Chapter 11

Ned slipped from the bench to go, but Watson looked back with a light beckon of the head and he turned to the wheel. Thence he glanced down over the breast-board, over the forward eaves of the texas, down to the skylight roof and upon several persons. First, the boat's commander. He was leaving his seat at the approach, from the head of a boiler-deck stair, of Madame Hayle and the doctor. On the skylight roof, near the bell, were the two players, just greeting Hugh as from the other side he reached the deck and stepped up to their level. On the same roof, midway between these and the front of the texas, were the squire's sister and her husband returning from their search for shade. And lastly, close after them, came Ramsey, a source of general astonishment. For the gown she was in and whose lower possibilities had aroused Ned's avowed and Watson's concealed interest was her mother's and swept the deck.

Madame Hayle grew more beautiful as with a play of indignation which wholly failed to disguise her pleasure she cried: "By what _per_-mission? by what _per_-mission have you pud--my--clothes?"

The girl would have flown to her arms but the doctor forbade, and for second choice she set up a dainty tripping to and fro athwartships; dipping, rising, skipping, swaying, bridling, like a mocking-bird on a garden wall. It made Ned and Watson themselves worth seeing. Professional dignity set their faces like granite though every vein seethed with a riot of laughter. But the laughter's chief cause was not Ramsey.

"Look at Hugh," muttered Watson, gently drawing down the wheel for the _Votaress_ to sweep round into a northward reach at whose head Natchez Island would presently show itself. To look at Hugh took nerve, but in a moment----

"Look at her," said Ned.... "There! she tipped her nose at him!"

"She didn't!"

"She did. Wats', yo' game ain't never goin' to work."

"Ned, y'ain't got the sense of a loon."

"Well, I swear I've got more'n Hugh--or her."

XXVIII

WORDS AND THE "WESTWOOD"

Down on the roof, while Ramsey's mother started with the physician around the skylights for the texas, and Hugh and Gilmore conversed with the captain, Mrs. Gilmore, her hands on Ramsey, said to madame:

"I want her now, to begin to make ready for tomorrow evening. My dear"--to the girl--"I've a dozen dresses that will become you better than this one."

"Long?" cried Ramsey. "I'll take the lot!" She felt Hugh distantly looking and listening.

"We won't trade on Sunday," laughed Mrs. Gilmore; "but you mustn't"--scanning her approvingly--"ever put on a short dress again."

"Ho-oh, I never will!" said Ramsey, with a toss meant for Hugh, who went by, hurrying aft to meet a newcomer. She started after him. Madame Hayle, in that direction, had gone into the sick-room, whence Ramsey's brother Julian, with barely a word to his mother, had come out. Stepping down into the narrow walk between the roofs of cabin and pantry and glancing over his shoulder upon the company about the bell, he winced at sight of his sister's attire. Yet he kept his course and was well started aft before he saw that he was being met by some one in the narrow way, and by whom but Marburg. It was that alien whom Hugh was hastening to reach and on whom Ramsey was staring. He had come up from the engine room through the steward's department, by the unguarded route which Basile's ascent had revealed, and now came face to face with a foe where there was room only for friends to meet and pass. So said the eyes of each to each, but just then a quick footfall on the cabin roof, behind and somewhat above him, caused Julian to face round and he confronted Hugh.

"Mr. Hayle," was Hugh's word, "what will you have, sir?"

"Nothing, sir, of you! What will _you_ have of _me_, sir?"

Ramsey glided by both and halted before the exile, whose scowl vanished in a look so grateful and supplicating that her words, clearly meant to justify his presence, caught in her throat: "What will you--have, sir? My mother?--back again?--and the doctor?"

"Yes," he replied, and then added in German with an anguish of gesture which was ample interpretation, "yes, for _my_ mother! for my little brother! Ah, God! he is not dead! He is yet alive! His arms are as supple as _these_. There is color still in his cheeks!"

She stood dumb with horror. Yet she woke to action as, close beside her, she heard her brother snarl at Hugh:

"I'll go where I please! Who stops me, God pity him!"

