Gideon's Band: A Tale of the Mississippi
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Title: Gideon's Band: A Tale of the Mississippi
Author: George Washington Cable
Illustrator: F. C. Yohn
Release date: September 22, 2006 [eBook #19348]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19348
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GIDEON'S BAND
BOOKS BY GEORGE W. CABLE
Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
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[Illustration: Ramsey [_Page 80_]]
GIDEON'S BAND
A TALE OF THE MISSISSIPPI
BY
GEORGE W. CABLE
ILLUSTRATED BY
F. C. YOHN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1914
Copyright, 1914, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published September, 1914
TO EVA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Steamboat Levee 1
II. "The Votaress" 5
III. Certain Passengers 9
IV. The First Two Miles 13
V. Ramsey Hayle 17
VI. Hayles's Twins 25
VII. Supper 31
VIII. Questions 37
IX. Sitting Silent 43
X. Peril 50
XI. First Night-Watch 57
XII. Hugh and the Twins 68
XIII. The Superabounding Ramsey 75
XIV. The Committee of Seven 83
XV. Morning Watch 90
XVI. Phyllis 95
XVII. "It's a-Happmin' Yit--to We All" 106
XVIII. Ramsey Wins a Point or Two 113
XIX. This Way to Womanhood 122
XX. Ladies' Table 131
XXI. Ramsey and the Bishop 138
XXII. Basile and What He Saw 147
XXIII. A State of Affairs 152
XXIV. A Senator Enlightened 158
XXV. "Please Assemble" 164
XXVI. Alarm and Distress 173
XXVII. Pilots' Eyes 180
XXVIII. Words and the "Westwood" 186
XXIX. Studying the River--Together 195
XXX. Phyllis Again 203
XXXI. The Burning Boat 211
XXXII. A Prophet in the Wilderness 222
XXXIII. Twins and Texas Tender 229
XXXIV. The Peacemakers 234
XXXV. Unsettled Weather 246
XXXVI. Captain's Room 252
XXXVII. Basile Uses a Cane 260
XXXVIII. The Cane Again 272
XXXIX. Fortitude 280
XL. Ramsey at the Footlights 289
XLI. Quits 299
XLII. Against Kin 306
XLIII. Which from Which 313
XLIV. Forbearance 319
XLV. Applause 327
XLVI. After the Play 331
XLVII. Insomnia 337
XLVIII. "California" 347
XLIX. Kangaroo Point 354
L. "Delta Will Do" 365
LI. Loving-Kindness 374
LII. Love Runs Rough but Runs on 383
LIII. Trading for Phyllis 393
LIV. "Can't!" 404
LV. Love Makes a Cut-Off 412
LVI. Eight Years After 425
LVII. Farewell, "Votaress" 436
LVIII. 'Lindy Lowe 443
LIX. "Conclusively" 446
LX. Once More Hugh Sings 460
LXI. Wanted, Hayle's Twins 469
LXII. Euthanasia 478
LXIII. The Captain's Chair 493
ILLUSTRATIONS
_Ramsey_ _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
_"Stop!... Stop! the safest place for you on this
boat now is right where you are standing--Phyllis"_ 258
_"My heavenly Father wouldn't 'a' had to call me in
out of the storm"_ 334
_"For I believe that we belong to each other from the
centre of our souls, by a fitness plain even to the
eyes of your brothers"_ 420
GIDEON'S BAND
I
THE STEAMBOAT LEVEE
Saturday, April, 1852. There was a fervor in the sky as of an August
noon, although the clocks of the city would presently strike five.
Dazzling white clouds, about to show the earliest flush of the sun's
decline, beamed down upon a turbid river harbor, where the water was
deep so close inshore that the port's unbroken mile of steamboat wharf
nowhere stretched out into the boiling flood. Instead it merely lined
the shore, the steamers packing in bow on with their noses to it, their
sterns out in the stream, their fenders chafing each other's lower
guards.
New Orleans was very proud of this scene. Very prompt were her citizens,
such as had travelled, to remind you that in many seaports vast
warehouses and roofed docks of enormous cost thronged out so greedily to
meet incoming craft that the one boat which you might be seeking you
would find quite hidden among walls and roofs, and of all the rest of
the harbor's general fleet you could see little or nothing. Not so on
this great sun-swept, wind-swept, rain-swept, unswept steamboat levee.
You might come up out of any street along that mile-wide front, and if
there were a hundred river steamers in port a hundred you would behold
with one sweep of the eye. Overhead was only the blue dome, in full view
almost from rim to rim; and all about, amid a din of shouting,
whip-cracking, scolding, and laughing, and a multitudinous flutter of
many-colored foot-square flags, each marking its special lot of goods,
were swarms of men--white, yellow, and black--trucking, tumbling,
rolling, hand-barrowing, and "toting" on heads and shoulders a countless
worth of freight in bags, barrels, casks, bales, boxes, and baskets.
Hundreds of mules and drays came and went with this same wealth, and out
beyond all, between wharf and open river, profiled on the eastern sky,
letting themselves be unloaded and reloaded, stood the compacted,
motionless, elephantine phalanx of the boats.
The flood beneath them was up to the wharf's flooring, yet their low,
light-draught hulls, with the freight decks that covered them doubled in
carrying room by their widely overhanging freight guards, were hid by
the wilderness of goods on shore. Hid also were their furnaces, boilers,
and engines on the same deck, sharing it with the cargo. But all their
gay upper works, so toplofty and frail, showed a gleaming white front to
the western sun. You marked each one's jack-staff, that rose mast high
from the unseen prow, and behind it the boiler deck, high over the
boilers. Over the boiler deck was the hurricane roof, above that the
officers' rooms, called the "texas." Above the texas was the
pilot-house, and on either side, well forward of the pilot-house and
towering abreast of each other and above all else--higher than the two
soaring derrick posts at the two forward corners of the passenger and
hurricane decks, higher even than the jack-staff's peak--stood the two
great black chimneys.
And what a populace teemed round and through all! Here was the Creole,
there the New Englander. Here were men of oddest sorts from the
Missouri, Ohio, and nearer and farther rivers. Here were the Irishman,
the German, the Congo, Cuban, Choctaw, Texan, Sicilian; the Louisiana
sugar-planter, the Mississippi cotton-planter, goat-bearded raftsmen
from the swamps of Arkansas, flatboatmen from the mountains of Tennessee
and Kentucky; the horse trader, the slave-driver, the filibuster, the
Indian fighter, the circus rider, the circuit-rider, and men bound for
the goldfields of California.
More than half the boats, this April afternoon, flew from the jack-staff
of each, to signify that it was her day to leave, a streaming burgee
bearing her name. A big-lettered strip of canvas drawn along the front
guards of her hurricane-deck told for what port she was "up," and the
growing smoke that swelled from her chimneys showed that five was her
time to back out.
In the midst of the scene, opposite the head of Canal Street--the
streets that run to the New Orleans levee run up-hill and get there head
first--lay a boat which specially belongs to this narrative. A pictorial
poster, down in every café and hotel rotunda of the town, called her
"large, new, and elegant," and such she was in fair comparison with all
the craft on all the sixteen thousand navigable miles of the vast river
and its tributaries. Her goal was Louisville, more than thirteen hundred
miles away. Her steam was up, a velvet-black pitch-pine smoke billowed
from her chimneys, and her red-and-white burgee, gleaming upon it, named
her the _Votaress_.
II
THE "VOTARESS"
Her first up-river trip! The crowd waiting on the wharf's apron to see
her go was larger and included better types of the people than usual,
for the _Votaress_ was the latest of the Courteney fleet, hence a rival
of the Hayle boats, the most interesting fact that could be stated of
anything afloat on Western waters.
So young was she, this _Votaress_, so bridally fresh from her Indiana
and Kentucky shipyards, that the big new bell in the mid-front of her
hurricane roof shone in the low sunlight like a wedding jewel. Its
parting strokes had sounded once but would sound twice again before she
could cast off. Both pilots were in the lofty pilot-house, down from the
breast-board of which a light line ran forward to the bell's tongue, but
neither pilot touched the line or the helm. For the captain's use
another cord from the bell hung over the hurricane deck's front and down
to the boiler deck rail, but neither up there on the boiler deck nor
anywhere near the bell on the roof above it was any captain to be seen.
At the front angle of the roof's larboard rail a youth, quite alone,
leaned against one of the tall derrick posts to get its shade. He was
too short, square, and unanimated to draw much attention, although with
a faint unconscious frown between widely parted brows his quiet eyes
fell intently upon every detail of the lively scene below.
The whole great landing lay beneath his glance, a vivid exposition of
the vast, half-tamed valley's bounty, spoils, and promise; of its motley
human life, scarcely yet to be called society, so lately and rudely
transplanted from overseas; so bareboned, so valiantly preserved, so
young yet already so titanic; so self-reliant, opinionated, and uncouth;
so strenuous and materialistic in mind; so inflammable in emotions; so
grotesque in its virtues; so violent in its excesses; so complacently
oblivious of all the higher values of wealth; so giddied with the new
wine of liberty and crude abundance; so open of speech, of heart, of
home, and so blithely disdainful of a hundred risks of life, health, and
property. And all this the young observer's glance took in with maybe
more realization of it than might be looked for in one not yet
twenty-one. Yet his fuller attention was for matters nearer and of much
narrower compass.
He saw the last bit of small freight come aboard and the last belated
bill-lading clerk and ejected peddler go ashore. He noted by each
mooring-post the black longshoreman waiting to cast off a hawser. He
remarked each newcomer who idly joined the onlooking throng. Especially
he observed each cab or carriage that hurried up to the wharf's front.
He studied each of the alighting occupants as they yielded their effects
to the antic, white-jacketed mulatto cabin-boys, behind whom they
crossed the ponderous unrailed stage and vanished on their up-stairs way
to the boiler deck, the cabin, and their staterooms. Had his mild
scrutinizings been a paid service, they could hardly have been more
thorough.
By and by two or three things occurred in the same moment. A number of
boats above Canal Street and several of lesser fame below sounded their
third bell, cast off, and backed out into the stream. The many pillars
of smoke widened across the heavens into one unrifted cloud with the
sunbeams illumining its earthward side. Now it overhung the busy landing
and now, at the river's first bend, it filled the tops of the dark mass
of spars and cordage that densely lined the long curve of the harbor's
up-town shipping.
At the same time, while the foremost boats were still in sight, the two
pilots in the pilot-house of the lingering _Votaress_ quietly took stand
at right and left of the wheel with their eyes on a distant vehicle, a
private carriage. It came swiftly out of Common Street and across the
broad shell-paved levee. As quietly as they, the youth at the derrick
post regarded it, and presently, looking back and up, he gave them a
slight, gratified nod. Through the lines of onlookers the carriage swept
close up to the stage and let down two aristocratic-looking men. The
taller was full fifty years of age, the other as much as seventy-five,
but both were hale and commanding.
As they started aboard the younger glanced up brightly to the unsmiling
youth at the roof's rail and then threw a gesture, above and beyond him,
to the pilot-house. One of the pilots promptly sounded the bell. Down on
the forecastle a dozen deck-hands, ordered by a burly mate, leaped to
the stage and began, with half as many others who ran ashore on it, to
heave it aboard. But a sharp "avast" stopped them, and four or five
cabin-boys gambolled out on it ashore. A smart hack came whirling up in
its own white shell dust, and a fledgling dandy of seventeen sprang down
from the seat of his choice by the driver before the vehicle could stop
or the white jackets strip it of its baggage.
III
CERTAIN PASSENGERS
From his dizzy outlook the older youth dropped his calm scrutiny upon
the inner occupants as they alighted and followed the boy on board.
First came a red-ringleted, fifteen-year-old sister, fairly
good-looking, almost too free of glance, and--to her high-perched
critic--urgently eligible to longer skirts. Behind her appeared an old,
very black nurse in very blue calico and very white turban and bosom
kerchief; and lastly a mother--of many children, one would have
said--still perfect in complexion, gracefully rounded, and beautiful.
This was the first time he on the hurricane deck had ever seen them, but
he knew at once who they were and looked the closer on that account. The
self-oblivious elation with which the slim lass gave her eyes and mind
to everything except her own footing caused him to keep his chief watch
on her. He even beckoned a black deck hand to do the same. Wherever her
glance went her gay interest went with it, either in a soft
soliloquizing laugh or in some demonstration less definite though more
radiant; some sign of delight from her lips, her eyes, her brow, her
springing step, dancing curls, or supple arms. The youth on the roof's
edge deepened his frown. At a point on the stage where its sheer, naked
sides spanned the narrow chasm through which the waters swept between
boat and wharf, her feet strayed too near one perilous edge, and just
then her eyes went up to him. The two glances had barely met when she
tripped and staggered. With a dozen others aboard and ashore, he gave a
start. She sent him a look of terror, then turned from deadly pale to
rosy red and gasped her thanks to the smiling deckhand, whose clutch had
saved her life. The next instant she was laughing elatedly to her
horrified nurse, and so disappeared with her kindred on the lower deck
and front stairs.
The mellow boom of the third and last parting signal diverted the
general mind, and a glance behind him showed the youth the close and
welcome presence of that superior-looking man in answer to whose gesture
the pilot had tolled the earlier bell. But this person was closely
preoccupied. Now his capable glance ran aft along every marginal line of
the boat, now it dropped below to where the big stage lay drawn in
athwart the forward deck from guard to guard. Now he gave short, quiet
orders to wharf and forecastle, now a single word or two to the
pilot-house. Far below, the engine bells jingled. The bowline was in. A
yeast of waters ran forward from the backing wheels, the breast line
slacked away in fierce jerks, and the _Votaress_ began to depart.
Meantime there was an odd stir on shore. A cab whirled up furiously and
two more youths, shapely, handsome, and fashionable, twins beyond cavil
and noticeably older than their twenty years, visibly rich in fine
qualities but as visibly reckless as to what they did with them, sprang
out, flushed and imperious, to wave the _Votaress_. One of her guards
was still rubbing along the steamer beside her, but before the pair
could dash aboard this other boat and half across her deck, a gap had
opened, impossible to leap. They halted in rage as the more compact
youth on the moving steamer's roof, catching their attention, pointed a
good two miles up the river front. Yet what he said they would not have
known had not her mate repeated from the forecastle:
"Post forty-six! Drive up thah! We stop thah fo' a load of emigrants!"
They fled back to the cab. Aboard the receding boat the ruthless engine
bells jingled on; the broad waterside and the city behind it seemed,
from her decks, to draw away into the western clouds, and the yellow
river spread wide its shores in welcome to her swinging form. Now its
mighty current seemed to quicken and quicken as she gradually overcame
her down-stream drift, the ship-lined shores ceased to creep
up-stream--began to creep down--and her black crew, standing close about
the capstan, broke majestically into song:
"Oh, rock me, Julie, rock me."
From the forecastle her swivel pealed, her burgee ran down the
jack-staff, a soft, continuous tremor set in among all her parts, her
scape-pipes ceased their alternating roars, her engines breathed quietly
through her vast funnels, the flood spurted at her cutwater, white
torrents leaped and chased each other from her fluttering wheels, her
own breeze fanned every brow, and the _Votaress_ was under way.
IV
THE FIRST TWO MILES
The youth whom we have called short, square, and so on crossed to the
starboard derrick post. Several passengers had come up to the roof, and
one who, he noticed, seemed, by the many kind glances cast upon her, to
be already winning favor, was the tallish lass with the red curls.
The nurse was still at her back. She drew close up beside him and stood
in the wind that ruffled her hat and pressed her draperies against her
form. Her servant betrayed a faint restiveness to be so near him, but
the girl, watching the steamer's watery path as it seemed of its own
volition to glide under the boat's swift tread, ignored him as
completely as if he were a part of the woodwork. The very good-looking
man who was "taking out" the boat returned from a short tour of the deck
and halted by the great bell over the foremost skylights; but soon he
moved away again in mild preoccupation. The maiden's frank scrutiny
followed him a step or two and then turned squarely to the youth. Her
attendant stirred uncomfortably and breathed some inarticulate protest,
but in a tone of faultless composure the girl spoke out:
"Is that the captain yonder?"
"No," he said, equally composed, though busy thinking that but for his
eye she would at this moment be lying, in all these dainty draperies, as
deep beneath the boiling flood as she now stood above it. "That's not
the captain."
"Then why is he running the boat?"
"He owns her."
"Oh!" The girl's soft laugh was at herself. Presently--"Where's her
captain?"
"Ashore, in the hospital."
"What's he got?"
"Missy!" murmured the dark woman beseechingly.
But missy gave her no heed. "Got cholera?" she ventured, "the Asiatic
cholera?"
"No, a broken leg."
"Oh! Is that all he's got?"
"No, he has another, not broken." The speaker was so solemn that, with
mirth in every drop of her blood, the inquirer contrived to be grave,
herself.
"How'd he get it--I mean get it broken?"
"He was superintending----"
"And fell? When'd he fall?"
"This afternoon, about----"
"Where'd it happen?"
"Down on the lower deck as he----"
"Which is the lower deck?"
"The deck you came aboard on."
"They told me that was the freight deck!"
"It is."
"Then, why--?" She ceased, pondered, and spoke again: "Is there any deck
lower than the lower deck?"
"None."
She mused once more: "Why--that's strange."
"Yes," he said, "strange, but true."
"Then how could the captain fall----" Again she ceased and yet again
pondered: "Are the boilers--on the boiler deck?"
"No, the boiler deck is just over the boilers."
"Then why do they--" Once more she pondered.
"The boilers," said the youth, "are down on the freight deck."
The questioner brightened. "Do they ever put any freight on the boiler
deck?" she asked.
Before he could say yes, and without the slightest warning, a laugh
burst from her tightened lips. He could not have called it unmusical and
did not resent it, although he did regard it as without the slenderest
excuse. Her eyes and brow, still confronting his in a distress of mirth,
confessed the whim's forlorn senselessness, while his face returned not
the smallest sign of an emotion. As the moment lengthened, the
transport, so far from passing, spread through all her lithe form.
Suddenly she turned aside, drew herself up, faced him again, and began
to inquire, "Do they ever--" but broke down once more, fell upon the old
woman's shoulder with a silvery tinkle, shook, hung limp, threw one foot
behind her, and tapped the deck with her toe. A married couple drifting
by, obviously players and of the best of their sort, enjoyed the
picture.
"Why, missy!" the nurse softly pleaded, "yo' plumb disgracin' yo'seff!
Stop! Stop!"
"I can't!" whined the girl, between her paroxysms, "till he stops
looking like _that_." But as the youth was merely looking like himself
he saw no reason why he should stop.
To avoid the current the steamer suddenly began to run so close beside
the moored ships that the continuous echo of all her sounds--the flutter
of her great wheels, the seething of waters, the varied activities of
her lower deck--came back and up to the three voyagers with a nearness
and minuteness that startled the girl and drew her glance; but just as
her dancing eyes returned reproachfully to the youth the big bell at her
back pealed its signal for landing and she sprang almost off her feet,
cast herself into the nurse's bosom, and laughed more inexcusably than
ever.
The woman put an arm about her shoulder and drew her a few steps back
along the rail to where four or five others were gathered. The young man
gave all his attention downward across the starboard bow. The engine
bells jingled far below, the wheels stopped, the giant chimneys ceased
their majestic breathing, and the boat came slowly abreast of a ship
standing high out of the water.
V
RAMSEY HAYLE
The flag of Holland floated aft of a deck crowded with a sun-tanned and
oddly clad multitude. The Dutch sailors lowered their fenders between
the ship's side and the boat's guards, lines were made fast, a light
stage was run down from the ship's upper deck to the boat's forecastle,
and in single file, laden with their household goods, the silent aliens
were hurried aboard the _Votaress_ and to their steerage quarters, out
of sight between and behind her engines.
Up on the boiler and hurricane decks her earlier passengers found,
according to their various moods and capacities, much entertainment in
the scene. The girl with the nurse laughed often, of course. Yet her
laugh bore a certain note of sympathy and appreciation which harmonized
out of it all quality that might have hurt or abashed the most diffident
exile. Childlike as she was, it was plain she did not wholly fail to see
into the matter's pathetic depths.
The youth at the derrick post, scrutinizing each immigrant that passed
under his eye, could hear at his back a refined voice making kind
replies to her many questions. He knew it as belonging to the older of
the two men for whose coming aboard the _Votaress_ had delayed her
start. Between the girl's whimsical queries he heard him indulgently
explain that the Dutch ensign's red, white, and blue were no theft from
us Americans and that at various periods he had lived in four or five
great cities under those three colors as flown and loved by four great
nations.
Amazing! She could not query fast enough. "First city?"
First in London, where he had been born and reared.
"And then?"
Then in Amsterdam, where he had been married.
"And then?"
Then for ten years in Philadelphia.
"And then?"
Why, then, for forty years more, down to that present 1852, in New
Orleans, while nevertheless, save for the last ten, he had sojourned
much abroad in many ports and capitals, but mainly in Paris.
The girl's note of mirth softly persisted, irrepressible but
self-oblivious, a mere accent of her volatile emotions, most frequent
among which was a delighted wonder in looking on the first man of
foreign travel, first world-citizen, with whom she had ever awarely come
face to face. So guessed the youth, well pleased.
Presently, as if she too had guessed something, she asked if the boat's
master was not this man's son.
He now running it? Yes, he was.
"And was he, too, born in England?--or in Holland?"
"In Philadelphia, 1803."
"And did he, too, marry a--Dutch--wife?"
"No, a young lady of Philadelphia, in 1832; an American."
"Did you ever see Andrew Jackson?"
"Yes, I knew him."
"Were you in the battle of New Orleans?"
"Yes, I commanded a battery."
"Did you know anybody else besides Jackson? Who else?"
"Oh, I knew them all; Claiborne, Livingston, Duncan, Touro, Sheppard,
Grimes, the two Lafittes, Dominique You, Coffee, Villeré, Roosevelt----"
"I know about Roosevelt; he brought the first steamboat down the
Mississippi. My grandfather knew him. Did you ever have any
grandchildren?"
