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GIDEON'S BAND
BOOKS BY GEORGE W. CABLE
Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
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[Illustration: Ramsey [_Page 80_]]
GIDEON'S BAND
A TALE OF THE MISSISSIPPI
BY
GEORGE W. CABLE
ILLUSTRATED BY
F. C. YOHN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1914
Copyright, 1914, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published September, 1914
TO EVA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Steamboat Levee 1
II. "The Votaress" 5
III. Certain Passengers 9
IV. The First Two Miles 13
V. Ramsey Hayle 17
VI. Hayles's Twins 25
VII. Supper 31
VIII. Questions 37
IX. Sitting Silent 43
X. Peril 50
XI. First Night-Watch 57
XII. Hugh and the Twins 68
XIII. The Superabounding Ramsey 75
XIV. The Committee of Seven 83
XV. Morning Watch 90
XVI. Phyllis 95
XVII. "It's a-Happmin' Yit--to We All" 106
XVIII. Ramsey Wins a Point or Two 113
XIX. This Way to Womanhood 122
XX. Ladies' Table 131
XXI. Ramsey and the Bishop 138
XXII. Basile and What He Saw 147
XXIII. A State of Affairs 152
XXIV. A Senator Enlightened 158
XXV. "Please Assemble" 164
XXVI. Alarm and Distress 173
XXVII. Pilots' Eyes 180
XXVIII. Words and the "Westwood" 186
XXIX. Studying the River--Together 195
XXX. Phyllis Again 203
XXXI. The Burning Boat 211
XXXII. A Prophet in the Wilderness 222
XXXIII. Twins and Texas Tender 229
XXXIV. The Peacemakers 234
XXXV. Unsettled Weather 246
XXXVI. Captain's Room 252
XXXVII. Basile Uses a Cane 260
XXXVIII. The Cane Again 272
XXXIX. Fortitude 280
XL. Ramsey at the Footlights 289
XLI. Quits 299
XLII. Against Kin 306
XLIII. Which from Which 313
XLIV. Forbearance 319
XLV. Applause 327
XLVI. After the Play 331
XLVII. Insomnia 337
XLVIII. "California" 347
XLIX. Kangaroo Point 354
L. "Delta Will Do" 365
LI. Loving-Kindness 374
LII. Love Runs Rough but Runs on 383
LIII. Trading for Phyllis 393
LIV. "Can't!" 404
LV. Love Makes a Cut-Off 412
LVI. Eight Years After 425
LVII. Farewell, "Votaress" 436
LVIII. 'Lindy Lowe 443
LIX. "Conclusively" 446
LX. Once More Hugh Sings 460
LXI. Wanted, Hayle's Twins 469
LXII. Euthanasia 478
LXIII. The Captain's Chair 493
ILLUSTRATIONS
_Ramsey_ _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
_"Stop!... Stop! the safest place for you on this
boat now is right where you are standing--Phyllis"_ 258
_"My heavenly Father wouldn't 'a' had to call me in
out of the storm"_ 334
_"For I believe that we belong to each other from the
centre of our souls, by a fitness plain even to the
eyes of your brothers"_ 420
GIDEON'S BAND
I
THE STEAMBOAT LEVEE
Saturday, April, 1852. There was a fervor in the sky as of an August
noon, although the clocks of the city would presently strike five.
Dazzling white clouds, about to show the earliest flush of the sun's
decline, beamed down upon a turbid river harbor, where the water was
deep so close inshore that the port's unbroken mile of steamboat wharf
nowhere stretched out into the boiling flood. Instead it merely lined
the shore, the steamers packing in bow on with their noses to it, their
sterns out in the stream, their fenders chafing each other's lower
guards.
New Orleans was very proud of this scene. Very prompt were her citizens,
such as had travelled, to remind you that in many seaports vast
warehouses and roofed docks of enormous cost thronged out so greedily to
meet incoming craft that the one boat which you might be seeking you
would find quite hidden among walls and roofs, and of all the rest of
the harbor's general fleet you could see little or nothing. Not so on
this great sun-swept, wind-swept, rain-swept, unswept steamboat levee.
You might come up out of any street along that mile-wide front, and if
there were a hundred river steamers in port a hundred you would behold
with one sweep of the eye. Overhead was only the blue dome, in full view
almost from rim to rim; and all about, amid a din of shouting,
whip-cracking, scolding, and laughing, and a multitudinous flutter of
many-colored foot-square flags, each marking its special lot of goods,
were swarms of men--white, yellow, and black--trucking, tumbling,
rolling, hand-barrowing, and "toting" on heads and shoulders a countless
worth of freight in bags, barrels, casks, bales, boxes, and baskets.
Hundreds of mules and drays came and went with this same wealth, and out
beyond all, between wharf and open river, profiled on the eastern sky,
letting themselves be unloaded and reloaded, stood the compacted,
motionless, elephantine phalanx of the boats.
The flood beneath them was up to the wharf's flooring, yet their low,
light-draught hulls, with the freight decks that covered them doubled in
carrying room by their widely overhanging freight guards, were hid by
the wilderness of goods on shore. Hid also were their furnaces, boilers,
and engines on the same deck, sharing it with the cargo. But all their
gay upper works, so toplofty and frail, showed a gleaming white front to
the western sun. You marked each one's jack-staff, that rose mast high
from the unseen prow, and behind it the boiler deck, high over the
boilers. Over the boiler deck was the hurricane roof, above that the
officers' rooms, called the "texas." Above the texas was the
pilot-house, and on either side, well forward of the pilot-house and
towering abreast of each other and above all else--higher than the two
soaring derrick posts at the two forward corners of the passenger and
hurricane decks, higher even than the jack-staff's peak--stood the two
great black chimneys.
