Chapter 7

Him the mother waved to a remote chair. "Bring me that," she said, for a pretext, and turned privately to Julian, speaking too swiftly for him to reply: "Was it part of that plot that you was both on that lower deck laz' night? No? But in the city those laz' two-three day' in how many strenge place' you was--lower deck of the whole worl'--God only know', eh?--unless maybe also the devil--an' the scavenger? That was likewise part of that plot aggains' us? No? But anny'ow that comity of seven--h-ah!"--she made a wry face--"that was cause' by the wicked plotting of those Courteney'? An' that diztrac' you so bad this morning that you 'ave not notiz' even that change' face on yo' brotheh?--or that change' voice, eh? An' him he's too affraid to tell you how he's feeling bad! As faz' as you can, take him--to his room--his bed--an' say you, both, some prayers. He's godd the cholera."

XVIII

RAMSEY WINS A POINT OR TWO

There was half an hour yet before the first mate's watch would end.

He had risen from the captain's seat on the approach of that middle-aged pair who in the first hour of the voyage had enjoyed seeing Hugh and Ramsey together; a couple whose home evidently was far elsewhere--if anywhere--and who as evidently had seen the world to better advantage than most of the _Votaress's_ passengers. As he rose Hugh and Ramsey came up near one of the wheels. Seeing them start directly for him, he made a heavy show of attention to the married pair.

While the quick step of the two younger people brought them near, the husband began to reply to the mate: "Why, to the common eye, tiresome, I dare say. To the artist--I wonder! It's the only much-travelled river in the world whose most imposing sight is always the boat."

"It isn't!" whispered Ramsey to Hugh. Then openly, yet decorously, "Ahem!" she said as they lapsed into waiting attitudes. But the mate was not to be ahemmed, and while he hearkened on to the critic she could do no better than hammer the small of her back and smooth into it a further perfection.

"At the same time," continued the stranger, "it's immensely interesting; politically as to its future, scientifically as to its past." He turned to his wife: "Look, for instance, at this bit of it right here." A trained art in his pose and gesture caused Ramsey and old Joy to look as he prompted. "This is Fausse Rivière Cut-off," he continued, and the mate said it was--'False River'.

"Yes. Now, barely two generations ago"--he animatedly took Ramsey into his glance--"this stream suddenly abandoned twenty-odd miles of its own tremendous length and width and sprang through this two-mile cut-off." There was such fervor in his tone, and in his wife's mien such vivacity of interest, that the amazing event stood before Ramsey as if it had just occurred.

"You've read books about this river!" she said.

"A few, drifting down it by flatboat."

"Oh, by Christopher!" broke out the mate, "I remember you now! Yo're that play-actor! Yo're the man, by gad! who hauled me into yo' skiff half roasted and half drownded when the _Quakeress_ was a-burnin'! By George, look here! What do you want on this boat, that you ain't already got? Name it, sir, just name it! Oh, by hokey, sir, I----!"

Smilingly the actor shook his head while his wife beamed delightedly. "We haven't a want ungratified," he answered.

"Oh, please!" put in Ramsey, "yes, you have--one!"

"Have we, mademoiselle? Surely we have if you have."

The mate interposed. "That's a daughter of Gideon Hayle, sir--as good a captain, by Joe, as ever took out a boat----"

The wife nodded gayly. "We know him," she said.

"Oh!" laughed Ramsey, scanning the pair up and down.

"What is it we want, worthy daughter of Gideon Hayle?" asked the player--"you and my wife and I--and your--this is your brother, is he not?"

Ramsey's mouth and eyes spread wide. She turned to Hugh and at sight of his heavy face whisked round again with her handkerchief to her lips. The mate spoke for her:

"That's Captain Courteney's son, sir."

"What Miss Hayle wants--" began Hugh----

"What _we_ want," said Ramsey----

"Yes," said Hugh, "what we want is the recall of----"

"An order," broke in the mate. "I know; my order for them two twins to go ashore. You can't have that, Hugh."

"We can!" said Ramsey, with tears in her laugh.

"No, sir-ee!" said the mate. "Ashore they go!"