Yes, he had had several, but before she could inquire what had become of
them the attention of every one was arrested by the second approach of
the cab bearing the two hotspurs who had missed the boat at Canal
Street. All the way up from there their labored gallop, by turns hid,
seen, and hid again, had amused many of her passengers, and now, as the
pair shouldered their angry way across the ship's crowded deck and down
the steep gang-plank, a general laugh from the boat's upper rails galled
them none the less for being congratulatory. So handsome and
dangerous-looking that the laugh died, they halted midway of the narrow
incline, impeding the stream of immigrants at their heels, and sent up a
fierce stare in response to the propitiatory smiles of the boat's
commander and the youth standing near him. Only one of the twins spoke,
but the eyes of his brother vindictively widened till they gleamed a
flaming concurrence in his fellow's high-keyed, oath-bound threat:
"We'll get even with you for this, Captain John Courteney. We warn you
and all your tribe."
The old nurse on the roof, to whose arm her slim charge was clinging
with both hands, moaned audibly: "Oh, Lawd, Mahs' Julian! Mahs' Lucian!"
The girl laughed, laughed so merrily and convincingly--as if to laugh
was the one reasonable thing to do--that most of the passengers did
likewise. Even the grave youth whose back was to her inwardly granted
that the lamentable habit could make itself useful in an awkward
juncture. While he so thought, he observed the unruffled owner of the
_Votaress_ motion to the chagrined young men to clear the way by coming
aboard, and as they haughtily did so he heard the commander's father say
to the girl still at his side:
"I believe those are your brothers?"
"Yes," she responded, for once without mirth, "my brothers," and the
peace-loving but conscientious nurse added with a modest pretence of
pure soliloquy:
"One dess as hahmless as de yetheh."
The bell boomed. The last transatlantic stranger shuffled aboard, wan
and feeble. Now to one wheel, now to the other, the pilot jingled to
back away, then to stop, then to go ahead, then to both for full speed,
and once more the beautiful craft moved majestically up the river. Her
course shifted from south to west, the shores for a time widened apart,
the low-roofed city swung and sank away backward, groves of orange and
magnolia grew plainer to the eye than suburban streets, and the course
changed again, from west to north. Soon on the right, behind a high
levee and backed by a sombre swamp forest, appeared the live-oaks and
gardens of Carrollton, and presently on the left came Nine-mile Point
and another bend of the river westward. As the boat's prow turned, the
waters, from shore to shore, reflected the low sun so dazzlingly that
nearly all the passengers on the roof moved aft, whence, ravished by the
ascending odors of supper, they went below.
But the handsome old man, the sedate youth, the girl, the nurse,
remained. Captain Courteney came along the deck and crossed toward the
four, eyed from head to foot by the girl even after he had stopped near
her. But her gaze drew no glance from him.
"Well, Hugh," he said.
The youth turned with a smile that bettered every meaning in his too
passive countenance: "Well, father?"
"Oh!" breathed the startled girl. She looked eagerly into the three male
faces, beamed round upon her dark attendant, and then looked again at
grandfather, father, and son. "Why, of course!" she softly laughed.
"John," said the older man, "this young lady is a daughter of Gideon
Hayle."
"I thought as much." The benign captain lifted his hat and accepted and
dropped again the dainty hand proffered him with childish readiness.
"Then you're the youngest of seven children."
Her reply was a gay nod. Presently, with a merry glint between her long
lashes, she said: "I'm Ramsey."
The captain's smile grew: "That must be great fun."
The girl looked from one to another, puzzled.
"Why, just to be Ramsey," he explained. "Isn't it?"
She gave him a wary, sidewise glance and looked out over the water. "My
three married sisters all live near this river," she musingly said; "one
in Louisiana, two in Mississippi." Her sidelong glance repeated itself:
"I know who it would be fun to be--for me--or for anybody!" Her eyes
widened as her brother's had done, though in an amiable, elated way.
"Your father?" asked the captain.
She all but danced: "How'd you know?"
"I saw him--in your eyes," was the placid reply. "Your father and I, and
your grandfather Hayle, and this gentleman here----"
"Ya-ass, ya-ass!" drawled the nurse in worshipping reminiscence, and
Ramsey laughed to Hugh, and all the while the captain persisted: "We've
built and owned rival boats----"
"Fawty yeah'!" murmured the nurse. "Fawty yeah'!"
"Yes, yes!" chirruped the girl. "Pop-a's up the river now, building the
_Paragon_! We're on our way to join him!"
"Law', missy," gently chid the nurse, made anxious by a new approach
which Ramsey was trying to ignore, "dese gen'lemens knows all dat."
Ramsey twitched her shoulders and waist. Her lips parted for a bright
question, but it was interrupted. The interrupters were the restless
twins, whose tread sounded peremptory even on the painted canvas of the
deck, and the fineness of whose presence was dimmed only by the hardy
lawlessness which, in their own eyes, was their crowning virtue.
"Ramsey," drawled one of them, who somehow seemed the more forceful of
the two. He spoke as if amazed at his own self-restraint. She whisked
round to him. He made his eyes heavy: "Have you had any proper
introduction to these--gentlemen?"
A white-jacket, holding a large hand-bell by its tongue, bowed low
before the captain, received a nod, and minced away. With suspended
breath the girl stared an instant on her brother, then on the captain,
and then on his father; but as her eyes came round to Hugh his solemnity
caught her unprepared, and, with every curl shaking, she broke out in a
tinkling laugh so straight from the heart, so innocent, and so helpless
that even the frightened old woman chuckled. Ramsey wheeled, snatched
the nurse round, and hurried her off to a stair, hanging to her arm,
tiptoeing, dancing, and carolling in the rhythm of the supper-bell
below:
"Ringading tingalingaty, ringadang ding,
Ringading tingalingaty, ringadang ding."
Red and dumb, the questioner glared after them until, near one of the
great paddle-boxes, they vanished below. But his brother, the one who
had the trick of widening his eyes, found words. "Captain Courteney," he
said, "by what right does your son--or even do you, sir--take the
liberty, on the hurricane-deck of a steamboat, to scrape acquaintance
with an unprotec----?"
The captain had turned his back. "Hugh," he affably said, "will you see
what these young gentlemen want?" And then to the older man: "Come,
father, let's go to supper." They went.
VI
HAYLE'S TWINS
Hugh was grateful for this task in diplomacy, yet wondered what mess he
should make of it.
He was here for just such matters, let loose from tutor and books for
the summer, to study the handling of a steamboat, one large part of
which, of course, was handling the people aboard. Both pilots, up
yonder, knew this was his rôle. Already he had tried his unskill--or let
"Ramsey" try it--and had learned a point or two. She had shown him, at
least twice, what value there might be in a well-timed, unmanageable
laugh. But a well-timed, unmanageable laugh is purely a natural gift. If
it was to come to his aid, it would have to come of itself. Lucian, the
twin who had asked the last question, turned upon him.
Hugh smilingly lifted a pacifying hand. "You're entirely mistaken," he
said. "Nobody's tried to scrape acquaintance." In the midst of the last
two words, sure enough, there broke from him a laugh which to him seemed
so honest, friendly, well justified, and unmanageable that he stood
astounded when his accuser blazed with wrath.
"You lie, damn you!" was the answering cry. "And then you laugh in my
face! We saw you--all three of you--just now!" The note was so high that
one of the pilots began to loiter down from the pilot-house.
Hugh crimsoned. "I see," he said, advancing step by step as the frenzied
boy drew back. "You really don't want a peaceable explanation, at all,
do you?"
The other twin, Julian, arrested his brother's back step by a touch and
spoke for him: "No, sir, we don't. You can't 'peaceably explain' foul
treatment, you damned fool, and that's all we Hayles have had of you
Courteneys this day. We want satisfaction! We don't ask it, we'll take
it! And we'll get it"--here a ripping oath--"if we have to wait for it
ten years!"
This time Hugh paled. "It needn't take ten minutes," he said. "Come down
to the freight deck, into the engine room, and I'll give both of you so
much of it that you won't know yourselves apart."
"One more insult!" cried Lucian, the boy who so often widened his eyes,
while Julian, narrowing his lids, said in a tone suddenly icy:
"That classes you, sir, on the freight deck."
"We don't fight deck hands," said Lucian.
"Nor emigrants!" sneered his brother. "And when we fight gentlemen we
fight with weapons, sir, as gentlemen should."
Hugh's awkward laugh came again, and the pilot who had come down from
beside his fellow at the wheel inquired:
"What's the fraction here?"
"Oh, nothing," said Hugh.
"Everything!" cried Julian. "And you'll find it so the first time we get
a fair chance at you--any of you!"
The pilot was amiable. "Hold on," he suggested. "See here, my young
friend, what do you reckon your father'd do to this young man"--touching
Hugh--"if he should rip around on a Hayle boat as you're doing here?"
"That's a totally different matter, sir!"
The pilot smiled. "Don't you know Gideon Hayle would put him ashore at
the first wood-yard?"
"He'd be wrong if he didn't," gravely said Hugh.
"Do you mean that for a threat?--either of you?" snapped Lucian.
"No," said the pilot, "I was merely trying to reason with you. Come,
now, go down to supper. It's a roaring good one: crawfish gumbo, riz
biscuits, fresh butter, fried oysters, and coffee to make your hair
curl. Go on, both of you. You've had--naturally enough--last day in the
city--a few juleps too many, but that's all right. A square meal, a
night's rest, and you'll wake up in the morning with Baton Rouge and all
the sugar lands astern, the big cotton plantations on both sides of us,
you feeling at home with everybody, everybody at home with you."
"Many thanks," sneered Julian. "We'll go to our meals self-invited. Good
evening."
Hugh granted the pair a slight nod. As they went, Lucian, looking back
over Julian's shoulder with eyes bigger than ever, said: "We'll wake up
in the morning without the least change of feeling for this boat's
owners, their relatives, or their hirelings."
The relative and the hireling glanced sharply at each other. But then
Hugh said quietly: "A man can't quarrel with boys, Mr. Watson."
"No," mused the pilot aloud as he watched the pair go below, "but he can
wait. They'll soon be men."
"And this be all forgotten," said Hugh.
"Not by them!" rejoined Mr. Watson. "They'll remember it ef they have to
tattoo it--on their stomachs."
"I should have managed them better," said Hugh.
"Lord, boy, nobody's ever managed _them_ sence they was born." The
speaker sauntered back toward the pilot-house, coining rhetoric in his
mind to relieve his rage. "It's only the long-looked-for come at last,"
he thought, "and come _toe_ last." As he resumed the bench behind his
partner his wrath at length burst out:
"Well, of all the hell-fry I ever come across----!"
"And they 'llow to keep things fryin'," said his mate.
Which made Watson even more rhetorical. "Yes, it's their only salvation
from their rotten insignificance." He meditated. "And yet--hnn!" He was
about to say something much kindlier when suddenly he laughed down from
a side window upon the twins returned. "Well, I'll swear!"
"We heard, sir," said Julian with a lordly bow.
"And you," chimed Lucian, "shall hear later." Rather aimlessly they
turned and again disappeared, and after a moment or two the man at the
wheel asked, with playful softness, with his eyes on the roof below:
"D'you reckon yon other two will ever manage to offset the tricks o'
Hayle's twins?"
His partner rose and looked down. The old nurse and the third Hayle
brother stood side by side watching the beautiful low-lying plantations
unbrokenly swing by behind the embankments of the eastern shore. The
level fields of young sugar-cane reposed in a twilight haze, while the
rows of whitewashed slave cabins, the tall red chimneys of the great
sugar-houses, and the white-pillared verandas of the masters' dwellings
embowered in their evergreen gardens, still showed clear in the last
lights of day. But the query was not as to the nurse and the boy. Near
them stood Ramsey, with arms akimbo, once more conversing with Hugh.
"Oh!" said the glowing Watson. "If that's to be the game, Ned, I'm in
it, sir! I'm in it!"
"Just's well, Watsy. You're in the twins' game anyhow."
Meantime Ramsey's talk flowed on like brook water, Hugh's meeting it
like the brook's bowlders:
"Guess who's at the head of the table!"
"Who? my grandfather?"
"No, he's 'way down at the men's end."
"Well, then, father?"
"Yes! And who's sitting next him--on his right?"
"Your mother?"
"Yes! And guess who's going to sit at the head of the children's table.
You!"
"How do you know that?"
The reply was chanted: "I asked the steward to put you there." She
laughed and glanced furtively at her unheeding brother. Then her eyes
came back: "And I'm to be the first on your right!" She spread her arms
like wings.
"Why, Miss Ramsey!" protested the nurse.
Hugh blushed into his limp, turn-down collar. "I don't believe you'd
better," he said.
"I will!" said Ramsey, lifting her chin.
VII
SUPPER
Deep in love with the river life was Ramsey.
She had tried it now, thoroughly, for an hour, and was sure! The
twenty-four hours' trip down from her plantation home, on the first boat
that happened along, a rather poor thing, had been her first experience
and a keen pleasure; but this, on the _Votaress_, was rapture.
One effect was that her mind teemed with family history. Her grizzly,
giant father, whom she so rarely saw, so vehemently worshipped, son of a
wild but masterful Kentucky mountaineer who had spent his life floating
"broadhorns" and barges down the Ohio and Mississippi, counted it one of
the drawbacks of his career that so few of his kindred cared for the
river. One of his brothers was an obscure pilot somewhere on the
Cumberland or Tennessee. Another, once a pilot, then a planter, and
again a pilot, had been lost on a burning boat, she knew not how nor
when. The third was a planter in the Red River lowlands. Her three
sisters, as we have heard her tell, were planters' wives, and the
father's home, when ashore, was on a plantation of his Creole wife's
inheritance, four or five miles in behind the old river town of Natchez.
There Ramsey had been born and had grown up, knowing the great
Mississippi only as a remote realm of poetry and adventure out of which
at intervals her mighty father came to clasp to his broad breast her
sweet, glad mother, tarry a few days or hours, and be gone again. She,
herself, had seldom seen it even from the Natchez bluffs, yet she could
name all its chief boats apart, not by sight but by the long, soft
bellow of their steam-whistles, wafted inland. But now, at last, she was
a passenger on its waters. As Hugh, so well grown up as to breadth and
gravity, took his seat at the head of the dazzling board that filled the
whole middle third of the cabin, and as she sat down next him with all
the other adolescents and juveniles in places of inferior dignity, the
affair seemed the most significant as well as most brilliant in which
she had ever taken part.
Most significant, because to love the river for itself would be to find
herself easily and lastingly first in her father's love and favor--her
only wish in this world. And most brilliant: without an angle or
partition the cabin extended between the two parallel lines of
staterooms running aft through the boat's entire length from boiler deck
to stern guards. Its richly carpeted floor gently dipped amidships and
as gently rose again to the far end, where you might see the sofas and
piano of that undivided part sanctified to the ladies. Its whole course
was dazzlingly lighted with chandeliers of gold bronze and crystal that
forever quivered, glittered, and tinkled to the tremor of the boat's
swift advance. It was multitudinously pilastered, gleamingly
white-painted and shellacked, profusely gilded and pictorially panelled,
and it bewilderingly reflected itself and Ramsey from mirrors wide or
narrow wherever mirrors wide or narrow could be set in.
A new decorum came into her bearing. She ceased to ask questions. She
waited for them to be put to her--from the head of the table--and smiled
where an hour earlier she would have laughed. Above all, she felt in her
spirit the same dreamy strangeness she had so lately felt in her bodily
frame when the boat first began to move: a feeling as if the young
company about her were but stayers behind on a shore from which she was
beginning to be inexorably borne away. The wide river of a world's life,
to which the rillet of her own small existence had been carelessly
winding, was all at once clearly in sight. She could almost have written
verse! She yearned to tell her whole history, but not one personal
question could she lure from Hugh. Silently she recalled the story of
her Creole grandmother, married at fifteen--her own present age. That
young lady had met her future husband just this way on Roosevelt's
famous _New Orleans_, earliest steamboat on the Mississippi. But there
sat Hugh, as square, as solid, and as incurious as an upended bale of
cotton. And still she kept her manners.
It was but the custom of the time and region that the most honored guest
of the _Votaress_, wife of her owner's most formidable competitor, with
her family, not only should enjoy her journey wholly without cost, but
that she should receive every attention courtesy could offer. The heat
of the contest counted for nothing. And so, while Ramsey ate and talked
with Hugh, his grandfather, near by in the ladies' cabin, at her left
and at Hugh's back, conversed with her mother on a sofa. It was a
heavenly hour. The resplendent boat kept her speed with no inward sign
of her ceaseless ongoing except the tremor of her perfect frame, the
flutter of her hundred-footed tread, and the tinkle and prismatic
twinkle of her pendent glass, all responsively alternating with the deep
breathings of her stacks, and with no sign of her frequent turnings but
the softly audible creepings of her steering-gear.
While never failing duly to receive and return Hugh's rather stiff
attentions, and while doing superb justice to the repast, Ramsey, with
side glances from her large, unconscious eyes emotionally enriched by
long auburn lashes, easily and with great zest contemplated her mother's
charming complexion, so lily-white and shell pink for a Creole matron,
as well as the lovely confidingness of her manner, so childlike yet so
wise. It was not for her to know that her mother, while hanging on every
word of the courtly old man, was closely observing both her and Hugh.
The grandfather, too, her blue-and-auburn glances took in sidewise, as
their closer scrutiny had earlier done pointblank on the hurricane-deck.
He was small, unmuscular, clean-shaven, erect, placid. She noted again
his snowy, waving hair, thin only on his pink crown. It shone like silk.
He still kept a soft flush of unimpaired health and an air of inner
cleanness equal to that which showed outwardly from gaitered shoes to
the bell-crowned beaver in his hand. She observed the wide cambric
ruffle that ran down his much-displayed, much-pleated shirt-front. His
stiff, high stock was tied with a limp white bow-knot. His standing
collar covered half of either cheek. He wore a jewelled breastpin and a
heavy gold fob-chain and seal. In his too delicate hand, along with the
beaver and his gloves, was a stout, gold-headed cane, and from his coat
skirt his handkerchief painstakingly peeped out behind. All of which
seemed quite natural on him and well related to the highly attractive
attire of the lady beside him.
Yet suddenly Ramsey had a painful misgiving. Hugh was remarking upon
some matter on the other side of the world, when she asked him as
abruptly as a boat might strike a snag: "Is your grandfather a Whig?"
"He is," said Hugh. They laid up their napkins.
"Oh!" sighed Ramsey, but then laughed. "Is your father a Whig, too?"
"Yes, my father, too."
"Not a Henry Clay Whig?" she hopefully prompted.
"Yes, a Henry Clay Whig yet."
Self-consciously she dropped her head over the back of her chair to be
rid of her curls. "My father," she musingly observed, "is a Democrat."
"Yet we can be friends," said Hugh, "can't we?" wondering, when he had
asked, why they need be.
Ramsey did not say. With her chin in her collar she looked herself over
carefully while she brokenly remarked, "All our men folks--four
men--three boys--are--red-hot Democrats."
But on the last word she checked and hearkened, and they smiled together
at the far-away whistle of another steamer, deep-toned, mellowed by
distance, and long sustained.
"That's a Courteney boat," quietly began Hugh, but Ramsey was up and
off.
"_The Empress!_" she called to her mother as she flew.
VIII
QUESTIONS
Out forward of the texas and close beside the great bell, Ramsey halted,
alone in the boundless starlight and rippling breeze on the cabin roof.
The stately _Votaress_, with her towering funnels lost in the upper
night, was running well inshore under a point, wrapped in a world-wide
silence broken only by the placid outgo of her own vast breath, the soft
rush of her torrential footsteps far below, and the answering rustle of
the nearer shore. Even on that side the dark land confessed no outline
save the low tree tops of two or three plantation-house groves, from
each of which shone a lighted window or two, tinier and lonelier than a
glowworm.
Across the point, between its groves, the flood revealed itself at
intervals in pale shimmerings, and just beyond one of these gleams, in
mid-river, shone the nearing boat, her countless lights merged into a
single sheen brokenly repeated in the water beneath her. Hugh came to
the girl's side at a moment when a wood on the point's extreme end
concealed the steamer's approach; but in the next the fleet comer swept
out of hiding, an empress in truth to Ramsey, jewelled, from furnace
doors to texas roof, with many-colored lights as if in coronation robes.
"That is how we look to her," said Hugh.
But his words were lost. With a startled laugh the girl shrank low over
the bell, clutching it as if a whirlwind had struck them, while its
single, majestic peal thundering, "I pass to starboard, hail! farewell!"
drowned speech and mind in its stupendous roar. Mirth, too, was drowned
in awe. And now the vast din ceased, and now the _Empress_, every moment
more resplendent, responded, first with her bell, then with the long,
solemn halloo of her whistle, and presently with huzzas from all her
glittering decks as she passed within a cable's length.
Ramsey gazed entranced. Not until the fading vision had dwindled down
and around the great bend did her tread realize again the quivering
deck, or her sight reawaken to the wonder of the ever coming, parting,
passing flood, its prostrate, phantom shores, and the starry hosts and
illimitable deeps of the sky. Even then she was but half-way back to
earth, unconscious that she had stepped down forward to the captain's
chair and into a group including Hugh and his grandfather, her mother
and youngest brother.
"Oh!" she cried, turning, "it's as if--" and found herself face to face
not with Hugh but his father.
"As if--what?" smilingly asked the boat's master.
"As if," she said more softly, "we'd left one world and were hunting
another."
His smile grew. Her own resented it. "I know what you're thinking," she
said, and glanced away. Her curls twitched, her chin tilted, and she
sent down from it one of those visible waves that ended at her feet, as
if they were the cracker of the whip. When he spoke, her eyes came back
at him sidelong.
"I was thinking only," he rejoined, "that at your age it's always as if
we'd just left one world and were seeking another."
Her eyes--and lashes--were sceptical. "Weren't you going to say it would
seem more so if we should blow up?"
"No," he laughed, "nothing like it."