She dropped nimbly from the skylights' overhang to the alien's level and with looks as beseeching as his waved him back a step. Then with the same mute entreaty she faced Julian and Hugh. But there was a ludicrous contrast, visible to all, between Hugh's phlegm and her brother's pomp, and by a flash of feminine instinct she divined the best mood with which to match it. Grimly elated, Hugh saw what was coming. Julian saw, and groaned a wearied wrath. The captain, the commodore--for the commodore had returned--the Gilmores, the Yazoo couple, the pilots overhead, all waited with lively and knowing gaze. She went limp, hid her face, swayed, sank to one knee, and filled the whole width of the narrow passage with arms and draperies, the meanwhile breaking into a laugh so wholly soliloqual that the two players became learners. But again she sprang erect and had hardly thrown her curls back from her blushing face when her mother, the bishop, and the doctor stepped from the sick-room, and madame addressed the immigrant:

"Ah, ritturn, if you ple-ease. Me, I am ritturning!"

"Yes," chimed the bishop and the doctor; "yes, at once!" and the exile, with pleading looks to Ramsey, to the others by turn and to her again, went below. Madame and the physician began to follow.

"How's Lucian?" called Ramsey after them.

"Getting well," replied both. They passed behind the wheel-house and only the pilots knew that at its corner Madame Hayle stopped where she could still see and hear. All others kept their eyes on Julian, who was in a redder heat than ever, and on Hugh, who was addressing him in a depth of tone that amused the Gilmores almost as keenly as it did Ramsey, who had rejoined them at his back. Suddenly he faced around.

"If Miss Hayle," he said, "would as soon go below----"

Miss Hayle sang her reply, bugled it: "She would no-ot."

Hugh stepped down into her brother's path and faced him again: "You have written your father a letter----"

Julian's head flew up but bent in slow avowal.

"To be put aboard the _Antelope_," pursued Hugh----

The head went higher: "Well, sir?"

"To outrun this boat."

"And--if--I--have, sir?"

"Why, yes," murmured the squire's brother-in-law and sister, to the Gilmores, "suppose he has?"

"So have I," said Hugh to Julian. He glanced up to the Yazoo couple and then to the bishop self-isolated near the sick-room door. Ramsey and the couple laughed. Hugh turned her way again: "If Miss Hayle----"

"She wouldn't," said Ramsey, laughing more.

"Well, sir!" drawled the waiting Julian, to Hugh.

Hugh waved a hand toward the bishop: "That gentleman has risked his life for your sick brother."

"Yes," said Ramsey. The bishop scowled up the river. Julian scowled at Hugh.

"Well, sir?" he once more challenged.

"He was told he was wanted as a minister," said Hugh.

"_Well, sir?_"

"He was wanted merely to get your letter off secretly."

"You lie!"

"Oh!" sighed the Yazoo pair. Ramsey shrank upon Mrs. Gilmore.

"Not at all," said a quiet voice overhead and the eyes of Julian, blazing upward, met Watson's blazing down.

"Come," said the player's wife to Ramsey, "come away."

"I won't," tearfully laughed Ramsey, and Mrs. Gilmore and the squire's sister had to laugh with her.

"The lie," said Hugh, "will keep. Your letter is such that the bishop declines to touch it."

The bishop swelled. Julian recoiled and, glancing behind him, confronted his mother.

"My son," she began, but he whirled back to Hugh.

"You keyhole spy!" he wailed; "you eavesdropping viper!"

Ramsey came tiptoeing along the edge of the pantry roof to light down between them but he imperiously motioned her off, still glaring at Hugh and gnawing his lip with chagrin. "Oh, never mind!" was all he could choke out; "never you mind!" He ceased again, to catch what Hugh was replying to him. Said Hugh:

"I'll take your letter and send it with my own."

"No, sir! No, you grovelling sneak!"

"Mais, yass!" called Madame Hayle from her place, and Ramsey laughed from hers, but a new voice arrested every one's attention. The bishop wheeled round to it with an exclamation of dismay that was echoed even by Julian. In the sick-room door stood Lucian, half dressed and feebly clinging to the jamb.

"Let him do it, Jule!" he cried in a tremulous thin voice. "Take the whelp at his word! Don't you see? Don't you see, Jule? We'll have him in a nine hole. It'll be hell for him if he puts it through and worse if he slinks it!" He tried to put off the bishop's sustaining arm.

A light of discernment filled Julian's face. There was no time to ponder. He had always trusted Lucian for the cunninger insight and did it now though Lucian lay in the bishop's arms limp and senseless. He drew forth the letter. Gayly stooping over the skylights Ramsey reached for it and passed it to Hugh. Julian sprang up to the bishop, who had borne Lucian into the sick-room and now filled its door again, waving a cheerful reassurance.