"Ashore they don't!" said Ramsey. "You just told this gentleman you'd do anything he----"

"I'd do anything he--yes, but"--the speaker looked beyond her--"Why, Mr. Play-actor, them two young Americans come up here a-smellin' o' buckwheat cakes and golden syrup, when they and some others--a general and a senator, wa'n't they?--had had some political tiff with you----"

"Oh, not political at all! There's a proposition--I had no idea it was theirs--to land our deck passengers on----"

"On Turnbull's or Natchez Island!"

Ramsey breathed an audible amazement.

"Exactly," said the player. "Well, I had the ill luck to call their scheme a bad name or two."

"Good! Now, sir, up they come here _a-demanding_ o' me to put you ashore, 'where he'll get himself lynched,' says they."

"Oh, bless my soul!" cried the actor. "If that was all and you want to please us, just let them alone."

The mate smiled to Hugh and shook his head. "It wa'n't all. _You_ know it wa'n't. Gad, Mr. Hugh, they got to go!"

"Oh, they must not!" begged both players. A few steps away the bishop and the judge were holding an earnest conversation with the grandfather Courteney, and his eye tried to call the mate. But Ramsey, holding to Hugh by his sleeve, gave the old gentleman a toss of her chin, a jerk of her curls, and took the mate by a coat button. Her slim, silken figure intercepting him, and his rude bulk smiling down into her upturned face with a commanding yet amiable restiveness, made a picture to the players and to the distant pilot, but much more than a picture to the captive himself. He had thought he had been fending off the banter of a child, but now, suddenly, this was not a child. A being was here not entirely mundane nor quite supernal yet surpassing all his earlier knowledge of feminine quality, something for which a year's hard thinking would not have found him a definition. Holding his button, she spoke low:

"Please change that order." What mysterious compulsion there was in that "please"! Her fingers tapped Hugh. "_He_ wants it changed--for me. We'll be responsible!"

"Oh, you will!" The big man did not look at Hugh; his smile broadened on their common captor. Her answering eyes laughed, but even in them, deep down, he saw a pleading ardor at once so childlike, so womanly, and so celestial that suddenly the deck seemed gone.

"Please change it! quick!" she murmured again, "for us!"

He felt an inward start and saw a vision--of the future--with those two in the midst of it. His brightening glance went belatedly to Hugh, and verily there was more of Hugh also than he had ever seen before, but the crass significance of his smile was quite lost on the pair.

"Yes," insisted Ramsey, "_we_ want it changed, him and me--I mean he and I!"

The big man's laugh drowned hers. "Oh, it's plain either way. Well, by George! that _is_ an argument. You and him! Gad, the case is covered! You and him has got me--by the hind leg!" He began to turn away, for yonder, apart from commodore, judge, and bishop, but with Madame Hayle at his side, stood the captain, giving him a sign which he promptly passed on up to the pilot. "By the hind leg," he repeated, whereat a titter broke from the averted face of old Joy, while Ramsey stood agape at her success.

"They _stay_--the twins--stay _aboard_?" she asked the actors, Hugh, and the mate in turn.

"Lord, yes!" said the latter.

On tiptoes of gratitude she had parted her lips to say more, when the air overflowed with the long bellow of the boat. "Oh," she cried protestingly in the din, "but that's to land!"

His reply was unheard, but a shake of his head reassured her as he moved toward the elder Courteneys, whom bishop and judge had left, and who now stood alone awaiting him. She faced Hugh. He was telling the actor's wife that this landing was to get a physician. Ramsey touched him and spoke low:

"We're going to have an awful time. Don't you think so?"

He did not say. The great bell tolled thrice. She waved him to look at the people ashore, of all sorts and shades, coming down to the wharf-boat to see them, but suddenly, invited by a glance from his father, he stepped away to him. "Humph!" she laughed to old Joy, and started to join her mother, who was leaving the deck. But the mother motioned her back. "Where are you going?" whined Ramsey.

"To Lucian."

The daughter halted, aghast. "Has he got it?" But her mother went on without reply. She turned to the players and, when they smiled invitingly, rejoined them. When she inquired their name they said it was Gilmore.

"Will you tell me about the _Quakeress_?" she asked.

The husband said he would. "But you don't mean now," he qualified, "when so many things are happening?"

