocheted back and forth from one wall to another—click-clack, click-clack. He was a tall, big man and the steel on the heels of his army boots made a sharp clear sound like a pistol shot each time they struck the stone pavement. He walked unsteadily for he had had too much champagne at La Lionne's establishment before the fight began and now the "hants" were after him again, those "hants" which only surrounded and attacked him when the malaria, picked up in the swamps of Virginia, returned or he became tired and bored and a little drunk. He had started the fight at La Lionne's out of boredom and once it gained the proportions of a riot he had slipped away out of the back door into Royal Street. And now the "hants" pursued him, coming out of old churches and town halls and still white houses all over New England to torment him—"hants" from which he would never escape because they were in his blood. The moon, rising hot above the bayous beyond the city came suddenly above the roofs of the houses and painted the empty silent street in black and silver. The heels still went click-clack, click-clack on the stone banquettes. A cat slithered quickly from one side of the street to the other, black in the clear metallic light. Then suddenly even the distant isolated screams and shots were no longer heard and he was in the remote section of the quarter, near to home. "Home !" He did not speak the word but the sound of it echoed in his brain. Home was a long way off. Boston would be full of slushy early April snow now, the whale-oil lights shining yellow