"A mere swoon," said the bishop; "all right again."

"It may be all right up there," the squire's sister began to say to the actor's wife--and hushed. But Ramsey had heard, as she watched her mother hurry below to the young Marburg brother lying as limp and faintly pink in death as her brother up here in life; heard, and thought of the perils in store for Hugh and his kin and her and hers unless this sweet, wise mother could charm them away as sunlight charms away pestilence. Mr. Gilmore called her:

"Come, we've lots to do."

But how could one come just then? A slight turn of the boat's head was putting Natchez Island close on her larboard bow and, seven miles away, bringing hazily into sight Natchez herself, both on her bluffs and "under-the-hill." Nay, more; abreast the _Votaress_ was another fine boat. The _Westwood_, she was named. Her going was beautiful, yet the _Votaress_ was gradually passing her. The Yazoo pair knew her well. When they made salute toward two men who stood near her forward skylights, one of them returned it.

"Why should he be so solemn?" asked the wife.

"Why shouldn't he?" laughed Ramsey.

"Because he's a mere passenger, on his wedding tour."

"Humph!" said Ramsey. "Weddings are solemn things. Is that other man the captain?" she asked the husband.

"No, I regret to say, he's only her first clerk."

"Why should you regret to say it?" inquired the girl; but the wife, too, had a question:

"Do you think there's anything wrong?"

"N-no, oh, no."

The _Westwood's_ clerk made a sign to Captain Courteney. The captain glanced up to Watson, and the two boats, still at full speed, began to draw sidewise together. But Ramsey's liveliest interest was in the _Westwood's_ crew, who, far below about her capstan, were paying their compliments to the newer, larger, speedier boat in song and refrain with stately wavings and dippings of ragged hats and naked black arms. Now the boats' guards almost touched and their commanders spoke so quietly together that she did not hear their words. But she noted the regretful air with which John Courteney shook his head to the _Westwood's_ clerk and then to the passenger, and the _Westwood_ began again to drop behind. Hugh came near, paused, and glanced around.

"Looking for the commodore?" she asked.

"I thought you went down with Mrs. Gilmore," he replied, "to rehearse your part in the play."

"Commodore's down on the lower deck," she said; "freight deck--with mom-a--and the bishop."

Hugh showed astonishment. "The bishop?"

"Yes, mom-a made him go." She laughed. "Some of the sick folks down there are Protestants and were threatening to turn Catholic. Is anybody sick aboard the _Westwood_?"

"No."

"Then where's her captain?"

Hugh made no reply but to meet her steady gaze with his own till she asked in a subdued voice: "Cholera?"

Hugh nodded. Each knew the other was aware of the song that floated up after them from the boat behind.

"What did the bridegroom want?" asked the girl.

"Wanted to give us a thousand dollars to take his bride--with him or without him--aboard the _Votaress_."

"But when he heard how much worse off we are--" prompted she. "Yes."

"But, Mr. Hugh----"

"Yes?"

"Anyhow, this boat hasn't got that boat's trouble!"

"No," said Hugh, and knew they were both thinking of his father. Together they stood hearkening to the last of the _Westwood's_ song:

"'Ef you git dah befo' I do-- _O, high-low!_-- Jest tell 'em I'm a-comin' too-- _John's gone to high-low!_'"

XXIX

STUDYING THE RIVER--TOGETHER

They did not tie to the wharf-boat at Natchez. At that stage of water there was good landing a few yards below, where the sandy bank was not too wet to walk across to a higher one which floods never reached, close under the bluff. Here had left the boat half a dozen passengers including the judge and his sister. So good-by to that lady. Never would _she_ have set foot on the _Votaress_ had she dreamed she was to be "dumped off" on such a spot. She believed that girl of Gideon Hayle's had laughed as she went up the perilous stage plank. And really there is no proof to the contrary.