She began absently to scrutinize his entire dress. It was like the old
man's though without the jewelry and ruffles. "Were you ever in an
explosion?" she asked. The words came of themselves. She was backsliding
from her table decorum.
"No," he replied, "I was never in an explosion."
"Ah, my child!" broke in the mother, "questions again? And even to
Captain Courteney?"
Ramsey laughed, gave the deck a wilful scuff, and demanded of the
captain: "Were you ever on a burning boat?"
Madame Hayle flinched, gasped, and drew her from him as he replied:
"Yes--once--I was."
The mother started again. "There!" she cried; "so! you 'ave it! Now,
go"--she laughingly pushed the querist--"go, talk with Hugh--allong with
yo' brotheh."
The girl, as she backed away, turned to the grandfather: "Was Hugh on
the boat--when it burned?"
Her mother smiled with new pain, but while the captain bowed himself
away the old man replied: "Come, Miss Ramsey, sit down with me and I'll
tell you the story--if we may, madam?--Hugh--some chairs, will you?"
Ramsey sprang to Hugh's aid, but her brother had a mind for mutiny. "You
told me," he accused his mother, "that I could go watch them play
cards!"
"Yes?" she asked in a pretty irony; "well, then, of co'se, sisteh or no
sisteh, you muz' instan'ly go!" The steady tinkle of the sister's
laughter as she passed with a chair provoked her own: "Yes, go! Me, I'll
rimmain with her till Joy"--the nurse--"ritturn from suppeh."
The boy went, flinging back for a last word: "You want to hear the story
as bad as Ramsey does!"
"'Tis true!" she brightly said to the old gentleman. "Since all those
nine year', me, I've want' to hear the Courteney side of that!"--little
supposing that this was what neither she nor Ramsey would then or ever
quite lay hold upon.
"No," laughed the irrelevant girl to the old man, "you sit here." She
faced him up-stream, her mother on his "stabboard," as she said, herself
on his "labboard," and Hugh on her left, "labboardest of all." But--to
Hugh--"now, wait--wait! If I'm on your stabboard--how can you be--on my
lab'--? Oh, yes, I see!" She dropped into her chair and, to Hugh's great
weariness, laughed till her curls fell on her cheeks, larboard and
starboard by turns.
Yet she ceased sooner than any one had hoped and the four sat silent
while several ladies sauntered past on the arms of escorts, all highly
entertained to see such cordiality between any Hayles and the
Courteneys. One trio that paused near by to catch some Hayle or
Courteney utterance praised aloud the enchantment of the night and of
the boat's speed, and as they strolled on again, having caught nothing,
Ramsey breathed softly to the old man:
"They can't describe it! Nobody can! I've tried!"
Through four or five breathings of the giant chimneys she waited for the
story she was not to hear, and at length herself broke silence. "I
think," she said, "this boat is the most wonderful thing in the world."
No one rejoined that it was or was not. "Don't you?" she airily
challenged the "labboardest of all," defensively letting herself realize
how nearly a woman she was, how merely a boy was he.
"It's very wonderful," replied Hugh indulgently, as one so nearly a man
should to one so merely a child. "I've never seen anything in this world
that wasn't."
"Neither have I!" cried the girl and clapped her hands.
In that moment, for the first time, each thought how admirable the
other, as yet so absurd, was--some day--probably--going--to be, and
right there arose between them a fellowship more potent than either
would recognize for a length of hours or days which is here best left
unstated. Their two seniors saw; saw, but kept still--_mais pourquoi
non?_--and why not?--while the great steamer breathed on, quivered on,
breathed and quivered, on and on.
Ramsey transiently forgot them. "Do you, too," she asked her
"labboardest," "feel yourself widen out of yourself and down and round
into all this wonderful boat till you are it and it's all--you?"
"Yes," Hugh confessed, and they in turn were still, even though the
seniors resumed converse, one mildly telling which sugar estates along
the shore had been whose and the other recounting how their heirs had
intermarried.
IX
SITTING SILENT
Thus they sat, Hugh and Ramsey, not recognizing that sitting silent is a
symptom.
They sat and together felt their consciousness, his and hers, wing and
wing, widen beyond their own frames to a mightier embodiment in this
great cloud-white structure breasting the air that cooled their brows
and cleaving unseen the flood so far beneath them. Together in this
greater self they felt the headway of the long, low hull, the prodigious
heart glow of the hungry fires, the cyclopean push of steam in eight
vast boilers, the pulsing click and travail of the engines--whisper of
valve and cylinder, noiseless in-plunge and out-glide of shining
rods--the ten-foot stroke of either shaft and equal sweep of crank, the
nimble beat of paddle-wheels and tumble of their cataracts, the tranquil
creep of tiller-ropes, and the compelling swing and sage guidance of the
helm.
In this vaster consciousness, by a partnership which had to be tacit or
instantly perish, they easily lifted and carried the abounding freight,
of every form and substance, destined for the feeding, apparelling, or
equipment of thousands awaiting it in homes and families whose strivings
and fortunes helped to make that universal wonder of things which kept
Hugh grave and Ramsey laughing. Especially the teeming human life of the
great craft did these two jointly draw into this magnified self. They
drew on deck-hands, mates, watchmen, firemen, engineers, and strikers,
each with some aspiration and some appetite. They drew in stewards,
cooks, chambermaids, and cabin-boys, every one with yearnings and
sacrifices; pilots, clerks, and mud clerks, full of histories and
dreams. Down in dim spaces behind the engines and between the two wheels
they drew in the immigrant deck passengers, so mutely sad for the
distant homes behind them, so mutely hopeful and fearful for the distant
homes before. And on the deck above these exiles they took in the cabin
passengers--ladies who told their lives over their knitting or
embroidery in floods of lamplight and the cushioned ease of feminine
seclusion; children here and there battling against sleep or yielding to
it in stateroom berths; the ruder sex at card-tables in the forward
cabin--from which, oddly, the twins were refraining; three or four
tipplers at the fragrant bar, and one or two readers under the
chandeliers. Outside, scores of non-readers sat in tilted chairs, their
heels breast-high on the guard-rails and their minds tobacco-lulled to a
silent content with the breezy lanternlight of the boiler deck, the
occasional passing of a downward-bound flatboat or steamer, the gradual
overhauling of some craft that had backed out earlier at New Orleans,
and the wide, slow oscillations of the unbounded starlight overhanging
land and flood.
These too the young pair included. All these were parts of their blended
consciousness as the alert Ramsey noticed that the grandfather's talk
had turned upon Hugh and boats.
"He and the _Quakeress_ were the same age," he was remarking, when
Ramsey's laugh jingled.
"Both," she broke in, "built the same year!" Her curls switched backward
at the old man. She faced Hugh. "Where were you born?"
But he only signed for her not to interrupt. In the dim light she made a
wry face at him and jingled again while her mother said: "On the
_Quakerezz_!--end of trial trip!--whiles landing at New Orleans! Me, I
was there, ad the landingg! Yes! on the boat of my 'usband, the
_Conqueror_--also trial trip--arrive' since only one hour biffo'!"
Ramsey, with her eyes roaming over Hugh, faintly kept up her laugh, yet
parallel with it her mother managed to continue: "Yes, that was in
eighteen-thirty-three, Janawary. Because that was the winter when
Jackson he conquer' Clay in the election and conquer' Calhoun in the
nullification, and tha'z the cause why my 'usband he name' his boat the
_Conqueror_. Ah, veree well I rimember that; how the _Quakerezz_ she
came cre-eepingg in, out of that fog, an' like the fog so still an'
white, cloze aggains' the _Conqueror_. And the firz' news they pazz----"
The old nurse reappeared, laid thin shawls on the mother and daughter,
and sat down on the deck close below Ramsey.
"Firz' news they pazz," resumed the speaker, "'tis that Captain
Courteney he's got with him his wife, from Philadelphia, and----"
Ramsey broke in merrily: "Was _she_ the Quakeress? Was the _Quakeress_
named for her?"
"Yes, and she's juz' have, they say, a li'l' son! An' my 'usband he
di'n' like that! Because----"
"But you had three little girls!" said Ramsey.
"Girl', they di'n' count! Because those girl', you know, they can' never
run those steam_boat_'."
"I don't see why," said Ramsey. Hugh might sit silent if he chose; her
silent sitting was over.
"They di'n' count," repeated the lady. "And so my 'usband he di'n' want
those Courteney' to be ahead of those Hayle' in having boys!"
"He little knew what was coming," said Ramsey, and wondered why the
remark was ignored, especially when----
"Me," said the pretty matron, "I was nearly ready to 'ave those twin',
but Gideon Hayle he di'n' know they was goin' be twin', an' he di'n'
know those twin' goin' be boys!" She gently laughed. The daughter stared
as if in no light--or shade--could those twins be a laughing matter, but
the mother spoke on gayly: "Never I 'ear my 'usband swear so hard--an'
so manny way'--like that day--at everything--everybody. Not because that
li'l babee--if that be all; but because he see that _boat_, that she's
the mo' fine boat, that _Quakerezz_, an' when they ripport her run from
Loui'ville, he's already affraid--to hisseff--that she's goin' to be the
mo' fas'."
"And was she?" asked the girl.
"Barely," said the grandfather. "It took years to prove it and by that
time your father had built another boat."
"The _Chevalier_!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, which beat the _Quakeress_ once or twice nearly every season until
the _Quakeress_ burned."
"Burned!" cried Ramsey, while Hugh, stirred to rise, yet remained. "Was
it the _Quakeress_ that--?" But the old man was telling earlier history
and she sank repiningly in her seat. "You're going backward," she softly
whined.
"In 'sixteen," he said, "I built the _Huntress_, and----"
"We already know about that," sighed Ramsey, bracing her feet in old
Joy's hands. "I know it from old nursie."
"Ramsey!" murmured her mother.
"In 'seventeen," said the chronicler, "Miss Ramsey's grandfather built
the _Hunter_. In 'twenty he built the _Charioteer_----"
"Ain't we ever going to hear about the burning?" laughingly whimpered
the girl, but the narrator kept on:
"In 'twenty-one I built the _Shepherdess_----"
Ramsey all at once revived. "And did the _Shepherdess_ outrun the
_Charioteer_?"
"A trifle, yes."
"Humph!" she said to herself, and twice again, on a higher key and with
a grimace at Hugh, "humph!"
"But in 'twenty-five the _Charioteer_ was run into and sunk, and the
Hayle boat that came next," continued the historian, "was the best ever
seen till then on these waters, of the hundred and sixty-five steamers
launched."
"Yes," said Madame Hayle, "and the firz' boat what my 'usband was
captain."
Ramsey started wildly. "The _Admiral_!" she cried at Hugh. She whisked
round on his grandfather. "And then--to beat the _Admiral_--you
built----?"
"My son built--the _Abbess_."
"And did the _Abbess_ beat the _Admiral_?"
"Not for a long time. But in 'thirty-three the _Conqueror's_ very first
run broke the _Abbess's_ record."
But madame was not to be outdone in generosity. "Ah, yes," she cried,
"but that same day the _Quakerezz_ she beat the _Conqueror_!" At which
the teased Ramsey, suddenly seeing that all this was but a roundabout
peacemaking where she could discern no strife, laughed herself so limp
that she all but tumbled into old Joy's lap.
"That's where we began!" she commented.
"True," said the old man to her mother, "but in 'thirty-eight came your
husband's _Chevalier_----"
"Came--yes! only to get beat racing yo'"--the name eluded her----
"_Ambassadress_," prompted Ramsey. "Everybody knows about that--'way
back in the country--even the dates. The _Ambassadress_ beat the
_Chevalier_, the Autocrat beat the _Ambassadress_, the _Empress_ beat
the _Autocrat_, the _Regent_ beat the _Empress_, te tum, te tum, te tum!
Didn't the _Quakeress_ ever burn up, after all?"
"Ramsey----"
"Oh, well! this forever sitting silent! I----!"
"Ramsey!----"
X
PERIL
Ramsey clutched the old man's arm, pressed curls and brow against it,
and laughed in a rillet of pure silver.
Hugh bore it, sitting silent, while the great boat, so humanly alive and
aglow in every part, ceaselessly breathed above and quivered below, and
the ruffling breeze as ceaselessly confirmed her unflagging speed. The
mere "catalogue of the ships" had lighted in him a secret glow that
persisted. In his roused imagination the long pageant of the rival
steamers still moved on through the rudely thronging, ever-multiplying
fleet of the boundless valley's yearly swelling commerce, ocean-distant
from all disparaging contrasts of riper empires; moved, yeasting,
ruffling, through forty years of a civilization's genesis, each new
boat, Hayle or Courteney, more beautifully capable than her newest
senior, and each, in her time and degree, as cloud-white by day, as
luminous by night, and as rife with human purpose and human hazards as
this incomparable _Votaress_.
The girl's mirth faded. From behind the four a quiet tread drew near.
From another quarter came two other steps, lighter yet more assertive.
The one was John Courteney's; the two, that halted farther away, meant
again the twins.
"Well, captain?" mildly said the grandfather.
"Well, commodore?" said the captain, declining his son's chair.
"Oh, good!" cried Ramsey, and rose with her nurse. "I didn't know
anybody but my father was called commodore!"
"Yes," replied the captain, "my father too."
"Where've you been?" asked the fearless girl.
His answer was mainly to her mother: "I've been making myself acquainted
in the ladies' cabin. This is no Hudson River boat, you know--whole trip
in a day's jaunt."
"Ah, 'tis a voyage!" said madame.
"So it's well to know one's people," added he. He looked up into the
night. "What a sky! Miss Ramsey, did you ever see, through a glass, the
Golden Locks of Berenice?"
"The gold--" she began eagerly--"no-o! What are the golden--?" But there
she checked, fell upon old Joy, and laughed whimperingly, "That's a dig
at my red hair!"
One of the twins gravely accosted his mother, but she and the captain
were laughing at Ramsey while the grandfather said: "My dear child, your
hair is beautiful."
With face still hid on Joy's bosom, the girl shuffled her feet, then
turned upon the old man and playfully intoned:
"I'm not a child!"
"Ramsey!" said the mother, and "Missie!" said the nurse.
"Hugh," said the captain, "suppose you take Miss Ramsey up to the
pilot-house and show her the----"
The girl laid a hand on his arm. "Do you want to tell mom-a something
you don't want me to hear?"
"Why--" began the captain, and laughed. "On second thought, no. I want
to tell your mother and the commodore something before any one else can,
and before I tell any one else; but you may hear it if----"
"If I won't get frightened. Has anything happened to the boat?"
"Ramsey!" "Missie!" lamented matron and servant again.
"Mother," with much dignity pleaded the twins.
"Oh, no," said the captain, "not to the boat."
"I want to stay and hear it," whined Ramsey, jerking up and down. "I
won't get scared."
"'T'u'd be de fust time sence she wuz bawn ef she did," audibly mused
the nurse, and Hugh said: "I believe that."
The girl stared round at him and then back at his father, her eyes wide
with merriment. "No Ramsey to the pilot-house with him if he can help
it!" she managed to say, and fell over her mother and nurse, down into
her chair and across its arm, her laughter jingling like a basket of
glass rolling down-stairs. Suddenly she hearkened. The captain was
speaking to her mother:
"Must you reach Loui'ville as quickly as you can?"
"Ah!--well? yes? we muz' do our possible. My 'usband he--Ramsey!"
The girl had turned face down in a play of collapse. "Nobody," she
piped, "finishes what he starts to tell!"
"Ho!" playfully retorted the mother, "an' you muz' go?--cannot wait?
Well, good night." But no one went.
Her mother turned again to the captain. "There is something veree
bad--on the boat?" Ramsey sat up alert.
The captain's reply was heard by none but her mother and the
grandfather, but evidently the twins knew whatever there was to tell.
"It was no time to take deck passengers at all!" said one of them to the
other, in full voice, while the grandfather was asserting:
"We are as wholly at your command, madam, as if this were Gideon Hayle's
boat. Our one thought is your safety."
"And comfort of mind," added the captain, about to go.
Ramsey guessed the trouble. "We are veree oblige'," said her mother;
"we'll continue on the _Votarezz_."
"Goody!" murmured the daughter to old Joy, to Hugh, and to the captain
as he left the group. "Goody!"
"Mother!" protested the twins, "you must not!"
"Oh-h! you?" she radiantly inquired, "you rather go ashore, you, eh?
Veree well. Doubdlezz the captain be please' to put you." Her smile grew
stately as Ramsey laughed. She turned to the grandfather. "Never in my
life I di'n' ran away from sicknezz. I billieve anybody can't die till
his time come'. When his time come' he'll die. My 'usband he billieve
that, too."
"Don't the Germans come from Germany?" asked Ramsey, but no one seemed
able to tell her.
"And also," pursued the lady, "I billieve tha'z a cowardly--to run away
from those sick." She looked around for the twins but they were
conferring aside. "And also I billieve, me--like they say--to get
scare'--tha'z the _sure_ way to catch that kind of sicknezz. 'Tis by
that it pazz into the syztem! My 'usband he tell me that. He's veree
acquaint' with medicine, my 'usband, yes! And----"
"Is Germany in Asia?" Ramsey drawled, but nobody seemed to know
anything.
"And I billieve," persisted madame, "to continue on the boat, tha'z also
the mo' safe. Because if we leave the boat, where we'll find one doctor
for _that_ maladee-e? An' if we _find_ one doctor, who's goin' nurse us
in that maladee?"
"Is Asia--?" tried Ramsey again, but hushed with a strange thrill as her
ear caught, remotely beneath her, a faint sawing and hammering.
"Mo' better, I billieve," continued her mother, "we continue on the boat
and ourselve' nurse those sick. When the Mother of God see' that she'll
maybe privent from coming our time to die."
"If Germany--" whined Ramsey, but huddled down in her seat as the sawing
and hammering came again----
"What, my chile?"
Light at last! She instantly sat up: "Why do they call it the Asiatic
cholera if--?" She stopped short. From the open deck far below rose an
angry cry:
"Stop that fool! Stop her!"
Ramsey darted so recklessly to the low front guard that Hugh darted also
and held her arm as she bent over, while close upon the cry came a
woman's long, unmistakable wail for her dead. Twice it filled the air,
then melted out over the gliding waters and into the night, above the
regardless undertones of the boat's majestic progress. Grandfather,
nurse, mother, brothers pressed after the girl and Hugh. Clutched by the
nurse, released by him, she still looked wildly down, seeing little yet
much. At their back the great bell boomed. The boat's stem began to turn
to the forested shore. A glare of torches at the lower guards crimsoned
the flood under the bows. She flashed round accusingly upon Hugh:
"What are we landing in the woods for?"
He met her gaze and it fell. Her mother tried to draw her away but she
dropped to her knees at the rail and bent her eyes upon a dark group
compacting below. Hugh muttered to his grandfather:
"She'd better leave the boat. She'd rather."
Catching the words, she leaped and stood, her head thrown high. "I
wouldn't! I won't!"
She glared on him through brimming tears, but something about him,
repeated and exaggerated in the twins as she whipped round to them,
reversed her mood. She smote her brow into her mother's bosom and, under
the stress of a silvery laugh that would not be stifled, hung to the
maternal neck and rocked from side to side.
XI
FIRST NIGHT-WATCH
Often through the first half of that night, while many other matters
pressed on them, the minds of the three Courteneys turned to one theme.
Ramsey's inquiries had called it up and the presence and plight of the
immigrants, down below, kept it before them: the story of Hugh's
grandmother, born and bred in Holland.
With Hugh standing by, the girl had drawn its recital from his
grandfather; as whose bride that grandmother had been an immigrant, like
these, though hardly in their forlorn way and with Philadelphia, not New
Orleans, for a first goal. Thence, years later, with husband and child,
she had reached and traversed this wild river, when it was so much
wilder, and had dwelt in New Orleans throughout her son's, John
Courteney's, boyhood. Thence again, in his twenty-first year, she had
recrossed the water to inherit an estate and for seven years had lived
in great ports and capitals of Europe, often at her husband's side, yet
often, too, far from him, as he--leaving his steamboats to good captains
and the mother to her son--came and went on commercial adventures
ocean-wide. It was these first seven years of John Courteney's manhood,
spent in transatlantic study, society, public affairs, and a father's
partnership, that had made him--what Ramsey saw.
The tale was fondly told and had made Hugh feel very homespun compared
with such progenitors. But Ramsey had looked him up and down as if he
must have all his forebears' beautiful values deep hid somewhere in his
inside pockets, and had wondered, as she tossed away to the pilot-house,
if he was destined ever to show the father's special gift of winning and
holding the strongest and best men's allegiance. A very mature thought
for her, but she sometimes had such, and had once heard her father
frankly confess that therein lay the Courteneys' largest advantage over
him, he being signally able to rule the rudest men by a more formidable
rudeness, but not to command the devotion of men superior to that sort
of rule.
At length the stars of midnight hung overhead. The amber haze of Queen
Berenice's hair glimmered to westward. Where the river had so writhed
round on itself as to be sweeping northeastward, the _Votaress_, midway
of a short "crossing" from left shore to right, was pointing southwest.
An old moon, fairly up, was on the larboard quarter, and in the nearest
bend down-stream the faint lights of a boat recently outstripped were
just being quenched by the low black willows of an island. In the bend
above shone the dim but brightening stern lights of the foremost and
speediest of the five-o'clock fleet. A lonely wooded point beneath the
brown sand of whose crumbling water's edge the poor German home-seeker
had found the home he least sought lay miles behind; miles by the long
bends of the river, miles even straight overland, and lost in the night
among the famed sugar estates that occupied in unbroken succession
College Point and Grandview Reach, Willow Bend, Bell's Point, and Bonnet
Carré. Past was Donaldsonville, at the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, and
yonder ahead, that boat just entering Bayagoula Bend, and which the
_Votaress_ was so prettily overhauling, was the _Antelope_.
"Fast time," ventured the watchman to the first mate.
"Yes, fast enough for a start."
No word from either as to any trouble aboard.
A cub pilot risked a remark to his chief: "'--Chase the antelope over
the plain,' says the song, but I reckon we won't quite do that, sir."
