The prospective journey was the same that we saw Suzanne and Françoise,
Joseph and Alix, take with toil and danger, yet with so much pleasure, in
1795. The early company went in a flatboat; these went in a round-bottom
boat. The journey of the latter was probably the shorter. Its adventures
have never been told, save one line. When several weeks afterwards the
boat returned, it brought word that Daniel Müller had one day dropped dead
on the deck and that his little son had fallen overboard and was drowned.
The little girls had presumably been taken on to their destination by
whoever had been showing the way; but that person's name and residence, if
any of those left in New Orleans had known them, were forgotten. Only the
wide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and by
people to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence.
Besides, the children's kindred were bound as redemptioners.

Those were days of rapid change in New Orleans. The redemptioners worked
their way out of bondage into liberty. At the end of a year or two those
who had been taken to plantations near by returned to the city. The town
was growing, but the upper part of the river front in faubourg Ste. Marie,
now in the heart of the city, was still lined with brick-yards, and
thitherward cheap houses and opportunities for market gardening drew the
emigrants. They did not colonize, however, but merged into the community
about them, and only now and then, casually, met one another. Young
Schuber was an exception; he throve as a butcher in the old French market,
and courted and married the young Eva Kropp. When the fellow-emigrants
occasionally met, their talk was often of poor shoemaker Müller and his
lost children.

No clear tidings of them came. Once the children of some Germans who had
driven cattle from Attakapas to sell them in the shambles at New Orleans
corroborated to Frank Schuber the death of the father; but where Salome