Another incident awoke in Ramsey no mirth. Yet she never forgot it. It occurred on the upper, greener level that overlooked, across the river, a great sweep of Louisiana lowlands at that moment bathed in a golden sunset. The same light fell upon the incident itself--the Marburg lad's burial; fell upon the bent mother standing behind the priest and between her elder son and Madame Hayle, surrounded by her fellow exiles, many of whom, with faces hidden like hers, wept more for her bereavement than they had earlier done for their own. So the rude pine coffin descended into the unhallowed ground. From the hurricane-deck Ramsey looked down with wet eyes to the meek mourner returning aboard on the arm of her Otto. Thinking how easily in the play of chance the lost brother might have been saved and her saved brother lost, and recalling the plight of the _Westwood_, she suddenly realized that no one could tell who might go next--"to high-low." Otto Marburg, glancing up, saw her tears, and would have paused but for the sacred burden on his arm.

At the same time, for eyes, even wet eyes, as lively as Ramsey's there were livelier things to see. Hugh had gone ashore and up to the wharf-boat, crossed it, and boarded the busy _Antelope_ with several letters in hand, the twins' letter among them. Said the squire's brother-in-law:

"That boy must know the danger to him there is in that document," and the planter of Milliken's Bend agreed.

So did their wives. There was "everything in it he wouldn't want there and nothing he would want."

He was doing the "brave thing," they all said, and the wives called it too brave. The brave thing, they thought, "ran a slim chance against Hayle's twins."

"My dear ladies," said the planter, "it runs the only chance he has. The brave thing is the only thing those two young fire-eaters have any respect for." He stopped short; Ramsey had overheard. Yet she kept a pretty front.

"Why do you call him 'that boy'?" she laughingly asked.

"Well, really, because," replied the planter, twinkling, "he's so much more than a boy. Don't you think so?"

She gave him a sidelong glance, twitched her curls, and looked down ashore. Her mother was there with the "boy's" grandfather. They were getting into a rickety hack. Now Hugh joined them from the _Antelope_, and they went whipping up the steep road across the face of the bluff and into the "stuck-up" Natchez atop the hill. She guessed their errand.

Meantime the _Westwood_ had reached the wharf-boat, put her bridal pair aboard the _Antelope_, and backed out again so promptly that as the _Antelope_ cast off and started after her she had rounded Marengo Bend and was showing only her smoke across Cowpen Point. And now reappeared Madame Hayle, the commodore, and Hugh, bringing with them--welcome sight--two sisters of charity. The moment they touched the lower deck the _Votaress_, with John Courteney on her roof, backed away, and soon, in the first bend above, any eye could plainly see the _Westwood_, still less than four miles off across country though eight by the river, with the _Antelope_ four miles behind her and four ahead of the _Votaress_. Said the pilot, Ned, to Ramsey, pulling the wheel down to head into the crimson west:

"Four 'n' four's eight, ain't it? Used to be. Can't tell what'll change on this river. When Lake Concordia, over here in Louisiana, was part o' the river, an' Vidal's Island, in its middle, was in the river, this bend wa'n't jest eight mile' round, it wuz twenty. These are _the_ bends. F'om here to Cairo we got to run one etarnal wriggle o' six hund'd 'n' eighty mile' to make three hund'd 'n' seventy."

"Oh, I'm glad of it! At least--ain't--ain't you?"

He shook his head: "Not this run." The supper bell rang and Ramsey fled, but he repeated: "No, not this run!" He turned and looked back upon Natchez bluff far behind the steamer's wake. "I wished every last Hayle on this blessed boat wuz off o' her an' 'top o' you!"

On that bluff, in colonial days, had stood Fort Rosalie, whose dire tragedy Ramsey, down in the cabin, found Gilmore, at table, recounting to Hugh and others: murder of its French settlers by Natchez Indians and the extermination of the Natchez tribe by the French from New Orleans. He was brief, and for a good ending went on to recall his own first sight of the spot, before the time of steamboats, when Natchez was a village; how, as his low broadhorn came drifting down around this point close above it, the bold rise swung into view, crowned with pines, its lower parts evergreen with the bay magnolia, and its precipitous front lighted up, as now, with the last beams of day. He made it seem so fair and important that Ramsey's native pride and a shame of her previous blindness almost drove her from the board to take a last look at it from the stern guards; but she was again in her mother's seat and again very hungry. He was good company to every one, the actor; always acting, yet always as natural as if acting and nature were one; a quiet education to Hugh, an unfailing joy to his wife, and both to Ramsey.