No, they wouldn't quite do that. Not a breath as to any unfortunate
conditions anywhere. But on every deck, wherever equals met, the fearful
plight of the queer folk down nearest the water was softly debated.
Distressing to feminine sympathy was the necessity of instant burials,
first revealed up-stairs by that woman's cry of agony down on the lower
gangway. But masculine nerve explained that such promptness would save
lives and might confine the disease to the lower deck. Was no physician
on the boat? No, one would be taken aboard in the morning. Of course you
could ask to be set ashore, but, all things considered, to stay seemed
wiser. Where was Madame Hayle? Few passengers knew, none of the boat's
"family" chose to tell, and at bedtime the majority "retired." So much
for the surface of things.
But beneath the surface--"Good God, sir! if any one is to go ashore, why
shouldn't it be _they_--the foreigners?"
For the full bearing of this speech let us recount certain doings in
this first half of the night. The Hayle twins, coming aboard at "Post
Forty-Six," had begun, by the time the boat backed away, to offer
exchanges of courtesy with such men on the boiler deck as seemed best
worth while, and this they kept up with an address which, despite their
obvious juleps, unfailingly won them attention. Even a Methodist bishop,
who "knew their father and had known his father, both stanch
Methodists," was unstintedly cordial. No less so was a senator.
"Know Gideon Hayle?" He had "known him before they had! Hoped to know
him yet when his sons should be commodores." Was on the _Chevalier_ when
the _Chevalier_ outran the _Quakeress_. One twin heard the tale while
the other brought the bishop.
"Senator, you already know Bishop So-and-So?"
"Senator, we'd like you to know Judge So-and-So, sir."
Judge, senator, and bishop were pleased. The senator reminded the judge
that they had met years before for a touch-and-go moment as one was
leaving and the other boarding the _Autocrat_--or was it the
_Admiral_--a Hayle boat at any rate--how time does fly! The brothers
took but a light part in the chat and were much too wise to betray any
degree of social zeal. Each new introduction was as casual as the one
before it. Sometimes they were themselves introduced but only those here
named stayed in the set. Chairs were found for four, and Julian,
stepping aside for a fifth chair, came upon another worthy, as well
juleped as himself and carrying his deck load quite as evenly.
"Bishop So-and-So, this is our father's boyhood friend, General
So-and-So. Judge So-and-So--Senator So-and-So--you both know the
general?" The general accepted Lucian's chair, and presently Lucian,
with two more chairs, brought one more personage, tall and solemn.
"Senator, have you never met Squire So-and-So?"
The senator had long wished to do so, the judge was well acquainted, the
general shook hands grandly, and the bishop blithely said the squire had
the largest plantation on the Yazoo River. The squire was too thirsty to
smile but said he hoped the bishop would not feel above joining the
others as his guest at the bar. The bishop declined, but kept the seats
of all till their return. They came back talking politics, having found
themselves of one democratic mind, southwestern variety, and able to
discuss with quiet dignity their minor differences of view on a number
of then burning questions now long burned out with the men who kindled
them: Webster, Fillmore, Scott, Seward, Clay, Cass, Douglas, Garrison,
Davis, and others.
By and by, without a break in the discussion, the seven walked back into
the cabin and stood where, on the first tap of the supper bell, each
could snatch a seat near the upper end of the table and so collectively
assume among the hundreds on the boat that separate and superior station
to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitled them. The squire
had his motherless children aboard but could leave them to a sister and
brother-in-law. Which reminded the twins to look after their sister, on
the roof, as hereinbefore set forth. But both the bishop and the senator
were thoughtful for them and when they came tardily to the board they
found the group close about the old commodore, their own places saved
and the judge and the general sustaining the squire's rather peppery
assertion to the courteous but vilely inconvincible commodore, that
certain new laws of Congress must be upheld with all the national power,
Yankee mobs be squarely shot into and their leaders hanged, or the
Federal Union would not long be worth a rap.
The senator had almost thought of something tactful to say and the
bishop had just the right word on the end of his tongue, when Julian,
with very good manners in a very bad manner, asked leave to speak, and
the squire, ignoring the commodore, said: "Certainly, Mr. Hayle, sir,
do!"
"One thing to be stopped at all cost," said Mr. Hayle, "is this deluge
of immigration. Every alien who comes to New Orleans, and especially
every alien who passes on up this river into the West, strengthens the
North and weakens the South commercially, industrially, and politically,
and corrupts the national type, the national speech----"
"The national religion,"----prompted the bishop.
"The national love of law and order,"----said the judge.
"And of justice and liberty,"----put in the general.
"And the national health," said the youth. "New Orleans should refuse
every immigrant entrance to the country, and every steamboat on the
Mississippi ought to decline to carry him to his destination!"
The commodore smiled to reply, but the senator broke in with an
anecdote, long but good, of a newly landed German. The judge followed
close with the story of a very green Irishman; and the general, with
mellow inconsequence, brought in a tale to the credit of the departed
Jackson and debit of the still surviving Clay. A new sultriness
prevailed. The judge's palliative word, that many a story hard on Clay
was older than Clay himself, relieved the tension scarcely more than did
Lucian's inquiry whether it was not, at any rate, true beyond cavil that
Clay had treated Jackson perfidiously in that old matter----
That old matter's extreme deadness reminded the group that the repast
was over and Whiggism amply squelched. Besides themselves only the
ladies'-cabin people and the captain, away aft, lingered. The long,
intervening double line of mere feeders was gone and the cabin-boys were
setting the second table. The commodore rose and the seven drifted out
again, with their seven toothpicks, to the boiler deck. There men who
had passed the salt to each other at table were giving each other
cigars, some standing in knots, others taking chairs about the guards.
Almost every one had related himself to some other one or more as
somehow his or their guest and host combined, and had taken his turn or
was watching his chance to recognize the captain as social and civil
autocrat and guardian angel over all. The conspicuousness of the twins
led to stories, in undertone, of the long Hayle-Courteney rivalry.
"Remarkable, how it's run on and on without their ever locking horns,
eh?"
"Mighty nigh did it when the _Quakeress_ burned."
"Oh! do you really think so?"
"I know it, sir!" He who knew spat over the rail, and the one who had
dared to doubt moved on. Between stories there were debates on the
comparative merits of the two types of hull favored respectively by the
rival builders: the slim Hayle model and the not so slim of the
Courteneys.
"After all, sir," asserted a man of eagle eye, "a duck flies faster than
a crane."
"I doubt that, sir," said one with the eye of a stallion. "Not that I
question your word, but----"
Their friends had to separate them.
At that point along came the _Empress_, as we know, a sight only less
inspiring on this deck than to Ramsey on the roof; shining, saluting,
huzzaing, then fading round the bend. When the card-tables were set out
our group of seven fell into three parts. The squire and the general sat
down to a game with a Vicksburg merchant and a Milliken's Bend planter,
who "couldn't play late," their wives being on the boat. The twins,
ceasing to tell the senator and the bishop what damnable things _some_
boats were known to have done for the sake of speed, went down-stairs to
take a glance at the safety-valve, following a few steps behind the
captain. For him they had just seen, as he came down from the roof to
their deck and met an unexpected messenger from the engine-room,
promptly turn with him and go below. But their needless glance at the
safety-valve they never took. They saw only two or three poor women
sobbing like babes, the dead body of a young man being prepared for
burial, and the carpenter finishing his coffin. When the captain, as
will be remembered, went back to the hurricane-deck to tell their
mother, they went too.
The boat's torches enabled all on the various decks to view the burial.
It ended the game of cards. During the swift ceremony and long after it
the twins consulted the squire, the general, the Vicksburger, the
senator, the bishop, the judge, and the planter from Milliken's Bend as
to what ought to be done. They took care to advance their questions and
suggestions singly and according to the nature of each hearer's
inflammability, and as each one kindled they brought him close to
another, Julian always supplying the hardihood, Lucian the guile. Here
were men, they said, and soon had others saying--the squire to the
merchant, the general to the Milliken's Bend planter--here were men,
gentlemen, scores on scores, not to say hundreds, who at all times and
everywhere could take the chances of life like men, like gentlemen,
native American gentlemen. But here also were women and children, the
families of many of these gentlemen. Such risks were not for such women
and children. Was no step to be generally agreed upon? Was it to be
supinely assumed that the owners of the _Votaress_, now mainly
preoccupied in overhauling the _Antelope_, knew all that was best to do
and would punctually do it all?
The twins did not originate half the inquiries or replies, they merely
started the ferment and kept it working. "You saw at table, did you not,
the positive contempt the commodore--who is a foreigner himself--showed
for the direst needs of our country?" To be sure that had little to do
with the management of the boat, but it made it easier to think that the
Courteneys, the captain himself being half Dutch in his origin, might
incline to do more for those people down-stairs than was just to those
above them--every way above them. The general called it a criminal error
to plant the victims of a deadly contagion along a great national
highway, like fertile seed in a fertile furrow. The bishop counted it no
mercy to the aliens themselves to keep them aboard when they could be
set ashore in a rough sort of roofless quarantine on some such isolated
spot as Prophet's Island, which should be reached by sunrise, was
heavily wooded, and lay but six miles below the small town of Port
Hudson.
Nor could he call it a mercy to consult the immigrants' wishes. How
could they be expected to view the matter unselfishly?
A deputation of seven elected itself to wait on the captain. The
masterful twins, finding themselves not of its number, sought him in
advance, alone. But their interview was brief. We pass it. The first
_watch_ turned in. The men who had served through the first two hours'
run came again on duty as "middle watch," and in their care, after their
four hours' rest, the shining _Votaress_, teeming with slumberers,
breasted the strenuous flood as regally as ever.
XII
HUGH AND THE TWINS
In the captain's chair, between the derricks and the bell, far above and
behind which the chimneys' vast double plume of smoke and sparks trailed
down the steamer's wake, sat Hugh Courteney, quite uncompanioned.
So his father had just left him, leaving with him the thought, though
without hint of it in word or tone, that some night, on some boat as
deeply freighted with cares as this one, he must sit thus, her master.
The wonder of it, with the wonder of the boat herself and all she
carried, sounded a continuous stern alarum through his spirit like a
long roll sounding through a camp: "Be a man! Make haste! See even those
Hayle twins, with all their faults, and up! Make haste! Rise up and be a
man!" Had the wonder-loving Ramsey been there she must have laughed
again; looking into his round, heavy visage was so much like looking
into the back of a watch--one saw such ceaseless movement of mind yet
learned so little from it. Amid his wonderings he wondered of her; not
only where at that moment she might be, but what a child she still was,
and yet in how few years--as few as two or three--she would be a woman,
might be a bride.
But soon a bride or never, the boat was full of matters only less
remarkable and he gently let the girl out of his thought by looking
behind him. The windows of the captain's room--between the
chimneys--front room of the texas--gave shining evidence that somewhere
the captain was yet astir. From the rayless pilot-house above it faint
notes of speech showed that some one was up there with the pilot, but at
the same time a near-by tread drew Hugh to his feet with quick pleasure
and again his father stood before him, looking at the lights of the
_Antelope_, a few hundred yards ahead.
"She'll soon be astern," said Hugh.
"We can't keep her so," replied the captain, accepting his chair. "We
must land too often. Where's your crony?"
"The commodore? He's turned in." After a pause--"Father, you've shipped
a lot of trouble."
"Yes," was the light response, "counting Hayle's twins."
"I wish you'd give me full charge of them."
"Do you?" laughed the father. "Take it. You hear them, don't you?"
They were easy to hear, down on the forward freight deck, dancing round
a bottle of liquor, and----
"Singing 'Gideon's Band,'" said Hugh listening.
"Yes," said the amused captain, "after pledging me on their honor to go
straight to bed." Hugh started away so abruptly that his father asked:
"Where are you bound?"
"I'm going to send them to bed."
"Both of them?" smilingly asked the captain.
"Yes, both."
"Not both at once?"
"Yes, both at once. Do you know where their sister is?"
"Why, abed and asleep long ago, is she not?"
"I don't know," said Hugh, going; "I doubt it."
On his way he glanced about for her. Taking charge of the twins seemed
logically to involve a care of her. Where the mother was he knew. Down
in the after parts of the lower deck, between the ceaseless torrents of
the wheels, most of the people from overseas had spread their beds
wherever they might, while in one small place apart some five or six lay
smitten with the deadly contagion, two or three in agony, one or two in
painless collapse, under the unskilled, heartbroken care of a few
terrified kindred. There, by stealth at first and by the captain's
helpless leave when he found her there, attended by a colored man and
maid from the cabin service, was Madame Hayle, ministering, now with
medicine, now with the crucifix, amid the hammer's unflagging din. To
this Hugh was reconciled; but it would never, never do, he felt, to let
the daughter share such an experience. Better to find her, even at that
hour, on the boiler deck.
But on the boiler deck he found only its wide semicircle of chairs quite
empty and no one moving among the high piles of trunks and light freight
under the hanging bunches of pineapples and bananas. He looked into the
saloon. It was bright though with half its lamps cold, but the barber's
shop and the clerk's office were shut, and double curtains of silk and
wool cloistered off the ladies' cabin. The fragrant bar stood open, and
at two or three card-tables sat heavy-betting, hard-chewing quartets,
but no one else was to be seen; even the third Hayle brother had gone to
bed. Halfway down the double front stairs to the lower deck, on a
landing where the two flights merged into one, Hugh paused. All about
beneath him forward of the wheels, clear out to the capstan and
jack-staff, slept the deckhands, except a few on watch, a few more who
with eager crouchings, snapping fingers, and soft cries gambled at dice
in the red glare of the furnaces, and one who had become an amused
onlooker of the Hayle twins--the negro who, six hours before, by merely
putting out a hand had saved their sister's life.
And there, close before Hugh, at the stairs' foot, under the open sky,
were the twins. In their hunger for notice, their equal disdain of the
captain and the deputation of seven, and their belief that the gayest
defiance of the plague was its best preventive, they had set their
bottle on the deck and in opposite directions were daintily pacing round
it in a long ellipse and chanting to a camp-meeting tune their song of
Gideon:
"O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
An' shingle it wid cinnamon bahk.
Do you belong to Gideon's band?
Here's my heart an' here's my hand!
Do you belong to Gideon's band?
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"[1]
A glance at Hugh gave them new life. Singing on, they halted at opposite
ends of the beat, patted thighs, called figures, leaped high, crossed
shins, cracked heels, cut double-shuffles, balanced, swung round the
bottle, lifted it, drank, replaced it, and resumed their elliptical
march to another stanza:
"He couldn't tote de whole worl' breed,
He couldn't tote de whole worl' breed,
He couldn't tote de whole worl' breed,
He los' de crap, but he save' de seed!
Do you belong to Gideon's band?
. . . . . . . .
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"
Hugh moved on down. "Both at once," he had said, but on every
account--their mother's, her daughter's, his father's--it must be both
at once without a high word from him. On the bottom step he was about to
speak, when a tall, flaxen-haired German in big boots and green cap and
coat, meek of brow and barely a year or two his senior, came out from
behind the stair and stepped between the dancers, silent but with a hand
lifted to one and then to the other.
"No," said Hugh to him. The alien's meekness vanished. He motioned
toward the sick. His blue eyes flashed. But in the same instant he was
jolted half off his feet by the lunging shoulder of one of the Hayles
marching to the refrain:
"Do _you_ belong to Gideon's band?"
His answer was a blow so swift that Hugh barely saw it. The singer fell
as if he had slipped on ice. Yet promptly he was up again, and from
right and left the brothers leaped at their foe. But while men rushed in
and hustled the immigrant aft the negro who had saved Ramsey caught one
twin as lightly as he had caught her, and Hugh, jerking the other to his
knees, snatched up the bottle and whirled it overboard. A moment later
he found himself backing up-stairs, followed closely by the pair. These
were being pushed up from below by others, and, in lofty phrases hot
with oaths, were accusing all Courteneys of a studied plan to insult,
misguide, imperil, assault, and humiliate every Hayle within reach and
of a cowardly use of deckhands and Dutchmen for the purpose.
His replies were in undertone: "Come up! Hush your noise, your mother'll
hear you! Come on! Come up!"
On the boiler deck they halted. The crowd filled the stair beneath and
he marvelled once more as he gazed on the two young Hectors, who, true
to their ideals and loathing the obliquities of a moral world that left
them off deputations, blazed with self-approval in a plight whose shame
burned through him, Hugh Courteney, by sheer radiation.
"And as sure," said Julian, "as sure as _hell_, sir, your life's blood
or that of your kin shall one day pay for this! To-night we are
helpless. What is your wish?"
"My father's wish is that you go to your stateroom and berths and keep
your word of honor given to him."
"That, sir, is what we were doing when a hired ruffian----"
"Never mind the hired ruffian. Charge that to me."
"Oh, sir, it is charged!" said the two. "And the charge will be
collected!" They went their way.
[Footnote 1: [music]]
XIII
THE SUPERABOUNDING RAMSEY
In his hurricane-deck chair, with eyes out ahead on the water, John
Courteney gently took his son's hand as the latter, returning to his
side, stood without a word.
"Tucked in, are they, both of them?"
No reply.
"Hugh, I hear certain gentlemen are coming to ask me to put our deck
passengers ashore."
"You can't do it, sir."
"Would you like to tell them so?"
"I'd like nothing better."
"Now that you've tasted blood, eh?"
No reply.
"It wouldn't be a mere putting of bad boys to bed, my son. It would be
David and Goliath, with Goliath in the plural."
"Can't I pass them on to you if I find I must?"
"Of course you can. Hugh, I'm tempted to try you."
"I wish you would, sir."
"With no coaching? No 'Polonius to the players'?"
"I wish you would."
The father looked into the sky. "Superb night," he said.
Again no reply.
"Were you not deep in the spell of it when I found you here awhile ago?"
"Yes, I was."
"My son, I covet your better acquaintance."
"You mean I--say so little?"
"You reveal yourself so little. Even your mother felt that, Hugh."
"I know it, father. And yet, as for you----"
"Yes--as for me----?"
"I've never seen you without wanting to tell out all that's in me." The
pair smiled to each other.
"And you say that at last, now, you can do it?"
"Did I say that, sir?"
"Not in words. But you seem all at once to be seeing things--taking hold
of things--in a new way."
"The things themselves are new, sir. They're small,
but--somehow--they've helped me on."
"Couldn't I guess one of them?"
"I hardly think so, sir; they're really such trifles."
"Well, for a first attempt, Ramsey."
"Yes. How did you guess that?"
"She's such a persuasive example of perfect openness."
"Her mother's a much lovelier one."
"No, Hugh; allowing for years, Miss Ramsey's even a better. But--another
small thing--shall I mention it?"
"Yes, please."
"All these Hayles, to-night, bring up the past--ours."
"Yes!" said Hugh, and said no more, as if the remark had partly unlocked
something and then stuck fast.
The questioner tried a smaller key. "What were you thinking," he asked,
"when I joined you here to-night?"
"When you--? Oh, nothing we're thinking of now."
"At the same time, what was it?"
"Why--something rather too fanciful to put into words."
"All the same, let's have it."
"Well, for one thing, seeing and feeling this boat, with all its light
and life, speeding, twinkling on and on through the night like a swarm
of stars, the thought came--and I was wishing I could share it with
you----"
The elder hand pressed the younger.
"The thought that since infinite space--" The thought seemed to stall,
take breath, and start again--"since infinite space is lighted only by
the stars, the rush and roll of this universe through space is forever
and ever--in the large--a night scene--an eternal starlight. Is that
absurd--to you?"
The father smiled: "Why, no. I merely--doubt it. All starlight is
sunlight--near enough by."
"Yes. But between stars there is no near-by, is there?"
"That depends on who's looking, I think. We mustn't impute human eyes to
God--or angels--or saints. You remember the word: 'Darkness and light
are both alike to thee'?"
"Yes," pensively said Hugh, rejoicing in this converse yet wondering why
it made him feel so childish to speak his best while Hayle's twins
showed up in so manly a fashion when they spoke their worst. "Yes, I
thought of that, too. Yet I was glad to believe there will always be
plenty of starlight for those who love it----"
"Wow!" yelled Ramsey in his ear.
With a gulp he whirled and faced her where, limp with laughter, she hung
and swung on the captain's chair. Its occupant quietly rose. The old
nurse wrung her hands, and Ramsey, in an agony of mirth and dismay,
cringed back on her. Suddenly the maiden stood at her best height and
with elaborate graciousness said:
"I _hope_ I haven't interrupted!"
The father's hand appeasingly touched the son's while playfully he said:
"You have a hopeful nature, Miss Ramsey." And then, as her disconcerted
eyes widened, he asked: "Where did you come from just now?"
He saw that if she spoke she must weep. Instead she jauntily waved a
whole arm backward and upward to the pilot-house. Then, her self-command
returning, she remarked, for Hugh in particular: "It's nice up there.
They don't snub you." She twitched a shoulder at him, made eyes to his
father, and once more tinkled her laugh, interiorly, as though it were a
door-bell.
The captain was amused, yet he gravely began to ask: "Does your
mother----?"
"Know I'm out? She doth. First time I've been out o' bed this late in
all my long and checkered career."
"If she does, Miss Ramsey, will you go up to the pilot once more and
tell him to land the boat at the wood-yard just this side of Bonnabel
plantation?"
Her mouth fell open: "Who, me? Tell the--?" She swept the strategist
with a quick, hurt glance, but beamed again beneath his kind eyes. "_I
get your idea_," she said, snatched the nurse's arm, and hurried off
with her, humming and tripping the song she had quoted.
The captain looked again into "infinite space." The wide scene was
shifting. High beyond the _Votaress's_ bow the stars of the west swung
as if they shifted southward. The moon crossed her silvering wake from
larboard quarter to starboard. The _Antelope_ shone close ahead. "To me,
Hugh," he lightly resumed, "this boat, full of all sorts of people,
isn't so much like your swarm of stars as it is like just one little
whole world."