"N-no," she replied grudgingly, and presently added: "I'm afraid my brother's got the cholera." But then she brightened triumphantly. "Anyhow," she said, "the mate didn't know that." The engine bells jingled, the wheels paused, and the shore appeared to drift down upon them, pushing the crowded wharf-boat before it. "What d'you reckon this beautiful boat is saying to herself right now?" she asked.

"She ought to say," critically put in the bishop, behind her, to the senator, while she turned and cast her head-to-foot scrutiny up and down the two, "that for the welfare of that wharf-boatful of men and boys, and of the homes they live in, she'd best not land, after all."

"That's what she _is_ saying!" defensively cried Ramsey, and, sure enough, while she laughed the scape-pipes roared and the wheels backed till the wharf-boat stood still. At the same time the pilots changed watch. The captain sauntered to the forward rail. The commodore, with the mate and Hugh, went below. So closely did the actor's eyes follow them that Ramsey asked: "What are they going to do?"

"Going ashore in the yawl, I hope, for a doctor."

"And medicines," added some one.

"And for a priest," disparagingly said the smiling bishop as they moved to the shoreward edge of the roof. "Large demands our deck passengers are making."

"An outrage!" said the senator. "It's an outrage that they, who wouldn't have dared whimper a month ago in their own country, should be allowed to behave this way here!"

"It isn't!" said Ramsey, squarely in his face. There was a general start, old Joy groaned, and Ramsey's eyes, though still in his, looked frightened; yet there was in her tone and bearing something so pertinent and worthy, even so womanly, that she had nearly every one on her side in a moment and the two players audibly murmured approval.

The senator grew benign. "My fair young lady," he said, "if your father, Gideon Hayle, were captain here he'd have those people off this boat in short metre."

"He wouldn't!" said Ramsey. Her eyes flashed and widened. Then as they darted round upon the actor her most tinkling laugh broke out, and she caught his wife's arm and rocked her forehead on it, the laugh recurring in light gusts between her words as they came singingly: "He wouldn't ... he wouldn't ... he wouldn't."

"There they go," said a voice, and down on the waters directly beneath appeared the white yawl like a painted toy, but full of men. The commodore was there and the mate. Beside the mate sat the young German who had fought the twins.

"That's the one they call Otto," said Ramsey, though how she knew is to be wondered; and somebody, to amplify, added:

"Otto Marburg. They're taking him along so the others will be quiet till he comes back."

"Humph!" said Ramsey, arching her brows to old Joy and the Gilmores and by her own glance directing theirs to the aftermost figure in the yawl. It was Hugh. He was steering.

XIX

THIS WAY TO WOMANHOOD

Noon came with a beauty of sky as if it smiled back to the smiles of a land innocent of pain, grief, or strife.

It found the _Votaress_ under full headway, with a physician aboard and Bayou Sara one great reach and two great bends behind. In a stateroom of her texas, by madame's grateful acceptance of the captain's offer, lay Lucian, torn with pain but bravely meek, with Julian in close attendance, Ramsey excluded, and the mother looking in often, though very busy yet with the doctor on the lower deck.

In the middle of the forenoon, invited by the captain, the bishop had held divine service in the ladies' cabin and, praying for his country, found himself praying also, resoundingly and with tears, for the "strange people" down under his bended knees, while out on the boiler deck the disputation concerning them steadily warmed and spread, the committee of seven feeling themselves for the moment baffled but by no means beaten--baffled, for their casual brush with Ramsey had most surprisingly, not to say unfairly, discredited their cause. "Gideon Hayle's daughter" had become as universally known by sight as "John Courteney's son," and all about among the male cabin passengers her method of debate--"It won't! They don't! He wouldn't! We shouldn't!"--with a mirth often provokingly unlike hers--was the fashion and had won two or three small victories.

"The side that laughs, nowadays and hereabouts," agreed the two players, "wins." But they said it aside from Ramsey, who, they had begun to fear, would be sadly spoiled, the juveniles were so humbly looking up to her, and so many grown-ups sought her to draw out her brief but prompt utterances upon the situation and repeat them elsewhere to those who liked their seats so much more than anything else. They tried to keep her with them and off the absorbing theme and were not without success.