After supper the players got out an old two-act play for the next evening's entertainment. They cast Hugh and Ramsey for two small rôles, and for two larger ones found a young brother and sister--of Napoleon--at the mouth of the Arkansas--who would have just time to act them before leaving the boat. Supper had prevented its guests from seeing the _Votaress_ turn Giles's Bend and Rifle Point and meet another boat as glittering as she and pass Lake Saint John and Fairchild's Bend--where the river widened to three miles about Fairchild's double island. Wherefore the indulgent Gilmores, on Ramsey's pleading, elected to coach first the brother and sister--of Napoleon--letting Hugh ascend to the starlight of the roof and Ramsey follow attended once more by old Joy.

She met Hugh at the foot of the pilot-house steps. "We are postponed!" she said, "you and me--I!"

"Yes. Do you know for what?"

"Yes, because those other two parts are so much bigger than ours, and because--I d'n' know--I believe they think I'm sleepy--ha, ha! I'm glad, for _I_ want to study this _river_, all I can, day and night. And you--must, mustn't you?"

"Yes," he said, which was all he was to say in the play.

Half-way up the steps she halted: "You're to be a captain on it yourself as soon as you're fit, ain't you?"

"If that time ever comes."

"Phew! how modest" She stared an instant, turned her back, clasped the rail, and with her forehead on her arms laughed till Hugh was weary--not necessarily long.

He spoke: "Here come the _Westwood_ and the _Antelope_."

"Where?" She glanced round, sprang up the steps, and soon was making room for him beside her at a larboard window behind Watson. Looking thence across the long, slim neck of Cole's Point they saw the two boats coming back westward in the upper reach of the fourteen-mile eastern loop they were running to make two miles into the north. Now the _Westwood_ passed and now the _Antelope_, their skylights glinting like fireflies through the intervening tree tops, and Watson showed how to tell them apart by night. Presently they turned north again and vanished, leaving the mighty stream to its three students.

"It'll cut off this whole fourteen mile' some day," said Watson; but the other two, in their dim nook, remained silent. He knew that sort of silence. When Ramsey by and by spoke, her words were to Hugh exclusively and in undertone.

"The _Quakeress_--Oh, I didn't mean----!"

"That's all right," said Hugh. "The _Quakeress_----!"

"Oh, I meant the _Antelope_! She'll soon be in the lead again?"

"Yes."

"With both those letters."

"Both."

"Ain't you glad I didn't mean the _Quakeress_?"

"No."

"Well, you're glad I didn't mean Phyllis, ain't you?"

"No."

"Would you really be willing to tell me about Phyllis?"

"I would."

"You wasn't willing--before--was you?--were you?"

"No."

"What's changed your mind?"

"Lawd, missy!" sighed the forgotten Joy.

But Ramsey insisted: "What's changed it?"

"You, chiefly."

"I haven't," very quietly said the girl.

"You have."

Ramsey glanced cautiously at Watson, but the pilot's eyes were a league ahead. Hers returned to Hugh. "Wasn't it my brothers changed your mind--the twins?"

"They helped."

She looked him over absently: "I love my brothers."

"I don't," said Hugh.

She stared again and slowly remarked: "You haven't got to.... You're powerful queer, ain't you?"

"Not by choice."

"I'm queer. Wish I wasn't--wa'n't--weren't--but I am."

"Yes," said Hugh, "you are."

She tilted her chin, stepped to Watson's side, and called down over the breast-board to the Gilmores, who had finished with their two pupils for a time and had taken chairs with a newly found young married pair on the texas roof:

"Oho, down there!"

"Oho!" the group answered.

"Do you want us to stay up here?" asked Ramsey. "'Cause if you do we'll come right down. Or if you'd rather we'd come down we'll stay up here!" It was a new note.

The players laughed. "It's the long dress says that," they observed to the other pair.

"It certain'y is," replied they; which is Southern form for "probably."

XXX

PHYLLIS AGAIN

About eleven o'clock that same Sunday evening the _Votaress_, at full speed, was in a part of the river whose remarkable character sustained the son of John Courteney and the daughter of Gideon Hayle in the theory that their interest in it was all that had brought them to--all that detained them in--the unlighted pilothouse, on the visitors' bench, beside Watson. Below, the passengers were for the most part once more in slumber. The exhorter had loudly sung himself to sleep:

"'Mahch-ign thoo Im-madn-uedl's groudnd Toe fahr-eh wordlds odn high.'"