And what a populace teemed round and through all! Here was the Creole,
there the New Englander. Here were men of oddest sorts from the
Missouri, Ohio, and nearer and farther rivers. Here were the Irishman,
the German, the Congo, Cuban, Choctaw, Texan, Sicilian; the Louisiana
sugar-planter, the Mississippi cotton-planter, goat-bearded raftsmen
from the swamps of Arkansas, flatboatmen from the mountains of Tennessee
and Kentucky; the horse trader, the slave-driver, the filibuster, the
Indian fighter, the circus rider, the circuit-rider, and men bound for
the goldfields of California.
More than half the boats, this April afternoon, flew from the jack-staff
of each, to signify that it was her day to leave, a streaming burgee
bearing her name. A big-lettered strip of canvas drawn along the front
guards of her hurricane-deck told for what port she was "up," and the
growing smoke that swelled from her chimneys showed that five was her
time to back out.
In the midst of the scene, opposite the head of Canal Street--the
streets that run to the New Orleans levee run up-hill and get there head
first--lay a boat which specially belongs to this narrative. A pictorial
poster, down in every café and hotel rotunda of the town, called her
"large, new, and elegant," and such she was in fair comparison with all
the craft on all the sixteen thousand navigable miles of the vast river
and its tributaries. Her goal was Louisville, more than thirteen hundred
miles away. Her steam was up, a velvet-black pitch-pine smoke billowed
from her chimneys, and her red-and-white burgee, gleaming upon it, named
her the _Votaress_.
II
THE "VOTARESS"
Her first up-river trip! The crowd waiting on the wharf's apron to see
her go was larger and included better types of the people than usual,
for the _Votaress_ was the latest of the Courteney fleet, hence a rival
of the Hayle boats, the most interesting fact that could be stated of
anything afloat on Western waters.
So young was she, this _Votaress_, so bridally fresh from her Indiana
and Kentucky shipyards, that the big new bell in the mid-front of her
hurricane roof shone in the low sunlight like a wedding jewel. Its
parting strokes had sounded once but would sound twice again before she
could cast off. Both pilots were in the lofty pilot-house, down from the
breast-board of which a light line ran forward to the bell's tongue, but
neither pilot touched the line or the helm. For the captain's use
another cord from the bell hung over the hurricane deck's front and down
to the boiler deck rail, but neither up there on the boiler deck nor
anywhere near the bell on the roof above it was any captain to be seen.
At the front angle of the roof's larboard rail a youth, quite alone,
leaned against one of the tall derrick posts to get its shade. He was
too short, square, and unanimated to draw much attention, although with
a faint unconscious frown between widely parted brows his quiet eyes
fell intently upon every detail of the lively scene below.
The whole great landing lay beneath his glance, a vivid exposition of
the vast, half-tamed valley's bounty, spoils, and promise; of its motley
human life, scarcely yet to be called society, so lately and rudely
transplanted from overseas; so bareboned, so valiantly preserved, so
young yet already so titanic; so self-reliant, opinionated, and uncouth;
so strenuous and materialistic in mind; so inflammable in emotions; so
grotesque in its virtues; so violent in its excesses; so complacently
oblivious of all the higher values of wealth; so giddied with the new
wine of liberty and crude abundance; so open of speech, of heart, of
home, and so blithely disdainful of a hundred risks of life, health, and
property. And all this the young observer's glance took in with maybe
more realization of it than might be looked for in one not yet
twenty-one. Yet his fuller attention was for matters nearer and of much
narrower compass.
He saw the last bit of small freight come aboard and the last belated
bill-lading clerk and ejected peddler go ashore. He noted by each
mooring-post the black longshoreman waiting to cast off a hawser. He
remarked each newcomer who idly joined the onlooking throng. Especially
he observed each cab or carriage that hurried up to the wharf's front.
He studied each of the alighting occupants as they yielded their effects
to the antic, white-jacketed mulatto cabin-boys, behind whom they
crossed the ponderous unrailed stage and vanished on their up-stairs way
to the boiler deck, the cabin, and their staterooms. Had his mild
scrutinizings been a paid service, they could hardly have been more
thorough.
By and by two or three things occurred in the same moment. A number of
boats above Canal Street and several of lesser fame below sounded their
third bell, cast off, and backed out into the stream. The many pillars
of smoke widened across the heavens into one unrifted cloud with the
sunbeams illumining its earthward side. Now it overhung the busy landing
and now, at the river's first bend, it filled the tops of the dark mass
of spars and cordage that densely lined the long curve of the harbor's
up-town shipping.
At the same time, while the foremost boats were still in sight, the two
pilots in the pilot-house of the lingering _Votaress_ quietly took stand
at right and left of the wheel with their eyes on a distant vehicle, a
private carriage. It came swiftly out of Common Street and across the
broad shell-paved levee. As quietly as they, the youth at the derrick
post regarded it, and presently, looking back and up, he gave them a
slight, gratified nod. Through the lines of onlookers the carriage swept
close up to the stage and let down two aristocratic-looking men. The
taller was full fifty years of age, the other as much as seventy-five,
but both were hale and commanding.