"Yes," said the son, facing him sidewise so that no Ramsey might again
surprise them: "I see it that way too. Father"--the father had stirred
as if to leave him--"I want to tell you some things about our past. But
I can't tell them piecemeal. I must find some time when you're off
watch."
"And when Miss Ramsey's asleep?"
"Yes."
"Why have you never told me before?"
"I've tried for years. The power wasn't in me. I've had to grow up to
it. But, as you say, 'now, at last,' I can do it."
The captain turned away and looked up to the dim pilot-house. Out of it
came the tranquil voice of the pilot who earlier had talked with the
twins: "Caving bank above has planted snags at that wood-yard, sir.
Whippoorwill Ferry's a better landing, on t'other side, head o' the
crossing."
"Well, Mr. Watson, land there."
The boat was sweeping close by the west-shore village of Bayagoula, that
lay asleep where the stream for a brief space widened to a mile. Her
veering jack-staff hid the north star a moment, then crept to right of
it and pointed up a five-mile reach of dim waters and dimmer shores,
hard on the heels of the panting _Antelope._ But the captain's eye
lingered behind and above him. Between him and the pilot-house, softly
veiled by its moonlight shadow, stood in unconscious statuesqueness on
the front overhang of the texas roof, between the towering chimneys,
Ramsey.
Her rippling curls and slim shoulders stood above the shade that
enveloped the rest of her form and showed dark against the feeble light
of the moon at her back. As he looked she uttered a droll sound--fair
counterfeit of the harsh note a mocking-bird speaks to himself before
his nightly outburst--and then broke forth in a voice as untrained, but
as fresh and joyous and as reckless of reproof or praise, as the bird's:
"'O, the lone, starry hours give me, love,
When still is the beautiful night----'"
At sight of a second and third figure he moved that way, while below the
singer's feet sounded a mother's moan: "Ramsey! mon Dieu! my chile! come
down from yondeh!"
The girl's eyes stayed in the sky, but one mutinous foot so keenly smote
the roof that her nurse, approaching behind, stopped short, and from
Hugh came a laugh, a thin, involuntary treble, which caused Ramsey
visibly to flinch.
"Ramsey!" entreated her mother again, but----
"Just this one moment, beloved mom-a! Listen, oh, listen, everybody! to
my midnight thought!" The rhapsodist struck a stiffer pose and began
with all her voice, "Since infinite space is lighted only by the stars!
their rush and roll--te rum te riddle, te rum te ree----"
"Ramsey!"
"--Is an eternal starlight!" The girl hugged and kissed her black nurse:
"Oh, mammy Joy! is that absurd to you?"
"Ram-zee!" cried the mother. But a toll of the great bell silenced her.
Another solemnly followed, and when a third completed the signal to
land, the staggering footsteps of the vanished girl dragging old Joy
with her in full retreat were a relief to every ear. As madame turned to
say good night a last bleat came out of the darkness:
"Please don't, anybody, tell about the _Quakeress_ to-night!"
XIV
THE COMMITTEE OF SEVEN
"Hitherto," said the senator, in his stateroom, to the bishop and the
judge, "there really has been no need to take any assertive step."
He was explaining his slowness as head of the deputation and was glad,
he said, to have a word apart with these two. The room could not seat
seven and for the moment the other four were at the bar, where standing
was so much easier than elsewhere.
Their business, the seven's, he added, was with the captain, and
officially the captain had gone off duty at eight o'clock and was on
again only now, at midnight, in the "middle watch." Even yet there need
be no hurry; what they wanted done could not be done before early
morning, at Prophet's Island.
The bishop approved. "Don't cross the bridge till you get to it," he
quoted.
The judge--whose elderly maiden sister was aboard and abed but
awake and alarmed and amazed and astounded that he should be so
helpless--assented, too, but thought there was now no call for further
delay; Prophet's Island was nearer every moment and the sooner "those
people" were well ashore the safer--and easier--for everybody.
"I was giving our numbers time to grow," remarked the senator.
"And the cholera time to spread?" queried the judge.
"We're but a small minority yet," persisted the senator.
"A minority always rules," smilingly said the bishop.
The senator smiled back. "There are two or three hundred of those deck
passengers alone," he responded.
"Senator," said the judge, "what of that? We've taken upon ourselves to
speak for all the cabin passengers on this boat, whether as yet they
agree with us or not. They are as numerous as those foreigners, sir,
and, my God! sir, _they_ are our own people. Self-preservation is the
first law!"
"Oh, surely you know," protested the senator, "I'm with you, heart and
soul! We must extricate these people of our own from a situation whose
desperateness most of them do not recognize. We'll go to the captain
now, as soon as--as we must. But let us agree right here that whatever
we require him to do we also require him to do of his own free will. He
must shift no responsibility upon us. You have, of your sort, bishop, a
constituency quite as sensitive as the judge's or mine, and we don't
want to give any one a chance to start a false story which we might find
it difficult to run down. And so we can hardly be too careful----"
The absent four had returned while he spoke. "Sir," interrupted the
general, whose th's were getting thick, "ththat is what we have
been--too careful!"
The hearts of the four were on fire. A chance word of the barkeeper,
they said, had sent them to the stateroom of Hayle's twins, who, with
tears of wrath, had confessed themselves prisoners; prisoners of their
own word of honor--"after being knocked down----"
"What?" cried senator, judge, and bishop.
"Yes, sirs, one of them literally knocked down by the acknowledged
minion of one Courteney, for having ventured to differ politically with
another and for daring to mention the pestilence to a third."
The seven poured out to the guards and started for the roof. The bell up
there tolled for the landing at Whippoorwill Ferry. About to ascend a
stair, they uncovered and stood aside while Madame Hayle and a cabin
maid passed down on their way back to the immigrants' deck. By the time
the roof was reached the boat was close inshore. The captain had begun
to direct her landing. The engine bells were jingling. Tall torch
baskets were blazing on the lower-deck guards, and another burial
awaited only the running out of the big stage. Now it hurried ashore, a
weirdly solemn pageant. The seven, looking down upon it, regained a more
becoming composure. When the swift task was done, the torches quenched,
and the boat again under way and her movements in control of the pilot,
they once more looked for the captain. His chair was empty, but his room
was bright and its door ajar. Within, however, was only the wholly
uninspiring figure of Hugh, at a table, where he was just beginning to
write. He rose and seemed sedately to count his visitors.
"We are looking for the captain," said the senator.
"He's down on the after lower deck, sir."
"Oh!" The bushy brows of the inquirer lifted. "Will you send for him? We
can't very well go down there."
"That's true, sir," said Hugh, feeling the irony, "unless you wish to
help." He looked from one to another, but none of the seven wished to
help.
"Do you mean to say," broke in the general, "ththat we can't sssee ththe
captain of ththis boat unless we nurse the cholera?"
"No, sir, I don't mean that, though he's very much occupied. If you will
state your business to me I will send for him unless I can attend to it
myself."
"Why, my young friend," said the senator, "does that strike you as due
courtesy to a delegation like this?"
"No, sir, ordinarily it would not be, sir. But my father--I am the
captain's son--knowing you were coming and what you were coming for,
waited for you as long as he could. Just now he is extremely busy, sir,
doing what he can--short-handed--for the sick and dying." The captain's
son, in spite of himself, began to warm up. "Those hundreds of people
down yonder, sir, are homeless, friendless, dumb--you may say--and in
his personal care. He has left me here to see that your every proper
wish has every attention. Gentlemen, will you please be seated?" He
resumed his own chair and at top speed began again to write.
It was a performance not pleasant for any one. He felt himself culpably
too full of the resentful conviction that this ferment, whose ultimate
extent nobody could predict, was purely of those Hayle twins' brewing,
and he knew he was speaking too much as though to them and them alone.
He was the only Courteney who could do this thing so badly, yet it must
be done. Still writing, he glanced up. Not a visitor had stooped to sit.
He dipped his pen but rose up again. "What can I do for you, sirs?"
"We have told you," said the senator. "Send for the captain!"
"Will you please say what you want him for?"
"No, sir! We will tell him that when he comes!"
"He'll not come, sir. I shan't send."
The senator glared steadily into the youth's face, and the youth,
forgetting their disparity of years, glared as steadily back. The bishop
blandly spoke:
"Senator, will you allow me, for an instant--? Mr. Courteney, you will
admit that this steamboat is not your property?"
"She's as much mine as anybody's, sir. I am one third owner of her."
The bishop's pause was lengthy. Then--"Oh, you are! Well, however that
may be, sir, your father ought to realize--and so ought you, sir--that
we cannot consent to conduct an affair like this in a second-handed
way."
"It really isn't second-handed, sir; but if you think it is and if
you're willing to put your request in writing and will dictate it to me,
here and now----"
The senator exploded: "Damn the writing!" He whirled upon the bishop:
"Your pardon, sir!"
"Some one had to say it," jovially answered the bishop. Everybody
laughed. Hugh dipped his pen once more.
"Shall I put that down, also?" he asked, looking to the bishop and the
senator by turns.
"Put what?--down where?" they asked. "What are you writing there,
anyhow?"
"Our conversation."
The senator stiffened high: "For what, sir?"
And the bishop asked, "A verbatim report to the captain?"
"Yes, sir, and the newspapers."
"Insolence!" exclaimed the general, but was hushed by the squire, though
the squire's own brow lowered.
"Who will vouch for your accuracy?" loftily asked the senator.
"I'll send now for witnesses." The youth reached toward a bell-cord. But
the senator lifted a hand between:
"Stop, sir. There will be nothing to witness. Nevertheless you know, of
course, that this is not the end."
"I see that, sir."
"When your passengers awake in the morning, your real, your cabin
passengers, they will, they _shall_ awake to the deadly hazard of their
situation. Gentlemen, there will be available landings beyond Prophet's
Island. We shall reach Turnbull's Island by noon and Natchez Island
before sundown. Meantime, sir, this mortal peril to hundreds of our best
people is wholly chargeable to your captain."
"Captain and owners," said Hugh.
"Captain and owners! Good night, sir."
"Good night, gentlemen."
For half an hour the _Votaress_ headed west. Then the north star crept
forward from starboard beam to bow and then back from bow to larboard
beam. Plaquemine town, bayou, and bend swept past, and as she laid her
course east for Manchac bayou, bend, and point a tranquil voice came up
to the pilot-house from the darkness forward of the bell: "Where is
Hugh, Mr. Watson?"
"He's just turned in, sir."
XV
MORNING WATCH
Twinkled quite away were the four hours of middle watch.
All the gentler turnings of the journey's first hundred miles were
finished and the many hundred miles of its wider contortions were well
begun. One winding of thirty-five miles had earned but twelve of
northward advance. But at any rate that was now far downstream. Baton
Rouge, the small capital of the State, crowning the first high bank you
reach, was some six miles astern. In the dark panorama of the shores,
decipherable only to a pilot's trained sight, the unbroken procession of
sugar estates was broken at last and the shining _Votaress_, having
rounded a point from north to west, was crossing close above it with
Seven Lakes and the Devil's Swamp on her starboard bow. The _Antelope_
glimmered a short mile behind.
It was the first mate's watch. On the hurricanedeck he paced at ease
across and across near the front rail, where at any instant his eye
could drop to its truer domain, the forecastle. The westerly moon hung
high over the larboard bow. Now the boat ran so close along the lowland
that in smiting the water each bucket of her shoreward wheel drew a
separate echo from the dense wood, as if a phantom boat ran beside her
among the moss-draped cypresses. Ramsey! what thrills you were missing!
She knew it. In her sleep she lay half consciously resenting the loss.
Under the next point a close turn led into a long northeastward reach,
and as the _Votaress_ bore due north across it the morning star, at one
flash, blazed out on the dark world and down the flood. Through her
stateroom's high window its silvery beam found Ramsey in the upper berth
and opened her eyelids with a touch. Staring on the serene splendor, she
would soon have slept again, but just then the many lights of a large
steamer glided out of the next bend above and Ramsey sprang to an elbow
to watch its swift approach and await her own boat's passing call and
the other's reply. Now the _Votaress_ tolled a single stroke, as if to
cry: "Hail, friend, we take the starboard."
With bird-like speed the shining apparition came on, and after a few
seconds--that seemed endless--its soft, slow note of assent floated over
the waters. Crossing the star's slender path on a long oblique, the
wonder came, came on, came close, glittered by, and was gone; now
lowland and flood lay again in mystic shadows, and the heavenly beacon
of dawn, shedding a yet more unearthly glory than before, swung nearer
and nearer to the _Votaress's_ course until it vanished forward of the
great wheel-house as she headed northeast.
The very pilot at the helm was not more awake than the reclining Ramsey
as she pondered the hours, each one a year, that had passed since she
came aboard. All their happenings, dark and bright; all their speeches;
all their faces, male, female, aged, adolescent, juvenile, danced
through her fancy with a variety and multiplicity of values which seven
such little country-girl minds as hers, thought she, could hardly make
room for. It seemed as though a shower of coined gold were overflowing
her wee muslin apron of an intelligence and dropping through it. She
could scarcely remain in the berth. Listen! Was her mother awake, in the
lower one? The boat veered a trifle back northward and suddenly again,
hovering over dim water and shore and blazing like a herald angel, was
the morning star, a scant point or so to "stabboard." She chuckled,
softly, at the word.
Gently her name was called, beneath her: "Ramsey?"
She let her face into the pillow and shook with the fun of it. If she
should squeak half a note of reply she would be ordered to stay abed.
Soon the mother rose and began stealthily to dress. No doubt it was to
return to those poor Germans below. The thought was very sobering.
Ramsey yearned to go with her, but knew she might as well ask leave to
ride in the white yawl which, night and day, so incessantly, invitingly
skimmed, zigzagged, foamed, and bounded after the _Votaress_, holding on
to her fantail by its jerking painter.
The yawl reminded her of the boy Hugh. He seemed to belong to
the boat in much the same way as it. He _was_ a boy, nothing
else--humph!--pooh!--though he seemed to think himself the elephant of
the show. A boy, and yet with what a mind! Not that she should ever want
one like it--whoop! what would she ever do with it? No wonder she had
laughed in his face. Without laughter she would have been his tossed and
trampled victim. Laughter was her ladder; the ladder up which the circus
girl runs to sit on the elephant's shoulder.
The lock of the stateroom door whispered. Her mother was going! Now she
was gone! The daughter rose enough to look out on the gliding flood. It
was day. But, night or day, how it intensified existence, this
perpetual, tremulous passing of heaven and earth over and round and by
and beneath one! Every least incident, indoors or out, was large and
vivid, and a mere look from a window became a picture in the memory, to
hang there through life. Nay, a sound was enough, too much. The remote
peck-peck of that carpenter's hammer smote into her mind the indelible
image of the only thing he could be making at such an hour. Trying to be
deaf, she thought of Joy--timely thought! At any moment the old dear
might steal in. She dropped from her berth, and when the actual invasion
came, when Joy appeared, Ramsey was at the wash-stand, splashing like a
canary, while strewn about the cramped place lay a lot of fresh attire,
her Sunday best, brightest, longest.
"Now, you needn't say one word!" she cried.
The old woman bridled to say many, but before she could speak there was
a fervent challenge to answer:
"Do you realize all I've got to attend to to-day?"
The nurse's mouth opened but another question was shot into it: "Has
anybody told about the _Quakeress_?"
There was a limit to forbearance. "Now, Miss Ramsey Hayle, ef dey is
tell it, aw ef dey hain't--to yo' ma--dat's all right an' beseemly. But
fo' you, dat ain't no fitt'n' story fo' you to heah!"
Ramsey stared from her towel with lips apart. "Why, you--I'm going to
hear it!--all!--this day!--or, anyhow, this trip!--from--from--" She
fell upon the nurse's shoulder, convulsed.
"F'om who' is you gwine hear it? Stop, missie, stawp! Dat's madness, dat
laughteh. De Bible say' so! F'm who'--? Lawd! yo' head's a-wett'n' my
breas'-han'kercheh!"
Ramsey drew up, her eyes dancing, but went into a new transport as she
replied: "From the baby elephant!"
"No, you don't, Miss Ramsey Hayle! No, you don't! An' besides, befo' you
heah de story o' de _Quak'ess_ you want to heah de story o' Phyllis."
XVI
PHYLLIS
From earliest childhood the Hugh whom it gave Ramsey such rapture to
nickname had unconsciously worn the dim frown that seemed to her so
droll because at once so scrutinous yet so appealing.
To others that faint shade had never meant more than an inborn mental
painstaking; a mind as steadily at work as the pulse; seemingly
sluggish, really active. But Ramsey, in her stateroom, letting Joy dress
her for all the Sabbath could mean afloat or ashore, could not accept
such a thought. A feminine eagerness to read the masculine brow had
promptly imputed to Hugh's a depth of mystery for which her romantic
young soul demanded a romantic interpretation. Hence, mainly, her hunger
for the story of the _Quakeress_. She had perceived, she thought, a
relation between it and the clouded brow, and was bent on finding for
the brow's owner as amazing a part in the tale as could be contrived by
any piecing together of its facts which did not absolutely mutilate
them. And these facts already she had begun to collect when by the
mention of this "Phyllis" she discovered that old Joy had at least a
share of the facts and under due pressure would yield them up.
"Phyllis?" asked Ramsey, "who was Phyllis?"
"Humph! Neveh hear o' Phyllis? Well, dey wuz reason fo' dat, too.
Phyllis wuz de likeliest yalleh gal I eveh see, not-in-standin' she wuz
my full fus' cousin."
Now, one could be as dark as a sloe and yet have a cousin as yellow as a
marigold, but Ramsey did not see it so. "How can that be?" she laughed,
"when you are so out and out black?" The bare idea seemed too comical
for human endurance.
"I ain't no blackeh'n Gawd made me--oh, Lawd! missie, how I gwine button
you up ef you shif' an' wriggle like dat? Phyllis wuz nuss to all de
Co'teney chil'en. 'Caze dat same day when de new _Quak'ess_ come down de
riveh wid dis same Mahs' Hugh, new-bawn, dah wuz yo' pa on his new boat,
de _Conjuror_----"
"Ow! the _Conqueror_!"
"Yass'm, dat's what I say. And dah wuz yo' ma, an' me, o' co'se, and dah
wuz Phyllis, my full fus' cousin--now, ef you cayn't stop a-gigglin' an'
wrigglin' long enough fo' me to finish dis----"
Ramsey was too unnerved to heed. "How could--" she insisted--"how could
a--a mulatto girl be your first cousin?"
"Now, you dess neveh min' how! Phyllis wa'n't no mullatteh, nohow. She
wuz a quadroom! Heh mullatteh motheh wuz my own sisteh!"
"Oh, you mean half-sister!"
"I means whole sisteh! Miss Hayle, betteh you dess drap dat subjic' now,
an' thaynk Gawd fo' yo' ign'ance!"
"All right! all right! whole sister! go on! were you twins?" The querist
gave a wild start of surprise at herself and sank to the floor.
"Missie," sighed the old woman, "y'ain't neveh in yo' life stopped to
think dat niggehs is got feelin's, is you?"
The speech was hardly begun before the girl was up and about the
protester's neck: "Hush! ple-ease hush! You've said it before, you've
said it before, you've said it before, before!"
The nurse's eyes filled: "Yass, an' what use it been? De wuss thing I
know 'bout good white folks--an' when I says 'good' I means de
best!--dat is, dat dey don't _believe_ niggehs is got feelin's!" It was
hard to speak on, for Ramsey had pushed her into a chair and was in her
lap.
"They do! they do, mammy Joy, they do!" She fell to kissing her, first
slowly, then wildly as Joy insisted:
"No, dey don't. Ef dey did, Phyllis 'ud neveh 'a' come to de pass she
came to. But dey don't! Some o' de bes' _believes_ dey believes, dat's
all. Oh, I 'llow you, lots o' white folks is got--oh, Lawd! _don't_
spile my breas'-han'kercheh!--is got mo' feelin's dan some niggehs; but
lots o' niggehs is got _lots_ mo' feelin's dan some white folks. Mo' an'
betteh! Now, my sisteh, my yalleh sisteh----"
"Oh, never mind, there's the rising gong! I know your yellow sister must
have had feelings. Tell about Phyllis--and the Courteneys--and the
_Quakeress_."
"Well, I will! Yo' plumb sot on gitt'n' de thing, an'----"
"Yes, and it's not a fit story for me to ask _him_ about and you know
I'll ask him if I have to! And besides, I just know mom-a's told you to
keep me off the hurricane roof any way you can and as long as you
can--listen! the big bell! we're meeting a boat, maybe half a dozen! And
we're passing to labboard. Come! Come on!"
At their own door they espied the passing craft: a single boat, not six;
a tiny, cabinless, one-funnelled, unclean, crawling thing, dimly made
out in the early dusk of the forested shore which it servilely hugged as
if doing all it could to hide its grimy name and identity.
"The _Fly-up-the-Creek_!" gasped Ramsey. "Oh, that _can't_ be all!" She
sprang up a stair, dragging the old woman after, and on the
hurricane-deck, near a paddle-box, stood for a moment in the wide glory
of water, land, and early sky, agape again at the squalid object. Then,
as the full humor of the thing struck her--but her behavior may as well
go undescribed. Yet it could not have been so very bad, for the pilot
high above at the wheel, Watson's "partner," glancing down from his side
window, enjoyed it much; silently, it is true, unsmilingly; yet so
heartily that he took a fresh bite of tobacco, chewed with energy, and
thought of home.
When the fit was over, old Joy had been pressed into a chair and the
theme was once more Phyllis.
"Why did they bring her to New Orleans?" was the question.
"Who, Phyllis? She wuz fotch down fo' to be sold."
Ramsey's gaze was roaming every sky-line, but at that word it flashed
back: "How, sold? Pop-a's told me, himself, he never in his life sold
one of his negroes!"
"Is I said he did? Is I call' heh his niggeh? Ain't I done say she wuz a
quadroom?"
"Why," laughed Ramsey, "a quadroon's a negro!"
