Chapter XXXII: A Prophet in the Wilderness 222 (6)

This young pair were expecting to go ashore within the next half-hour at "New Carthage," a city of seven houses, nearly opposite another of equal pride called Palmyra, and some four miles above the head of Hurricane Island, whose foot the _Votaress_ was then passing. They and the Gilmores were still down at the forward edge of the texas roof, the players finding the Carthaginians very attractive: fluent on morals, cuisine, manners, steamboats, the turf, fashions, the chase; voluble on the burdensomeness of the slave to his master, the blessedness of the master to his slave; but sore to the touch on politics and religion--with their religion quite innocently adjusted to their politics--and promptly going hard aground on any allusion to history, travel, the poets, statistics, architecture, ornithology, art, music, myths, memoirs, Europe, Asia, Africa, homoeopathy, or phrenology. It entertained the players just to see how many things the happy lovers knew nothing about and to hear them state in some new form, each time they backed off a sand-bar of their own ignorance, that they had seen the world, sucked the orange, yet found no spot of earth so perfect to live in as New Carthage.

The briefest sittings at such entertainment had been enough for Hugh, too much for Ramsey, and had driven them back, twice and thrice, to that fairer world on high in the pilot-house, where they could study the river undistracted. There and thence, now together, now apart, they had gone and come all through Watson's watch, moved by Hugh's duties or her caprice. Their each new meeting had been by accident, but it is odd how often accidents can occur--"at that stage o' the game," thought the kind pilot, and on each recurrence he noticed that they had got a bit farther on in the story of Phyllis.

"How long is this island, Mr. Watson?" inquired Ramsey, as if islands were all she was sitting up for.

"Two mile' 'n' a half. D'd you ask me that before? I don't hear much behind me if it ain't hove right at me." Stalest device of the sentimentalist--the self-sacrificing lie! But Watson cared not for its staleness if it might promote the game. And the game, though as wanderingly as the river, went on. Without strict order of time, now on the bench, now on the roof, early and late, here is how it went:

"You're not afraid of my brothers, are you? I'm not."

"I'm afraid for them. And for my father and grandfather. And for your father and your mother."

"Good gracious!" laughed Ramsey, then mused, and then asked: "Ain't you afraid for me?"

Hugh said nothing, and thenceforth her tone grew more maidenly though her words remained childlike enough.

"I know why you want to tell me about Phyllis," she added more softly. "You think if you don't my brothers will."

"They don't know the facts," murmured Hugh.

"Don't they think they do? And ain't that the trouble?"

"Yes." Hugh thought her insight surprising, while she enjoyed the spiritual largeness she fancied she saw in his immobile features. "Yes," he repeated, "they think they do; that's the trouble, much of it."

"How do you know they don't?"

"By what they believe and by what I know."

"How do you know you know?"

"By my own eyes and Phyllis's own lips."

"Would she tell you things she never told any one else?"

"Yes, things she never dared tell any one else."

Ramsey pondered, laughed, and pondered and laughed again: "Why, most of that time you was--you were--nothing but a little toddler. Didn't she love you?"

"She hated me."

Ramsey flinched but quickly laughed a bright unbelief to the youth's face, a face which might as well have been a wood-carving. "Oh," she cried, "how ridiculous!"

"She used to flog me, cruelly."

Ramsey gasped: "And you never told? Oh, why--why----?"

"She said she'd kill me--and my mother. And she'd have done it, somehow."

"But she's been dead ten years!"

"Has she?"

"Why, of course! Wasn't she on the _Quakeress_ when----?"

"So was I."

Ramsey flinched worse and stared away with lips apart, wondering if that was what gave him that look.

"But Phyllis," she resumed, "was lost."

"Was she?"

"Why ... wasn't she? Mammy Joy says my uncle--in the blazing pilot-house--did you know my uncle Dan?"

"Yes. That night, half an hour before the burning----"

"Oh! was it at night?"

"Yes. I was sitting with Phyllis, behind him, with him at the wheel, as we're sitting now behind Mr. Watson."

"Uncle Dan didn't hate you, did he?"

"No, indeed."

"Then why didn't you tell him about Phyllis? He was her master, you know."

"I did. He wormed it out of me. He was like you--in some things."

The questioner flashed and stared but then dropped her eyes. "Did he--have red curls?"

"Yes, redder than yours."

"Humph!" ... She mused.... "I'm tired here. Let's go down by the Gilmores and walk--'thortships!"

They went. "Well?--about Phyllis? What did she whip you for? Being bad?"

"Bad or good was all one to Phyllis."

"Wasn't--weren't--weren't you ever bad, Mr. Hugh?"

"Frequently."

"How were you bad?--steal jam?--eat green plums?"

"Yes; had fights, went in swimming--in snake holes----"

"D'd you tease your sisters?--pull their hair?--let the sawdust out o' their dolls?"

"Yes, yes, all that."

"Hmm! that's nothing. Basile and I--Ain't you going on? Of course, if you don't want to I--I shan't worm. Why did Phyllis--oh, pshaw!"

With the exclamation came such one-sided mirth that Mrs. Gilmore looked round. But her husband said there would never be anything to look round for while "that laugh" kept its quality.

Presently Hugh found himself murmurously "going on" and Ramsey listening. It was a great moment in both lives. If we cannot see it so, no matter; but in still depths of perception below all formulated thought both the youth and the girl were aware, separately, that the story of Phyllis was not the largest fruit of the hour.