As they started aboard the younger glanced up brightly to the unsmiling
youth at the roof's rail and then threw a gesture, above and beyond him,
to the pilot-house. One of the pilots promptly sounded the bell. Down on
the forecastle a dozen deck-hands, ordered by a burly mate, leaped to
the stage and began, with half as many others who ran ashore on it, to
heave it aboard. But a sharp "avast" stopped them, and four or five
cabin-boys gambolled out on it ashore. A smart hack came whirling up in
its own white shell dust, and a fledgling dandy of seventeen sprang down
from the seat of his choice by the driver before the vehicle could stop
or the white jackets strip it of its baggage.
III
CERTAIN PASSENGERS
From his dizzy outlook the older youth dropped his calm scrutiny upon
the inner occupants as they alighted and followed the boy on board.
First came a red-ringleted, fifteen-year-old sister, fairly
good-looking, almost too free of glance, and--to her high-perched
critic--urgently eligible to longer skirts. Behind her appeared an old,
very black nurse in very blue calico and very white turban and bosom
kerchief; and lastly a mother--of many children, one would have
said--still perfect in complexion, gracefully rounded, and beautiful.
This was the first time he on the hurricane deck had ever seen them, but
he knew at once who they were and looked the closer on that account. The
self-oblivious elation with which the slim lass gave her eyes and mind
to everything except her own footing caused him to keep his chief watch
on her. He even beckoned a black deck hand to do the same. Wherever her
glance went her gay interest went with it, either in a soft
soliloquizing laugh or in some demonstration less definite though more
radiant; some sign of delight from her lips, her eyes, her brow, her
springing step, dancing curls, or supple arms. The youth on the roof's
edge deepened his frown. At a point on the stage where its sheer, naked
sides spanned the narrow chasm through which the waters swept between
boat and wharf, her feet strayed too near one perilous edge, and just
then her eyes went up to him. The two glances had barely met when she
tripped and staggered. With a dozen others aboard and ashore, he gave a
start. She sent him a look of terror, then turned from deadly pale to
rosy red and gasped her thanks to the smiling deckhand, whose clutch had
saved her life. The next instant she was laughing elatedly to her
horrified nurse, and so disappeared with her kindred on the lower deck
and front stairs.
The mellow boom of the third and last parting signal diverted the
general mind, and a glance behind him showed the youth the close and
welcome presence of that superior-looking man in answer to whose gesture
the pilot had tolled the earlier bell. But this person was closely
preoccupied. Now his capable glance ran aft along every marginal line of
the boat, now it dropped below to where the big stage lay drawn in
athwart the forward deck from guard to guard. Now he gave short, quiet
orders to wharf and forecastle, now a single word or two to the
pilot-house. Far below, the engine bells jingled. The bowline was in. A
yeast of waters ran forward from the backing wheels, the breast line
slacked away in fierce jerks, and the _Votaress_ began to depart.
Meantime there was an odd stir on shore. A cab whirled up furiously and
two more youths, shapely, handsome, and fashionable, twins beyond cavil
and noticeably older than their twenty years, visibly rich in fine
qualities but as visibly reckless as to what they did with them, sprang
out, flushed and imperious, to wave the _Votaress_. One of her guards
was still rubbing along the steamer beside her, but before the pair
could dash aboard this other boat and half across her deck, a gap had
opened, impossible to leap. They halted in rage as the more compact
youth on the moving steamer's roof, catching their attention, pointed a
good two miles up the river front. Yet what he said they would not have
known had not her mate repeated from the forecastle:
"Post forty-six! Drive up thah! We stop thah fo' a load of emigrants!"
They fled back to the cab. Aboard the receding boat the ruthless engine
bells jingled on; the broad waterside and the city behind it seemed,
from her decks, to draw away into the western clouds, and the yellow
river spread wide its shores in welcome to her swinging form. Now its
mighty current seemed to quicken and quicken as she gradually overcame
her down-stream drift, the ship-lined shores ceased to creep
up-stream--began to creep down--and her black crew, standing close about
the capstan, broke majestically into song:
"Oh, rock me, Julie, rock me."
From the forecastle her swivel pealed, her burgee ran down the
jack-staff, a soft, continuous tremor set in among all her parts, her
scape-pipes ceased their alternating roars, her engines breathed quietly
through her vast funnels, the flood spurted at her cutwater, white
torrents leaped and chased each other from her fluttering wheels, her
own breeze fanned every brow, and the _Votaress_ was under way.
IV
THE FIRST TWO MILES
The youth whom we have called short, square, and so on crossed to the
starboard derrick post. Several passengers had come up to the roof, and
one who, he noticed, seemed, by the many kind glances cast upon her, to
be already winning favor, was the tallish lass with the red curls.
The nurse was still at her back. She drew close up beside him and stood
in the wind that ruffled her hat and pressed her draperies against her
form. Her servant betrayed a faint restiveness to be so near him, but
the girl, watching the steamer's watery path as it seemed of its own
volition to glide under the boat's swift tread, ignored him as
completely as if he were a part of the woodwork. The very good-looking
man who was "taking out" the boat returned from a short tour of the deck
and halted by the great bell over the foremost skylights; but soon he
moved away again in mild preoccupation. The maiden's frank scrutiny
followed him a step or two and then turned squarely to the youth. Her
attendant stirred uncomfortably and breathed some inarticulate protest,
but in a tone of faultless composure the girl spoke out:
"Is that the captain yonder?"
