XLVII

XLVIIINSOMNIA

Down in the cabin, in one of its best staterooms, where all were choice, the senator wooed slumber.In vain. Sounds were no obstacle. They abounded but they were normal. Except—"Peck-peck-peck" and so on, which the steady pulse of normal sounds practically obliterated. The peck-pecking was not for him.An unwelcome odor may keep one awake, but the senator's berth was fragrant of fresh mattresses and new linen, the wash-stand of jasmine soap, and the room at large of its immaculate zinc-white walls and doors and their gilt trimmings. Nor could the cause be his supper of beefsteak and onions, black coffee, hot rolls, and bananas, for every one about him had had those, and every one about him was sound asleep. It could not be for lack of the bath; he had already slept well without it too many nights hand-running. Nor could it be a want of special nightclothes; he had won his election over a nightshirt aristocrat, as being not too pampered to sleep, like the sons of toil, in the shirt he had worn all day and would wear again to-morrow. Nor yet was it nicotine or alcohol, the putting of which into him was like feeding cottonwood to Hayle's oldHuntress. Such, at least, was his private conviction. Oh, he knew the cause! He believed he could drop into sleep as this boat's sounding-lead could drop to the river's bottom, if for one minute he could get his mind off that singularly old, contemptibly young poker-face.Recalling that face and the grandfather's as he had confronted them together earlier in the journey, they were a double reminder of the Franklinian maxim—he kept a store of such things for stump use—that an old young man makes a young old man. But maxims didn't bring sleep; he turned the pillow and damned the maxim and the men, with Benjamin Franklin to boot.It tossed him from his right side to his left, to think of his own part in this two days' episode, and of the flocks of passengers stepping ashore at various landings who, as sure as—hmm!—would at every step drop that story into the public ear as corn is dropped into the furrow. It tossed him back again, to think how his adversaries in the political game, where cunning was always trumps, would light down on that story like crows behind the plough. He mixed his metaphors by habit; the people loved them mixed. Another maxim, his own invention, was, Take care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself. The —— it will! You've got to takeat leastas much care of reputation. But here both were concerned. He could not, for the sake either of his characterorhis reputation, let himself be made a fool of by any one, however small, anywhere. He had got to recover a personal importance solemnly pilfered from him by a half-grown Shanghai still in his pin-feathers. Against Hayle's girl he was excusably helpless, but him he had got to get the upper hand of and get it quick. Memphis in the morning! More passengers to be dropped there and the whole town's attention to be attracted by the burial of the bishop. Good Lord! That "verbatim report for the newspapers"! And of all papers the Memphis papers!Avalanche—Appeal—it was all one, he happening to be at the moment equally at odds with both. It, the "report," would not take a defensive attitude. Poker-face was too sharp for that. It would take the offensive from the start and it would take the start. Gentlemen of the jury, in a war of words there's just one word better than the last, and that's the first! And moreover! the brief "report's" main theme would not be he, the senator, nor his vanished committee of seven. No, sir-ee, it would be the cholera, and he would be dished up in a purely casual way; as the French say "on, pass on."He rubbed his head and sat up. There was a chance that he might find Hugh awake and on duty. If so his cast-iron lordship might yet be browbeaten, or wheedled, into inaction. Or if sleeping he might yet be circumvented. Was he worth circumventing? How absurdly troubles magnify on a waking pillow. Despise your enemy and sleep! Well—hardly. Lethimdo that, especially whenyou can't.He threw off the light cover, rose, and dressed. He began to see a way to win. He would countermine. He would raise a counter-issue—"Harriet." Loitering by the twins' door he listened and rightly judged they were asleep, Lucian being so feeble and Julian so full. The office was open but empty. Its clock read two. The card-tables were vacant. The bar was closed. Out on the dim boiler deck he found only the two who had fleeced Basile. They sat at the very front, elbow to elbow, with their feet up on the rail. Their quiet talk ceased as he came near and stood looking out over the gliding bow and the waters beyond, which were out of their banks and stretched everywhere off into the night, a veritable deluge."A good forty miles wide, no doubt," he remarked to the pair, and they assured him he was right."What piece of river is this?" he inquired, and was told that they were in the long, winding, desolate sixty-mile stretch between White River and Horseshoe Bend; that they had just put Islands Sixty-two and Sixty-three astern and would be more than two hours yet in reaching Helena."Arkansas your State?" he asked. "Helena your town?""No," they said, they were of the "hoop-pole State," meaning Indiana. He knew better but changed the subject. "The Ohio," he remarked, "must be up on her hind legs.""Yes, everything was up: the Saint Francis, the Tennessee, Cumberland, Illinois, Wabash, Kentucky, Miami, Scioto—" The pair did not talk like men narrowly of the hoop-pole commonwealth. Modestly speaking on, they seemed to know the whole great valley quite by heart.So the senator, to show how quite by heart he knew this whole little world, said affably: "The pan-fish ain't biting so very lively this trip."The reply was as flawless for candor as though they had the same hope to use him which he had to use them. Said one:"No, we ain't paying expenses."And his mate: "We've caught a few little flappers.""Captain's son make it hard to do business?""Oh, he—we've all got our prejudices, you know.""Yes, you ought to have some against him by now.""Maybe so. You've got yourn, senator, we've noticed.""I? No! I admire him. The way he runs this cabin——""Makes her keep up with the boat," they admitted."I never saw his like," laughed the statesman."Wouldn't want to, would you?""N-no, he makes big mistakes. But—he's got a future!""So mind his heels," said one of the pair. They were enjoying their politician. He saw that by their gravity. In their world men looked gravest when amused, and saved their smiles for emergencies. While he offered, and they accepted, cigars he spoke absently:"The young gentleman's making a mistake right now that he ought to be saved from.""Another?" they dryly asked as they used his cigar for a light. So far had he fallen in the general esteem.He chose not to hear. "I wish," he insisted, "we could save him from it.""Why, yes!—wish you could. But 'we' ain't us. We sporting men, we're mighty bashful, you know.""Naturally," admitted the senator."Yes, glass, with care. But there's another mistake maker we wish you wished you could save. We ev'm might help.""Aha!" thought the senator. He was right, after all. He had felt confident that these men, treated by Hugh as they had been, would privately "have it in for him"; that they would be glad of any safe chance to "get away with him"—not so utterly as to imperil their necks, yet not too lightly for their spiritual comfort the rest of their days—and that they saw their chance just where he saw his."Ye-es?" He mused. They let him muse. The exhorter, he reflected, having picked up the trail and opened the cry—trail which the headlong twins had so witlessly overrun—these older dogs were on it hot; trail of the Gilmores and "Harriet." Somewhere on that trail the captain's son would show up, and when the game should be treed they would be able, in the general mix-up, to "go and see Hugh" and "cook his goose."The musing ceased. "You mean the actor?"The pair warmed up. "Yes, sir-ee, him.Thatfellow's making a mistake we might help you to handle. God! sir, he's a nigger-stealer. His wife has got a stolen nigger wench with her now. Had her these ten years. Savehim. Savethem.""Our friend John the Baptist suggests that," began the senator."Adzac'ly!" was the facetious affirmation. "Smelt 'em out at the show. That's how come the mate has locked him up."The senator stiffened. "Oh, you must be mistaken!""Want to bet? Pull out. Go you a thousand they've jugged him and them two Arkansas killers. Yes, sir, to stay jugged till they leave us, at Helena.""Who!—have done that?""Same as you're thinking; they; them; him; that believes he's bossing the boat—which maybe he is.""Where is he?""Up on the roof, with a select few, both sexes.""Gentlemen, he must let them go at once!""Senator, not with money, but just on your word, you sort o' bail 'em out. If they cut up, nobody'll blame you.""I'll do it! We don't want an owner of the finest boat on Southern waters to have any part inthat sortof mistake, whatever his youth.""Youth!" (Profanity.) "That boy's forty year' old. Oh, he's all right; if he thinks he'd ought to protect every galoot on his boat, why, maybe he'd ought. What you know is that that white nigger'sgotto be took away from them two barnstormers instanter and restored back to her own Hayle folks. That's a mistake you ain't never got to ask nobody's leaves to save nobody from.""You don't mean to-night?" Capital disguise for eagerness—the cigar. The senator puffed. The pair puffed."We mean now; when the right men can be woke up and the others—and the ladies—sleep on. Now, straightaway, while the shouter's still aboard—and the two shooters. If we wa'n't sporting men we'd like to sit into that game ourselves. Maybe we can if it's kept—dignified.""Even if there's resistance?""Who'll resist? The boat's people? Only thing they dassen't resist. Couldn't never run another trip on this river. Resist! Couldn't ever resist, any time; but now? Look at their fix. Sweet time to set everybody a-kicking like steers. Bishop dead, chief Dutch woman ditto, that nice young Hayle boy that they took away from us when he wanted to stay like a man, ditto——""Oh, not dead? My God! I hadn't heard that.""No, it ain't been properly advertised. But Hamlet knows it—I mean your actor. The way him and his wife—or lady—are buzzing around, you'd think they was the undertakers. Maybe they are.Hewon't resist. He knows how well resistance would suit you—oh, not yourself, no more'n us, but—the crowd; men like them three that's locked up and must be turned loose first thing. He knows if he lifts a finger, or so much as gives anybody any of his lip—and maybe anyhow—he'll be took ashore and lost in the woods, first time we stop to bury some more Dutch; say daybreak.""Ah, but we mustn't let that happen, either.""Oh, no! we mustn't let that happen, either.""Well"—the senator put on a bustling frown—"I'll see Hugh. I wish—I wonder if that Californian has——""Put up his shutters? No, he's on the roof. Why?""He might help wake up the right men, as you say."One of the pair, without rising, tapped the senator caressingly. "You—let—California—sweat. Trust in Providence. The right men'll get woke up somehow, beginning with the general. That right?... All gay, but don't you take no California in yourn to-night.""No? Very well. But—I wonder if you gentlemen really recognize the seriousness of this affair.""Look a-here, senator, you go up-stairs and save Mr. Innocence from running his boat into this mistake." The sleek pair rose, evidently to begin their part.The senator rummaged his mind for a word that would give him creditable exit but had to hurry off without it. Turning, the two exchanged a calm gaze and one luxurious puff, which meant that the "old sucker's" use of them would suit them exactly. They rummaged for no words; had no more need for words than two leopards.Before falling to work they glanced out over the flood. This was Horseshoe Cut-off. Kangaroo Point was just astern in the west. Yonder ahead, under the old moon, came Friar's Point. In these hundred miles between Napoleon and Helena they were meeting one by one the Saturday evening boats out of Saint Louis. Now one came round the upper bend, four days from Cincinnati. They knew her; the Courteneys' fine oldMarchioness. The youngVotaressswept by her saluting and saluted like the belle of a ball, a flying vision of luxury, innocence, and joy.