Phyllis, Hugh said, had not hated him alone. In her heart had burned a pure flame of wrath against every member--save one--of the fair race to which she belonged by three-fourths of her blood but by not one word of human law. Wronged for the race she disclaimed, she hated the race that disclaimed her. Hated even the mothers of Hugh and Ramsey, who abhorred slavery, a slavery enthralling men, women, children in whose veins ran not four only but eight and sixteen times as much masters' blood as slaves'. She hated them because all their sweet abhorrence found no deliverance or revenge for her. Mitigations there were, but mitigations she loathed. The uncompromising quality of her hatred was one thing that had made dissimulation easy, and through all Hugh's childhood she had practised it perfectly in every relation and direction on every one but him. Another easement had been her indomitable, unflagging triple purpose to be free, to be reunited to her master, and to be revenged.

And a third, craftily won through the trustfulness of Hugh's Quaker mother, had been the opportunity to wreak the frequent overflow of her resentments on him. The fact that he was almost of the exact age of her own lost offspring had forever goaded her, and to him, with each maltreatment, she had told again her heart's whole burden, outermost wrong, innermost rage, thus recovering poise to treat his sisters and brother with exemplary care and tenderly to discuss with their mother Hugh's precocious reticence and gravity. Always she had held a self-command cunningly tempered in the fire of her triple resolve and fitted to the desperate chances with which she unceasingly crossed daggers. She never tired of telling her little white slave that, having herself once got the lash, she was only paying interest on it through him. Him, at least, she would teach to hate slavery as she hated it.

Hugh's listener moved as if to touch him. A boat was coming by. They paused in their "thort-ships" walk and with a slight choke in her voice Ramsey asked: "You know what I hope?" Her voice went lower. "I hope you learned."

"That's the strangest part," said Hugh. "I did."

The boat passed, a cloud of burning gems. "Go on," said Ramsey, "I can see that and hear you at the same time."

But Hugh's mind was too masculine for such legerdemain and though she sighed and sighed again he waited until the vision grew dim astern. Then, as he was about to resume, she interrupted.

XXXI

THE BURNING BOAT

"Where was the commodore all that time?" she asked.

"In Europe. We did business there too. It wasn't all river and boats those days."

"Humph!" She preferred it to be all river and boats.

"But at length," said Hugh----

"What length?"

"Ten years. Grandfather was coming home, to stay. We were all to go up to Saint Louis on the _Quakeress_."

"Phyllis too?"

"Yes, to meet him there and bring him back with us."

"Ten years!" marvelled Ramsey. "Hadn't Phyllis ever heard from my--from Walnut Hills?"

"Now and then, yes; and when those ten years seemed to have worn her, body and soul, to the breaking point----"

"You're strange. You feel tender to her yet."

"Perhaps I do. One day--night--she got word--I heard it from my nursery bed--she got news; news that to her was as good and as bad as news could be."

"That _he_ was on the river again!" guessed Ramsey.

"Yes, relearning it--it changes so fast, you know--and that your father had asked my father to employ him; for he didn't want to go with your father."

"No, Hayles will _fight_ for Hayles, pop-a says, but they won't work for them."

"Also that he was going to be married. But Phyllis told my mother so meekly that the past was all past----"

"And she'd seemed so good for so long, I suppose."

"Yes--that even my father thought it _was_ past, and when we went aboard the boat and it started up the river, there at the wheel was your uncle Dan."

"You didn't dare tell on her?--Oh, you were only ten years old!"

"It wasn't that. I was older than I am to-day. But if I told a word I'd have to tell all, and by that time she'd made me believe that about all the guilt was mine."

"Yours! Well, and then? Was his lady-love on the boat?"

"No, but a passenger who came aboard at Natchez turned out to be the overseer Phyllis had once run away from."

"Oh! oh! the man who lost the child! What a difference that must have made!"

"Difference a wind makes to a fire. And yet for a time things ran along as smoothly as the old boat."

"She wasn't any older than you."

"For a boat she was, several times. Mr. Watson," asked Hugh from the roof between the Gilmores and the pilot, "what's the average age of a boat on this river?"

"Average age? Well, it varies! Say about five year'."

Hugh's voice dropped again. "The overseer being aboard, Phyllis and I, to be clear of him, were allowed free run of the roofs, and I being the captain's son it was so natural to see us often in the pilot-house----"

"And she was so wary, and you were so silent----"

"Yes--that no one noticed anything and the past still seemed past. One day your uncle Dan told me of your twin brothers. They'd spent half a year with him."

"Which mom-a's sorry for to this day. They worship him yet, she says. Go on; skip their visit."

"Well, when we reached Saint Louis I knew that he and Phyllis had agreed on something perfectly joyful to her. I don't know even now--what it was. She was to be set free, but that was only a small part."

"Skip again. The commodore joined you?"

"No, he failed us. We had to turn back without him."

"But with Uncle Dan, of course?"

"Yes, in wedding clothes. And with the overseer and with Phyllis. She'd tried to run away again, in Saint Louis, but she couldn't do it without my mother's help, and my mother, though she declared the laws were shameful, wouldn't break them."

"I'd 've broken them!" whispered Ramsey. "Well, you turned back?"

"Yes, and I saw at once there was something horribly wrong. Day and night Phyllis was frantic. She hid her feelings from others, wonderfully, but she poured them out on your uncle Dan. It was then he suspected how she'd been treating me, and coaxed me to tell him; and when he told her I'd told him and that he would tell she saw she was at the end of everything and I thought that now she would whip me to death."

"Stop! Stop!" The two were again in the pilot-house, but Watson, just then jingling his engine bells, was too busy to heed anything not "hove at him." His big bell had sounded for New Carthage, and John Courteney had appeared down forward of it, but neither Hugh nor Ramsey was enough diverted to answer the parting hail of the town's two residents joyfully going ashore. "I can't stand it!" she ran on. "I won't hear it!"