"No," he said, equally composed, though busy thinking that but for his
eye she would at this moment be lying, in all these dainty draperies, as
deep beneath the boiling flood as she now stood above it. "That's not
the captain."
"Then why is he running the boat?"
"He owns her."
"Oh!" The girl's soft laugh was at herself. Presently--"Where's her
captain?"
"Ashore, in the hospital."
"What's he got?"
"Missy!" murmured the dark woman beseechingly.
But missy gave her no heed. "Got cholera?" she ventured, "the Asiatic
cholera?"
"No, a broken leg."
"Oh! Is that all he's got?"
"No, he has another, not broken." The speaker was so solemn that, with
mirth in every drop of her blood, the inquirer contrived to be grave,
herself.
"How'd he get it--I mean get it broken?"
"He was superintending----"
"And fell? When'd he fall?"
"This afternoon, about----"
"Where'd it happen?"
"Down on the lower deck as he----"
"Which is the lower deck?"
"The deck you came aboard on."
"They told me that was the freight deck!"
"It is."
"Then, why--?" She ceased, pondered, and spoke again: "Is there any deck
lower than the lower deck?"
"None."
She mused once more: "Why--that's strange."
"Yes," he said, "strange, but true."
"Then how could the captain fall----" Again she ceased and yet again
pondered: "Are the boilers--on the boiler deck?"
"No, the boiler deck is just over the boilers."
"Then why do they--" Once more she pondered.
"The boilers," said the youth, "are down on the freight deck."
The questioner brightened. "Do they ever put any freight on the boiler
deck?" she asked.
Before he could say yes, and without the slightest warning, a laugh
burst from her tightened lips. He could not have called it unmusical and
did not resent it, although he did regard it as without the slenderest
excuse. Her eyes and brow, still confronting his in a distress of mirth,
confessed the whim's forlorn senselessness, while his face returned not
the smallest sign of an emotion. As the moment lengthened, the
transport, so far from passing, spread through all her lithe form.
Suddenly she turned aside, drew herself up, faced him again, and began
to inquire, "Do they ever--" but broke down once more, fell upon the old
woman's shoulder with a silvery tinkle, shook, hung limp, threw one foot
behind her, and tapped the deck with her toe. A married couple drifting
by, obviously players and of the best of their sort, enjoyed the
picture.
"Why, missy!" the nurse softly pleaded, "yo' plumb disgracin' yo'seff!
Stop! Stop!"
"I can't!" whined the girl, between her paroxysms, "till he stops
looking like _that_." But as the youth was merely looking like himself
he saw no reason why he should stop.
To avoid the current the steamer suddenly began to run so close beside
the moored ships that the continuous echo of all her sounds--the flutter
of her great wheels, the seething of waters, the varied activities of
her lower deck--came back and up to the three voyagers with a nearness
and minuteness that startled the girl and drew her glance; but just as
her dancing eyes returned reproachfully to the youth the big bell at her
back pealed its signal for landing and she sprang almost off her feet,
cast herself into the nurse's bosom, and laughed more inexcusably than
ever.
The woman put an arm about her shoulder and drew her a few steps back
along the rail to where four or five others were gathered. The young man
gave all his attention downward across the starboard bow. The engine
bells jingled far below, the wheels stopped, the giant chimneys ceased
their majestic breathing, and the boat came slowly abreast of a ship
standing high out of the water.
V
RAMSEY HAYLE
The flag of Holland floated aft of a deck crowded with a sun-tanned and
oddly clad multitude. The Dutch sailors lowered their fenders between
the ship's side and the boat's guards, lines were made fast, a light
stage was run down from the ship's upper deck to the boat's forecastle,
and in single file, laden with their household goods, the silent aliens
were hurried aboard the _Votaress_ and to their steerage quarters, out
of sight between and behind her engines.
Up on the boiler and hurricane decks her earlier passengers found,
according to their various moods and capacities, much entertainment in
the scene. The girl with the nurse laughed often, of course. Yet her
laugh bore a certain note of sympathy and appreciation which harmonized
out of it all quality that might have hurt or abashed the most diffident
exile. Childlike as she was, it was plain she did not wholly fail to see
into the matter's pathetic depths.
The youth at the derrick post, scrutinizing each immigrant that passed
under his eye, could hear at his back a refined voice making kind
replies to her many questions. He knew it as belonging to the older of
the two men for whose coming aboard the _Votaress_ had delayed her
start. Between the girl's whimsical queries he heard him indulgently
explain that the Dutch ensign's red, white, and blue were no theft from
us Americans and that at various periods he had lived in four or five
great cities under those three colors as flown and loved by four great
nations.
Amazing! She could not query fast enough. "First city?"
First in London, where he had been born and reared.
"And then?"
Then in Amsterdam, where he had been married.
"And then?"
Then for ten years in Philadelphia.
"And then?"
Why, then, for forty years more, down to that present 1852, in New
Orleans, while nevertheless, save for the last ten, he had sojourned
much abroad in many ports and capitals, but mainly in Paris.
The girl's note of mirth softly persisted, irrepressible but
self-oblivious, a mere accent of her volatile emotions, most frequent
among which was a delighted wonder in looking on the first man of
foreign travel, first world-citizen, with whom she had ever awarely come
face to face. So guessed the youth, well pleased.
Presently, as if she too had guessed something, she asked if the boat's
master was not this man's son.
He now running it? Yes, he was.
