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."