"But I must tell you," murmured Hugh.

"Why must you?"

"Because of what you have already heard and will hear and because you are you; who you are; what you are."

"Mr. Hugh, I'm the same I was last night when you and your father were talking poetry and trying to get rid of me!"

"Not quite."

"Well, go on; they quarrelled and you thought your hour had come--it seems it hadn't. Go on--if you 'must.'"

"I must," he said, and went on. "I had picked up, that day--it was the third day out and we were down in these bends and had taken on nearly half a load of cotton--I'd picked up, where your uncle Dan had dropped it, a small paper box of fusees--you know?--matches that you can't blow out. Childlike, guiltily, I kept them. In their quarrel, that night, Phyllis ended by imploring your uncle Dan not to tell on her. I never knew what supplication was till then. She wept on her knees, clinging to his. When she had to leave him, to put me to bed, he made her promise never again to do me the least hurt, and swore that if she did he'd sell her to the overseer.

"We went. I was afraid that down in the stateroom she'd find the fusees in my pocket and that I should go to jail as a public thief. But she stood me in the middle of the room, threw herself on my berth, and writhed and hid her face and beat her head and looked at me a hundredfold more murderously than your uncle Dan had ever looked at her. So once, while she lay still a moment, I slipped out onto the guards, and as I lifted my hand to throw the fusees into the river she caught it in hers, it and them. Then for the first time in my life I resisted her. I fought. Do you know what a cow-eat is?"

Ramsey stared. "No. Is it a way of fighting?"

It was not a way of fighting. Cattle often eat deep holes into cotton bales. "Ah, yes!" The tale went on.

"I fought her, and somehow the fusees, the whole box, got lighted and were dropped. Whether she dropped them purposely or not, or I dropped them, I'll never know; but they fell just over the rail, among the cotton bales, and we saw the lint in a cow-eat about three tiers down flash like gunpowder. She snatched me back into the stateroom, shut the door, and stood clutching me wildly and listening. 'Say your prayers,' she said, and knelt with me. She'd never knelt with me before. When I finished she had me go over them again. She did not say them with me, only whimpered and whispered, and fluttered her hands on my head and back. She made me begin once more, but before I was half through we heard the watchman run along the roof close over us and cry: 'Fire!' She lifted me to my feet, whispering, 'Now! Now!' and began to put a life-preserver on me, still saying over and over nothing but 'Now! Now! Now!' until the sounds of alarm were everywhere, and just as she sprang into the next stateroom to rouse the other children my mother came into it from the main cabin. I got my little brother into my room and was dressing him there while my mother dressed one sister and Phyllis the other, when your father's overseer, who had once followed the river himself, came down the cabin shouting to every one to come out and go forward and was kicking in every door he found locked. At ours he told my mother not to mind the smoke--which had grown thick and choking--but to rush us all straight through it to the boiler deck and down the forward stairs, and on her life not to stop for life-preservers but to go at once. So she and Phyllis ran with the three little ones; but I, childlike again, had got the notion that life-preservers were forbidden and was so long getting mine off that Phyllis turned back for me.

"That delay saved my life, for, as we ran out into the cabin together, the smoke in front of us, forward, turned red and then went all to flame, and right in the midst of it, hurrying toward us, we saw the overseer. He tripped on a hassock or something and fell and the flame literally swallowed him alive. We sprang through an open stateroom and climbed a wheelhouse stair to the hurricane deck. There we saw no one, but through the crackle and roar of the flame, which a light breeze behind us sent straight up into the darkness, I heard the voice of my father, twice, at his post in front of the skylights, and the answer of the engine bells showed that your uncle Dan and the engineers were sticking to their places. We were landing in a strong eddy under a point and didn't have to round to. The boat was wonderfully quiet. I even heard--probably because the shore was so close ahead of us--the first mate--same that's with us here now--heard him ordering the stage run out over the water, as always when about to land. I heard the clerks and others telling the passengers to 'keep cool' and 'not crowd,' saying there was room and time for every one.

"The pilot-house was burning brightly on one side but it was so wrapped in smoke that your uncle Dan was hid from Phyllis and me till the boat hit the bank. Then the breeze gave us a glimpse of him as it curled the whole blaze forward so that it overarched the people who filled the front stairs and gangway, waiting to swarm off across the stage. That brought panic and the panic brought death. Some male passengers--we couldn't see, but our hearing was like sight--had got all the women and children to the front of the crowd and a few even partly out on the stage, over the water, to be the first put ashore.

"When the boat's nose struck the shore the back part of the crowd thought the landing was made and began to push, and there were no men in front to push back--for some of the boat's family, missing Phyllis and me, had run aft to find us--and when that smoke rolled down on every one the push became a rush and suddenly two or three women were screaming at one edge of the stage, with nothing to lay hold on but one another.

"We heard their cries and the cry of the crowd, through the crackling of the fire. My mother tried to save them, with her three children clinging to her, and the whole six fell into the black shadow of the freight guards and the swift eddy drew them under the boat's hull before a thing could be done except that two of our men jumped in and sank with them."

Ramsey covered her face. "What did your father do?"

"He let himself down by one of the derrick posts. As he did so, and when they who had tried to rescue us had failed, the mate, who is a famous swimmer, sprang overboard, as near the larboard wheel as the fire would let him, struck out round it, climbed up on it into the paddle-box, and tried to reach the cabin deck by the kitchen stair. But a sweep of the flames drove him back into the river, and he was just sinking when Mr. Gilmore, you know, drew him into his skiff.