"And was he, too, born in England?--or in Holland?"
"In Philadelphia, 1803."
"And did he, too, marry a--Dutch--wife?"
"No, a young lady of Philadelphia, in 1832; an American."
"Did you ever see Andrew Jackson?"
"Yes, I knew him."
"Were you in the battle of New Orleans?"
"Yes, I commanded a battery."
"Did you know anybody else besides Jackson? Who else?"
"Oh, I knew them all; Claiborne, Livingston, Duncan, Touro, Sheppard,
Grimes, the two Lafittes, Dominique You, Coffee, Villeré, Roosevelt----"
"I know about Roosevelt; he brought the first steamboat down the
Mississippi. My grandfather knew him. Did you ever have any
grandchildren?"
Yes, he had had several, but before she could inquire what had become of
them the attention of every one was arrested by the second approach of
the cab bearing the two hotspurs who had missed the boat at Canal
Street. All the way up from there their labored gallop, by turns hid,
seen, and hid again, had amused many of her passengers, and now, as the
pair shouldered their angry way across the ship's crowded deck and down
the steep gang-plank, a general laugh from the boat's upper rails galled
them none the less for being congratulatory. So handsome and
dangerous-looking that the laugh died, they halted midway of the narrow
incline, impeding the stream of immigrants at their heels, and sent up a
fierce stare in response to the propitiatory smiles of the boat's
commander and the youth standing near him. Only one of the twins spoke,
but the eyes of his brother vindictively widened till they gleamed a
flaming concurrence in his fellow's high-keyed, oath-bound threat:
"We'll get even with you for this, Captain John Courteney. We warn you
and all your tribe."
The old nurse on the roof, to whose arm her slim charge was clinging
with both hands, moaned audibly: "Oh, Lawd, Mahs' Julian! Mahs' Lucian!"
The girl laughed, laughed so merrily and convincingly--as if to laugh
was the one reasonable thing to do--that most of the passengers did
likewise. Even the grave youth whose back was to her inwardly granted
that the lamentable habit could make itself useful in an awkward
juncture. While he so thought, he observed the unruffled owner of the
_Votaress_ motion to the chagrined young men to clear the way by coming
aboard, and as they haughtily did so he heard the commander's father say
to the girl still at his side:
"I believe those are your brothers?"
"Yes," she responded, for once without mirth, "my brothers," and the
peace-loving but conscientious nurse added with a modest pretence of
pure soliloquy:
"One dess as hahmless as de yetheh."
The bell boomed. The last transatlantic stranger shuffled aboard, wan
and feeble. Now to one wheel, now to the other, the pilot jingled to
back away, then to stop, then to go ahead, then to both for full speed,
and once more the beautiful craft moved majestically up the river. Her
course shifted from south to west, the shores for a time widened apart,
the low-roofed city swung and sank away backward, groves of orange and
magnolia grew plainer to the eye than suburban streets, and the course
changed again, from west to north. Soon on the right, behind a high
levee and backed by a sombre swamp forest, appeared the live-oaks and
gardens of Carrollton, and presently on the left came Nine-mile Point
and another bend of the river westward. As the boat's prow turned, the
waters, from shore to shore, reflected the low sun so dazzlingly that
nearly all the passengers on the roof moved aft, whence, ravished by the
ascending odors of supper, they went below.
But the handsome old man, the sedate youth, the girl, the nurse,
remained. Captain Courteney came along the deck and crossed toward the
four, eyed from head to foot by the girl even after he had stopped near
her. But her gaze drew no glance from him.
"Well, Hugh," he said.
The youth turned with a smile that bettered every meaning in his too
passive countenance: "Well, father?"
"Oh!" breathed the startled girl. She looked eagerly into the three male
faces, beamed round upon her dark attendant, and then looked again at
grandfather, father, and son. "Why, of course!" she softly laughed.
"John," said the older man, "this young lady is a daughter of Gideon
Hayle."
"I thought as much." The benign captain lifted his hat and accepted and
dropped again the dainty hand proffered him with childish readiness.
"Then you're the youngest of seven children."
Her reply was a gay nod. Presently, with a merry glint between her long
lashes, she said: "I'm Ramsey."
The captain's smile grew: "That must be great fun."
The girl looked from one to another, puzzled.
"Why, just to be Ramsey," he explained. "Isn't it?"
She gave him a wary, sidewise glance and looked out over the water. "My
three married sisters all live near this river," she musingly said; "one
in Louisiana, two in Mississippi." Her sidelong glance repeated itself:
"I know who it would be fun to be--for me--or for anybody!" Her eyes
widened as her brother's had done, though in an amiable, elated way.
"Your father?" asked the captain.
She all but danced: "How'd you know?"
"I saw him--in your eyes," was the placid reply. "Your father and I, and
your grandfather Hayle, and this gentleman here----"
"Ya-ass, ya-ass!" drawled the nurse in worshipping reminiscence, and
Ramsey laughed to Hugh, and all the while the captain persisted: "We've
built and owned rival boats----"
"Fawty yeah'!" murmured the nurse. "Fawty yeah'!"
"Yes, yes!" chirruped the girl. "Pop-a's up the river now, building the
_Paragon_! We're on our way to join him!"
"Law', missy," gently chid the nurse, made anxious by a new approach
which Ramsey was trying to ignore, "dese gen'lemens knows all dat."