Down in the cabin, in one of its best staterooms, where all were choice, the senator wooed slumber.

In vain. Sounds were no obstacle. They abounded but they were normal. Except—"Peck-peck-peck" and so on, which the steady pulse of normal sounds practically obliterated. The peck-pecking was not for him.

An unwelcome odor may keep one awake, but the senator's berth was fragrant of fresh mattresses and new linen, the wash-stand of jasmine soap, and the room at large of its immaculate zinc-white walls and doors and their gilt trimmings. Nor could the cause be his supper of beefsteak and onions, black coffee, hot rolls, and bananas, for every one about him had had those, and every one about him was sound asleep. It could not be for lack of the bath; he had already slept well without it too many nights hand-running. Nor could it be a want of special nightclothes; he had won his election over a nightshirt aristocrat, as being not too pampered to sleep, like the sons of toil, in the shirt he had worn all day and would wear again to-morrow. Nor yet was it nicotine or alcohol, the putting of which into him was like feeding cottonwood to Hayle's oldHuntress. Such, at least, was his private conviction. Oh, he knew the cause! He believed he could drop into sleep as this boat's sounding-lead could drop to the river's bottom, if for one minute he could get his mind off that singularly old, contemptibly young poker-face.

Recalling that face and the grandfather's as he had confronted them together earlier in the journey, they were a double reminder of the Franklinian maxim—he kept a store of such things for stump use—that an old young man makes a young old man. But maxims didn't bring sleep; he turned the pillow and damned the maxim and the men, with Benjamin Franklin to boot.

It tossed him from his right side to his left, to think of his own part in this two days' episode, and of the flocks of passengers stepping ashore at various landings who, as sure as—hmm!—would at every step drop that story into the public ear as corn is dropped into the furrow. It tossed him back again, to think how his adversaries in the political game, where cunning was always trumps, would light down on that story like crows behind the plough. He mixed his metaphors by habit; the people loved them mixed. Another maxim, his own invention, was, Take care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself. The —— it will! You've got to takeat leastas much care of reputation. But here both were concerned. He could not, for the sake either of his characterorhis reputation, let himself be made a fool of by any one, however small, anywhere. He had got to recover a personal importance solemnly pilfered from him by a half-grown Shanghai still in his pin-feathers. Against Hayle's girl he was excusably helpless, but him he had got to get the upper hand of and get it quick. Memphis in the morning! More passengers to be dropped there and the whole town's attention to be attracted by the burial of the bishop. Good Lord! That "verbatim report for the newspapers"! And of all papers the Memphis papers!Avalanche—Appeal—it was all one, he happening to be at the moment equally at odds with both. It, the "report," would not take a defensive attitude. Poker-face was too sharp for that. It would take the offensive from the start and it would take the start. Gentlemen of the jury, in a war of words there's just one word better than the last, and that's the first! And moreover! the brief "report's" main theme would not be he, the senator, nor his vanished committee of seven. No, sir-ee, it would be the cholera, and he would be dished up in a purely casual way; as the French say "on, pass on."

He rubbed his head and sat up. There was a chance that he might find Hugh awake and on duty. If so his cast-iron lordship might yet be browbeaten, or wheedled, into inaction. Or if sleeping he might yet be circumvented. Was he worth circumventing? How absurdly troubles magnify on a waking pillow. Despise your enemy and sleep! Well—hardly. Lethimdo that, especially whenyou can't.

He threw off the light cover, rose, and dressed. He began to see a way to win. He would countermine. He would raise a counter-issue—"Harriet." Loitering by the twins' door he listened and rightly judged they were asleep, Lucian being so feeble and Julian so full. The office was open but empty. Its clock read two. The card-tables were vacant. The bar was closed. Out on the dim boiler deck he found only the two who had fleeced Basile. They sat at the very front, elbow to elbow, with their feet up on the rail. Their quiet talk ceased as he came near and stood looking out over the gliding bow and the waters beyond, which were out of their banks and stretched everywhere off into the night, a veritable deluge.

"A good forty miles wide, no doubt," he remarked to the pair, and they assured him he was right.

"What piece of river is this?" he inquired, and was told that they were in the long, winding, desolate sixty-mile stretch between White River and Horseshoe Bend; that they had just put Islands Sixty-two and Sixty-three astern and would be more than two hours yet in reaching Helena.

"Arkansas your State?" he asked. "Helena your town?"

"No," they said, they were of the "hoop-pole State," meaning Indiana. He knew better but changed the subject. "The Ohio," he remarked, "must be up on her hind legs."

"Yes, everything was up: the Saint Francis, the Tennessee, Cumberland, Illinois, Wabash, Kentucky, Miami, Scioto—" The pair did not talk like men narrowly of the hoop-pole commonwealth. Modestly speaking on, they seemed to know the whole great valley quite by heart.

So the senator, to show how quite by heart he knew this whole little world, said affably: "The pan-fish ain't biting so very lively this trip."

The reply was as flawless for candor as though they had the same hope to use him which he had to use them. Said one:

"No, we ain't paying expenses."

And his mate: "We've caught a few little flappers."

"Captain's son make it hard to do business?"

"Oh, he—we've all got our prejudices, you know."

"Yes, you ought to have some against him by now."

"Maybe so. You've got yourn, senator, we've noticed."

"I? No! I admire him. The way he runs this cabin——"

"Makes her keep up with the boat," they admitted.

"I never saw his like," laughed the statesman.

"Wouldn't want to, would you?"

"N-no, he makes big mistakes. But—he's got a future!"

"So mind his heels," said one of the pair. They were enjoying their politician. He saw that by their gravity. In their world men looked gravest when amused, and saved their smiles for emergencies. While he offered, and they accepted, cigars he spoke absently:

"The young gentleman's making a mistake right now that he ought to be saved from."

"Another?" they dryly asked as they used his cigar for a light. So far had he fallen in the general esteem.

He chose not to hear. "I wish," he insisted, "we could save him from it."

"Why, yes!—wish you could. But 'we' ain't us. We sporting men, we're mighty bashful, you know."

"Naturally," admitted the senator.

"Yes, glass, with care. But there's another mistake maker we wish you wished you could save. We ev'm might help."

"Aha!" thought the senator. He was right, after all. He had felt confident that these men, treated by Hugh as they had been, would privately "have it in for him"; that they would be glad of any safe chance to "get away with him"—not so utterly as to imperil their necks, yet not too lightly for their spiritual comfort the rest of their days—and that they saw their chance just where he saw his.

"Ye-es?" He mused. They let him muse. The exhorter, he reflected, having picked up the trail and opened the cry—trail which the headlong twins had so witlessly overrun—these older dogs were on it hot; trail of the Gilmores and "Harriet." Somewhere on that trail the captain's son would show up, and when the game should be treed they would be able, in the general mix-up, to "go and see Hugh" and "cook his goose."

The musing ceased. "You mean the actor?"

The pair warmed up. "Yes, sir-ee, him.Thatfellow's making a mistake we might help you to handle. God! sir, he's a nigger-stealer. His wife has got a stolen nigger wench with her now. Had her these ten years. Savehim. Savethem."

"Our friend John the Baptist suggests that," began the senator.

"Adzac'ly!" was the facetious affirmation. "Smelt 'em out at the show. That's how come the mate has locked him up."

The senator stiffened. "Oh, you must be mistaken!"

"Want to bet? Pull out. Go you a thousand they've jugged him and them two Arkansas killers. Yes, sir, to stay jugged till they leave us, at Helena."

"Who!—have done that?"

"Same as you're thinking; they; them; him; that believes he's bossing the boat—which maybe he is."

"Where is he?"

"Up on the roof, with a select few, both sexes."

"Gentlemen, he must let them go at once!"

"Senator, not with money, but just on your word, you sort o' bail 'em out. If they cut up, nobody'll blame you."

"I'll do it! We don't want an owner of the finest boat on Southern waters to have any part inthat sortof mistake, whatever his youth."

"Youth!" (Profanity.) "That boy's forty year' old. Oh, he's all right; if he thinks he'd ought to protect every galoot on his boat, why, maybe he'd ought. What you know is that that white nigger'sgotto be took away from them two barnstormers instanter and restored back to her own Hayle folks. That's a mistake you ain't never got to ask nobody's leaves to save nobody from."

"You don't mean to-night?" Capital disguise for eagerness—the cigar. The senator puffed. The pair puffed.

"We mean now; when the right men can be woke up and the others—and the ladies—sleep on. Now, straightaway, while the shouter's still aboard—and the two shooters. If we wa'n't sporting men we'd like to sit into that game ourselves. Maybe we can if it's kept—dignified."

"Even if there's resistance?"

"Who'll resist? The boat's people? Only thing they dassen't resist. Couldn't never run another trip on this river. Resist! Couldn't ever resist, any time; but now? Look at their fix. Sweet time to set everybody a-kicking like steers. Bishop dead, chief Dutch woman ditto, that nice young Hayle boy that they took away from us when he wanted to stay like a man, ditto——"

"Oh, not dead? My God! I hadn't heard that."

"No, it ain't been properly advertised. But Hamlet knows it—I mean your actor. The way him and his wife—or lady—are buzzing around, you'd think they was the undertakers. Maybe they are.Hewon't resist. He knows how well resistance would suit you—oh, not yourself, no more'n us, but—the crowd; men like them three that's locked up and must be turned loose first thing. He knows if he lifts a finger, or so much as gives anybody any of his lip—and maybe anyhow—he'll be took ashore and lost in the woods, first time we stop to bury some more Dutch; say daybreak."

"Ah, but we mustn't let that happen, either."

"Oh, no! we mustn't let that happen, either."