"At the same time your uncle Dan came tumbling down from a pilot-house window and staggered with us back to the stern rail, for all the stairs were burning. It was idle to call for help. The whole thing had lasted but a minute or two. Phyllis didn't want help and we had just that instant to get down in.

"Those who had gone ashore could not see us. The smoke hid us. So did the texas. Your uncle Dan dragged a mattress out of it and dropped it over the stern, away down onto the fantail, scores of feet below. The flames made the boat's shadow as black as ink. We thought the yawl was down there, but some of the crew had swum out from the shore and pulled away in it to pick up the mate--and us, of course, if we were with him.

"Your uncle, though fearfully burnt, took me on his back and showed Phyllis how to climb down beside him by the bracket work and posts and balustrades of the guards, as I could have done, but he wouldn't let me.

"If the wind had been the other way we should have perished right there. But the guards of the ladies' cabin ran round the stern, as they do on this boat, and her fantail, below, stretched still farther aft. So we got down to those guards easily. But in the ladies' cabin the fire had worked aft faster than outside, and on those guards the heat was torture. We could only hang from them and drop. Your uncle went first, then Phyllis and then I, he catching us, for down there he had light enough, looking up, and as we fell the flames shot through the cabin stern windows. He caught us, but then he said, 'I'm gone, Phyllis,' and crumpled down at her feet. Then I cried for help but Phyllis said we didn't need to call, and we didn't. We'd been seen at last, on the guards as we climbed down. They called to us to stick to the boat till swimmers could reach us. But we couldn't. The wind had turned, the heat was worse than ever, the fire had parted the boat's lines and she was being blown out into the current. Then your uncle struggled half up again and helped Phyllis get the mattress outside the bull railings, where I climbed out and held it. He asked if I could swim and when I said yes he warned me not to swim to the shore as the river was falling and the bank caving, but to float with the mattress and call till I was picked up. So I went over with it. But it twisted away from me. I swam to a floating cotton bale, one with a flicker of fire still on it, as it drifted up-stream in the eddy. At the same time I'd heard your uncle and Phyllis strike the water together, and a moment later I saw them--their heads. She was holding to the mattress with one hand and to him with the other. But presently I heard her give a low wail and saw him slip from her and sink. Then the smoke came down between us, and by and by the returning yawl, whose men had heard my calls and had seen Mr. Gillmore's skiff pick up the mate, found me on the cotton bale and had barely lifted me in when I fainted away."

Ramsey covered her face again. It would have been joy to her to let one of the drops that melted through her fingers fall on Hugh's hand.

Watson cleared his throat. "Sort o' inquirin' fo' one o' you, down on the roof," he said without looking back. He was a man not above repeating himself for a good end. "Third time they've sung out to me, but--up here I off'm don't notice much f'om anywheres 'at ain't hove right at me."

Ned entered and silently took the wheel.

XXXII

A PROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS

Through all the middle watch of Sunday night, with her Ned quite alone in the pilot-house, the _Votaress_ came and passed from crossing to crossing, up reaches, through chutes, around points and bends, a meteor in harness. Such she seemed from the dim shores. So came, so passed, before the drowsy gaze of that strange attenuated fraction of humanity which scantily peopled the waters and margins of the great river to win from it the bare elements of livelihood or transit, winning them at a death-rate not far below the immigrant's and in a vagabondage often as wild as that of the water-fowl passing unseen in the upper darkness.

If to the contemplation of the Courteneys, father and son, the fair craft, "with all her light and life, speeding, twinkling on and on through the night," was "a swarm of stars," or "one little whole world," how shall we see her--with what sense of wonder and splendor--through the eyes of the flatboatman or the swamper, the raftsman, the island squatter, the trading-scow man, the runaway slave in the canebrake, the woodyard man, or the "pirooter"--that degenerate heir, dwarfed to a parasite, of the terrible, earlier-day land-pirates and river-wolves of Plum Point and Crow's Nest Island? To such sorts, self-described as human snapping-turtles and alligators, her peacock show of innumerable lights was the jewelled crown of the only civilization they knew, knowing it only with the same aloofness with which they knew the stars. She woke them with the flutter of her wheels as of winged feet and passed like a goddess using the river's points and islands for stepping-stones, her bosom wrapped in a self-communion that gave no least hint of its intolerable load of grief and strife.

Not until she entered the great bend of Vicksburg did she once come into contrast with anything that could in any degree diminish her regal supremacy. There, as day was breaking, she entered the deep shadow of the southernmost "Walnut Hill." The town on its crest was two hundred feet above her lower deck, and the stiff Yazoo squire, his kindly brother-in-law and sister and the Vicksburg merchant and his wife, waiting down there while she slowed up to the wharf-boat at its foot to let them and others off, were proud of the bluff and of the two miles of sister hills hid by it and the night. Even overproud they were. The two husbands and wives silently wished for that lover of wonders, the sleeping Ramsey, that they might enjoy her enjoyment of the sight, who, though from exalted Natchez, never had beheld so vast an eminence or a city stuck up quite so high.

But Ramsey, far removed in her new, sweet-smelling berth, did not stir from a slumber into which she was throwing all the weight of an overloaded experience. She was paying large back taxes to sleep and had become so immersed in the transaction that her mother's rising, dressing, and stealing away lifted, this time, not one of her eyelashes. In not a sigh or motion did she respond to the long, quaking, world-filling roar of the _Votaress's_ whistle, nor to John Courteney's tolling of her great bell, nor to the jingle of lesser bells below, nor to any stopping or reversing or new going ahead of her wheels either for landing or for backing out and straightening up the river again. She slept on though these were the very Walnut Hills of her uncle Dan's and Phyllis's dark story; persevered in sleep though John Courteney's son, her profoundest marvel, was once more up and out, with the story still on his heart and "a-happmin' yit." It was one of its happenings that, very naturally, though quite unreasonably, he begrudged the sleeper's absence from texas roof and pilot-house.