Ramsey twitched her shoulders and waist. Her lips parted for a bright
question, but it was interrupted. The interrupters were the restless
twins, whose tread sounded peremptory even on the painted canvas of the
deck, and the fineness of whose presence was dimmed only by the hardy
lawlessness which, in their own eyes, was their crowning virtue.
"Ramsey," drawled one of them, who somehow seemed the more forceful of
the two. He spoke as if amazed at his own self-restraint. She whisked
round to him. He made his eyes heavy: "Have you had any proper
introduction to these--gentlemen?"
A white-jacket, holding a large hand-bell by its tongue, bowed low
before the captain, received a nod, and minced away. With suspended
breath the girl stared an instant on her brother, then on the captain,
and then on his father; but as her eyes came round to Hugh his solemnity
caught her unprepared, and, with every curl shaking, she broke out in a
tinkling laugh so straight from the heart, so innocent, and so helpless
that even the frightened old woman chuckled. Ramsey wheeled, snatched
the nurse round, and hurried her off to a stair, hanging to her arm,
tiptoeing, dancing, and carolling in the rhythm of the supper-bell
below:
"Ringading tingalingaty, ringadang ding,
Ringading tingalingaty, ringadang ding."
Red and dumb, the questioner glared after them until, near one of the
great paddle-boxes, they vanished below. But his brother, the one who
had the trick of widening his eyes, found words. "Captain Courteney," he
said, "by what right does your son--or even do you, sir--take the
liberty, on the hurricane-deck of a steamboat, to scrape acquaintance
with an unprotec----?"
The captain had turned his back. "Hugh," he affably said, "will you see
what these young gentlemen want?" And then to the older man: "Come,
father, let's go to supper." They went.
VI
HAYLE'S TWINS
Hugh was grateful for this task in diplomacy, yet wondered what mess he
should make of it.
He was here for just such matters, let loose from tutor and books for
the summer, to study the handling of a steamboat, one large part of
which, of course, was handling the people aboard. Both pilots, up
yonder, knew this was his rôle. Already he had tried his unskill--or let
"Ramsey" try it--and had learned a point or two. She had shown him, at
least twice, what value there might be in a well-timed, unmanageable
laugh. But a well-timed, unmanageable laugh is purely a natural gift. If
it was to come to his aid, it would have to come of itself. Lucian, the
twin who had asked the last question, turned upon him.
Hugh smilingly lifted a pacifying hand. "You're entirely mistaken," he
said. "Nobody's tried to scrape acquaintance." In the midst of the last
two words, sure enough, there broke from him a laugh which to him seemed
so honest, friendly, well justified, and unmanageable that he stood
astounded when his accuser blazed with wrath.
"You lie, damn you!" was the answering cry. "And then you laugh in my
face! We saw you--all three of you--just now!" The note was so high that
one of the pilots began to loiter down from the pilot-house.
Hugh crimsoned. "I see," he said, advancing step by step as the frenzied
boy drew back. "You really don't want a peaceable explanation, at all,
do you?"
The other twin, Julian, arrested his brother's back step by a touch and
spoke for him: "No, sir, we don't. You can't 'peaceably explain' foul
treatment, you damned fool, and that's all we Hayles have had of you
Courteneys this day. We want satisfaction! We don't ask it, we'll take
it! And we'll get it"--here a ripping oath--"if we have to wait for it
ten years!"
This time Hugh paled. "It needn't take ten minutes," he said. "Come down
to the freight deck, into the engine room, and I'll give both of you so
much of it that you won't know yourselves apart."
"One more insult!" cried Lucian, the boy who so often widened his eyes,
while Julian, narrowing his lids, said in a tone suddenly icy:
"That classes you, sir, on the freight deck."
"We don't fight deck hands," said Lucian.
"Nor emigrants!" sneered his brother. "And when we fight gentlemen we
fight with weapons, sir, as gentlemen should."
Hugh's awkward laugh came again, and the pilot who had come down from
beside his fellow at the wheel inquired:
"What's the fraction here?"
"Oh, nothing," said Hugh.
"Everything!" cried Julian. "And you'll find it so the first time we get
a fair chance at you--any of you!"
The pilot was amiable. "Hold on," he suggested. "See here, my young
friend, what do you reckon your father'd do to this young man"--touching
Hugh--"if he should rip around on a Hayle boat as you're doing here?"
"That's a totally different matter, sir!"
The pilot smiled. "Don't you know Gideon Hayle would put him ashore at
the first wood-yard?"
"He'd be wrong if he didn't," gravely said Hugh.
"Do you mean that for a threat?--either of you?" snapped Lucian.
"No," said the pilot, "I was merely trying to reason with you. Come,
now, go down to supper. It's a roaring good one: crawfish gumbo, riz
biscuits, fresh butter, fried oysters, and coffee to make your hair
curl. Go on, both of you. You've had--naturally enough--last day in the
city--a few juleps too many, but that's all right. A square meal, a
night's rest, and you'll wake up in the morning with Baton Rouge and all
the sugar lands astern, the big cotton plantations on both sides of us,
you feeling at home with everybody, everybody at home with you."
"Many thanks," sneered Julian. "We'll go to our meals self-invited. Good
evening."
Hugh granted the pair a slight nod. As they went, Lucian, looking back
over Julian's shoulder with eyes bigger than ever, said: "We'll wake up
in the morning without the least change of feeling for this boat's
owners, their relatives, or their hirelings."