"Well"—the senator put on a bustling frown—"I'll see Hugh. I wish—I wonder if that Californian has——"

"Put up his shutters? No, he's on the roof. Why?"

"He might help wake up the right men, as you say."

One of the pair, without rising, tapped the senator caressingly. "You—let—California—sweat. Trust in Providence. The right men'll get woke up somehow, beginning with the general. That right?... All gay, but don't you take no California in yourn to-night."

"No? Very well. But—I wonder if you gentlemen really recognize the seriousness of this affair."

"Look a-here, senator, you go up-stairs and save Mr. Innocence from running his boat into this mistake." The sleek pair rose, evidently to begin their part.

The senator rummaged his mind for a word that would give him creditable exit but had to hurry off without it. Turning, the two exchanged a calm gaze and one luxurious puff, which meant that the "old sucker's" use of them would suit them exactly. They rummaged for no words; had no more need for words than two leopards.

Before falling to work they glanced out over the flood. This was Horseshoe Cut-off. Kangaroo Point was just astern in the west. Yonder ahead, under the old moon, came Friar's Point. In these hundred miles between Napoleon and Helena they were meeting one by one the Saturday evening boats out of Saint Louis. Now one came round the upper bend, four days from Cincinnati. They knew her; the Courteneys' fine oldMarchioness. The youngVotaressswept by her saluting and saluted like the belle of a ball, a flying vision of luxury, innocence, and joy.

XLVIII"CALIFORNIA"

Under the benign stars, as we have said, Hugh hastened from Basile to his father.Those were the same heavenly lights with which only two nights earlier he and that father had so tranquilly—and the dead boy's sister so airily—communed. With a hand yet on the door that he was leaving, and while his distress for what had befallen in this room brought a foreboding of what might impend in the other, he felt the chiding of that celestial benignity and was dimly made to see its illimitable span and the smallness of magnifying the things we call trouble.All the more, then, a melting heart for the tearful mother and sister, to whom no word of this could be said; but a stout heart, stouter than he knew where to find, for whatever was yet in store. Also a preoccupied good-by to sweet companionship. Nay, a mind too preoccupied for any good-by to any companionship for the remainder of this voyage, if not forever. It was humiliating to have even so much thought of such a kind at such a time; yet suppress it as he might, he could not wholly stifle it, even at his father's door.Three hours later the senator, coming up in search of him, gradually discovered the presence of more people than he was looking for or cared even to find awake—being who they were. At the top of the steps he told the watchman sleeplessness had driven him up here for fresh air. It is but human to explain to a watchman.But how was the captain? And how was the commodore?The commodore was doing well enough, but the captain—the watchman shook his head with the wisdom of a doctor.The seeker after fresh air, eager to move on, yet loath to imply that the air about a watchman was stale, said, with a glance at the stars, that here was quiet.But the watchman begged to differ. Never by starlight had he seen so busy a hurricane-deck. Just now there was a lull but it was the first in three hours. Preparations here, preparations there, for the dead, for the living, the sick, the well; such a going and coming of cabin-boys, of chambermaids, of the immigrant they called Marburg, the Hayles' old black woman, the texas tender, the mud clerk, the actor and his wife, her servant girl——"And others," prompted the senator. "What doing?"A hundred things. The actor's wife had got Miss Hayle into funeral black from her own stage "warrobe," and the young man Marburg had brought up, for Madame Hayle, one of his deceased mother's mourning gowns, "a prodigious fine one." It did not fit but the actor's wife and her maid were altering it while they kept watch where Basile lay and while Madame Hayle resumed her cares on the lower deck.And who was caring for the commodore?Second clerk and mud clerk answered his few needs.But the captain——?Ah, that was another matter. The actor was with him.Mr. Gilmore; um-hmm. A step or so forward of the captain's room, as the senator moved toward the bell, two male figures seated on the edge of the skylight roof spoke his name in a mild greeting, and, looking closely, he found them to be Watson's cub and the Kentuckian whom the pair down on the boiler deck had just called "California."The senator expressed surprise that these two were not abed, where he himself ought to be but—sleeplessness had driven him up here for fresh air."Well, here the fresh air is," said California. "Senator, we've just been wishing we could see you.""Ah!" said the senator, grateful yet wary. "I'll just take a turn or two up forward and be right back.""But—hold on, senator; just one question."The three stood. "Now, this first question ain't it; this is just the cut and deal. Hayle's twins have offered to fight Hugh Courteney—any way open to gentlemen, as they say—haven't they?""Oh—night before last, I—believe so.""Ancient history, yes; but it's a standing invitation and they've called him names: poltroon, coward——""Well, really, Mr. So-and-so, while we can't justify the names, nor the invitation, we can't wonder at the givers.""Why—I can. I think they're pretty tol'able wonderful. But so's he—to let 'em do it. Now, this ain't the question, either, but—why does he allow it? It ain't for lack of pluck, senator. I know a coward's earmarks and he ain't got 'em. It ain't for religion; less'n two hours out of Orleans he'd offered them twins, I'm told, to take 'em down to the freight deck and dish up the brace of 'em at one fell scoop. And no more is it because his people won't let him alone to do his own way. He's about the let-alone-dest fellow I ever see, for his age, if he is any particular age. No, sir, I've studied out what it's for.""Hmm. But what's your question? What'sitabout?""Why, it's about this—and your friend the general. For I'll tell you, senator, why Mr. Hugh don't fight. It's for—can I tell you in confidence, strict, air-tight?""Certainly, strict, air-tight.""Well, then, it's for love. He's in love with their sister. Now,that'ssomething Idon'twonder at. I am, too. So are a lot of us." He smiled at the cub, who frowned away. "Now, by natural fitness, he's got ground for hope. I ain't got a square inch. She ain't on my claim. Next week my face'll be to the setting sun. So what do I do but go to him—this was before her young brother died—which I almost loved the brother too—and s'I, 'Mr. Courteney, I've saw the sun go down and moon come up on this thing three times running, and every time and all between I've stood it, seeing you stand it. And I've studied it. And I see your fix. But most of us don't; so somebody's got to indorse you. Now, being a Kentuckian, not blue-grass but next door, I feel like doing it. You'vegotto play two hands and youcan'tplay but one. Well, I'll play the one you can't. I'll fight them twins.'""Well, of all—and he accepted?""Now, you know he didn't. He said it would be absolutely impossible. But he said it the funniest way—! It made me see the size of him for the first time. And, senator, he's life-size. But I reckon you knowed that before I did. He took me by the button-hole, just as I'm holding you now, and talked to me as majestic as a father sending his boy off to school, and at the very same time and in the very same words as sweet as a girl sending her soldier to war.""And he convinced you?""No, we was interrupted and couldn't talk it out. Well, I can't go back to him and resume, no more'n a wildcat bank. For one thing, I wouldn't take him from her.""You don't mean they're together now?""Now, no, but by spells, yes. Bound to happen—so many of us so willing. I'd try to talk the thing out with this young man and Mr. Watson, but they all feel alike. Reckon it does 'em credit, but—well—I'd like to talk it out with you and the general. I think we can dispense with the boat's consent. Don't you?""Oh, Lord, man, what have I got to do with that?""Hold your horses, senator. I look at it this way: If the twins hadn't been too busy pecking at Mr. Hugh I'm just the sort o' man they'd 'a' pecked at, and hence I have a good moral right to waive their not doing it and take the will for the deed.""Nonsense, my good friend; good joke, nothing more.""Hold on; there's this anyhow: If Mr. Hughcouldaccept their invitation maybe he'd take me for his second; and what does second mean if it don't mean that if, after all, something should force him to drop out I could drop in?""Oh," laughed the senator, freeing his buttonhole by gentle force and edging away, "very well; but the twins! They're out! Look attheirfix;theycan't fight now.""Senator, just so. But the general, all along he's sort o' been their second; indorsed for 'em same's I'd like to for Mr. Hugh. He'd be their second now if they could fight—as we know they'd be glad to. So, why ain't he honor bound to take their place if I take Mr. Hugh's? This young gentleman'll act for me—won't you?—yes, and the senator can act for the general. Then, senator, the first time we can get ashore we can settle the whole thing without involving Mr. Hugh and without ever letting the ladies know—or the crowd either—that it ain't just our own affair. I can easily give the general cause, you know.""My friend," said the cunning senator, who knew his ruling sin was tardiness and that he was tardy now, "I don't say anything could be fairer—in its right time. If you'll go to bed and to sleep——""Senator, delays are dangerous. I might get the cholera. The general might get it. Or some other trouble might crop up and sort o' separate us."Ah! It flashed into the senator's mind that California, though meaning all he said, had in full view the Gilmore-Harriet affair and that this was a move in that, a move to checkmate. His countermove had to be prompt; some one was coming up the nearest steps. "My dear sir, thereisanother trouble; serious, imminent, and almost sure to involve our friend Hugh in a vital mistake—Why, general, I thought you, at least, was asleep.""Sss-enator, I was. I mmm-erely had not und-ressed. Have you fff-ound that young man?""Not yet, general. Let's go see him together. I want to see you, too, for just a moment, if these gentlemen will excuse me that long.""Mr. Hugh's with the first clerk, yonder by the bell," said the gold hunter. "We'll wait here, eh?"The general wanted to reply, but "I wish you would," responded the senator and hurried him away.

Under the benign stars, as we have said, Hugh hastened from Basile to his father.

Those were the same heavenly lights with which only two nights earlier he and that father had so tranquilly—and the dead boy's sister so airily—communed. With a hand yet on the door that he was leaving, and while his distress for what had befallen in this room brought a foreboding of what might impend in the other, he felt the chiding of that celestial benignity and was dimly made to see its illimitable span and the smallness of magnifying the things we call trouble.

All the more, then, a melting heart for the tearful mother and sister, to whom no word of this could be said; but a stout heart, stouter than he knew where to find, for whatever was yet in store. Also a preoccupied good-by to sweet companionship. Nay, a mind too preoccupied for any good-by to any companionship for the remainder of this voyage, if not forever. It was humiliating to have even so much thought of such a kind at such a time; yet suppress it as he might, he could not wholly stifle it, even at his father's door.

Three hours later the senator, coming up in search of him, gradually discovered the presence of more people than he was looking for or cared even to find awake—being who they were. At the top of the steps he told the watchman sleeplessness had driven him up here for fresh air. It is but human to explain to a watchman.