The _Votaress_ was under full headway, with Vicksburg astern, Watson again at the wheel and the captain in his chair. The most northerly of the Walnut Hills were on the starboard bow. Beyond them the sun, rising into thunder-clouds, poured a dusty-yellow light over the tops of their almost unbroken woods, here and there brightening with a strange vividness the tilled fields and white homestead and slave quarters of some noted plantation. Between the hills and the river lay a mile's breadth or more of densely forested swamp, or "bottom," swarming with reptiles great and small, abounding in deer, bear, and panther, and from which, though the buffalo had been long banished, the wolf was not yet gone. On the skylight roof, close "abaft the bell," as Ramsey would have said, stood the commodore and Hugh. They had just met there and after a casual word or so Hugh was about to say something requiring an effort, when they were joined by the exhorter.

"Mawnin', gentle-_men_," he said. "Now, what you reckon them-ah po' Gawd-fo'-saken'd Eu-_rope_-ians down-stahs air a-thinkin' to theyse'v's whilst they view this-yeh lan'scape o'? D'you reckon they eveh, ev'm in they dreams o' heav'm, see sich

"'Sweet fiel's beyond the swellin' flood
Stand deck' in livin' green'?

"I tell you, gentle-_men_, as sho' as man made the city an' Gawd made the country, he made this-yeh country last, when he'd got his hand in! You see that-ah house an' cedah grove on yan rise? Well, that's the old 'Good Luck Plantation.' Gid Hayle 'uz bawn thah. His fatheh went to Gawd f'om thah an' lef' it to Dan, the pilot, what 'uz lost on the _Qua'_--Hell! listen at me! As ef _you_ didn't know that, which ev'y sight o' you stahts folks a-talkin' about it! But, Lawd! what a country this-yeh 'Azoo Delta is, to be sho'! Fo' craps! All this-yeh Mis'sippi Riveh, you mowt say, fo'm Cairo down, an' th' 'Azoo fo' the top-rail! Fo' craps--an' the money-makin'est craps! An' jest as much fo' game! Not pokeh but wile game; fo'-footen beasts afteh they kind an' fowl afteh they kind. An' ef a country's great fo' craps _an'_ game, what mo' kin it be great faw what ain't pyo' Babylonian vanity an' Eu-_rope_-ian stinch?"

The commodore admitted that game was a good thing and that crops were even better.

"No, sir-ee! Game comes fust! Man makes the craps but Gawd made the game! It come fust when it fust come an' it comes fust yit! Lawd A'mighty! who wouldn't drutheh hunt than plough, ef he could hev his druthehs? But the game ain't what it wuz, not ev'm in this-yeh 'Azoo country an' not ev'm o' the feathe'd kind. Oh, wile turkey, o' co'se, they here yit, by thousan's, an' wile goose, an' duck, an' teal, by hund'eds o' thousan's, an' wile pigeon, clouds of 'em, 'at dahkened the noonday sun. Reckon you see' 'em do that, ain't you? I see' it this ve'y season. But, now, take the pelikin! if game is a fah' name fo' him--aw heh, as the case may be; which that bird--nine foot f'm tip to tip, the white ones--use' to be as common on this riveh as cuckle-burrs in a sheep's tail!" The jester laughed, or, more strictly, exhaled his mirth from the roof of a wide-spread mouth in a long hiss that would have been more like an angered alligator's if alligators used fine-cut tobacco. It was addressed to the commodore; for Hugh, his grandfather's conscious inferior in human charity, had turned the squarest back--for its height--aboard the _Votaress_, to gaze on a wonderful sight in the eastern sky. The exhorter resumed:

"Why, I ain't see' a pelikin sence I use' to flatboat down to Orleans--f'om Honey Islan' an' th' 'Azoo City. 'Pelikin in the wildeh-_ness_,' says the holy book, but they 'can't stan' the wildeh-_ness_!' They plumb gone!--vamoost!--down to the Gulf!--what few ain't been shot!" He grew indignant. "An' whahfo' shot? Faw noth'n'! Jeemany-crackies! gentle-_men_, it makes my blood bile an' my bile go sour! Ain't no bounty on pelikins. Dead pelikins ain't useful--naw awnamental--naw instructive, an' much less they don't tas'e good. No, suh, they jess shot in pyo' devil-_ment_ by awngawdly damn fools--same as them on this boat all day 'istiddy a-poppin' they pistols at ev'y live thing they see'--fo' no damn' reason in the heab'ms above aw the earth beneath aw the watehs undeh the earth--Lawd! it mighty nigh makes me swah! An' I feel the heab'mly call--seein' as that-ah tub-shape' Methodis' bishop _h-ain't_ feel it--fo' to tell you, commodo', you-all hadn't ought allowed that hell-fi'ud nonsense on Gawd's holy day."

Even to his grandfather's response Hugh paid no visible attention. The eastern sky had become such a picture that down forward at the break of the deck John Courteney rose eagerly from his chair and looked back and up to be sure that his son was one of its spectators. Yes, Hugh was just casting a like glance to him and now turned to invite the notice of his grandfather. The thunder-clouds had so encompassed the sun that its rays burst through them almost exclusively in one wide crater, crimsoning, bronzing, and gilding their vaporous and ever-changing walls. Thence they spread earthward, heavenward, leaving remoter masses to writhe darkly on each other and themselves, in and out, in and in, cloaking this hill in blue shadow, bathing that one in green light, while from a watery fastness somewhere hid in the depth of the forested swamp under the hills, some long-lost bend of the Mississippi or cut-off of the Yazoo, rose into the flood of beams an innumerable immaculate swarm of giant cranes. Half were white as silver, half were black as jet, and from moment to moment each jet magically turned to silver, each silver to jet, as on slowly pulsing wings they wove a labyrinthian way through their own multitude with never a clash of pinion on pinion, up, down, athwart and around, up, down, and around again, now raven black across the sun and now silver and snow against the cloud.