The relative and the hireling glanced sharply at each other. But then
Hugh said quietly: "A man can't quarrel with boys, Mr. Watson."
"No," mused the pilot aloud as he watched the pair go below, "but he can
wait. They'll soon be men."
"And this be all forgotten," said Hugh.
"Not by them!" rejoined Mr. Watson. "They'll remember it ef they have to
tattoo it--on their stomachs."
"I should have managed them better," said Hugh.
"Lord, boy, nobody's ever managed _them_ sence they was born." The
speaker sauntered back toward the pilot-house, coining rhetoric in his
mind to relieve his rage. "It's only the long-looked-for come at last,"
he thought, "and come _toe_ last." As he resumed the bench behind his
partner his wrath at length burst out:
"Well, of all the hell-fry I ever come across----!"
"And they 'llow to keep things fryin'," said his mate.
Which made Watson even more rhetorical. "Yes, it's their only salvation
from their rotten insignificance." He meditated. "And yet--hnn!" He was
about to say something much kindlier when suddenly he laughed down from
a side window upon the twins returned. "Well, I'll swear!"
"We heard, sir," said Julian with a lordly bow.
"And you," chimed Lucian, "shall hear later." Rather aimlessly they
turned and again disappeared, and after a moment or two the man at the
wheel asked, with playful softness, with his eyes on the roof below:
"D'you reckon yon other two will ever manage to offset the tricks o'
Hayle's twins?"
His partner rose and looked down. The old nurse and the third Hayle
brother stood side by side watching the beautiful low-lying plantations
unbrokenly swing by behind the embankments of the eastern shore. The
level fields of young sugar-cane reposed in a twilight haze, while the
rows of whitewashed slave cabins, the tall red chimneys of the great
sugar-houses, and the white-pillared verandas of the masters' dwellings
embowered in their evergreen gardens, still showed clear in the last
lights of day. But the query was not as to the nurse and the boy. Near
them stood Ramsey, with arms akimbo, once more conversing with Hugh.
"Oh!" said the glowing Watson. "If that's to be the game, Ned, I'm in
it, sir! I'm in it!"
"Just's well, Watsy. You're in the twins' game anyhow."
Meantime Ramsey's talk flowed on like brook water, Hugh's meeting it
like the brook's bowlders:
"Guess who's at the head of the table!"
"Who? my grandfather?"
"No, he's 'way down at the men's end."
"Well, then, father?"
"Yes! And who's sitting next him--on his right?"
"Your mother?"
"Yes! And guess who's going to sit at the head of the children's table.
You!"
"How do you know that?"
The reply was chanted: "I asked the steward to put you there." She
laughed and glanced furtively at her unheeding brother. Then her eyes
came back: "And I'm to be the first on your right!" She spread her arms
like wings.
"Why, Miss Ramsey!" protested the nurse.
Hugh blushed into his limp, turn-down collar. "I don't believe you'd
better," he said.
"I will!" said Ramsey, lifting her chin.
VII
SUPPER
Deep in love with the river life was Ramsey.
She had tried it now, thoroughly, for an hour, and was sure! The
twenty-four hours' trip down from her plantation home, on the first boat
that happened along, a rather poor thing, had been her first experience
and a keen pleasure; but this, on the _Votaress_, was rapture.
One effect was that her mind teemed with family history. Her grizzly,
giant father, whom she so rarely saw, so vehemently worshipped, son of a
wild but masterful Kentucky mountaineer who had spent his life floating
"broadhorns" and barges down the Ohio and Mississippi, counted it one of
the drawbacks of his career that so few of his kindred cared for the
river. One of his brothers was an obscure pilot somewhere on the
Cumberland or Tennessee. Another, once a pilot, then a planter, and
again a pilot, had been lost on a burning boat, she knew not how nor
when. The third was a planter in the Red River lowlands. Her three
sisters, as we have heard her tell, were planters' wives, and the
father's home, when ashore, was on a plantation of his Creole wife's
inheritance, four or five miles in behind the old river town of Natchez.
There Ramsey had been born and had grown up, knowing the great
Mississippi only as a remote realm of poetry and adventure out of which
at intervals her mighty father came to clasp to his broad breast her
sweet, glad mother, tarry a few days or hours, and be gone again. She,
herself, had seldom seen it even from the Natchez bluffs, yet she could
name all its chief boats apart, not by sight but by the long, soft
bellow of their steam-whistles, wafted inland. But now, at last, she was
a passenger on its waters. As Hugh, so well grown up as to breadth and
gravity, took his seat at the head of the dazzling board that filled the
whole middle third of the cabin, and as she sat down next him with all
the other adolescents and juveniles in places of inferior dignity, the
affair seemed the most significant as well as most brilliant in which
she had ever taken part.
Most significant, because to love the river for itself would be to find
herself easily and lastingly first in her father's love and favor--her
only wish in this world. And most brilliant: without an angle or
partition the cabin extended between the two parallel lines of
staterooms running aft through the boat's entire length from boiler deck
to stern guards. Its richly carpeted floor gently dipped amidships and
as gently rose again to the far end, where you might see the sofas and
piano of that undivided part sanctified to the ladies. Its whole course
was dazzlingly lighted with chandeliers of gold bronze and crystal that
forever quivered, glittered, and tinkled to the tremor of the boat's
swift advance. It was multitudinously pilastered, gleamingly
white-painted and shellacked, profusely gilded and pictorially panelled,
and it bewilderingly reflected itself and Ramsey from mirrors wide or
narrow wherever mirrors wide or narrow could be set in.