But how was the captain? And how was the commodore?

The commodore was doing well enough, but the captain—the watchman shook his head with the wisdom of a doctor.

The seeker after fresh air, eager to move on, yet loath to imply that the air about a watchman was stale, said, with a glance at the stars, that here was quiet.

But the watchman begged to differ. Never by starlight had he seen so busy a hurricane-deck. Just now there was a lull but it was the first in three hours. Preparations here, preparations there, for the dead, for the living, the sick, the well; such a going and coming of cabin-boys, of chambermaids, of the immigrant they called Marburg, the Hayles' old black woman, the texas tender, the mud clerk, the actor and his wife, her servant girl——

"And others," prompted the senator. "What doing?"

A hundred things. The actor's wife had got Miss Hayle into funeral black from her own stage "warrobe," and the young man Marburg had brought up, for Madame Hayle, one of his deceased mother's mourning gowns, "a prodigious fine one." It did not fit but the actor's wife and her maid were altering it while they kept watch where Basile lay and while Madame Hayle resumed her cares on the lower deck.

And who was caring for the commodore?

Second clerk and mud clerk answered his few needs.

But the captain——?

Ah, that was another matter. The actor was with him.

Mr. Gilmore; um-hmm. A step or so forward of the captain's room, as the senator moved toward the bell, two male figures seated on the edge of the skylight roof spoke his name in a mild greeting, and, looking closely, he found them to be Watson's cub and the Kentuckian whom the pair down on the boiler deck had just called "California."

The senator expressed surprise that these two were not abed, where he himself ought to be but—sleeplessness had driven him up here for fresh air.

"Well, here the fresh air is," said California. "Senator, we've just been wishing we could see you."

"Ah!" said the senator, grateful yet wary. "I'll just take a turn or two up forward and be right back."

"But—hold on, senator; just one question."

The three stood. "Now, this first question ain't it; this is just the cut and deal. Hayle's twins have offered to fight Hugh Courteney—any way open to gentlemen, as they say—haven't they?"

"Oh—night before last, I—believe so."

"Ancient history, yes; but it's a standing invitation and they've called him names: poltroon, coward——"

"Well, really, Mr. So-and-so, while we can't justify the names, nor the invitation, we can't wonder at the givers."

"Why—I can. I think they're pretty tol'able wonderful. But so's he—to let 'em do it. Now, this ain't the question, either, but—why does he allow it? It ain't for lack of pluck, senator. I know a coward's earmarks and he ain't got 'em. It ain't for religion; less'n two hours out of Orleans he'd offered them twins, I'm told, to take 'em down to the freight deck and dish up the brace of 'em at one fell scoop. And no more is it because his people won't let him alone to do his own way. He's about the let-alone-dest fellow I ever see, for his age, if he is any particular age. No, sir, I've studied out what it's for."

"Hmm. But what's your question? What'sitabout?"

"Why, it's about this—and your friend the general. For I'll tell you, senator, why Mr. Hugh don't fight. It's for—can I tell you in confidence, strict, air-tight?"

"Certainly, strict, air-tight."

"Well, then, it's for love. He's in love with their sister. Now,that'ssomething Idon'twonder at. I am, too. So are a lot of us." He smiled at the cub, who frowned away. "Now, by natural fitness, he's got ground for hope. I ain't got a square inch. She ain't on my claim. Next week my face'll be to the setting sun. So what do I do but go to him—this was before her young brother died—which I almost loved the brother too—and s'I, 'Mr. Courteney, I've saw the sun go down and moon come up on this thing three times running, and every time and all between I've stood it, seeing you stand it. And I've studied it. And I see your fix. But most of us don't; so somebody's got to indorse you. Now, being a Kentuckian, not blue-grass but next door, I feel like doing it. You'vegotto play two hands and youcan'tplay but one. Well, I'll play the one you can't. I'll fight them twins.'"

"Well, of all—and he accepted?"

"Now, you know he didn't. He said it would be absolutely impossible. But he said it the funniest way—! It made me see the size of him for the first time. And, senator, he's life-size. But I reckon you knowed that before I did. He took me by the button-hole, just as I'm holding you now, and talked to me as majestic as a father sending his boy off to school, and at the very same time and in the very same words as sweet as a girl sending her soldier to war."

"And he convinced you?"

"No, we was interrupted and couldn't talk it out. Well, I can't go back to him and resume, no more'n a wildcat bank. For one thing, I wouldn't take him from her."

"You don't mean they're together now?"

"Now, no, but by spells, yes. Bound to happen—so many of us so willing. I'd try to talk the thing out with this young man and Mr. Watson, but they all feel alike. Reckon it does 'em credit, but—well—I'd like to talk it out with you and the general. I think we can dispense with the boat's consent. Don't you?"

"Oh, Lord, man, what have I got to do with that?"

"Hold your horses, senator. I look at it this way: If the twins hadn't been too busy pecking at Mr. Hugh I'm just the sort o' man they'd 'a' pecked at, and hence I have a good moral right to waive their not doing it and take the will for the deed."

"Nonsense, my good friend; good joke, nothing more."

"Hold on; there's this anyhow: If Mr. Hughcouldaccept their invitation maybe he'd take me for his second; and what does second mean if it don't mean that if, after all, something should force him to drop out I could drop in?"

"Oh," laughed the senator, freeing his buttonhole by gentle force and edging away, "very well; but the twins! They're out! Look attheirfix;theycan't fight now."

"Senator, just so. But the general, all along he's sort o' been their second; indorsed for 'em same's I'd like to for Mr. Hugh. He'd be their second now if they could fight—as we know they'd be glad to. So, why ain't he honor bound to take their place if I take Mr. Hugh's? This young gentleman'll act for me—won't you?—yes, and the senator can act for the general. Then, senator, the first time we can get ashore we can settle the whole thing without involving Mr. Hugh and without ever letting the ladies know—or the crowd either—that it ain't just our own affair. I can easily give the general cause, you know."

"My friend," said the cunning senator, who knew his ruling sin was tardiness and that he was tardy now, "I don't say anything could be fairer—in its right time. If you'll go to bed and to sleep——"

"Senator, delays are dangerous. I might get the cholera. The general might get it. Or some other trouble might crop up and sort o' separate us."

Ah! It flashed into the senator's mind that California, though meaning all he said, had in full view the Gilmore-Harriet affair and that this was a move in that, a move to checkmate. His countermove had to be prompt; some one was coming up the nearest steps. "My dear sir, thereisanother trouble; serious, imminent, and almost sure to involve our friend Hugh in a vital mistake—Why, general, I thought you, at least, was asleep."

"Sss-enator, I was. I mmm-erely had not und-ressed. Have you fff-ound that young man?"

"Not yet, general. Let's go see him together. I want to see you, too, for just a moment, if these gentlemen will excuse me that long."

"Mr. Hugh's with the first clerk, yonder by the bell," said the gold hunter. "We'll wait here, eh?"

The general wanted to reply, but "I wish you would," responded the senator and hurried him away.