"Not in de sight o' Gawd! My Lawd, dat's de shame on it!--dat de likes
o' my baby kin say de likes o' dat! Oh, you kin _make_ a niggeh out'n a
simon-pyo' white gal ef you dess raise heh wid de niggehs and treat heh
like a niggeh; but----"
Ramsey flushed: "Oh, I don't believe that!"
"Look hyuh, chile! I ain't choosin' to tell about dat, but--I's seen it
done! Time an' ag'in! An' Phyllis she see it done! Dat's how come
Phyllis to be de kind o' Phyllis she come to be!"
"What kind? Good, or bad? I don't want to hear about her if she was
good."
"She was bofe. But I ain't hawngry to tell about heh, naw 'bout de
_Quak'ess_." The narrator shut her lips tight.
The morning air was like a sparkling wine. Ramsey squared her slim
shoulders and drank it. The turbid waters next the sunrise showed a
marvellous lilac hue, their myriad ripples tipped with pink, silver, and
gold. Up-stream the river opened widely to the west, but the _Votaress_
bore northward across the foot of the reach, and soon it was plain that
she was about to enter a "chute," whose vividly green, low, wooded shore
on her larboard bow was a large island: an island of swamp and jungle,
ancient fastness of an Indian prophet, hiddenly swarming with all the
ravening and venomous brute, reptile, and insect life possible to the
region. Prophet's Island, it was, yet no senator, bishop, general,
judge, or squire was in sight.
Ramsey had seen it on her down trip, when the boat, as required by law
when descending the stream there, went eight miles round it in the main
river. She had heard with awe that bit of history--not this
history,--the drowning, by collision of a steamboat and a ship, of four
hundred Creek Indians who were being deported to make room for the white
man, and had felt herself grow older while she listened. But now what
unmixed raptures awaited her in the narrow short cut! The recent
presence of the _Fly-up-the-Creek_ away over here on this morning side
of the flood was made clear; she had run the chute, where she had no
right to be, coming down-stream.
"My!" cried the girl, "I wish--oh, my, my, _my_, I wish I could be five
people at once!"
For here the boat's watchman sauntered by--a boat's watchman must be a
world in himself! Yonder at the forward rail the first mate still paced
athwart the deck. By the captain's chair stood both the elder
Courteneys, their enthralling conversation all going to waste. Here
rushed and quivered all the beautiful boat, her great human menagerie
still unviewed, her cabin-boys laying her breakfast table, her
cook-house smelling of hot rolls, the miracles of machinery pulsing on
her lower deck, and down there an awful tragedy going on, with the sweet
mother playing angel--oh, my, my!--and here, up yonder, was the pilot,
by whose side one might presently look right into the narrow chute's
greenwood walls and out over their tops--"Go on, mammy Joy, I can't ever
listen to you, once we're in the chute!"
"I ain't bust'n' to tell noth'n'. Phyllis ain't belong to yo' pa, nohow.
She belong' fust to yo' grampa Hayle, same like my sisteh do, my yalleh
sisteh--aw rutheh to yo' gramma. Yo' gramma she own' a place back o'
Vicksbu'g, same like _us_ got back o' Natchez, whils' yo' grampa he
stick to de riveh, same like yo' pa do now. But yo' grampa he outlive'
yo' gramma nigh twen'y-five yeah'. An' 'bout two yeah' ayfteh yo' gramma
die' my sisteh, my yalleh sisteh, she housekeep fo' yo' grampa--a shawt
spell. Yo' ma she soon bruk dat up."
"Why, that was a funny thing for mom-a to do."
"H-it wuz a right thing! Dat's what it wuz."
"But, mammy, grandpa died before I was born!"
"An' what dat got to do wid de price o' beeswax? Yo' a-mixin' me up
a-puppose! Afo' yo' grampa die'--well, I'll stop tell you quits de
giggles.... Afo' he die', when Phyllis wuz growed up, an' 'bout a yeah
ayfteh y'uncle Dan--de bacheldeh--de pilot--quit de riveh a spell fo' to
run de Vicksbu'g plantation, yo' ma, down on de Natchez place, she speak
up ag'in, an' ax' yo' grampa fo' to loan Phyllis to she. An' yo' grampa,
sho' enough, sawnt heh down, bofe Phyllis an' de chile."
"Chi--you skipped! You're skipping! like fury!"
"Ef I skips I skips fo' de good o' yo' soul."
Ramsey stared. "Why did mom-a borrow her?"
"'Caze she couldn' buy heh. Yo' gramma she die' leavin' dat whole
Vicksbu'g place an' people, bawn an' unbawn, to yo' grampa, fo' to pass,
when he die', to y'uncle Dan, an' y'uncle Dan he wouldn' even 'a' loan'
Phyllis ef he could 'a' perwent. Humph-ummm! he tuck on 'bout his
'rights' like a sett'n' hen."
"But what did mom-a _want_ to borrow her for?"
"Well, I mowt say, fo' heh beauty; but ef I don't skip noth'n' I got to
say she 'llow to p'otect heh."
Ramsey stared again and suddenly fell into that soft, rippling laugh,
keen, merry, self-oblivious, which forty excusing adjectives would not
have excused to her nurse.
"Protect her from--from wha-at?" She rippled again.
"F'om herseff!--an' f'om him!--an' him f'om heh!--and de whole Hayle
fambly an' de law o' Gawd f'om bofe! An' she done it, yo' ma!--up to de
wery day he meet his awful en' in dat bu'nin' pilot-house, when----"
"Ah-h-h! what pilot-house? You never told me----"
"Anybody else eveh tol' you? No. Us Hayles-es ain't fon' o' dat story.
What I ain't tell you ain't be'n ripe to tell. I don't tell noth'n'
'tell it's ripe to tell, me!"
"Oh, it's dead ripe now. Go on, go on!--Burning pilot-house--my uncle
Dan--stop!... Hmm!... That's funny.... Why, mammy, how could he be my
uncle if he--was burnt up--before I was born?"
"Dat's yo' lookout. He wa'n't bu'nt up tell you wuz goin' on five. Yo'
mixin' his las' en' wid yo' grampa's."
"Oh, I see-ee! He was lost on the _Quakeress_!"
"Well, thaynky, ma'am! Yo' perceivin' powehs is a-gitt'n' ahead o' de
hounds. I wuz a-comin' to dat----"
Ramsey interrupted. Her cry of ecstasy was not for the breakfast bell,
which on the deck next below rang joyously up and down both guards and
died away in the ladies' cabin. It was for a vision that rose before her
and the _Votaress_; an illusion of the boat's whole speed being lost to
the boat and given to the shore. Suddenly the fair craft seemed to stop
and stand, foaming, panting, quivering like a wild mare, while the
green, gray-bearded, dew-drenched forest--island and mainland--amid a
singing of innumerable birds, glided down upon her, opening the chute to
gulp her in without a twang of her guys or a stain upon her beauty.
"Go on!" cried Ramsey, her eyes enthralled by the scene, her ears by the
story:--"Mom-a borrowed Phyllis--go on!"
"When yo' grampa gone," said Joy, "an' de will is read, yo' ma tell
y'uncle Dan fo' to neveh mine his rights aw his lef's; he kin go on
ownin' Phyllis and de chile, but, all de same, he cayn't have 'em. An'
when he paw de groun' an' th'ow dus' on his back yo' pa dess--go an' see
him. Wheneveh yo' pa dess go an' see anybody, you know----"
Ramsey knew. She tinkled with delight.
"But den come wuss trouble. 'Caze 'bout dat time----"
About that time Ramsey whisked round and stood so as to give Hugh
Courteney, as he came on deck, a square view of her young back. He
noticed her better length of skirt.
"Go on," she murmured. "Is he coming this way?"
"Co'se he ain't. He gwine up to de pilot-house."
"Humph, how _awful_ busy! That's just for grandeur. Go on." And while
the leafy jaws of the chute drew them in and all the air was suddenly
filled with the boat's sounds flung back from every rippling bough, tree
top, and mass of draping vines, the nurse went on:
"'Bout dat time yo' pa he git de hahdess ovehseeh he eveh did git, an'
you can't 'spute de fact dat yo' pa he take' natchiully to hahd men, an'
hahd men take natchiully to him. You kin say dat to his credits."
"Yes," replied Ramsey, "yes," sighing, gesticulating, whimpering in
ecstasies of sight as the walls of the watery lane cramped in to half
its first width. They seemed to rush past of their own volition, while
out beyond them on either hand the whole dense gray-green interwoven
wilderness, with ceremonial stateliness, swung round on itself in slow
time to the windy speed of the _Votaress_.
XVII
"IT'S A-HAPPMIN' YIT--TO WE ALL"
Nevertheless, "Go on!" cried Ramsey. "How could the overseer be hard on
Phyllis if Phyllis was mom-a's maid?"
"Phyllis fo'ce' him to it! 'Caze all dat time, while she sweet as roses
wid yo' ma--so's to keep in cahoots wid heh an' not have noth'n' to do
wid niggehs o' no breed, pyo', half, quahteh, aw half-quahteh--she so
wild to git back to y'uncle Dan dat she----"
"And to leave mom-a! The goosy-goosy! What for?"
"Well, for one thing, by bad luck, f'om fus' sight, de ovehseeh he
_fancy_ Phyllis. Y'un'stan'----"
"I don't! I don't want to--Go on!"
"Humph! Phyllis un'stan'. She un'stan' so well an' so quick dat de fus'
drizzly night when de rain 'u'd spile de trail--de scent--she up wid de
chile an' putt out."
"For my uncle Dan! Walnut Hills! Go on!" The moving scene was forgotten
though the chute was widening again.
"Well, de ovehseeh, o' co'se, he _got_ to run heh down an' fetch heh
back. An' same time de creeks an' bayous----"
"Oh, now, that's the same old----"
"Yass, oh, yass, de same ole! So ole an' common dat you white
folks--what has all de feelin's----"
"Now, just hush! You don't know anything about it! Go on! Go on! The
bayous were--what?"
"Bank full, dat's all. One place Phyllis an' him nigh got swep' away an'
he drap' de chile."
"Oh!... Oh!... Oh!"
"He bleeged to do it, he tell yo' ma, fo' to save Phyllis--what ain't
want'n' to be save'. Whils' de chile--wuz--de chile wuz drownded." The
old woman moved to rise, but the girl, with a new expression in her
face, prevented her.
"Go on! What did mom-a do?"
"Lawd, what could she do--widout yo' pa?"
"Oh, I'd have done something. What did Phyllis do?"
"Phyllis? Dess th'ash' de bed fo' th'ee days--eyes a-blazin' murdeh;
th'ee days and de Lawd know' how many night'. Yo' ma done one thing but
you don't want to know dat, I reckon."
"What did she do? Did she turn Whig?"
"Wuss!--ef wuss kin be. She tu'n'--dat day--Abolitionless. Ain't neveh
tell me, but--you ax heh. Mebbe it wa'n't all 'count o' Phyllis. Mebbe
it wa'n't plumb hoss-sensible nohow. But dat day-- You ax heh!"
Ramsey flashed: "What are you telling me all this for?"
"Lawd! An' how many time' is you say, 'Go on'?"
"I meant about the _Quakeress_."
"Well, ain't dis de story o' de _Quak'ess_? When----"
"Stop! I'll tell it to you. I see it all."
"You! Y'ain't see it de quahteh o' half a quahteh. Dat story is
a-happmin' yit--to we-all--on dis boat!"
The breakfast-bell rang again, and Hugh started down from the
pilot-house. But Ramsey would ask the old woman one more question: "Is
it happening to him, too?"
"Co'se, him; all o' us; twins an' all. When us brung Phyllis down de
riveh yo' ma wuz dead ag'in sellin' heh, an' when us git win' dat de
Co'teneys want' a nuss yo' pa he dat glad he snap his fingehs. 'Us'll
rent Phyllis to 'em!' he say. 'Dey's Hendry Clay Whigs; dey'd ought to
treat heh fine.' (Dat wuz his joke.) An' yo' ma make answeh: 'Ef dey
don't, us kin take heh back! Betteh dat dan sell heh! Nobody o' de Hayle
blood shayn't do dat whils' I live.'"
Hugh was near. "Good morning!" sang Ramsey. They met at the head of a
stair. She turned away and looked out beyond the jack-staff as radiantly
as if she had just alighted on the planet. The chute was astern. A new
reach of open water came, sun-gilt, to meet them, and on either hand the
low, monotonous green shores crept southward a mile apart.
She faced again to Hugh. "Isn't this God's country?"
"In a way," the youth admitted with a scant smile.
She glanced about. "Most beautiful river in the world!" she urged, and
when he faltered she cried: "Oh, you're prejudiced!" She turned half
away. "I know one thing; I wouldn't let _my_ grandfather prejudice
_me_."
A new thought struck her: "Oh!... I've just heard all about it!... And
it helps to explain--you!"
He enjoyed the personality. "Heard all about what?"
"Phyllis!" She jerked up and down. His smile vanished; his lips set; he
turned red.
Ramsey was even more taken aback than he or old Joy. She knew the pilot
was looking down on her, the mate glancing back at her. Yet she laughed
and prattled and all at once frowningly said: "But one thing I just
can't make out! What on earth had the _Hayle blood_ to do with any right
or wrong of selling Phyllis? Do you know?"
Hugh reddened worse, and in that instant, outblushing him, she saw the
truth. "Never mind!" she cried. "Oh, did I stop you? Go on!--I--I mean
go on down--to breakfast!"
"Won't you go first?"
"No, thank you; go on! Please, go on!" Glancing up to the pilot and
catching his amused eye, she pointed distantly ahead. "What is that high
bank on the--the stabboard shore?" she asked him.
"Why"--his tobacco caused but a moment's delay--"nothing much. They call
that Port Hudson."
"Thank you!" She darted below, where Hugh was already gone. As she
started she caught sight of the twins. They had just come up on the far
side of the boat and were approaching the mate. Still flushed, but
straight as a dart, at the stair's foot she turned on her attendant and
with brimming eyes said softly: "I don't want any breakfast. I'm going
to the lower deck--to find mom-a."
"You shayn't! You'll git de cholera!"
"Pooh, the cholera!--after what I've got!--I'm going to tell mom-a on
you!"
"On me--me! Good Lawd! Go on, I's wid you!"
"You'd no right to tell me that story!"
"Missie, I on'y tol' you fo' to stop you. You said yo'se'f you gwine ax
him all about it."
"Oh, him!" The girl laughed, yet showed new tears. "I don't mind him; I
mind the story! I don't even care who it's about, Hayles or no Hayles!"
"Why, den, what does you care----?"
"I care _what_ it's about." She suddenly looked older. "Oh, I'm all over
bespattered with the horrid----"
"Y'ain't. Y'ain't de sawt fo' dat. Look at yo' ma. She have bofe han's
in it. Is she all oveh bespattud?"
"Oh, you! You know nothing could ever bespatter mom-a!... I'm going to
her to get clean!"
"Dat's good!" A shrewd elation lit up the black face. "Go on! As you say
yo'se'f, go on!"
Ramsey started away but with an overjoyed gasp found herself in her
mother's arms. She pressed closer while the three laughed, and when the
other two ceased she still mirthfully clung in that impregnable
sanctuary. Suddenly she hearkened, tossed her curls, and stood very
straight. Two male voices were coming down the stairs.
"We cannot," said one, "submit to this alive!"
"Yes," said the other, "we can. It's just _we who_ can--till the day we
catch them where they've got us to-day!"
"And what, now, is this?" smilingly inquired Madame Hayle as her twin
sons halted before her.
The young men uncovered. They were surprisingly presentable after the
night they had spent. Julian, in particular, looked capable and proud of
their waywardness.
"Good morning," put in Ramsey, on her mother's arm. "See those little
houses up on that bank? That's Port Hudson. Up there they can see away
down the river, past Prophet's Island, and at the same time away
up-stream. If we were on the hurric--" She made a start, but her mother,
while addressing the twins, restrained her.
"Well," she asked, "you cannot submit--to what?"
"We are ordered ashore!" said Julian.
"At the next landing!" quavered Lucian--"Bayou Sara!"
Ramsey slipped from her mother and gazed at the twins with her eyes as
large as theirs. "You shan't go!" she broke in. "Where's Hugh?" She
darted for the cabin, old Joy following. Julian glared after them.
"See?" he said to his mother. "You don't see--the plot? It's a plot!--to
compromise us!--you and her included!"
"Before this boat-load of witnesses!" chimed Lucian.
Him the mother waved to a remote chair. "Bring me that," she said, for a
pretext, and turned privately to Julian, speaking too swiftly for him to
reply: "Was it part of that plot that you was both on that lower deck
laz' night? No? But in the city those laz' two-three day' in how many
strenge place' you was--lower deck of the whole worl'--God only know',
eh?--unless maybe also the devil--an' the scavenger? That was likewise
part of that plot aggains' us? No? But anny'ow that comity of
seven--h-ah!"--she made a wry face--"that was cause' by the wicked
plotting of those Courteney'? An' that diztrac' you so bad this morning
that you 'ave not notiz' even that change' face on yo' brotheh?--or that
change' voice, eh? An' him he's too affraid to tell you how he's feeling
bad! As faz' as you can, take him--to his room--his bed--an' say you,
both, some prayers. He's godd the cholera."
XVIII
RAMSEY WINS A POINT OR TWO
There was half an hour yet before the first mate's watch would end.
He had risen from the captain's seat on the approach of that middle-aged
pair who in the first hour of the voyage had enjoyed seeing Hugh and
Ramsey together; a couple whose home evidently was far elsewhere--if
anywhere--and who as evidently had seen the world to better advantage
than most of the _Votaress's_ passengers. As he rose Hugh and Ramsey
came up near one of the wheels. Seeing them start directly for him, he
made a heavy show of attention to the married pair.
While the quick step of the two younger people brought them near, the
husband began to reply to the mate: "Why, to the common eye, tiresome, I
dare say. To the artist--I wonder! It's the only much-travelled river in
the world whose most imposing sight is always the boat."
"It isn't!" whispered Ramsey to Hugh. Then openly, yet decorously,
"Ahem!" she said as they lapsed into waiting attitudes. But the mate was
not to be ahemmed, and while he hearkened on to the critic she could do
no better than hammer the small of her back and smooth into it a further
perfection.
"At the same time," continued the stranger, "it's immensely interesting;
politically as to its future, scientifically as to its past." He turned
to his wife: "Look, for instance, at this bit of it right here." A
trained art in his pose and gesture caused Ramsey and old Joy to look as
he prompted. "This is Fausse Rivière Cut-off," he continued, and the
mate said it was--'False River'.
"Yes. Now, barely two generations ago"--he animatedly took Ramsey into
his glance--"this stream suddenly abandoned twenty-odd miles of its own
tremendous length and width and sprang through this two-mile cut-off."
There was such fervor in his tone, and in his wife's mien such vivacity
of interest, that the amazing event stood before Ramsey as if it had
just occurred.
"You've read books about this river!" she said.
"A few, drifting down it by flatboat."
"Oh, by Christopher!" broke out the mate, "I remember you now! Yo're
that play-actor! Yo're the man, by gad! who hauled me into yo' skiff
half roasted and half drownded when the _Quakeress_ was a-burnin'! By
George, look here! What do you want on this boat, that you ain't already
got? Name it, sir, just name it! Oh, by hokey, sir, I----!"
Smilingly the actor shook his head while his wife beamed delightedly.
"We haven't a want ungratified," he answered.
"Oh, please!" put in Ramsey, "yes, you have--one!"
"Have we, mademoiselle? Surely we have if you have."
The mate interposed. "That's a daughter of Gideon Hayle, sir--as good a
captain, by Joe, as ever took out a boat----"
The wife nodded gayly. "We know him," she said.
"Oh!" laughed Ramsey, scanning the pair up and down.
"What is it we want, worthy daughter of Gideon Hayle?" asked the
player--"you and my wife and I--and your--this is your brother, is he
not?"
Ramsey's mouth and eyes spread wide. She turned to Hugh and at sight of
his heavy face whisked round again with her handkerchief to her lips.
The mate spoke for her:
"That's Captain Courteney's son, sir."
"What Miss Hayle wants--" began Hugh----
"What _we_ want," said Ramsey----
"Yes," said Hugh, "what we want is the recall of----"
"An order," broke in the mate. "I know; my order for them two twins to
go ashore. You can't have that, Hugh."
"We can!" said Ramsey, with tears in her laugh.
"No, sir-ee!" said the mate. "Ashore they go!"
"Ashore they don't!" said Ramsey. "You just told this gentleman you'd do
anything he----"
"I'd do anything he--yes, but"--the speaker looked beyond her--"Why, Mr.
Play-actor, them two young Americans come up here a-smellin' o'
buckwheat cakes and golden syrup, when they and some others--a general
and a senator, wa'n't they?--had had some political tiff with you----"
"Oh, not political at all! There's a proposition--I had no idea it was
theirs--to land our deck passengers on----"
"On Turnbull's or Natchez Island!"
Ramsey breathed an audible amazement.
"Exactly," said the player. "Well, I had the ill luck to call their
scheme a bad name or two."
"Good! Now, sir, up they come here _a-demanding_ o' me to put you
ashore, 'where he'll get himself lynched,' says they."
"Oh, bless my soul!" cried the actor. "If that was all and you want to
please us, just let them alone."
The mate smiled to Hugh and shook his head. "It wa'n't all. _You_ know
it wa'n't. Gad, Mr. Hugh, they got to go!"
"Oh, they must not!" begged both players. A few steps away the bishop
and the judge were holding an earnest conversation with the grandfather
Courteney, and his eye tried to call the mate. But Ramsey, holding to
Hugh by his sleeve, gave the old gentleman a toss of her chin, a jerk of
her curls, and took the mate by a coat button. Her slim, silken figure
intercepting him, and his rude bulk smiling down into her upturned face
with a commanding yet amiable restiveness, made a picture to the players
and to the distant pilot, but much more than a picture to the captive
himself. He had thought he had been fending off the banter of a child,
but now, suddenly, this was not a child. A being was here not entirely
mundane nor quite supernal yet surpassing all his earlier knowledge of
feminine quality, something for which a year's hard thinking would not
have found him a definition. Holding his button, she spoke low:
"Please change that order." What mysterious compulsion there was in that
"please"! Her fingers tapped Hugh. "_He_ wants it changed--for me. We'll
be responsible!"