Just now the word had run all through the boat that the next turn would bring her into the "Raccourci," or, as every one but the players called it, "Raccourci Cut-off." Counting up-stream, it was the second of four great shortenings of the river, which, in the brief century and a half since the country had become a white man's possession, had reduced a hundred and twenty miles of its wandering course to half as many within a straight overland distance of thirty. Wonderful to Ramsey was the story of it. The kindly Gilmore told it with a pictorial and personal interest that made it seem as if he himself had planned and supervised the whole work. One of the shortenings was Shreve's Cut-off, made only twenty-one years before this birth year of the _Votaress_. Yonder it lay, just veering into the remotest view, where Red River, over twelve hundred miles from its source in the Staked Plains beyond the Rocky Mountains, swept, two thousand feet wide, into the Mississippi without broadening the "Father of Waters" a yard.

Yet why look there, so distantly, when here between, right here under the boat's cut-water, was the Raccourci, barely four years old? The _Votaress_ was in it, half through it, before either Ramsey or Mrs. Gilmore could be fully informed, and now their attention was beyond even their own command. For yonder ahead, miles away in Shreve's Cut-off, riding the strong current under Turnbull's Island, came the _Regent_, finest and speediest of Gideon Hayle's steamers.

So late in the season her passengers were few and she was not utterly smothered in a cargo of cotton bales, yet her freight deck showed a goodly brown mass of them, above which her snowy form gleamed against the verdant background of the forested island, as dainty as a swan, while her gliding stem raised on either side a silver ribbon of water that arched itself almost to her gunwales.

"Each to her own starboard," answered the _Regent's_ mellow bell to the bell of the _Votaress_. Her whistle whitened and trumpeted in salute, and on jack-staff and verge-staff her rippling flags ran up and dipped, twice, thrice, to the answering flags of the Courteney boat. Well forward on her hurricane-deck her captain, whom many on the _Votaress_ pointed out by name, stood alone. Amid-ships her cabin-boys lined her cook-house guards. Her negro crew swarmed round her capstan with their chantey-man on its head and sent over the gliding waters the same stalwart perversion of the wilderness hymn of "Gideon's Band" to which the twins had danced the night before. Now the lone, high voice of the leader sang:

"Fus' come de animals, two by two, Fus' come de animals, two by two, Fus' come de animals, two by two, De elephantine and de kanguiroo,"

and now, while he held the key-note through the refrain's whole first line, the chorus rolled up from an octave below:

"Do you belong to Gideon's Band? Here's my heart an' here's my hand! Do you belong to Gideon's Band? Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"

No song is so poor that it may not thrill a partisan devotion. Ramsey stood on her toes. Down in his berth and in torture the shut-in Lucian faintly heard, turned his gaze to his brother, whispered "the _Regent_!" and listened for another verse. The boats were passing widely apart, and when it came only memory made its foolish lines plain to his doting ear:

"Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, De camomile and de bumblebee. Do you belong to Gideon's Band? . . . . . . . .

Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"

On the last line the singers were half a mile downstream, in Raccourci Cut-off, and Ramsey and the _Votaress_ were well started up the ten-mile reach from Red River Landing to Fort Adams.

How swiftly and incessantly the scene changed. Down in a stateroom near the boiler deck some beginner on the horn was dejectedly playing "A Life on the Ocean Wave," but even with pestilence aboard and a brother stricken with it what an exalted, exalting life was a life on this mighty stream! Flat lands? Flat waters? It was the highest, widest outlook into the world of nature and of man she had ever had. Monotonous?--when one felt oneself a year older to-day than yesterday and growing half a month's growth every hour? In yesterday's childishness she had begun at Post Forty-six to keep count of all the timber rafts and flatboats met, and here in this long stretch came three more of the one and five of the other, with men hurrahing to her from them--men as wild as the wilderness, yet with homes and families away back up the great tributaries and their tributaries. And here were mile-wide cotton fields, with the black people hoeing in them and looking no bigger than flocks of birds feeding. And here came another steamboat--and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall. Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow and cottonwood jungles of the creeping shores; but while the "labboard" shore was still Louisiana the "stabboard" was now her own native Mississippi.