XLIXKANGAROO POINT

Aboard theVotaresswas a gentle, retiring lady, large and fair, whom both Hugh and Ramsey had liked from the first, yet whose acquaintance they had made very slowly and quite separately. She was a parson's wife, who had never seen a play, a game of cards, or a ball, danced a dance, read a novel, tasted wine, or worn a jewel. She had four handsome, decorous, well-freckled children, two boys, two girls.At table, until the married pairs of Vicksburg, Yazoo, and Milliken's Bend had gone ashore, she had not sat with the foremost dozen, although she and the bishop spoke often together and were always "sister" and "brother." Her near neighbors at the board had been the Carthaginians and Napoleonites, and it was through them that she had met the Gilmores. To Ramsey and Hugh she had been made known by her children, one boy and girl having fallen wildly in love with the young lady's red curls, and the other two with Hugh and his frown.The Gilmores' hearts she had won largely by the way in which her talks with them revealed the sweet charities of a soul unwarped by the tyrannous prohibitions under which she had been "born and raised" and to which she was still loyal; and she had crowned the conquest by a gentle, inflexible refusal to "brother" John the Baptist. In their lively minds she reawakened the age-old issue between artist and pietist. Said the amused Gilmore:"Humiliate me? Not in the least. She only humbles me; she's such a beautiful example of——""Yes, but, goodness, don't say it here!" said his wife. "Harriet" and the exhorter were already trouble enough.Nevertheless, "What lovely types of character," insisted Gilmore, "come often,sooften, from ugly types of faith!"The wife flinched and looked about but he persisted: "So much better, my love—this is only my humble tribute to her—somuchbetter is religion, even her religion, without the liberal arts than the liberal arts without religion. Faith is the foundation, they are the upper works.""Dear, you should have been a preacher!""No, I'd always be preaching that one sermon. If I didn't tell it to you, I'd have to tell it to her, or make you tell her."Mrs. Gilmore had not told her, but between the two women, across the gulf between them, there had grown such a commerce of silent esteem that neither Hugh nor Ramsey knew which one's modest liberalism to admire most. To Ramsey it was nothing against the matron that she was not nursing the immigrant sick. Only Madame Hayle was allowed to do that, and the parson's wife, being quite without madame's art of doing as she pleased, had had to submit conscience and compassions to the captain's forbiddal, repeated by the commodore and Hugh. But after the play she had insisted, "strict orders or none, and whether her children were four or forty-four," on entering the service of the busy Gilmores, "no matter how," and was now, with old Joy, in the pilot-house, a most timely successor to the actor's wife in the social care of Ramsey.For to Ramsey, in this first bereavement of her life, sleep was as abhorrent as if her brother's burial were already at hand. Grief was good, for grief was love. Sleep was heartlessness. Moreover, in sleep, only in sleep, there was no growth. Of course, that was not true; only yesterday and the day before she had grown consciously between evening and morning, grown wonderfully. But she had forgotten that and in every fibre of her being felt a frenzy for growth, for getting on, like the frenzy of a bird left behind by the flock. All the boat's human life, all its majestic going—led on by the stars—and especially all those by whose command or guidance it went, made for growth. So, too, did this dear Mrs. So-and-so, who could so kindly understand how one in deep sorrow may go on seeing the drollery of things. Grief, love, solace, growth, she was all of them in one. If she, Ramsey, might neither nurse the sick with her mother nor watch with Mrs. Gilmore and "Harriet," here was this dear, fair lady with the tenderest, most enlightening words of faith and comfort that ever had fallen on her ears; words never too eager or too many, but always just in time and volume to satisfy grief's fitful questionings.For refuge they had tried every quarter of these upper decks; now paced them, now stood, now sat, and had found each best in its turn; but such open-air seclusion itself drew notice, made notice more felt, and so the dusk of the pilot-house had soon been found best of all. It remained so now—while the great chimneys out forward breathed soothingly, and a mile astern glimmered theWestwood, and a mile ahead glimmered theAntelope, and here among the few occupants of the visitors' bench there drifted a soft, alluring gossip about each newly turned bend of the most marvellous of rivers. To nestle back in its larboard corner while now some one came up and in and now some one slipped down and out, and while ever the pilot's head and shoulders and the upper spokes of his vigilant wheel stood outlined against the twinkling sky and rippling air, was like resting one's head on theVotaress'sbosom.And yet another reason made sleep unthinkable. He who had said, "I need you," was awake, was on watch. Now that the feud, blessed thought, was all off, sworn off, and a lingering mistrust of the twins seemed quite unsisterly, probably that need of her, or illusion of need, had passed. Well, if so he ought to say so! For here were great cares and dangers yet. The river was out of all its bounds. Most of those bounds themselves and the great plantations behind them were under the swirling deluge. The waters of Scrubgrass Bend, for instance, were crosscutting over Scrubgrass Towhead in one league-wide sheet, and Islands Seventy-this-and-that and Islands Sixty-that-and-this were under them to their tree-tops. These things might be less fearful in fact than in show, or might be a matter wherein it was only a trifle more imbecile to think of her helping than in some others. Yet here were officers and servants of the boat busy out of turn and omitting routine duties unfortunate to omit and which she might perform if they would but let her. She noticed the presence of both pilots at once—Watson at the wheel, Ned on the bench. No wonder, with so awesome a charge; guiding a boat like this, teeming with human souls and driven pell-mell through such a war of elemental forces in desert darkness, with never a beacon light from point to point, from hour to hour; running every chute, with a chute behind nearly every point or island, and the vast bends looping on each other like the folds of a python and but little more to be trusted.And here was this "Harriet" affair, a care and danger that as yet smouldered, but at any moment, with or without aid of the twins, might blaze. No one mentioned it, but you could smell it like smoke. And here was that supreme care and danger, the plague, with all the earlier precautions against it dropped, and with its constant triple question: Who next of the sick? Who next of the well? Who next on either of the decks below?Two or three times Hugh came, sat awhile, spoke rarely, and went out. What a spontaneous new deference every one accorded him and with what a simple air of habitude he received it, though it seemed to mark him for bereavement as well as for command! Why did he come? Why did he go? wondered Ramsey. Not that she would hinder him, coming or going. She could not guess that one chief object was care of her. She could only recall how lately they two had stood behind the footlights and sung their nonsense rhymes, partners in, and justified by, one brave, merciful purpose. Ought he to let care, danger, and grief, as soon as they had become acutely hers and his, drive him and her apart and strike him dumb to her, as dumb as a big ship dropping her on a desert shore and sailing away? Various subtleties of manner in others on the bench convinced her that they were thinking of him and her and thinking these same questions. What right had he to bring that upon her? Once, as he went out, somebody unwittingly stung her keenly by remarking, to no one in particular, that it was hard to see what should keep him so busy."D'you know," retorted Ned, "what running a boat is?""Why, yes, it's making things spin so smooth you can't see 'em spin, ain't it?""Right. Ever fly a kite? Not with yo' eyes shet, hey? Well, a boat's a hundred kites. Ain't she, Watsy?""Two hundred," said Watson, at the wheel."But Mr. Hugh ain't actually running this boat, is he?""I ain't said he wuz," replied Ned, and——"He ain't a-runnin' no other," said Watson.For an instant Ramsey was all pride for him they exalted; but in the next instant a wave of resentment went through her as if their vaunting were his; as if her pride were his own confessed, colossal vanity; as if the price of his uplift were her belittlement. Never mind, he should pay! Absurd, absurd; but she was harrowingly tired, lonely, idle, grief-burdened, and desolate, and absurdity itself was relief. He should pay, let his paying cost her double. Somehow, in some feminine, minute, pinhole way, she would deflate him, wing him, bring him down, before he should soar another round. With old Joy at her feet, in the dusk of her corner beyond Mrs. So-and-so, the parson's wife; she allowed herself a poor, bitter-sweet smile.Each time when Hugh had come back to the bench, room had been hurriedly made for him next the parson's wife—"stabboard side"—who, speaking for all, promptly began to interrogate him, her first question always being as to his father's condition, which did not improve. Making room on the bench made room in the conversation—decoying pauses hopefully designed to lure him into saying something, anything, to Ramsey, or her to him; but always the kind trap had gone unsprung. Two or three times, obviously, Mrs. So-and-so's inquiries had first been Ramsey's to her; as when one of them elicited the fact that the next turn would be Horseshoe Cut-off and Kangaroo Point; and once, at length, after twice failing to believe the ear she bent to Ramsey's murmur, she said audibly:"Ask him, dear; ask him yourself."Every one waited and presently Hugh remarked:"I'll answer if I can.""I'd rather," faltered Ramsey, "ask John the Baptist."The unlucky mention took no evident effect on any one. If that was the snub she would have to try again."I can ask him for you," said Hugh. "He's up, expecting to leave us at Helena.""No, thank you," she sighed, "you're too awfully busy. It won't make any real difference if I never find out.""Won't sink the boat to ask," drawled Watson; but she remained silent till Hugh inquired:"Are you sure I can't tell you?""Oh, you can!" came from Ramsey's dark corner. "But—with the whole boat in your care—we oughtn't to ask you things we don't have to know.""Lard! belch it out," urged the innocent Ned, taking her in earnest; but again she was silent."Well?" said Hugh."Oh, well, are there many—? Oh, it ain't important.""Why, missy," muttered old Joy, "you's dess natchiully bleeds to ax it now.""Yes, dear," said the parson's wife, "let's have it.""Well—are there many—? Oh, it's not—are there—are there many kangaroos on Kangaroo Point?"At any outer edge of civilization a joke may be as hard and practical as ship's bread, yet pass. Amid the general mirth and while Hugh pulled a bell cord which made no jingle down in the engine-room and had never before been observed by Ramsey, his reply was prompt and brief but too gently solemn for her ear; and when she got Mrs. So-and-so to repeat it to her it was merely to the effect that, though kangaroos were few on Kangaroo Point, she ought to see the wealth of horseshoes in Horseshoe Cut-off.Oh, kind answer! that excused her frivolity by sharing it. Kind beyond her utmost merit. She did not say so, but she thought it, sitting dumb, in sudden tears, and burning with shame for her blindness to the hour's fearful realities. While Ned stepped to Watson's side to speak critically of theAntelope, now shining on their starboard bow, Hugh, near the door, dropped a quiet request to the two or three other occupants of the bench and they followed him out."Why do they go?" she asked, fancying them as much appalled at her as she herself was, and when the sweet lady could not enlighten her the pilots offered a guess that two had gone to relieve Mrs. Gilmore and her maid and that Hugh would presently join the first clerk by the bell."There he is now," said Ned, actually expecting her to rise and look down. But she sat still and watched theAntelope, wishing her far better speed in view of the letters she carried. So came thoughts of the long telegraphic despatch to her father which Hugh must by this time have written for her mother, as agreed between them, and which was to be sent, in the morning, from Memphis.The door opened and Mrs. Gilmore and "Harriet" came in."Well," softly inquired the actor's wife, "how do we come on?" and Ramsey answered as softly, yet taking pains that Ned and Watson should overhear:"I've disgraced myself.""Mmm!" mumbled old Joy in corroboration."What have you done now?""Nothing. I don'tdoanything. Only said something, something so silly I can't even apologize.""To whom?""The baby elephant," said Ramsey and laughed a note or two. The door opened again and Hugh's bell call was explained by the entrance of the texas tender and another white-jacket, each bearing a large tray of cups and plates, hot coffee, and hot toasted rolls and butter. She hadn't dreamed she was so hungry.Watson stared back from the wheel with grim pretence of surprise. "Who sent that here?""Mr. Hugh Co'teney sawnt it, suh," said the tender, arranging the cups on the bench. "Yass'm," he repeated to the grateful ladies, "Mr. Hugh, yass'm.""Oh! Mr. Hugh," replied Watson. "He must 'a' gave you the order before he come up here this last time.""Yass, suh, but say don't fetch it tell he ring.""Six cups," counted the pilot, "six—You go down with Miss Hayle's compliments to Mr. Courteney, and——""No-o-o-o!" sang Ramsey, running up the scale.But Watson was firm. "Boy, you heard me, didn't you?"Ned, with his eyes down on the bell, interposed: "Hold on, Wats', three into one you can't. Hugh's in a confab with the senator and the general."Ramsey, eating like a hunter come home, suddenly stood. "Now look, everybody, at theAntelope. She's right abeam. Ain't she abeam, Mr. Watson?"Watson drawled that she wasn't anything else, and Ramsey failed to see that he saw her cast an anxious glance down to the bell and the captain's chair beyond it.

Aboard theVotaresswas a gentle, retiring lady, large and fair, whom both Hugh and Ramsey had liked from the first, yet whose acquaintance they had made very slowly and quite separately. She was a parson's wife, who had never seen a play, a game of cards, or a ball, danced a dance, read a novel, tasted wine, or worn a jewel. She had four handsome, decorous, well-freckled children, two boys, two girls.

At table, until the married pairs of Vicksburg, Yazoo, and Milliken's Bend had gone ashore, she had not sat with the foremost dozen, although she and the bishop spoke often together and were always "sister" and "brother." Her near neighbors at the board had been the Carthaginians and Napoleonites, and it was through them that she had met the Gilmores. To Ramsey and Hugh she had been made known by her children, one boy and girl having fallen wildly in love with the young lady's red curls, and the other two with Hugh and his frown.