An awed voice broke the stillness and old Joy stood a modest step back from Hugh's side with rapt gaze on hill and sky.

XXXIII

TWINS AND TEXAS TENDER

"Sign f'om de Lawd!" droned the old woman. "It's de souls o' de saints in de tribilatioms o' de worl'!"

But explanation was poor tribute to such beauty. Hugh glanced away to his father, then around to the commodore, up to Watson, and back again upon the spectacle. In a tone of remote allusion the grandfather spoke: "One wants a choice partnership for a sight like that."

Hugh cast back a sudden frown but it softened promptly to a smile which old Joy thought wonderfully sweet.

"Late sleepers," persisted the commodore, "know what they gain but not what they lose."

"Naw yit," audibly soliloquized the nurse, "what dey makes de early riseh lose." She added a soft high-treble "humph!" and gave herself a smile at least as sweet as Hugh's, which he repeated to her as he said:

"Good morning, auntie."

She courtesied. "Mawnin', suh." They need not have been more cordial had they just signed a great treaty.

* * * * *

The _Votaress_, swinging westward, left the picture behind, and the neglected exhorter, caring far less for cranes and clouds than for pelicans and sinners, reopened, this time on Hugh: "But that's anotheh thing 'at rises my bristles, ev'm ef it don't the bishop's."

"What rises them?" asked the solemn Hugh, the commodore's attention wandering.

"Shell I spit it out? Wall, it's folks a-_proj_-eckin' togetheh--church membehs an' non-membehs a-_proj_-eckin' _togetheh_--fo' to drownd Gawd A'mighty's chas-tise_ments_ in the devil's delights. _You_ know they a-layin' fo' to do that on this boat this ve'y evenin'. You know they a-_proj_-eckin' fo' to raise filthy lucre by fiddlin' an' play-actin' an' a-singin' o' worl'ly songs an', to top all, a-dayncin'!--right oveh the heads o' the sick an' dyin', my Gawd! You know that, don't you?"

"Yes, I'm mixed up in it."

"An' they a-doin' it fo' what? Fo' no betteh reason 'an to he'p them-ah damn' ovehwhelmin' furrinehs to escape the righteous judg-_ments_ o' the Lawd! Young brotheh, my name is Jawn. Jawn the Babtiss, I am, an' as sich I p'otess! An' also an' mo'oveh I p'otess ag'in' any mo' leadin's f'om them-ah 'Piscopaliam play-actohs, an' still mo' f'om that-ah bodacious brick-top gal o' Gid Hayle's. Which she made opem spote o' _my_ leadin's in 'istiddy's meet'n'! An' o' co'se! havin' a popish motheh."

"Oh!--my!--Lawd!" gasped Joy, and the commodore had begun to meet protest with protest, when Hugh touched him.

"This is too small for you. May I----?"

"Take it," said the grandfather and turned inquiringly to the nurse.

"Yaas, suh," she hurried to say, "my mist'ess ax de honoh to see you at de stateroom o' Mahs' Basile."

Meantime Hugh answered the complainant: "My friend, that young lady--you mustn't call her anything else again--made no sport of you whatever."

"Oh, dat she didn't, boss!" put in old Joy, breaking off from her talk with the commodore.

"Honestly, sir," continued Hugh, "I was afraid some one would, but I happened to see her from first to last, and----"

"Happ'm'd! The hell you happ'm'd! Yo' eyes 'uz dead _sot_ on heh when they'd ought to been upraise' in prah!"

Hugh laughed--a laugh so hearty it might have been the brick-top's own. The texas tender enjoyed it as he bore a tray of dishes from the room of the twins. Down beyond the bell it drew the father's smile and up at the wheel the stoical gaze of Watson. Half of it was for the exhorter and half for a newcomer at tardy sight of whom the exhorter paled, certain that he had been overheard.

"Oh!" he cried, "I ain't meant no offence to nobody naw tuck none!" and eagerly followed the commodore's beckon to go below with him and the nurse. Hugh, still smiling, met the blazing stare of Julian Hayle.

"Good morning," he said, while Hayle was inquiring:

"May I again ask of you a word in private?"

"Oh, this is private enough," said Hugh. "Every private word I've had with you so far, or with your--coterie, has been so unsatisfactory to you--and them, and so tiresome to everybody, I can't see why you should want another. My friend----"

"We are not friends, sir."

"Well, then, let's make friends. Here's my hand. I'm utterly ashamed of this miserable little spat."

Hayle folded his arms. "You'll find it life-size before we're done."

"Nonsense! it's too small for words, private or otherwise. Let's end it, for that reason if for no better."

"That's not your reason, sir. You have another."

"Yes, I simply can't quarrel with you."

"You--crawling--poltroon!"

Hugh's smile vanished at last. He gulped as though a wave had gone over him. But he remembered his father. Beyond doubt his father had heard. He glanced down to him, and what he saw was worth a year of commonplace experience. The father had heard, yet he sat at ease, his knees crossed and his gaze out forward on the boat's course. Watson--but what could Watson matter then? Hugh's eyes burned big on Hayle, his voice deepened, his words came slow. "We can't fight here and now. I can only put you ashore. Don't make me do that. There's trouble enough on this boat as it is. You're having your share. Mr. Hayle, I fear--though I don't know--that Basile has the cholera."

