Gideon's Band Part 17

"Going ash.o.r.e in the yawl, I hope, for a doctor."

"And medicines," added some one.

"And for a priest," disparagingly said the smiling bishop as they moved to the sh.o.r.eward edge of the roof. "Large demands our deck pa.s.sengers are making."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Hugh. He was steering.

XIX

THIS WAY TO WOMANHOOD

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

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

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

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

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

Yet why look there, so distantly, when here between, right here under the boat's cut-water, was the Raccourci, barely four years old? The _Votaress_ was in it, half through it, before either Ramsey or Mrs.

Gilmore could be fully informed, and now their attention was beyond even their own command. For yonder ahead, miles away in Shreve's Cut-off, riding the strong current under Turnbull's Island, came the _Regent_, finest and speediest of Gideon Hayle's steamers.

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

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

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

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

"Do you belong to Gideon's Band?

Here's my heart an' here's my hand!

Do you belong to Gideon's Band?

Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"

No song is so poor that it may not thrill a partisan devotion. Ramsey stood on her toes. Down in his berth and in torture the shut-in Lucian faintly heard, turned his gaze to his brother, whispered "the _Regent_!"

and listened for another verse. The boats were pa.s.sing widely apart, and when it came only memory made its foolish lines plain to his doting ear:

"Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, De camomile and de b.u.mblebee.

Do you belong to Gideon's Band?

Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"

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

How swiftly and incessantly the scene changed. Down in a stateroom near the boiler deck some beginner on the horn was dejectedly playing "A Life on the Ocean Wave," but even with pestilence aboard and a brother stricken with it what an exalted, exalting life was a life on this mighty stream! Flat lands? Flat waters? It was the highest, widest outlook into the world of nature and of man she had ever had.

Monotonous?--when one felt oneself a year older to-day than yesterday and growing half a month's growth every hour? In yesterday's childishness she had begun at Post Forty-six to keep count of all the timber rafts and flatboats met, and here in this long stretch came three more of the one and five of the other, with men hurrahing to her from them--men as wild as the wilderness, yet with homes and families away back up the great tributaries and their tributaries. And here were mile-wide cotton fields, with the black people hoeing in them and looking no bigger than flocks of birds feeding. And here came another steamboat--and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall.

Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow and cottonwood jungles of the creeping sh.o.r.es; but while the "labboard"

sh.o.r.e was still Louisiana the "stabboard" was now her own native Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ramsey laughed in relief.

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

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