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?"
"Why, they think that for that very reason John Courteney let his
wife--from Philadelphia, you know--abolitionist--bring the girl and Dan
together, hoping he'd either set her free or else skip the wedding and
somehow disgrace the whole Hayle family. Just those boys' guess
but--they believe it. What they _see_ is a Hayle killed and no one
killed for him."
"Oh, we settled that with their dad ten years ago."
"They say not. And, really, you know, some of the liveliest feuds along
this river are founded on less cause. Gid Hayle, they claim, couldn't
bring the Courteneys to law at the time because the only men he had to
back him were his two in-laws. Now these twins are men and they feel
honor-bound to throw down--no, to take up--the gage, thrown down to them
every hour they've been on this boat."
"Shoo! They've been treated only too well."
"Tactfully, do you think?"
"Depends on what you call tact. Ordinary tact's the worst thing you
could throw at 'em." The clerk spoke with both eyes on the general and
the actor. His fellow clerk, second clerk, had nudged him. The general
was raising his voice to the actor.
"They f-forbid your lady to chaperon their sister, since you both, last
evening, all-llowed young Courteney to give her his account of the
b-urning of the _Quakeress_."
"General!" the smiling senator cautioned him, "privately, if you please!
more privately!"
But the soldier persisted. "Th-they even suspect you, sir, of
s-s-piriting off to Canada their s-s-lave p-roperty, missing after that
event."
"Why, gentlemen," began the player, looking very professional but also
very handsome, and with a flash of annoyance only when he noticed that
the exhorter had joined the group, "I never in my--nonsense! fantastical
nonsense! Why, I'll be--I'll see you later! At present, as I've already
said, I'm overdue at that rehearsal."
"Yes, Mr. Gilmore," said the first clerk, "you are."
"A moment," interposed the senator. "Purely in the interest of peace,
Mr. Gilmore----"
"Oh, senator," the actor amiably laughed, "I don't question your
good-will, or the general's; but you don't know, either of you, the
interest of peace when you run against it--pardon! I take that back. My
annoyance, at quite another thing, flew off the handle. I take it back.
Excuse me, I'll make it a point to see you later." The three bowed. As
he started away the exhorter blocked his path.
"Excuse _me_," said the zealot. "Fust tell us: Ef ye _mowt_ sperit a
niggeh off to Canady would ye aw wouldn't ye?"
For an instant the player stood mute and then he said only, in a
preoccupied tone: "Please let me pass." But at the same time he laid his
unexpected left hand lightly on the questioner and by some stage trick
sent him stumbling aside along a line of chairs and toppling to the
floor. The cub and the younger clerks had him up in a twinkling, while a
dozen men appeared from the boiler deck as if by magic, and the player
walked away down the cabin.
"Now, no more noise here," said the second clerk to the lifted man,
restraining both his arms. "No, you stay right here. He didn't do a
thing to you, you just stepped a little too spry and sort o' tripped
up."
From his window shelf the first clerk, in the tail of his eye, saw the
zealot and his group disperse while he, the clerk, talked laughingly to
the soldier on one subject and gravely to the statesman on another.
"You can't challenge a man, general," he said, "who apologizes for
calling you a poor peacemaker."
"By--! s-sir, I can and I sh-shall!" was the retort.
The clerk ignored it. He and the senator bent heads together again.
"No," he said, "Hugh only told him he _feared_ it was Basile. In fact,
it wasn't. It isn't."
"Who is it, then? It's a passenger and a bad case."
"Will you keep it dark--by the patient's own request--till the show's
over to-night?"
The senator nodded. The two heads came closer. The general scorned to
listen. The name did not reach him.
"Jove!" gasped the senator. "Come, general." They went.
The first clerk turned to the second clerk's elbow at the high desk,
saying dryly: "They came to demand those shooting-irons and couldn't
muster the brass."
XXXV
UNSETTLED WEATHER
Again the _Votaress_ was passing the Westwood and again was but a short
mile behind the _Antelope_.
Led by Ramsey, the amateur players, including Hugh, had stopped
rehearsing and were on the skylight roof, gathered about the commodore,
the Gilmores, and the bell. In their company, though below them on the
forward hurricane deck, the first mate leaned bulkily against the roof
on which they stood. It was his watch. Ned was up at the wheel.
As early as the evening before, a good hundred and fifty miles back down
the river, the _Antelope_, it will be remembered, had been close on the
_Westwood's_ heels. So Gilmore reminded his wife. So Hugh needlessly
reminded Ramsey. From the mate it was further learned that the pursuer
had overhauled the pursued between Petit Goufre--which he and the whole
company called Petty Gulf--and Grand Gulf; places named before the days
of steam for their dangerous eddies. Yet, he went on to tell Ramsey, the
swifter boat, with more freight to put ashore and with a larger appetite
for cord-wood, had never got clean away. Even now, in full view ahead,
she was down at half speed, wooding up from a barge in tow alongside.
You could hear her crew singing as they trotted under their great
shoulder loads of wood. The amateurs, except Hugh but including Ramsey,
caught up their song and were promptly joined by a group around the bell
of the _Westwood_ as that gallant loser foamed along between the
_Votaress_ and the shore:
"Oh, if I had a scolding wife,
As sure as you are born
I'd take her down to Noo Orleans
And trade her off for corn."
Presently the _Antelope_ cast off the emptied flat in midstream, and a
redoubled whiteness behind her paddle-boxes showed full speed.
"Now we can give her a square deal!" said a youth.
"And pass her inside of an hour!" declared another.
"In Bunch's Cut-off!" ventured one to the commodore, but the commodore
said the _Votaress_ herself was hungry for wood, and the mate confirmed
him by a nod.
"How much wood," some one asked the mate, "will a boat like this use up
in twenty-four hours?" It quickened the blood to be up here midway
between these turbid waters and yonder passionate sky so joyous in one
quarter, so angry in another; particularly to be here while steadily
distancing one beautiful boat and overtaking another "amid green
islands," as Mrs. Gilmore quoted--one of which, still in sight astern,
was that old haunt of flatboat robbers, called Island Ninety-four,
Stack's Island, or Crow's Nest. One half forgot the sad state of affairs
below. Conversation glided as swiftly as a flock of swallows and in as
many directions.
"How much wood?" said the mate. "Well, that sort o' depends. I once part
owned a boat that fo' one whole month didn't burn enough wood to dry the
sheriff's shoes, but that 'uz 'cause he kep' her tied up to the bank."
Ramsey did not hear this and cared nothing for the laugh it won. She had
seen the doctor and the priest slip from the twins' room in the texas
and go below aft. "How's mom-a?" she eagerly asked the commodore.
"Very well."
"How's Lucian?"
Lucian was so much better, he told her, that both brothers had been
returned to their cabin stateroom.
"Then you've just put a new case into the texas!"
The commodore smiled. "Yes, from the freight deck."
"Freight--humph! That's the lower deck," she reminiscently said, turning
to Hugh. "Who is it? Is it--Otto?"
But Hugh's face wore its absurd iron look, which had its usual effect on
her. The old man spoke: "Will Miss Ramsey do us all a favor; one that
will help the play?"
"Whew, yes! That'll help everything. What is it?"
"It's to make no mention of the new case to any one."
"Till the close of the evening," put in the Gilmores, and Ramsey saw
that they knew. Yet----
"All right," she said. "Oh, I know who it is." She tossed her curls.
"It's Otto's mother." But both tone and glance lacked conviction. The
commodore left them.
Meantime the mate was amusing his half of the
company.