"Damn him and it! You wouldn't fight me if you could."

"True."

"Why? On your father's account--and his father's?"

"On everybody's. Your own father's. Your mother's."

"My sister's?" The question was a threatening sneer.

"Yes, sir." The breakfast bell rang merrily below and Hugh turned to leave. Julian blazed out in curses:

"I forbid you 'that young lady's' company henceforth!"

"And that's the private word you had for me?"

"Yes, damn you! I know who sat up late last night. If you do it again I'll shoot you right on this boat!"

"My private word for you, Mr. Hayle, isn't as public as that. Only I and the texas tender know it."

"Most fitting partnership!"

"No, it was entirely his own enterprise. While you and your brother were getting your information from him he got your weapons from both of you. I have them in the clerk's safe."

XXXIV

THE PEACEMAKERS

Some four of the _Votaress's_ "family," one seated, three standing at ease, were allowing their mild, slow conversation its haphazard way under barely enough constraint to hold it in the channel of discretion. It drifted as unpretentiously as a raft or flatboat, now and then merely floating without progress, like a floating alligator; that is, with one small eye imperceptibly open to every point of the compass.

He who sat was the first clerk, a man of thirty-seven or so, and therefore, as age then counted, fairly started on the decline of life. He occupied the high stool in the clerk's office, his limp back against its standing desk. Nearest him the second clerk, standing, leaned on an elbow thrown out upon the desk and rested one foot on a rung of the stool. A second clerk might do that; a third or "mud" clerk would hardly have made so free. The youthful mud clerk, with his hat under his folded arms, leaned on the jamb of a door that let back into the clerks' stateroom. Opposite him the youngest of the four, latest come among them, stood out in the cabin and hung in over the broad window counter, across which the office did business with the world. Watson's "cub pilot" he was, on the sick list, thin and weak with swamp-fever.

The forenoon watch was half gone. The boat was fluttering along at high speed under a bright but fickle sky, and the clerks and the "cub" hardly needed to glance out the nearest larboard window to know that she was already turning northward into a pleasant piece of river called Nine Mile Reach. A certain Point Lookout was some five miles behind in the east, and the town of Providence, negligibly small, with Lake Providence, an old cut-off, hid in the woods behind it, was close ahead. One of the number mentioned the boat's failure during the night to make the miles expected of her, but the four agreed that the cause was not any lack of speed power but an overplus of landings below Vicksburg--two being for burials--and a long delay at Vicksburg itself, providing for the sick.

This explanation, the second clerk said, had been as gratifying to the planter of Milliken's Bend and his "lady" as their not having to be called up before day. They had taken breakfast in the general company, which, with the commodore at one end of the cabin and Hugh at the other, had sat down when Old River and the mouth of the Yazoo were on the starboard bow, and had risen while passing My Wife's Island. Finally they had gone ashore in great elation, thanking Hugh with high voices and fervent hand-shakings, and his father with wavings from the bank to the roof, for the "most delightful trip anybody ever made"; careless as infants of the hundreds of strangers gazing on them, both native and alien, both woe-stricken and self-content, and, even when the great wheels were backing the boat away, calling fond messages to Hugh for the still invisible "Miss Ramsey" as if she were in his exclusive keeping and all those strangers were trees.

So recounted the second clerk, not to criticise such innocent disdain of the public eye and ear--to him an every-day sight--but with a feeling for the picturesque and in mild humor making the point that such messages, so given, were hardly calculated to make life easier for Hugh. The mud clerk and the cub pilot grunted their accord yet privately envied Hugh. To be message bearer to that young lady would have been rapture to either of them under whatever hardness or peril of life, the more the better. Oddly enough, with Milliken's Bend now forty miles astern the messages had not been delivered.

"No fault of his," said the first clerk, the second said no, and the mud clerk and the cub loyally echoed them. For they knew, at least the three clerks knew, always knew, not by flat inquiry but by trained perceptions and the alligator's eye, whatever was going on in each and every part of the boat. Indeed, the boat's news naturally flowed to them; flowed to and ran forth again from them, aerated and cleansed, as normally as blood to and from the breast of a strong man. By the sound of the steam they knew the water was right in the boilers. By the rhythm of the machinery they knew all was right in the engine room. They could have said, nearly enough, how soon the boat would have to stop again for wood. To them the quiet of the populous boiler deck, where nearly every man sat reading some stale newspaper of Louisville, Saint Louis, or Cincinnati--brought aboard from the Vicksburg wharf-boat--was informational, witnessing a general resigned admission that there was already "trouble enough." Of three notables not there they knew that one, the bishop, was in his berth, very weary, and that the senator and the general had been for some time with Hayle's twins. They could have greeted every cabin passenger by name. They knew who were filling the places lately vacated at the ladies' table, whose was each ubiquitous child selling tickets for the appointed "show," and whose each private servant, however rarely seen: not such as old Joy merely, but the senator's black Cato, the general's yellow Tom, Mrs. Gilmore's theatrically handsome Harriet, or the nearly as white Dora of the young lady from Napoleon. And they knew well that the non-delivery of those messages was no fault of Hugh's.