The Gilmores' hearts she had won largely by the way in which her talks with them revealed the sweet charities of a soul unwarped by the tyrannous prohibitions under which she had been "born and raised" and to which she was still loyal; and she had crowned the conquest by a gentle, inflexible refusal to "brother" John the Baptist. In their lively minds she reawakened the age-old issue between artist and pietist. Said the amused Gilmore:

"Humiliate me? Not in the least. She only humbles me; she's such a beautiful example of——"

"Yes, but, goodness, don't say it here!" said his wife. "Harriet" and the exhorter were already trouble enough.

Nevertheless, "What lovely types of character," insisted Gilmore, "come often,sooften, from ugly types of faith!"

The wife flinched and looked about but he persisted: "So much better, my love—this is only my humble tribute to her—somuchbetter is religion, even her religion, without the liberal arts than the liberal arts without religion. Faith is the foundation, they are the upper works."

"Dear, you should have been a preacher!"

"No, I'd always be preaching that one sermon. If I didn't tell it to you, I'd have to tell it to her, or make you tell her."

Mrs. Gilmore had not told her, but between the two women, across the gulf between them, there had grown such a commerce of silent esteem that neither Hugh nor Ramsey knew which one's modest liberalism to admire most. To Ramsey it was nothing against the matron that she was not nursing the immigrant sick. Only Madame Hayle was allowed to do that, and the parson's wife, being quite without madame's art of doing as she pleased, had had to submit conscience and compassions to the captain's forbiddal, repeated by the commodore and Hugh. But after the play she had insisted, "strict orders or none, and whether her children were four or forty-four," on entering the service of the busy Gilmores, "no matter how," and was now, with old Joy, in the pilot-house, a most timely successor to the actor's wife in the social care of Ramsey.

For to Ramsey, in this first bereavement of her life, sleep was as abhorrent as if her brother's burial were already at hand. Grief was good, for grief was love. Sleep was heartlessness. Moreover, in sleep, only in sleep, there was no growth. Of course, that was not true; only yesterday and the day before she had grown consciously between evening and morning, grown wonderfully. But she had forgotten that and in every fibre of her being felt a frenzy for growth, for getting on, like the frenzy of a bird left behind by the flock. All the boat's human life, all its majestic going—led on by the stars—and especially all those by whose command or guidance it went, made for growth. So, too, did this dear Mrs. So-and-so, who could so kindly understand how one in deep sorrow may go on seeing the drollery of things. Grief, love, solace, growth, she was all of them in one. If she, Ramsey, might neither nurse the sick with her mother nor watch with Mrs. Gilmore and "Harriet," here was this dear, fair lady with the tenderest, most enlightening words of faith and comfort that ever had fallen on her ears; words never too eager or too many, but always just in time and volume to satisfy grief's fitful questionings.

For refuge they had tried every quarter of these upper decks; now paced them, now stood, now sat, and had found each best in its turn; but such open-air seclusion itself drew notice, made notice more felt, and so the dusk of the pilot-house had soon been found best of all. It remained so now—while the great chimneys out forward breathed soothingly, and a mile astern glimmered theWestwood, and a mile ahead glimmered theAntelope, and here among the few occupants of the visitors' bench there drifted a soft, alluring gossip about each newly turned bend of the most marvellous of rivers. To nestle back in its larboard corner while now some one came up and in and now some one slipped down and out, and while ever the pilot's head and shoulders and the upper spokes of his vigilant wheel stood outlined against the twinkling sky and rippling air, was like resting one's head on theVotaress'sbosom.

And yet another reason made sleep unthinkable. He who had said, "I need you," was awake, was on watch. Now that the feud, blessed thought, was all off, sworn off, and a lingering mistrust of the twins seemed quite unsisterly, probably that need of her, or illusion of need, had passed. Well, if so he ought to say so! For here were great cares and dangers yet. The river was out of all its bounds. Most of those bounds themselves and the great plantations behind them were under the swirling deluge. The waters of Scrubgrass Bend, for instance, were crosscutting over Scrubgrass Towhead in one league-wide sheet, and Islands Seventy-this-and-that and Islands Sixty-that-and-this were under them to their tree-tops. These things might be less fearful in fact than in show, or might be a matter wherein it was only a trifle more imbecile to think of her helping than in some others. Yet here were officers and servants of the boat busy out of turn and omitting routine duties unfortunate to omit and which she might perform if they would but let her. She noticed the presence of both pilots at once—Watson at the wheel, Ned on the bench. No wonder, with so awesome a charge; guiding a boat like this, teeming with human souls and driven pell-mell through such a war of elemental forces in desert darkness, with never a beacon light from point to point, from hour to hour; running every chute, with a chute behind nearly every point or island, and the vast bends looping on each other like the folds of a python and but little more to be trusted.

And here was this "Harriet" affair, a care and danger that as yet smouldered, but at any moment, with or without aid of the twins, might blaze. No one mentioned it, but you could smell it like smoke. And here was that supreme care and danger, the plague, with all the earlier precautions against it dropped, and with its constant triple question: Who next of the sick? Who next of the well? Who next on either of the decks below?

Two or three times Hugh came, sat awhile, spoke rarely, and went out. What a spontaneous new deference every one accorded him and with what a simple air of habitude he received it, though it seemed to mark him for bereavement as well as for command! Why did he come? Why did he go? wondered Ramsey. Not that she would hinder him, coming or going. She could not guess that one chief object was care of her. She could only recall how lately they two had stood behind the footlights and sung their nonsense rhymes, partners in, and justified by, one brave, merciful purpose. Ought he to let care, danger, and grief, as soon as they had become acutely hers and his, drive him and her apart and strike him dumb to her, as dumb as a big ship dropping her on a desert shore and sailing away? Various subtleties of manner in others on the bench convinced her that they were thinking of him and her and thinking these same questions. What right had he to bring that upon her? Once, as he went out, somebody unwittingly stung her keenly by remarking, to no one in particular, that it was hard to see what should keep him so busy.

"D'you know," retorted Ned, "what running a boat is?"

"Why, yes, it's making things spin so smooth you can't see 'em spin, ain't it?"

"Right. Ever fly a kite? Not with yo' eyes shet, hey? Well, a boat's a hundred kites. Ain't she, Watsy?"

"Two hundred," said Watson, at the wheel.

"But Mr. Hugh ain't actually running this boat, is he?"

"I ain't said he wuz," replied Ned, and——

"He ain't a-runnin' no other," said Watson.

For an instant Ramsey was all pride for him they exalted; but in the next instant a wave of resentment went through her as if their vaunting were his; as if her pride were his own confessed, colossal vanity; as if the price of his uplift were her belittlement. Never mind, he should pay! Absurd, absurd; but she was harrowingly tired, lonely, idle, grief-burdened, and desolate, and absurdity itself was relief. He should pay, let his paying cost her double. Somehow, in some feminine, minute, pinhole way, she would deflate him, wing him, bring him down, before he should soar another round. With old Joy at her feet, in the dusk of her corner beyond Mrs. So-and-so, the parson's wife; she allowed herself a poor, bitter-sweet smile.

Each time when Hugh had come back to the bench, room had been hurriedly made for him next the parson's wife—"stabboard side"—who, speaking for all, promptly began to interrogate him, her first question always being as to his father's condition, which did not improve. Making room on the bench made room in the conversation—decoying pauses hopefully designed to lure him into saying something, anything, to Ramsey, or her to him; but always the kind trap had gone unsprung. Two or three times, obviously, Mrs. So-and-so's inquiries had first been Ramsey's to her; as when one of them elicited the fact that the next turn would be Horseshoe Cut-off and Kangaroo Point; and once, at length, after twice failing to believe the ear she bent to Ramsey's murmur, she said audibly:

"Ask him, dear; ask him yourself."

Every one waited and presently Hugh remarked:

"I'll answer if I can."

"I'd rather," faltered Ramsey, "ask John the Baptist."

The unlucky mention took no evident effect on any one. If that was the snub she would have to try again.

"I can ask him for you," said Hugh. "He's up, expecting to leave us at Helena."

"No, thank you," she sighed, "you're too awfully busy. It won't make any real difference if I never find out."

"Won't sink the boat to ask," drawled Watson; but she remained silent till Hugh inquired:

"Are you sure I can't tell you?"

"Oh, you can!" came from Ramsey's dark corner. "But—with the whole boat in your care—we oughtn't to ask you things we don't have to know."

"Lard! belch it out," urged the innocent Ned, taking her in earnest; but again she was silent.

"Well?" said Hugh.

"Oh, well, are there many—? Oh, it ain't important."

"Why, missy," muttered old Joy, "you's dess natchiully bleeds to ax it now."

"Yes, dear," said the parson's wife, "let's have it."

"Well—are there many—? Oh, it's not—are there—are there many kangaroos on Kangaroo Point?"

At any outer edge of civilization a joke may be as hard and practical as ship's bread, yet pass. Amid the general mirth and while Hugh pulled a bell cord which made no jingle down in the engine-room and had never before been observed by Ramsey, his reply was prompt and brief but too gently solemn for her ear; and when she got Mrs. So-and-so to repeat it to her it was merely to the effect that, though kangaroos were few on Kangaroo Point, she ought to see the wealth of horseshoes in Horseshoe Cut-off.

Oh, kind answer! that excused her frivolity by sharing it. Kind beyond her utmost merit. She did not say so, but she thought it, sitting dumb, in sudden tears, and burning with shame for her blindness to the hour's fearful realities. While Ned stepped to Watson's side to speak critically of theAntelope, now shining on their starboard bow, Hugh, near the door, dropped a quiet request to the two or three other occupants of the bench and they followed him out.

"Why do they go?" she asked, fancying them as much appalled at her as she herself was, and when the sweet lady could not enlighten her the pilots offered a guess that two had gone to relieve Mrs. Gilmore and her maid and that Hugh would presently join the first clerk by the bell.

"There he is now," said Ned, actually expecting her to rise and look down. But she sat still and watched theAntelope, wishing her far better speed in view of the letters she carried. So came thoughts of the long telegraphic despatch to her father which Hugh must by this time have written for her mother, as agreed between them, and which was to be sent, in the morning, from Memphis.

The door opened and Mrs. Gilmore and "Harriet" came in.