"Oh, you will!" The big man did not look at Hugh; his smile broadened on
their common captor. Her answering eyes laughed, but even in them, deep
down, he saw a pleading ardor at once so childlike, so womanly, and so
celestial that suddenly the deck seemed gone.
"Please change it! quick!" she murmured again, "for us!"
He felt an inward start and saw a vision--of the future--with those two
in the midst of it. His brightening glance went belatedly to Hugh, and
verily there was more of Hugh also than he had ever seen before, but the
crass significance of his smile was quite lost on the pair.
"Yes," insisted Ramsey, "_we_ want it changed, him and me--I mean he and
I!"
The big man's laugh drowned hers. "Oh, it's plain either way. Well, by
George! that _is_ an argument. You and him! Gad, the case is covered!
You and him has got me--by the hind leg!" He began to turn away, for
yonder, apart from commodore, judge, and bishop, but with Madame Hayle
at his side, stood the captain, giving him a sign which he promptly
passed on up to the pilot. "By the hind leg," he repeated, whereat a
titter broke from the averted face of old Joy, while Ramsey stood agape
at her success.
"They _stay_--the twins--stay _aboard_?" she asked the actors, Hugh, and
the mate in turn.
"Lord, yes!" said the latter.
On tiptoes of gratitude she had parted her lips to say more, when the
air overflowed with the long bellow of the boat. "Oh," she cried
protestingly in the din, "but that's to land!"
His reply was unheard, but a shake of his head reassured her as he moved
toward the elder Courteneys, whom bishop and judge had left, and who now
stood alone awaiting him. She faced Hugh. He was telling the actor's
wife that this landing was to get a physician. Ramsey touched him and
spoke low:
"We're going to have an awful time. Don't you think so?"
He did not say. The great bell tolled thrice. She waved him to look at
the people ashore, of all sorts and shades, coming down to the
wharf-boat to see them, but suddenly, invited by a glance from his
father, he stepped away to him. "Humph!" she laughed to old Joy, and
started to join her mother, who was leaving the deck. But the mother
motioned her back. "Where are you going?" whined Ramsey.
"To Lucian."
The daughter halted, aghast. "Has he got it?" But her mother went on
without reply. She turned to the players and, when they smiled
invitingly, rejoined them. When she inquired their name they said it was
Gilmore.
"Will you tell me about the _Quakeress_?" she asked.
The husband said he would. "But you don't mean now," he qualified, "when
so many things are happening?"
"N-no," she replied grudgingly, and presently added: "I'm afraid my
brother's got the cholera." But then she brightened triumphantly.
"Anyhow," she said, "the mate didn't know that." The engine bells
jingled, the wheels paused, and the shore appeared to drift down upon
them, pushing the crowded wharf-boat before it. "What d'you reckon this
beautiful boat is saying to herself right now?" she asked.
"She ought to say," critically put in the bishop, behind her, to the
senator, while she turned and cast her head-to-foot scrutiny up and down
the two, "that for the welfare of that wharf-boatful of men and boys,
and of the homes they live in, she'd best not land, after all."
"That's what she _is_ saying!" defensively cried Ramsey, and, sure
enough, while she laughed the scape-pipes roared and the wheels backed
till the wharf-boat stood still. At the same time the pilots changed
watch. The captain sauntered to the forward rail. The commodore, with
the mate and Hugh, went below. So closely did the actor's eyes follow
them that Ramsey asked: "What are they going to do?"
"Going ashore in the yawl, I hope, for a doctor."
"And medicines," added some one.
"And for a priest," disparagingly said the smiling bishop as they moved
to the shoreward edge of the roof. "Large demands our deck passengers
are making."
"An outrage!" said the senator. "It's an outrage that they, who wouldn't
have dared whimper a month ago in their own country, should be allowed
to behave this way here!"
"It isn't!" said Ramsey, squarely in his face. There was a general
start, old Joy groaned, and Ramsey's eyes, though still in his, looked
frightened; yet there was in her tone and bearing something so pertinent
and worthy, even so womanly, that she had nearly every one on her side
in a moment and the two players audibly murmured approval.
The senator grew benign. "My fair young lady," he said, "if your father,
Gideon Hayle, were captain here he'd have those people off this boat in
short metre."
"He wouldn't!" said Ramsey. Her eyes flashed and widened. Then as they
darted round upon the actor her most tinkling laugh broke out, and she
caught his wife's arm and rocked her forehead on it, the laugh recurring
in light gusts between her words as they came singingly: "He wouldn't
... he wouldn't ... he wouldn't."
"There they go," said a voice, and down on the waters directly beneath
appeared the white yawl like a painted toy, but full of men. The
commodore was there and the mate. Beside the mate sat the young German
who had fought the twins.
"That's the one they call Otto," said Ramsey, though how she knew is to
be wondered; and somebody, to amplify, added:
"Otto Marburg. They're taking him along so the others will be quiet till
he comes back."
"Humph!" said Ramsey, arching her brows to old Joy and the Gilmores and
by her own glance directing theirs to the aftermost figure in the yawl.
It was Hugh. He was steering.
XIX
THIS WAY TO WOMANHOOD
Noon came with a beauty of sky as if it smiled back to the smiles of a
land innocent of pain, grief, or strife.
It found the _Votaress_ under full headway, with a physician aboard and
Bayou Sara one great reach and two great bends behind. In a stateroom of
her texas, by madame's grateful acceptance of the captain's offer, lay
Lucian, torn with pain but bravely meek, with Julian in close
attendance, Ramsey excluded, and the mother looking in often, though
very busy yet with the doctor on the lower deck.
In the middle of the forenoon, invited by the captain, the bishop had
held divine service in the ladies' cabin and, praying for his country,
found himself praying also, resoundingly and with tears, for the
"strange people" down under his bended knees, while out on the boiler
deck the disputation concerning them steadily warmed and spread, the
committee of seven feeling themselves for the moment baffled but by no
means beaten--baffled, for their casual brush with Ramsey had most
surprisingly, not to say unfairly, discredited their cause. "Gideon
Hayle's daughter" had become as universally known by sight as "John
Courteney's son," and all about among the male cabin passengers her
method of debate--"It won't! They don't! He wouldn't! We
shouldn't!"--with a mirth often provokingly unlike hers--was the fashion
and had won two or three small victories.
"The side that laughs, nowadays and hereabouts," agreed the two players,
"wins." But they said it aside from Ramsey, who, they had begun to fear,
would be sadly spoiled, the juveniles were so humbly looking up to her,
and so many grown-ups sought her to draw out her brief but prompt
utterances upon the situation and repeat them elsewhere to those who
liked their seats so much more than anything else. They tried to keep
her with them and off the absorbing theme and were not without success.
Just now the word had run all through the boat that the next turn would
bring her into the "Raccourci," or, as every one but the players called
it, "Raccourci Cut-off." Counting up-stream, it was the second of four
great shortenings of the river, which, in the brief century and a half
since the country had become a white man's possession, had reduced a
hundred and twenty miles of its wandering course to half as many within
a straight overland distance of thirty. Wonderful to Ramsey was the
story of it. The kindly Gilmore told it with a pictorial and personal
interest that made it seem as if he himself had planned and supervised
the whole work. One of the shortenings was Shreve's Cut-off, made only
twenty-one years before this birth year of the _Votaress_. Yonder it
lay, just veering into the remotest view, where Red River, over twelve
hundred miles from its source in the Staked Plains beyond the Rocky
Mountains, swept, two thousand feet wide, into the Mississippi without
broadening the "Father of Waters" a yard.
Yet why look there, so distantly, when here between, right here under
the boat's cut-water, was the Raccourci, barely four years old? The
_Votaress_ was in it, half through it, before either Ramsey or Mrs.
Gilmore could be fully informed, and now their attention was beyond even
their own command. For yonder ahead, miles away in Shreve's Cut-off,
riding the strong current under Turnbull's Island, came the _Regent_,
finest and speediest of Gideon Hayle's steamers.
So late in the season her passengers were few and she was not utterly
smothered in a cargo of cotton bales, yet her freight deck showed a
goodly brown mass of them, above which her snowy form gleamed against
the verdant background of the forested island, as dainty as a swan,
while her gliding stem raised on either side a silver ribbon of water
that arched itself almost to her gunwales.
"Each to her own starboard," answered the _Regent's_ mellow bell to the
bell of the _Votaress_. Her whistle whitened and trumpeted in salute,
and on jack-staff and verge-staff her rippling flags ran up and dipped,
twice, thrice, to the answering flags of the Courteney boat. Well
forward on her hurricane-deck her captain, whom many on the _Votaress_
pointed out by name, stood alone. Amid-ships her cabin-boys lined her
cook-house guards. Her negro crew swarmed round her capstan with their
chantey-man on its head and sent over the gliding waters the same
stalwart perversion of the wilderness hymn of "Gideon's Band" to which
the twins had danced the night before. Now the lone, high voice of the
leader sang:
"Fus' come de animals, two by two,
Fus' come de animals, two by two,
Fus' come de animals, two by two,
De elephantine and de kanguiroo,"
and now, while he held the key-note through the refrain's whole first
line, the chorus rolled up from an octave below:
"Do you belong to Gideon's Band?
Here's my heart an' here's my hand!
Do you belong to Gideon's Band?
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"
No song is so poor that it may not thrill a partisan devotion. Ramsey
stood on her toes. Down in his berth and in torture the shut-in Lucian
faintly heard, turned his gaze to his brother, whispered "the _Regent_!"
and listened for another verse. The boats were passing widely apart, and
when it came only memory made its foolish lines plain to his doting ear:
"Nex' come de hoss and den de flea,
Nex' come de hoss and den de flea,
Nex' come de hoss and den de flea,
De camomile and de bumblebee.
Do you belong to Gideon's Band?
. . . . . . . .
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"
On the last line the singers were half a mile downstream, in Raccourci
Cut-off, and Ramsey and the _Votaress_ were well started up the ten-mile
reach from Red River Landing to Fort Adams.
How swiftly and incessantly the scene changed. Down in a stateroom near
the boiler deck some beginner on the horn was dejectedly playing "A Life
on the Ocean Wave," but even with pestilence aboard and a brother
stricken with it what an exalted, exalting life was a life on this
mighty stream! Flat lands? Flat waters? It was the highest, widest
outlook into the world of nature and of man she had ever had.
Monotonous?--when one felt oneself a year older to-day than yesterday
and growing half a month's growth every hour? In yesterday's
childishness she had begun at Post Forty-six to keep count of all the
timber rafts and flatboats met, and here in this long stretch came three
more of the one and five of the other, with men hurrahing to her from
them--men as wild as the wilderness, yet with homes and families away
back up the great tributaries and their tributaries. And here were
mile-wide cotton fields, with the black people hoeing in them and
looking no bigger than flocks of birds feeding. And here came another
steamboat--and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly
frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told
to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and
plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall.
Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow
and cottonwood jungles of the creeping shores; but while the "labboard"
shore was still Louisiana the "stabboard" was now her own native
Mississippi.
Yes, these wild shores were States--States of the great Union, the
world's hope; Jackson's, Clay's, Webster's Union, which "must and shall
be preserved," "now and forever, one and inseparable." Somewhere between
these shores, moreover, and not behind but away on up-stream, probably,
Mr. Watson said, in Dead Man's Bend, was, once more, the _Antelope_. In
the long wait at Bayou Sara, where Hugh and the outlandish Otto--who
could speak French--had found the priest while the commodore and the
mate were getting the doctor, the _Antelope_ had reappeared, swept up,
and foamed by, and now was so far ahead that in hardly less than another
hundred and sixty miles could she be again overtaken. But to Ramsey,
even without the _Antelope_ or any or all of the sights and facts of
landscape and history, no moment could go stale while the tale of
Phyllis and the _Quakeress_ waited like funds in a bank, and while the
commodore, the captain, and Hugh, the pilots, the mate, the Gilmores,
the judge, general, bishop, squire, senator, Otto Marburg in his green
coat, and dozens and scores of others were all over the boat, each more
and more a story, a study, as hourly she grew older.
On the bench close behind her in the pilot-house a lady with needlework,
a gentleman with _De Bow's Review_ (the squire's sister and
brother-in-law), had begun to talk with the Gilmores and presently
mentioned the twins, speaking in such a tone of doom as to give Ramsey a
sudden panic.
"It's fine!" said the husband, praising Julian's devotion to his
stricken brother. "And they are fine. Their faults--which you've had
occasion to discover, sir--are spots on the sun; the faults, madam, of
all our young Southern gentlemen----"
"Would you say of all?" asked the actor's wife.
"No!" said the other lady, "no, not of all!" and her husband was glad to
stand corrected.
"No," he admitted, "but still of almost all; faults of which we may
almost say, sir, that we may almost be proud!"
"Oh, well," begged his wife, "please almost don't say it! They're the
faults of our 'peculiar institution' and I wish our 'peculiar
institution' were--" She sewed hard.
"In the deep bosom of the ocean buried," suggested her husband to the
players. "Why, honestly, so do I. But it's not, and can't be, and as
long as it can't be we----"
"Oh, well," said his wife, "don't let's begin on that."
Reckless of institutions Ramsey turned. "Is my brother worse?" she broke
in, but a white-jacket entered with the dinner-bell and spoke softly to
old Joy. "Yes," said Ramsey to him, "I'm Miss Hayle. What is it? Is my
brother worse?"
"Miss Hayle, Mr. Hugh Co'teney make his comp'ments----"
Ramsey laughed in relief.
"Yass'm, an' say' cap'm cayn' come to de table an' yo' ma she cayn't
come----"
"I know she can't. Is my brother----?"
"And de commodo' he at de gemp'men's table, an' so he, Mr. Hugh, he
'p'inted to de ladies' table, an' will you please fo' to set in de place
o' yo' ma?"
"Oh, rid-ic-ulous! Who? me? I?" The laugh grew plaintive.
"Yes, you; why not?" said the pilot at the wheel, with his eyes fixed
far up the river.
But Ramsey glanced at her short skirts and laughed to all by turns: "Oh,
it's just some ridiculous mistake!"
"No, miss, 'tain't no mistake. All de yetheh ladies incline de place."
Every one laughed. "Oh, he on'y off' it to one! But when she say fo' to
off' it to you den dey all say de same; yass'm, sawt o' in honoh o' yo'
ma."
"They're afraid that seat'll give 'em the cholera," said the pilot in
grim jest, still gazing up-stream, but the ladies cried out in denial
for all their sex.
"I accept," said Ramsey, with a downward pull at her draperies. "How's
my brother?"
"Thank y'ma'am," was the bowing waiter's only reply. He tripped down the
pilot-house steps and away.
"Your brother," said the squire's sister as they all followed, "isn't in
nearly so much pain, we hear."
Ramsey flashed: "Does that mean better--or worse?"
"Why--we--we can't always be sure."
"Ringading tingalingaty, ringadang ding!" sang the festive bell up and
down the deck to which they began to descend by a narrow stair, old Joy
at the rear. Madame Hayle, ascending by another with the Bayou Sara
priest, espied the nurse and beckoned her. The pilot, high above,
observed the three as they met, although his ear was bent to a
speaking-tube. Now he answered into it: "Yes, sir.... Yes, close above
the point--Point Breeze, yes, sir."
As he resumed his up-stream gaze he saw old Joy, still at the stair,
stand as if lost and then descend alone while madame and the priest
moved toward the sickroom. The helm went gently over and the _Votaress_
rounded the point, but the priest waited outside where madame had gone
in, and when the door reopened enough to let one out it was Julian who
grimly confronted him, holding a pen, half concealed.
"My brother declines to see you, sir."
A flash came from the eyes of the priest, but the youth repeated: "My
brother _declines_ to _see_ you, sir."
The visitor caught breath to speak, but the great bell pealed for
another landing and burial, and madame came out. She addressed him a few
words in French, and with an austere bow to Julian he humbly turned away
at her side.
XX
LADIES' TABLE
Hugh stood at the head of the midday dinner-table, waiting for a full
assembly of its guests. The Vicksburg merchant and his wife, the planter
from Milliken's Bend and his wife, also stood at their places.
The two ladies glanced about as if listlessly noting the cabin's lavish
arabesques and gilding, while each really studied and knew the other was
studying the captain's son. For this tale which we tell, they saw. It
was "a-happmin'" before their eyes and, in degree, to themselves. Hugh
and his father, the commodore and madame, the first mate, the twins,
Ramsey, and the committee of seven--who, we shall see, were not taking
discomfiture meekly--were scarlet threads in the story's swiftly weaving
fabric--cogent reasons, themselves, why these two ladies had helped vote
Ramsey to the seat next Hugh.
His face, Hugh's, was not easy reading. Certain shadows cast on it by
that part of his mind just then busiest were quite unintelligible.
Deciphered they would have meant a solemn joy for his broadening
accountability; an awesome anxiety and distressed eagerness to meet and
fill that accountability as fast as it broadened. He was just then
recalling one of Ramsey's queries of the evening before, when she had
seemed so much younger than now, and when, nevertheless, a germ of
fellowship had sprung up between them; that word of hers about "feeling
oneself widen out of oneself," etc. He did not at present feel himself
nearly so much as he felt things round about him growing and growing.
The _Votaress_ had grown, grown wonderfully, and the story happening,
the play being acted on her three decks at once, was neither story nor
play to him. Which fact was one of the few things the two gentle
students of his face made out to read. However, it quite rewarded them;
it went, itself, so well into the story.
And certainly, as even the Gilmores would have said, it is not when our
spiritual vision sees things at their completest values that _all_ the
world's a stage and its men and women _merely_ players. Nor is it at our
best that we discern our own story, as a story, while it happens. It is
a poor eye that sees itself. When Ramsey arrived at the table Hugh's
gaze was so big with the reality, not the romance, of things on all the
three decks that she had to laugh a little to keep her balance.
Yet her question was an earnest and eager one: "Is my brother better, or
is he worse?"
The toll of the bell on the deck above--to land, as we have said, near
Point Breeze--came like a spectral reply, invoking, as it did, new
trouble unknown to her though just beneath her feet.
"He's better not to be worse," said Hugh, and when she frowned
whimsically he explained: "His sickness is not quite the same as that on
the lower deck."
"How is it different?" she asked, unconsciously keeping the whole
company of the ladies' table on their feet. At the gentlemen's table,
just forward of them and tapering slenderly away in the long cabin's
white-and-gilt perspective, that grosser majority who had come only to
feed were mutely and with stooped shoulders feeding like pigeons from a
trough, and far down at its end the white-haired commodore had taken his
seat, with senator, judge, squire, general, and the seventeen-year-old
Hayle boy nearest him on his right and left. The bishop was not there.
He was at the ladies' table, paired with the judge's sister"--a leaden
load even for a bishop.
"Your brother's illness is so much slower," Hugh said.
"So, then--he--he had it when he came aboard?"
"He had it when he came aboard," assented Hugh, moving for the group to
be seated. "But----"
"Wait," said Ramsey. "Mustn't we all be as gay and happy as we can?" And
when every one but the judge's sister playfully said yes she turned to
the Vicksburg merchant: "Then will you change places with Mr. Gilmore?"
Faith, he would! It paired him with the actor's wife, and his wife with
the actor. Gayety began forthwith. "And will you change--with--with
you?" Ramsey asked the planter of Milliken's Bend and the squire's
brother-in-law.
Indeed they would. The change not only paired each with the other's wife
but brought the brother-in-law next to Ramsey. Underfoot meantime the
engine bells jingled, overhead the scape-pipes roared, and in every part
the boat quivered as her great wheels churned or was strangely quiet as
they paused for another signal. So all sat down, well aware what the
landing was for, and began blithely to converse and be waited on, as if
the world were being run primarily for their innocent delight.
What a Sabbath feast was there spread for a bishop to say grace upon,
and what travellers' hunger to match it. Among Hugh and Ramsey's dozen,
if no further, how the conversation rippled, radiated, and out-tinkled
and out-twinkled the fine tablewares. One almost forgot his wine or that
the boat and her wheels had stopped; might have quite forgotten had not
certain sounds, starting in full volume from the lower deck but arriving
under the cabin floor faint and wasted--emaciated, as you might
say--stolen up and in. A diligent loquacity contrived to ignore the most
of them. The soft chanting of the priest as he walked down the
landing-stage and out upon the damp brown sands, followed by the bearers
of the new pine box and by a short procession of bowed mourners,
perished unheard at the table; but many noises more penetrative were
also much more discomfiting, and it was fortunate that the talk of the
bishop and others could charm most of them away even from the judge's
nervous sister, who, nevertheless, amid such remote themes as Jenny
Lind, Nebraska, coming political conventions, and the new speed record
of the big _Eclipse_ in the fourteen hundred and forty miles from New
Orleans, could not help a light start now and then. It was good, to Hugh
and to Ramsey, to see how the actor, Gilmore, despite this upward
seepage of ghostly cries--faint notes of horror, anguish, and
despair--attenuated groans and wailings of bodily agony--held the eyes
of the ladies nearest him with tales of travel and the theatre, and
mention of the great cut-off of 1699, which they would soon pass and
must notice. But quite as good was it to the wives of Vicksburg and
Milliken's Bend to observe with what fluency Hugh, commonly so quiet,
discoursed to Mrs. Gilmore and to Ramsey on other river features near at
hand: Dead Man's Bend, Ellis Cliffs, Natchez Island, the crossing above
it, Saint Catherine's Creek, and Natchez itself.
"Where I was born!" said Ramsey. "Largest town in Mississippi and the
most stuck-up."
The other Mississippians laughed delightedly.
"We stop there," said Hugh, "to put off freight."
"Mr. Courteney," asked Ramsey, "what _is_ a 'crossing'?"
There were new lower-deck noises to drown and Hugh welcomed the slender
theme. "The channel of a great river in flat lands," he said, "is a
river within a river. It frets against its walls of slack water----"
"I see!--as the whole river does against its banks!"