Yes, these wild shores were States--States of the great Union, the world's hope; Jackson's, Clay's, Webster's Union, which "must and shall be preserved," "now and forever, one and inseparable." Somewhere between these shores, moreover, and not behind but away on up-stream, probably, Mr. Watson said, in Dead Man's Bend, was, once more, the _Antelope_. In the long wait at Bayou Sara, where Hugh and the outlandish Otto--who could speak French--had found the priest while the commodore and the mate were getting the doctor, the _Antelope_ had reappeared, swept up, and foamed by, and now was so far ahead that in hardly less than another hundred and sixty miles could she be again overtaken. But to Ramsey, even without the _Antelope_ or any or all of the sights and facts of landscape and history, no moment could go stale while the tale of Phyllis and the _Quakeress_ waited like funds in a bank, and while the commodore, the captain, and Hugh, the pilots, the mate, the Gilmores, the judge, general, bishop, squire, senator, Otto Marburg in his green coat, and dozens and scores of others were all over the boat, each more and more a story, a study, as hourly she grew older.

On the bench close behind her in the pilot-house a lady with needlework, a gentleman with _De Bow's Review_ (the squire's sister and brother-in-law), had begun to talk with the Gilmores and presently mentioned the twins, speaking in such a tone of doom as to give Ramsey a sudden panic.

"It's fine!" said the husband, praising Julian's devotion to his stricken brother. "And they are fine. Their faults--which you've had occasion to discover, sir--are spots on the sun; the faults, madam, of all our young Southern gentlemen----"

"Would you say of all?" asked the actor's wife.

"No!" said the other lady, "no, not of all!" and her husband was glad to stand corrected.

"No," he admitted, "but still of almost all; faults of which we may almost say, sir, that we may almost be proud!"

"Oh, well," begged his wife, "please almost don't say it! They're the faults of our 'peculiar institution' and I wish our 'peculiar institution' were--" She sewed hard.

"In the deep bosom of the ocean buried," suggested her husband to the players. "Why, honestly, so do I. But it's not, and can't be, and as long as it can't be we----"

"Oh, well," said his wife, "don't let's begin on that."

Reckless of institutions Ramsey turned. "Is my brother worse?" she broke in, but a white-jacket entered with the dinner-bell and spoke softly to old Joy. "Yes," said Ramsey to him, "I'm Miss Hayle. What is it? Is my brother worse?"

"Miss Hayle, Mr. Hugh Co'teney make his comp'ments----"

Ramsey laughed in relief.

"Yass'm, an' say' cap'm cayn' come to de table an' yo' ma she cayn't come----"

"I know she can't. Is my brother----?"

"And de commodo' he at de gemp'men's table, an' so he, Mr. Hugh, he 'p'inted to de ladies' table, an' will you please fo' to set in de place o' yo' ma?"

"Oh, rid-ic-ulous! Who? me? I?" The laugh grew plaintive.

"Yes, you; why not?" said the pilot at the wheel, with his eyes fixed far up the river.

But Ramsey glanced at her short skirts and laughed to all by turns: "Oh, it's just some ridiculous mistake!"

"No, miss, 'tain't no mistake. All de yetheh ladies incline de place." Every one laughed. "Oh, he on'y off' it to one! But when she say fo' to off' it to you den dey all say de same; yass'm, sawt o' in honoh o' yo' ma."

"They're afraid that seat'll give 'em the cholera," said the pilot in grim jest, still gazing up-stream, but the ladies cried out in denial for all their sex.

"I accept," said Ramsey, with a downward pull at her draperies. "How's my brother?"

"Thank y'ma'am," was the bowing waiter's only reply. He tripped down the pilot-house steps and away.

"Your brother," said the squire's sister as they all followed, "isn't in nearly so much pain, we hear."

Ramsey flashed: "Does that mean better--or worse?"

"Why--we--we can't always be sure."

"Ringading tingalingaty, ringadang ding!" sang the festive bell up and down the deck to which they began to descend by a narrow stair, old Joy at the rear. Madame Hayle, ascending by another with the Bayou Sara priest, espied the nurse and beckoned her. The pilot, high above, observed the three as they met, although his ear was bent to a speaking-tube. Now he answered into it: "Yes, sir.... Yes, close above the point--Point Breeze, yes, sir."