A new decorum came into her bearing. She ceased to ask questions. She
waited for them to be put to her--from the head of the table--and smiled
where an hour earlier she would have laughed. Above all, she felt in her
spirit the same dreamy strangeness she had so lately felt in her bodily
frame when the boat first began to move: a feeling as if the young
company about her were but stayers behind on a shore from which she was
beginning to be inexorably borne away. The wide river of a world's life,
to which the rillet of her own small existence had been carelessly
winding, was all at once clearly in sight. She could almost have written
verse! She yearned to tell her whole history, but not one personal
question could she lure from Hugh. Silently she recalled the story of
her Creole grandmother, married at fifteen--her own present age. That
young lady had met her future husband just this way on Roosevelt's
famous _New Orleans_, earliest steamboat on the Mississippi. But there
sat Hugh, as square, as solid, and as incurious as an upended bale of
cotton. And still she kept her manners.
It was but the custom of the time and region that the most honored guest
of the _Votaress_, wife of her owner's most formidable competitor, with
her family, not only should enjoy her journey wholly without cost, but
that she should receive every attention courtesy could offer. The heat
of the contest counted for nothing. And so, while Ramsey ate and talked
with Hugh, his grandfather, near by in the ladies' cabin, at her left
and at Hugh's back, conversed with her mother on a sofa. It was a
heavenly hour. The resplendent boat kept her speed with no inward sign
of her ceaseless ongoing except the tremor of her perfect frame, the
flutter of her hundred-footed tread, and the tinkle and prismatic
twinkle of her pendent glass, all responsively alternating with the deep
breathings of her stacks, and with no sign of her frequent turnings but
the softly audible creepings of her steering-gear.
While never failing duly to receive and return Hugh's rather stiff
attentions, and while doing superb justice to the repast, Ramsey, with
side glances from her large, unconscious eyes emotionally enriched by
long auburn lashes, easily and with great zest contemplated her mother's
charming complexion, so lily-white and shell pink for a Creole matron,
as well as the lovely confidingness of her manner, so childlike yet so
wise. It was not for her to know that her mother, while hanging on every
word of the courtly old man, was closely observing both her and Hugh.
The grandfather, too, her blue-and-auburn glances took in sidewise, as
their closer scrutiny had earlier done pointblank on the hurricane-deck.
He was small, unmuscular, clean-shaven, erect, placid. She noted again
his snowy, waving hair, thin only on his pink crown. It shone like silk.
He still kept a soft flush of unimpaired health and an air of inner
cleanness equal to that which showed outwardly from gaitered shoes to
the bell-crowned beaver in his hand. She observed the wide cambric
ruffle that ran down his much-displayed, much-pleated shirt-front. His
stiff, high stock was tied with a limp white bow-knot. His standing
collar covered half of either cheek. He wore a jewelled breastpin and a
heavy gold fob-chain and seal. In his too delicate hand, along with the
beaver and his gloves, was a stout, gold-headed cane, and from his coat
skirt his handkerchief painstakingly peeped out behind. All of which
seemed quite natural on him and well related to the highly attractive
attire of the lady beside him.
Yet suddenly Ramsey had a painful misgiving. Hugh was remarking upon
some matter on the other side of the world, when she asked him as
abruptly as a boat might strike a snag: "Is your grandfather a Whig?"
"He is," said Hugh. They laid up their napkins.
"Oh!" sighed Ramsey, but then laughed. "Is your father a Whig, too?"
"Yes, my father, too."
"Not a Henry Clay Whig?" she hopefully prompted.
"Yes, a Henry Clay Whig yet."
Self-consciously she dropped her head over the back of her chair to be
rid of her curls. "My father," she musingly observed, "is a Democrat."
"Yet we can be friends," said Hugh, "can't we?" wondering, when he had
asked, why they need be.
Ramsey did not say. With her chin in her collar she looked herself over
carefully while she brokenly remarked, "All our men folks--four
men--three boys--are--red-hot Democrats."
But on the last word she checked and hearkened, and they smiled together
at the far-away whistle of another steamer, deep-toned, mellowed by
distance, and long sustained.
"That's a Courteney boat," quietly began Hugh, but Ramsey was up and
off.
"_The Empress!_" she called to her mother as she flew.
VIII
QUESTIONS
Out forward of the texas and close beside the great bell, Ramsey halted,
alone in the boundless starlight and rippling breeze on the cabin roof.
The stately _Votaress_, with her towering funnels lost in the upper
night, was running well inshore under a point, wrapped in a world-wide
silence broken only by the placid outgo of her own vast breath, the soft
rush of her torrential footsteps far below, and the answering rustle of
the nearer shore. Even on that side the dark land confessed no outline
save the low tree tops of two or three plantation-house groves, from
each of which shone a lighted window or two, tinier and lonelier than a
glowworm.
Across the point, between its groves, the flood revealed itself at
intervals in pale shimmerings, and just beyond one of these gleams, in
mid-river, shone the nearing boat, her countless lights merged into a
single sheen brokenly repeated in the water beneath her. Hugh came to
the girl's side at a moment when a wood on the point's extreme end
concealed the steamer's approach; but in the next the fleet comer swept
out of hiding, an empress in truth to Ramsey, jewelled, from furnace
doors to texas roof, with many-colored lights as if in coronation robes.
"That is how we look to her," said Hugh.