"Well," softly inquired the actor's wife, "how do we come on?" and Ramsey answered as softly, yet taking pains that Ned and Watson should overhear:

"I've disgraced myself."

"Mmm!" mumbled old Joy in corroboration.

"What have you done now?"

"Nothing. I don'tdoanything. Only said something, something so silly I can't even apologize."

"To whom?"

"The baby elephant," said Ramsey and laughed a note or two. The door opened again and Hugh's bell call was explained by the entrance of the texas tender and another white-jacket, each bearing a large tray of cups and plates, hot coffee, and hot toasted rolls and butter. She hadn't dreamed she was so hungry.

Watson stared back from the wheel with grim pretence of surprise. "Who sent that here?"

"Mr. Hugh Co'teney sawnt it, suh," said the tender, arranging the cups on the bench. "Yass'm," he repeated to the grateful ladies, "Mr. Hugh, yass'm."

"Oh! Mr. Hugh," replied Watson. "He must 'a' gave you the order before he come up here this last time."

"Yass, suh, but say don't fetch it tell he ring."

"Six cups," counted the pilot, "six—You go down with Miss Hayle's compliments to Mr. Courteney, and——"

"No-o-o-o!" sang Ramsey, running up the scale.

But Watson was firm. "Boy, you heard me, didn't you?"

Ned, with his eyes down on the bell, interposed: "Hold on, Wats', three into one you can't. Hugh's in a confab with the senator and the general."

Ramsey, eating like a hunter come home, suddenly stood. "Now look, everybody, at theAntelope. She's right abeam. Ain't she abeam, Mr. Watson?"

Watson drawled that she wasn't anything else, and Ramsey failed to see that he saw her cast an anxious glance down to the bell and the captain's chair beyond it.

L"DELTA WILL DO"

In Horseshoe Cut-off the course was east. When Ned directed Ramsey's sight to its upper end, where the flood came into view from the north, she feared he would name the point it turned; but he forbore and she gazed on the thin old moon off in the southeast."Make out yan bunch o' sycamores?" was his nearest venture. The sycamores were on the point. Across the river where it ran concealed beyond those sycamores—he went on to tell—at the up-stream end of a low pencil stroke of forest between the head of the cut-off and the eastern stars, was another turn, Friar's Point. But her interest in points had faded, and whether friars abounded on that one or not she took pains not to inquire.Instead, she was about to ask the cause of a strange silvering in the sky close over the black pencil stroke, when, as on Sunday, the morning star sprang into view and cast its tremulous beam on the waters. She gazed on the white splendor as genuinely enthralled as ever, though at the same time her eye easily, eagerly took in the first clerk, the senator, the general, and Hugh, standing about the captain's empty chair. They loomed as dimly as the sycamores, yet when a fifth figure drew near them she knew by his fine gait that it was the actor, relieved from the captain's sick-room by "California" and the cub pilot. A gesture from Hugh stopped him some yards off and he stood leaning on the bell.For the actor was their theme. This was plain to every one in the pilot-house, the two waiters being gone. A remnant of the food was being consumed by "Harriet" and Joy. All the others were observing, like Ramsey, the morning star and the five men under it. Among her own and Mrs. Gilmore's draperies Ramsey found that lady's hand. Except a few low words between the pilots, conversation failed. Without leave-taking Ned left. Presently here he was beneath, on the skylight roof, and now he joined the actor. Ramsey let go the caressed hand and moved nearer to Watson. While he and she gazed far up the stream, yet watched the six men below, he repeated Ned's question."See that clump o' big sycamores a mite to lab-board o' where we're p'inted?"She didn't believe she did."Well," he persisted, "that's it.""That's what?""Why," said Watson, whose only aim was to set her once more at ease, "that's the p'int you——""Humph." She turned to the two ladies, who, with their eyes frankly below, were counselling together. "Let's go down there ourselves," she said, but they whispered on."Better not," put in Watson; "you can't help."His kind intent did not keep the words from hurting. With a faint toss she said:"I hoped we might be some hindrance."She laughed in her old manner, dropped her glance again on the two men and the four, and hearkened. So did the two ladies beside her. They could all see who spoke below and could hear each voice in turn, though they could not catch what was said. The only sustained speeches were the senator's. The general's interpellations were little regarded. The silent pair at the bell heard everything of essential bearing.The consciously belated senator had begun with rhetorical regrets for the captain's and the commodore's illness and with paternal enthusiasm for those on whom it had brought such grave new cares. His own sympathetic share in their anxieties, he had hurried on to say, had robbed him of sleep and driven him up here solely for this interview. On the way he had chanced upon the general in the——"Sssame ffframe of mind," the general had said, while the senator pressed as straight on as theVotaress.As far as the interests involved were private to this boat, he said, her officers and owners were entitled to keep them so and to be let alone in the management of them. But when that management became by its nature a vital part of an acute public problem—a national political issue—he felt bound, both as the Courteneys' private well-wisher and as a public servant, to urge such treatment of the matter as its national importance demanded. A spark, he said, might burn a city! A question of private ownership not worth a garnishee might set a whole nation afire! The arrival of Gilmore at the bell threw him into a sudden heat:"My God! Mr. Courteney—Mr. clerk—Ishan't offer to lay hands onanyman; not I. AllIask is that you take yours off—of three. My dear sirs, equally as your true friend and as a lover of our troubled country Ibegyou to liberate those citizens of the sovereign State of Arkansas whom you hold in unlawful duress, and to hear before witnesses the plea they regard as righteous and of national concern."The sight of Ned joining Gilmore heated him again: "Gentlemen, if you will do that, now, at once, you will save the fortunes of this superb boat, her honored owners, and their fleet. If you don't you wreck them forever before this day dawns. And you may—great heavens, gentlemen, youmaysee the first bloodshed of sectional strife.""K-'tional ssstrife!" growled the general.The clerk smiled. "Why, senator, those men don't go beyond Helena. They leave us there, before sun-up.""Precisely, sir! And if they're not set free before you enter Helena Reach, or even pass Friar's Point, you may as well not free them at all."Hugh glanced at the clerk as if to speak. The clerk nodded and in the pilot-house they saw Hugh begin:"Mr. Senator, suppose we do that?""You would do me honor, sir, and yourselves more.""Of course the watchmen of this boat watch."As Hugh said this the cub pilot came from the captain's room with some word to Gilmore, who, though yearning to stay, left him and Ned and hastened back to the texas.Meantime the senator: "I should hope so, sir. I hope every one on watch watches, sir.""They do. And so we know that you and the general know, perfectly, that the same men who want those three released want Mr. Gilmore put ashore. Is that your wish, too?""It is, sssir," put in the general while the senator did some rapid thinking. Now he too replied:"Mm—no, sir, it is not. And yet—yes, sir, it is.""Then you would advise us to do that also?""I would advise you to do that also.""Why?""Good Lord! my young friend, to save you! you, your father, grandfather, boats, all, and Mr. Gilmore himself!""How about his wife?""And his wife. For her to be with him may help him if he goes. It can't if he stays." The speaker had let his voice rise. The pilot-house group caught his words. Also they saw the cub pilot detain Ned when he started forward."Let's go down there ourselves," repeated Ramsey; but the parson's wife had whisperingly laid both hands on the wife of the actor, and Ramsey chafed to no avail.The senator's voice dropped again. "Good God, sir, you know the longer they're aboard the worse it will be for them, and they've got to go some time or at Louisville a mob will burn theVotaressto the water's edge with them on her."The two stared at each other, the senator's mind bewailing the loss of each golden moment. The night was not too dark to show him the poker face fitting its nickname insufferably. But not until its owner spoke again did he frown—to hide an exultant surprise."They could leave their maid, you think, with Madame Hayle?" was Hugh's astonishing inquiry. The senator had expected of him nothing short of a grim defiance."They could—they can," replied both he and the soldier. "That'll satisfy everybody." The general saw only the surface of the proposition but the senator perceived in it all the opportunity their two modest accomplices of the boiler deck asked. That pair and their adherents—not followers—you wouldn't catch them leading—they and their gathering adherents would construe the landing of the players as an attempt to deliver them out of their hands and would undertake to seize and maltreat the actor, at least, the moment he should be off the boat. That they were likely to fail was little to the senator; there would be a tumult, so managed as to bring Hugh to the actor's rescue, and in the fracas Hugh was sure of a hammering he would not only never forget but would discern that he owed, first and last, to him, the senator.Hugh glanced at the clerk. "You had just recommended Delta Landing." The clerk nodded and he turned back to the senator. "We'll be there inside of half an hour.""Delta will do," said the senator, his frown growing.Hugh nodded to the clerk. The clerk looked over to Ned."Think Delta's above water?""Oh—eyes and nose out, Watson allows.""Delta'll be all right," persisted the senator.The clerk glanced up to the pilot-house. "Mr. Watson, we'll stop at Delta, to put off a couple o' passengers.""Yes, sir." The group at the pilot's back gasped at each other. Then Ramsey gasped at him."Oh, what does that mean?" she demanded. But his gaze remained up the river as he kindly replied:"What it says, I reckon. Don't fret, ladies—when you don't know what to do, don't do it.""Ho-o-oh!" cried Ramsey, whisking away, "I will!""Lawd 'a' massy!" Old Joy sprang for the door, but Ramsey was already out on the steps and scurrying down them. On the texas roof, however, she took a wrong direction and lost time; slipped forward round the pilot-house counting on steps which were not, and never had been, out there. Returning she lost more by meeting old Joy in the narrow way between the house and the edge of the texas roof, and when at length she sprang away for the after end of the texas and the only stair she was now sure of, whom should she espy bound thither ahead of her but Mrs. Gilmore. In that order the three hurried down to the guards of the texas and forward along them by its stateroom doors.Meantime, out at the bell the clerk had left Hugh and privately sent Ned and the cub pilot different ways. Hugh moved a pace or two aside to observe theAntelopeout on their larboard quarter. The senator and the general moved with him."She'll pass you again at Delta," remarked the senator. "You see, general—you see, Mr. Courteney,—at Delta they" (the players) "can very plausibly explain—there won't be more than two or three, if any, to explain to—that they're running from the cholera and want to hail theWestwood, which they won't more than just have time to do."She won't mind taking them," he babbled on, "already having the cholera herself. Not many up-river boats would answer a hail from Delta, but she will, for she'll see they're from this boat and that it's your wish. There she comes round the bend now. Yes, Delta's a lot safer for 'em than Helena with its wharf-boat and daylight crowd and those three red-hots going ashore with 'em. On theWestwoodthey can put up with any yarn that'll carry 'em through. They're actors and used to that sort o' thing."Musingly Hugh broke in: "Counting all the chances, isn't there a touch of cruelty in this, to the lady at least?""Oh, now, my young friend—" the senator began to rejoin, but two men lounging by stopped to ask after the father and grandfather. They were the second engineer and his striker, presently to go on watch.Mrs. Gilmore, coming along the texas guards, met the cub pilot. He perched on the railing to let her pass and a few strides farther on began to do the same for Ramsey.