Miss Ramsey was up, yes; but she had breakfasted in seclusion and was then in a small under-cabin for ladies' maids, close beneath the main one, rehearsing with Mrs. Gilmore and others. Gilmore had been coaching them but was now momentarily out on the boiler deck. Through the extensive glass of the cabin's front they could see him standing before a knot of men: John the Baptist and the man with the eagle eye and the man with the eye of a stallion and the man who knew so slap-bang that the Hayles and Courteneys had all but locked horns when the _Quakeress_ burned. They were the only exponents of unrest out there and only the actor wore an air both spirited and kind. No one in the office openly kept an eye on the outer group. In there the gossip lingered on Hugh. Hugh had plenty, it was agreed, of the Courteney stuff and something besides which these four hoped was the very thing with which to meet this new phase so plainly at hand in the Hayle-Courteney contest.

Suddenly the first clerk looked straight out on Gilmore, so obviously at bay, and murmured to the cub pilot: "Go, bring him." While the cub went, the clerk spoke on. Hugh, he said, would one day be the best-liked of his name.

In kindly dissent the second clerk shook his head, but the first would have it so. The liking might be slow coming, he allowed, because of Hugh's oddities, but in the end men would like even the oddities.

The mud clerk named one as if he liked it: "When he's by himself he's got the iron-est phiz----"

The second clerk laughed his appreciation. "And when he's poked up," he said, "it gets ironer and ironer."

"It'll need to mighty soon," observed the first clerk.

"When he runs into Gid Hayle," said the second.

The actor came. His pleased manner was more thankful than inquiring and he insisted on remaining outside the window shelf with the cub.

"Mr. Gilmore," said the first clerk gravely, "we thought you might condescend to inspect our ceiling decorations through fresh foliage."

The player looked puzzled an instant but a smell of mint from the bar cleared his mental vision. Yet again he declined. Later in the day he shouldn't be so coy, he admitted, but one oughtn't to take too long a running start for his jump into bed.

"No, he _might_ get there too soon," said the clerk. "My boys, sir, want to ask you a riddle. You know Gid Hayle. How can his daughter, here, be just like him for all the world and yet those twins be just like him for all the same identical world, too?"

"Well put!" was the prompt rejoinder. "My wife and I have been toying with that riddle these twenty-four hours. Those brothers are Gideon Hayle's sons if ever a man had sons; that daughter is his from the ground up; yet the two and the one are as unlike as night and noon."

The clerks and cub pilot agreed so approvingly that the actor, lover of lines, was inspired to go on at more length. He remarked, in effect, that he had never seen so striking an instance of a parent's natural traits growing into--blemishes--in one inheritor and into graces in another. Yet to know Gideon Hayle was to read the riddle. As quick to anger as his sons, as full of mirth as his daughter; open-hearted, wrong-headed, generous, tyrannous, valorous, contemptuous of all book wisdom yet an incessant, keen inquirer with a fantastical explanation of his own for everything in nature, science, politics, or religion. Implacable in his prejudices, he----

"Yes," interrupted the first clerk, with amazing irrelevancy, "but a man of Henry Clay's experience ought to have known better. Kossuth is a gentleman who--well, general, how are you now? Mr. Gilmore, you know the general? Senator, you know Mr. Gilmore?"

"Assuredly!" The condescending senator had known Mr. Gilmore, "a day by contact but long by fame."

The general was civil but not suave. He remembered the player's hard names for the committee's dead scheme. "Taking care of Henry Clay, too, sir?" he asked him. "With so many pleasanter cares"--that meant Ramsey--"you might let Henry Clay take care of himself."

"That's something," put in the second clerk, flushing defensively, while the senator, with cigar cocked one way and his silk hat another, drew Gilmore aside, "that's something Henry Clay never does."

"Right, young man. He merely tries. Th-there's no one in the nation has t-tried harder or f-failed worse!"

The youth turned to his work at the high desk. "Sir," said the general to the first clerk, who rose, "the senator and I have been up to your texas----"

"Contrary to orders," mildly said the first clerk.

"I admit it, sir, but our intentions were only th-the k-kindest. It seems to us, sir, or to me--us or me, sir, as you will--that th-those sons of our old friend Hayle are not getting justice."

"They ought to be mighty glad of that, general."

"S-s-sir, they'd rather have it! We admit, of course,--we or I--I, if you prefer, sir, or if the senator prefers--I admit they are not unbiassed."

"No, I admit they're not."

"Th-they are supe-perbly stiff-necked and illogical young barons from four centuries back, sir, without a f-f-fault that isn't a v-v-virtue overdrawn--or out of date."

The speaker turned to the actor and senator and they to him: "If those boys have the pride of L-l-lucifer, Mr. Gilmore, they have also his intrep-idity. Th-they may be as high-headed as giraffes, sir, but they're as s-s-straightf-f-forward as a charging bull! Mr. clerk, the splendid surge of their imp-pulses should excuse their f-f-foibles even if their s-s-souls were _not_ wr-wri-writhing under the lash of a new whip on old sores, sir."

"Will you just make that a little clearer, general?"

"I will," softly put in the senator--"by your leave, general?"

With limp majesty the general waved permission.

"All for peace, however," said the senator smilingly to the clerk. "There's been enough strife."

"Never saw so much aboard boat," said the clerk.

"Well,"--statesman and clerk laid elbows on the shelf and dropped their voices while the actor and the general drew a step aside,--"this thing can be settled only by the right friends and it's now or never." The two exchanged a look but the clerk was mute and the senator spoke on: "You've heard of Dan Hayle--and the girl Phyllis, hmm?"

"I was first clerk on the _Quakeress_ when she burned."

"Why, so you _was_. These twins believe, bitterly, that in that mysterious disaster all due search for their uncle was neglected to save the captain's son and that the girl and Dan Hayle were never fully accounted for."

"Shucks! Why--Dan--it was I found Dan's body."

"Yes, but they call it an outrage for him to have been there at all; to give him the wheel and take her aboard on the same trip."

"_Law'_! what did she count, with him about to marry?"