"Yes. Wherever the shore bends, the current, when strong, keeps straight
on across the slack water till it hits the bend. Then it swerves just
enough to rush by, and miles below hits the other shore, swerves again,
and crosses in another long slant down there."
"Except where it breaks through and makes a cut-off!"
"But a cut-off is an event. This goes on all the time, in almost every
reach; so that pilots, whether running down-stream in the current or
up-stream in the slack water, cross the river about as often as the
current does."
"Hence the term!" laughed Ramsey.
"I think so. You might ask Mr. Watson."
"No, I'll ask him what a reach is--and a towhead--and a pirooter--oh,
don't you love this river?"
While the talk thus flowed, what delicacies--pastries, ices, fruits--had
come in and served their ends! But also against what sounds from the
underworld had each utterance still to make headway: commands and
threats and cries of defiance and rage, faint but intense, and which all
at once ceased at the crack of a shot! The judge's sister let out a soft
note of affright and looked here and there for explanation. In vain. The
Vicksburg merchant lightly spoke across the table:
"Shooting alligators, bishop?"
"Oh!" broke in the judge's sister, aggrieved, "that was for no
alligator." She appealed to a white-jacket bringing coffee: "Was that
for an alligator?"
"I dunno'm. Mowt be a deer. Mowt be a b'ar."
His bashful smirk implied it might be none of the three. Ramsey looked
at Hugh and Hugh said quietly to a boy at his back:
"Go, see what it is."
XXI
RAMSEY AND THE BISHOP
"High water like this," casually said the planter, next to Ramsey,
"drives the big game out o' the swamps, where they use, and makes 'em
foolish."
"Yes," said the bishop. "You know, Dick"--for he and the planter were
old acquaintances--"not far from here, those long stretches of river a
good mile wide, and how between them there are two or three short pieces
where the shores are barely a quarter of a mile apart?"
"Yes," replied Dick and others.
"Well, last week, on my down trip, as we rounded a point in one of those
narrow places, there, right out in mid-river, was a big buck, swimming
across. Two swampers had spied him and were hot after him in a skiff."
"Oh," cried Ramsey, "I hope he got away!"
"Why, _I_ partly hoped he would," laughed the bishop, "and partly I
hoped they'd get him."
"Characteristic," she heard the planter say to himself.
"And sure enough," the tale went on, "just as his forefeet hit the
bank--" But there Hugh's messenger reappeared, and as Hugh listened to
his murmured report the deer's historian avoided oblivion only by
asking:
"Well, Mr. Courteney, after all, what was it?"
"Tell the bishop," said Hugh to the boy.
"'T'uz a man, suh," the servant announced, and when the ladies exclaimed
he amended, "leas'wise a deckhan', suh."
"Thank Heaven!" thought several, not because it was a man but because
the bells jingled again and the moving boat resumed her own blessed
sounds. But the bishop was angry--too angry for table talk. He had his
suspicions.
"Did deckhands make all that row?"
"Oh, no, suh; not in de beginnin', suh."
"Wasn't there trouble with the deck passengers?"
"Yassuh, at fus'; at fus', yassuh; wid dem and dey young leadeh. Y'see,
dey be'n so long aboa'd ship dey plumb stahve fo' gyahden-sass an'
'count o' de sickness de docto' won't 'low 'em on'y some sawts. But back
yondeh on sho' dey's some wile mulbe'y trees hangin' low wid green
mulbe'ys, an' comin' away f'om de grave dey make a break fo' 'em. But de
mate he head' 'em off. An' whilse de leadeh he a-jawin' at de mate on
sho', an' likewise at de clerk on de b'ileh deck an' at the cap'm on de
roof----"
"In a foreign tongue," prompted the bishop, to whom that seemed the
kernel of the offense.
"Yassuh, I reckon so; in a fond tongue; yassuh."
"About his sick not having proper food?" asked Ramsey.
"Yass'm--no'm--yass'm! An' whilse he a-jawin', some o' de crew think dey
see a chance fo' to slip into de bresh an' leave de boat. An' when de
mate whip' out his 'evolveh on 'em, an' one draw a knife on him, an' he
make a dash fo' dat one, he--dat deckhan'--run aboa'd so fas' dat he
ain't see whah he gwine tell it's too la-ate."
The bishop tightened his lips at Hugh and peered at the cabin-boy: "How
was it too late?"
"De deckhan' he run ove'boa'd, suh."
The ladies flinched, the men frowned. "But," said the querist, "meantime
the mate had fired, hmm? Did he--hit?"
"Dey don't know, suh. De deckhan' he neveh riz."
"Awful!" The bishop and Hugh looked steadily at each other. "So that
also we owe to our aliens!"
"Yes," said Hugh.
"We don't," said Ramsey softly, yet heard by all.
Across the board Mrs. Gilmore said "Oh!" but in the next breath all but
the judge's sister laughed, the bishop, as Hugh and he began to rise,
laughing most.
"Wait," said Ramsey, laying a hand out to each and addressing Hugh. "How
are those sick downstairs going to get the right food?"
The cabin-boy almost broke in but caught himself.
"Say it," said Hugh.
"Why, dem what already sick dey a-gitt'n' it. Yass'm, dey gitt'n' de
boat's best. Madam Hayle and de cap'm dey done see to dat f'om de staht.
H-it's de well uns what needs he'p."
"But," said Ramsey, still to Hugh, "for sick or well--the right
food--who pays for it?"
"The boat."
"Who pays the boat?" she asked, and suddenly, blushing, saw her
situation. Except the bishop and the judge's sister, who were conversing
in undertone--except them and Hugh--the whole company, actually with
here and there an elbow on the board, had turned to her in such bright
expectancy as to give her a shock of encounter. But mirth upheld her,
and leaning in over the table she shifted her question to the smiling
bishop: "Who pays the boat?"
"The boat? Why--ha, ha!--that's the boat's lookout."
"It isn't," she laughed, but laughed so daintily and in a gayety so
modestly self-justified that the group approved and the Vicksburg man
asked her:
"Who ought to pay the boat?"
"We!" she cried. "All of us! It's in the Bible that we ought!" She
looked again to the bishop. "Ain't it?"
"Why, I don't recall any mention of this matter there."
"Nor of strangers?" she asked, "nor of sick folks?" and her demure
mirth, not flung at him or at any one, but quite to itself and for
itself, came again.
"Ah, that's another affair!" he rejoined. He felt her and Hugh, with
half the rest, saying to themselves, "It is not!" but was all the more
moved to continue: "My fair daughter, you prepare the way of the Lord.
Brethren and sisters, I want you to gather with me here as soon as
those yonder are through"--a backhanded toss indicated the children's
table, whose feasters showed no sign that they would ever be through
at all. "We must--every believer--and whosoever will--on this
passenger-deck--spend an hour--more if the spirit leads--in prayer
for this pestilence to be stayed." He fastened his gaze on Hugh; no
senator was present to overtop him now, and certainly this colt of John
Courteney's should not. Yet the largeness with which the colt's eyes
stared through and beyond him was significant to all.
"And we must do more!" he persisted.
"We shall," said Hugh.
"We must!" said the bishop; "we must beseech God for a spiritual
outpouring. We have on this boat the stranger of our own land and the
sick of our own tongue: the stranger to grace and the sick in soul, who
may be eternally lost before this boat has finished her trip; and as
much as the soul's worth outweighs the body's is it our first duty to
help them get religion!"
With her curls lowered nearly to the table Ramsey--ah, me!--laughed. Her
notes were as light as a perfume, but to the bishop all perfumes were
heavy. He turned to the actor. "Isn't that so, brother?"
"Oh, bishop, you know a lot better than I do."
"He doesn't," tinkled Ramsey, and, as the bishop swung back to her--"Do
you?" she ingratiatingly challenged him. "No, you don't! You know you
don't!"
The company would have laughed with her if only to save their face, and
when he made a very bright retort they laughed the heartier. They rose
with Hugh. Ramsey said she wished she knew again how her brother was,
and Hugh sent his servant to inquire. As all loitered aft, the bishop
held them together a moment more.
"You don't object to such a meeting?" he asked Hugh.
"Not if you don't alarm or distress any one. The doctor forbids that."
While Hugh so replied, the circle was joined by the commodore. The
bishop flared:
"Doctors always forbid! How can we exhort sinners without alarming or
distressing them?"
Hugh's answer was overprompt: "I don't know, sir."
But Ramsey, drawing the Gilmores with her, came between. "Just a bit
ago," she said to the bishop, "didn't you say yes, we must all be as gay
and happy as we can?"
"I did, verily. But surely that shouldn't prevent this."
"Oh, surely not!" exclaimed both the players.
"It needn't," said Ramsey. "But if we five"--Gilmores, Courteneys, and
herself--"and some others--help you with your meeting to-day will you
help us with ours to-morrow?"
"If I can, assuredly! But how will you help me to-day, my young sister?"
On three fingers the young sister--so lately his daughter--counted:
"First, we'll get the people to come; we'll tell them you're not going
to alarm or distress anybody. Second, if you forget and begin to do it
we'll remind you! And, third, we'll take up the collection!"
The senator laughed so much above the rest that the bishop colored as he
said: "I never exhort and collect at the same time."
"Oh-h!" sighed Ramsey. "We must collect, you know, to pay our share,
each of us, for the care of the sick. And we can't collect to-morrow;
we'll all be so busy getting up our own meeting." Her eyes wandered to
the senator, so fervently was he urging some matter upon the commodore.
"What," asked the bishop, turning to the players, "is to-morrow's
meeting to be for?"
"Why," brightly said the wife, "just to keep every one as gay and happy
as we can." But Ramsey added: "And to raise money for the not-sick
emigrants, to get them the right food."
"Ho, ho! Another collection!"
"No, only admission fees. Six bits for the play, four bits for the
dance."
Half offended, half amused, the bishop swelled. "And you ask me"--he
laughed, but she had turned away and he reverted to the players--"on top
of our prayers for God's mercy upon our bodies and souls you ask me to
help get up a play and a dance!"
Eagerly, amid a general merriment that was not quite merry, the Gilmores
answered with amused disclaimers for themselves and copious excuses for
him. Ramsey's eyes, like Hugh's, were on the commodore and the senator,
who were starting off together. The commodore's nod called Hugh and he
moved to overtake them. The boy whom Hugh had sent to the texas,
returning, sought to intercept him, but Hugh passed on and the messenger
found Ramsey. She had just been rejoined by her old nurse, and to both
servants her questions were prompt and swift. Their low replies plainly
disturbed her, and she wheeled to the bishop where he still stood
addressing the Gilmores and a dozen others in a manner loftily
defensive. He forestalled her speech with good-natured haste. "Now, if
our gay and happy young sister will ask me to do something befitting a
minister of the gospel," he began----
"Amen to dat!" said old Joy, and as Ramsey's eyes showed tears the
speaker paused.
"All right," she quietly said. "Come to my sick brother. Won't you,
please?"
"Why--why, yes, I--I will. Cer-certainly I will. Yet--really--if I'm
forbidden to alarm him"--his smile could not hide his sense of mortal
risk.
"Oh, he's already alarmed!"
"He's turrified!" softly said old Joy.
"Why, then, the moment we're through our meeting----"
"Don't begin it!" said Ramsey. "It can wait heaps better than he can.
He's waiting now and begging for you. Come! You needn't be afraid; I'll
go with you!" She laughed.
"No!" cried Joy. "Lawd, Mahs' Bishop, she mus'n't!"
"She need not," said the bishop. "But for me to go now, before I--why, I
couldn't come back and mingle----"
"Oh, come!" The girl drew him by the sleeve. But the Gilmores held her
back and he went on alone, his face betraying a definite presentiment as
he glanced round in response to a clapping of hands.
"Oh, thank you!" cried Ramsey. "Gawd bless you!" droned Joy. "We'll run
your meeting while you're gone!" called Ramsey. "And we'll pray for you!
Won't we?" she asked the players, and they and others answered: "Yes."
XXII
BASILE AND WHAT HE SAW
For these twenty hours of constant activity one young passenger, save
only when asleep in his berth, had contemplated the _Votaress_ and her
swarming managers and voyagers with a regard different from any we have
yet taken into account. The Gilmores, softly to each other, termed him
"a type." To the face of nature he seemed wholly insensible. As the
gliding boat incessantly bore him onward between river and sky, shore
and shore, he appeared never to be aware whether the forests were gray
or green, the heavens blue or gray, the waters tawny or blue. No
loveliness of land or flood could deflect his undivided interest in
whatever human converse he happened to be nearest as he drifted about
decks in a listless unrest that kept him singled out at every pause and
turn. His very fair intelligence was so indolently unaspiring, so
intolerant of harness, as we may say, and so contentedly attuned to the
general mind, mind of the multitude, that the idlest utterance falling
on his ear from any merest unit of the common crowd was more to him than
all the depths or heights of truth, order, or beauty that learning,
training, or the least bit of consecutive reasoning could reveal.
Earlier he had not lacked books or tutelage, but no one ever had been
able to teach him what they were for. This was Basile Hayle, the
overdressed young brother of the twins. Now that his seventeen years had
ripened in him the conviction that he was entitled, as the phrase is,
"to all the rights of a man and all the privileges of a boy," he seemed
yet to have acquired no sense of value for any fact or thought beyond
the pointblank range of the five senses. He could not have read ten
pages of a serious book and would have blushed to be found trying to do
it.
He was not greatly to blame. That way of life was much the fashion all
about him, and he was by every impulse fashionable. Moreover, as he
measured success by the crowd's measure, it was the way of life oftenest
successful, the way of his father. He did not see the difference between
the father's toiling up that way and his idling down it. So, at any
rate, agreed the indulgent Gilmores, reading him quite through in a few
glances, while all about the boat those who thought they knew best
pronounced him more like Gideon Hayle in his regard for "folks just as
folks" than were either the twins or the sister, from all three of whom
his impulses kept him amiably aloof.
Of the three brothers certainly he had soon become the most widely
acceptable among not only the young people of the passenger guards but
also the male commonalty of the boiler deck. In a state of society which
he, as "a type," reflected they saw themselves; saw their own spiritual
image; their unqualified straightforwardness, their transparent
simplicity of mind and heart, their fearlessness, their complacent
rusticity, their childish notions of the uses of wealth, their personal
modesty and communal vanity, their happy oblivion to world standards,
their extravagance of speech, their political bigotry, their magisterial
down-rightness, their inflammability, and their fine self-reliance. They
saw these traits, we say, reflected in him as in a flattering
hand-glass, perceived the blemishes rather plainer than the charms, and
liked them better.
So it was that our friend the senator had early discovered Basile and
later had found a capital use for him. In him he saw a most timely
opportunity, one not afforded by anybody besides. He showed the youth
marked attentions, affirming in him all the men's rights and boys'
privileges he had ever thought of, got him assigned to his sick
brother's place at table, presented him to the committee of seven,
called him Gideon by mistake, and at the right moment made him an
instrument, not to say tool, by diverting his idle course through the
crowd into a highly successful soliciting of signatures to the
committee's, or let us say his own, the senator's, petition.
Unlucky task! An exceptional feature of the _Votaress_ was that her
passenger guards ran aft in full width all round her under the stern
windows of the ladies' cabin. Beneath, the lower deck ended in a fantail
of unusual overhang, around whose edge curved the stout bars of the
"bull-ring," to fence it off from the billowing white surge that writhed
after the rudder blade and the trailing yawl, so close below. Among the
petition's subscribers were several pretty girls of an age at which
their only important business was beauty and levity and who gave small
heed to the document's purport, readily assuming that nothing _they_
were asked to sign needed to be taken seriously. There was much laughter
over the performance. They turned it into a "Signing of the
Declaration," patterned after the old steel engraving. One of them, as
the scroll lay open on the rail under her pen hand, unwittingly set foot
in a scrubbing bucket kept there with a line attached for bailing water
from the river, and was so unnerved by the fun of it that all at once
the scroll flirted back into scroll form and fell through the whirling
air that eddied behind the boat. Yet it had the luck to drop upon the
deck below, and there presently an immigrant stood mutely gazing up with
it in his lifted hand. Otto Marburg came and stood looking up beside
him.
Dropping the bucket's line through the balusters under the rail, Basile
stepped over the guards and proceeded, while the girls acted out their
girlish distresses, to let himself down. The foolish exploit was
sufficiently unsafe and painful to be its own reward, the rough line
cutting his hands and forcing him, as soon as he dared, to drop into the
arms of the two men. With them and others he passed from sight between
the great wheels but soon was with the pretty signers again, coming up
alone by way of the cook-house and pantry. His hands showed ugly red
scars as he brushed away a few flies that liked his perfumery and had
stubbornly followed him from below.
But the fun was over. It was not his galled palms but his pallid face
that struck the young company with a frank dismay. His whole bearing was
transformed and betrayed him smitten with emotions for which he found no
speech. Had it made him ill, they asked, going down by that dreadful
rope? No, he was not ill at all. But when they vacantly proposed to
resume the signing he exclaimed almost with vehemence that he had names
enough, and left them, to return the petition to the senator.
This was an incident of the forenoon. As he delivered the paper the
senator spoke a pleased word and then gazed on him in surprise. "Why,
what's the matter? Sick?"
"No, I'm not sick."
"But, look here, where--where's your own signature?"
"You can't have it."
"Oh, you want to sign, don't you?"
"No." A sudden anguish filled the boy's face. "Not for all the gold in
California. God A'mighty, sir, I've been down there and seen those
people!"
"Oh! my! dear! fellow! If we let mere sights and sounds--of things that
can't be helped--upset us--There's the dinner-bell--come, have a
cocktail with me--a Rofignac!... Ah! general--judge--wet your whistle
with us?"
The general and the judge, accepting, looked sharply at Basile.
"Why--what's the matter? Sick?"
But he went with them to the bar and to the board.
XXIII
A STATE OF AFFAIRS
Watson was in the pilot-house, though not at the wheel.
So early of a Sabbath afternoon, in the middle of his partner's watch,
he might well have been in his texas stateroom asleep, but to a
Mississippi River pilot Sunday afternoon, or any afternoon, or forenoon,
or midnight, or dusk or dawn, on watch or off, the one thing in this
world was the river. Else what sort of a pilot would he be, when the
whole lore of its thousands of miles of navigation was without chart,
light, or beacon, a thing kept only in pilots' memories, a lamp in a
temple?
Glancing down forward of the bell, he was reminded of a certain young
lady the sight of whom on the previous evening just after his brush with
Hayle's twins, standing there before Hugh Courteney with her arms
akimbo, had led him to say: "If that's to be the game I'm in it." He
wished she were there now, or up here again in the pilot-house asking
her countless questions about this endlessly interesting world's
highway. He would be answering that the mouth of Red River was now
twenty miles behind, the mouth of Buffalo Bayou ten and of Homochitto
River four; that right here they were in the great cut-off of a hundred
and fifty-odd years before. He would say they were passing up the west
shore because the current was over yonder on the east side, Palmetto
Point, and that behind there, inland, lay the great loop of still water
which had once been part of the river. He would explain that now the
slender Homochitto ran through that still water lengthwise, for miles,
until, within forty rods of the Mississippi, it recoiled again to launch
in at last farther down, opposite Black Hawk Point, still in sight
astern. And he would tell how, over here on this west side, Red River
was yet only four miles away and actually sent Grand Cut-off Bayou
across into the Mississippi, but likewise swerved away southward through
seven leagues more of wet forest before it finally surrendered to the
mightier stream. All this would he tell, without weariness, to one who
loved his great river.
Yet really he was in the pilot-house at this time not chiefly for the
river, nor the girl, nor the _Votaress_, though the _Votaress_ was new,
with kinks of character quite her own and important to be learned. He
was there because the stateroom given Hayle's twins in the texas was
next to his, and they, rarely in their life having restricted themselves
to tones of privacy and being now especially in a state of storm and
stress, had made sleep impossible even to a pilot off watch after a
midday Sunday dinner. Lounging in his berth, he had overheard things
which ought to be told to one Courteney or another early, though, of
course, casually.
Meantime he enjoyed not telling his partner, at whose back he quietly
chatted while the partner stood with hands and foot on the wheel and
with eyes well up the river, holding the jack-staff close to his "mark"
far ahead in the next bend.
"I couldn't stay," drawled Watson. "Noth'n' 'twixt the sick one an' me
but a half-inch bulkhead."
"Cholery can't scratch through a half-inch bulkhead," said the partner.
"Sounds kin. Funny what little bits o' ones kin. An' the sawt o' keen,
soft way he hollas an' cusses through his sot teeth an' whines an' yaps
into his piller--why, he's suffered enough by now to be dead five times
over."
"That sufferin', that ain't the peggin'-out stage."
"No, I know that, an' I don't misdoubt but what he's a-goin' to git
well."
"Hmm!--sorry fo' that. What's goin' to kyore him?"
"His simon-pyo' cussedness! He's so chuck full of it--looks like it's
a-p'isonin' the p'ison o' the cholery."
"Pity!" said the partner.... "Humph! _Now_ what's up?"
To see what was up, Watson rose and looked down. On the roof below,
evidently having come there for privacy, were the commodore, the
senator, and Hugh. Watson loitered from the pilot-house and disappeared.
Down on the roof the commodore and the senator conversed across Hugh's
front. The statesman, with heavy "dear sirs" and heavier smiles, was
buttonholing the elder Courteney, who at every least pause affably
endeavored to refer him to Hugh. The grandson's turn to speak seemed not
to have arrived. The senator was trying to keep it from arriving and
Hugh was glum. Hence it may be doubted if the senator's cigar was really
cocked as high, or that his silk hat was as dingy, his very good teeth
as yellow, his cheeks as hard, or his forehead as knotty as they
appeared to Hugh, or that his tone of superiority, so overbearing last
night, so ingratiating to-day, was any worse for the change. Hugh was
biassed--felt bias and anger as an encumbering and untimely weight. In
self-depreciating contrast he recalled a cer
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