In Horseshoe Cut-off the course was east. When Ned directed Ramsey's sight to its upper end, where the flood came into view from the north, she feared he would name the point it turned; but he forbore and she gazed on the thin old moon off in the southeast.

"Make out yan bunch o' sycamores?" was his nearest venture. The sycamores were on the point. Across the river where it ran concealed beyond those sycamores—he went on to tell—at the up-stream end of a low pencil stroke of forest between the head of the cut-off and the eastern stars, was another turn, Friar's Point. But her interest in points had faded, and whether friars abounded on that one or not she took pains not to inquire.

Instead, she was about to ask the cause of a strange silvering in the sky close over the black pencil stroke, when, as on Sunday, the morning star sprang into view and cast its tremulous beam on the waters. She gazed on the white splendor as genuinely enthralled as ever, though at the same time her eye easily, eagerly took in the first clerk, the senator, the general, and Hugh, standing about the captain's empty chair. They loomed as dimly as the sycamores, yet when a fifth figure drew near them she knew by his fine gait that it was the actor, relieved from the captain's sick-room by "California" and the cub pilot. A gesture from Hugh stopped him some yards off and he stood leaning on the bell.

For the actor was their theme. This was plain to every one in the pilot-house, the two waiters being gone. A remnant of the food was being consumed by "Harriet" and Joy. All the others were observing, like Ramsey, the morning star and the five men under it. Among her own and Mrs. Gilmore's draperies Ramsey found that lady's hand. Except a few low words between the pilots, conversation failed. Without leave-taking Ned left. Presently here he was beneath, on the skylight roof, and now he joined the actor. Ramsey let go the caressed hand and moved nearer to Watson. While he and she gazed far up the stream, yet watched the six men below, he repeated Ned's question.

"See that clump o' big sycamores a mite to lab-board o' where we're p'inted?"

She didn't believe she did.

"Well," he persisted, "that's it."

"That's what?"

"Why," said Watson, whose only aim was to set her once more at ease, "that's the p'int you——"

"Humph." She turned to the two ladies, who, with their eyes frankly below, were counselling together. "Let's go down there ourselves," she said, but they whispered on.

"Better not," put in Watson; "you can't help."

His kind intent did not keep the words from hurting. With a faint toss she said:

"I hoped we might be some hindrance."

She laughed in her old manner, dropped her glance again on the two men and the four, and hearkened. So did the two ladies beside her. They could all see who spoke below and could hear each voice in turn, though they could not catch what was said. The only sustained speeches were the senator's. The general's interpellations were little regarded. The silent pair at the bell heard everything of essential bearing.

The consciously belated senator had begun with rhetorical regrets for the captain's and the commodore's illness and with paternal enthusiasm for those on whom it had brought such grave new cares. His own sympathetic share in their anxieties, he had hurried on to say, had robbed him of sleep and driven him up here solely for this interview. On the way he had chanced upon the general in the——

"Sssame ffframe of mind," the general had said, while the senator pressed as straight on as theVotaress.

As far as the interests involved were private to this boat, he said, her officers and owners were entitled to keep them so and to be let alone in the management of them. But when that management became by its nature a vital part of an acute public problem—a national political issue—he felt bound, both as the Courteneys' private well-wisher and as a public servant, to urge such treatment of the matter as its national importance demanded. A spark, he said, might burn a city! A question of private ownership not worth a garnishee might set a whole nation afire! The arrival of Gilmore at the bell threw him into a sudden heat:

"My God! Mr. Courteney—Mr. clerk—Ishan't offer to lay hands onanyman; not I. AllIask is that you take yours off—of three. My dear sirs, equally as your true friend and as a lover of our troubled country Ibegyou to liberate those citizens of the sovereign State of Arkansas whom you hold in unlawful duress, and to hear before witnesses the plea they regard as righteous and of national concern."

The sight of Ned joining Gilmore heated him again: "Gentlemen, if you will do that, now, at once, you will save the fortunes of this superb boat, her honored owners, and their fleet. If you don't you wreck them forever before this day dawns. And you may—great heavens, gentlemen, youmaysee the first bloodshed of sectional strife."

"K-'tional ssstrife!" growled the general.

The clerk smiled. "Why, senator, those men don't go beyond Helena. They leave us there, before sun-up."

"Precisely, sir! And if they're not set free before you enter Helena Reach, or even pass Friar's Point, you may as well not free them at all."

Hugh glanced at the clerk as if to speak. The clerk nodded and in the pilot-house they saw Hugh begin:

"Mr. Senator, suppose we do that?"

"You would do me honor, sir, and yourselves more."

"Of course the watchmen of this boat watch."

As Hugh said this the cub pilot came from the captain's room with some word to Gilmore, who, though yearning to stay, left him and Ned and hastened back to the texas.

Meantime the senator: "I should hope so, sir. I hope every one on watch watches, sir."

"They do. And so we know that you and the general know, perfectly, that the same men who want those three released want Mr. Gilmore put ashore. Is that your wish, too?"

"It is, sssir," put in the general while the senator did some rapid thinking. Now he too replied:

"Mm—no, sir, it is not. And yet—yes, sir, it is."

"Then you would advise us to do that also?"

"I would advise you to do that also."

"Why?"

"Good Lord! my young friend, to save you! you, your father, grandfather, boats, all, and Mr. Gilmore himself!"

"How about his wife?"

"And his wife. For her to be with him may help him if he goes. It can't if he stays." The speaker had let his voice rise. The pilot-house group caught his words. Also they saw the cub pilot detain Ned when he started forward.

"Let's go down there ourselves," repeated Ramsey; but the parson's wife had whisperingly laid both hands on the wife of the actor, and Ramsey chafed to no avail.

The senator's voice dropped again. "Good God, sir, you know the longer they're aboard the worse it will be for them, and they've got to go some time or at Louisville a mob will burn theVotaressto the water's edge with them on her."

The two stared at each other, the senator's mind bewailing the loss of each golden moment. The night was not too dark to show him the poker face fitting its nickname insufferably. But not until its owner spoke again did he frown—to hide an exultant surprise.

"They could leave their maid, you think, with Madame Hayle?" was Hugh's astonishing inquiry. The senator had expected of him nothing short of a grim defiance.

"They could—they can," replied both he and the soldier. "That'll satisfy everybody." The general saw only the surface of the proposition but the senator perceived in it all the opportunity their two modest accomplices of the boiler deck asked. That pair and their adherents—not followers—you wouldn't catch them leading—they and their gathering adherents would construe the landing of the players as an attempt to deliver them out of their hands and would undertake to seize and maltreat the actor, at least, the moment he should be off the boat. That they were likely to fail was little to the senator; there would be a tumult, so managed as to bring Hugh to the actor's rescue, and in the fracas Hugh was sure of a hammering he would not only never forget but would discern that he owed, first and last, to him, the senator.

Hugh glanced at the clerk. "You had just recommended Delta Landing." The clerk nodded and he turned back to the senator. "We'll be there inside of half an hour."

"Delta will do," said the senator, his frown growing.

Hugh nodded to the clerk. The clerk looked over to Ned.

"Think Delta's above water?"

"Oh—eyes and nose out, Watson allows."

"Delta'll be all right," persisted the senator.

The clerk glanced up to the pilot-house. "Mr. Watson, we'll stop at Delta, to put off a couple o' passengers."

"Yes, sir." The group at the pilot's back gasped at each other. Then Ramsey gasped at him.

"Oh, what does that mean?" she demanded. But his gaze remained up the river as he kindly replied:

"What it says, I reckon. Don't fret, ladies—when you don't know what to do, don't do it."

"Ho-o-oh!" cried Ramsey, whisking away, "I will!"

"Lawd 'a' massy!" Old Joy sprang for the door, but Ramsey was already out on the steps and scurrying down them. On the texas roof, however, she took a wrong direction and lost time; slipped forward round the pilot-house counting on steps which were not, and never had been, out there. Returning she lost more by meeting old Joy in the narrow way between the house and the edge of the texas roof, and when at length she sprang away for the after end of the texas and the only stair she was now sure of, whom should she espy bound thither ahead of her but Mrs. Gilmore. In that order the three hurried down to the guards of the texas and forward along them by its stateroom doors.

Meantime, out at the bell the clerk had left Hugh and privately sent Ned and the cub pilot different ways. Hugh moved a pace or two aside to observe theAntelopeout on their larboard quarter. The senator and the general moved with him.

"She'll pass you again at Delta," remarked the senator. "You see, general—you see, Mr. Courteney,—at Delta they" (the players) "can very plausibly explain—there won't be more than two or three, if any, to explain to—that they're running from the cholera and want to hail theWestwood, which they won't more than just have time to do.

"She won't mind taking them," he babbled on, "already having the cholera herself. Not many up-river boats would answer a hail from Delta, but she will, for she'll see they're from this boat and that it's your wish. There she comes round the bend now. Yes, Delta's a lot safer for 'em than Helena with its wharf-boat and daylight crowd and those three red-hots going ashore with 'em. On theWestwoodthey can put up with any yarn that'll carry 'em through. They're actors and used to that sort o' thing."

Musingly Hugh broke in: "Counting all the chances, isn't there a touch of cruelty in this, to the lady at least?"

"Oh, now, my young friend—" the senator began to rejoin, but two men lounging by stopped to ask after the father and grandfather. They were the second engineer and his striker, presently to go on watch.

Mrs. Gilmore, coming along the texas guards, met the cub pilot. He perched on the railing to let her pass and a few strides farther on began to do the same for Ramsey.

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