Gideon's Band Part 22

"Good for you," said the senator. "Mr. pilot, this paper, of a hundred signatures, pet.i.tions this boat to put off her foreigners at Natchez Island. If that is refused, when and where are we likely to overhaul the _Antelope_?"

"_Antelope_? Let's see. We'd still be a-many a bend behind the _Antelope_ at sundown but fo' one thing. At Natchez she's got to discharge an all-fired lot o' casting an' boilers, things she can't put ash.o.r.e 'ithout han'spikes, block-an'-taickle an' all han's a-cuss'n' to oncet. Like as not we'll catch her right there."

"Good again; sundown!" said the senator. "Now, commodore, this pet.i.tion begs----"

The commodore tried to wave him to Hugh but the senator's big hand gently prevented. "It begs," he went on, "and every friend of Gideon Hayle and John Courteney on this boat insists, that Madame Hayle be required to leave this suicidal work she's doing and with her daughter and youngest son be put aboard the _Antelope_ to join her husband ahead of all bad news." With his under lip pushed out he smiled into the commodore's serene face.

Hugh spoke. "The _Votaress_ being slow?" he inquired.

"Not at all! But, my young friend, the _Votaress_ can't hold funerals and outrun the _Antelope_ at the same time."

The commodore had turned to Watson: "Want to see me?" The two moved a few paces aft.

"Then it isn't," Hugh asked the senator, "that your hundred signers of this thing are afraid madame will get the cholera?" He took the pet.i.tion's free end between thumb and finger and softly pulled. But its holder held on.

"Why, yes," said the holder-on, "we fear that, too. Good Lord, she may have the contagion now!" It gave him grim amus.e.m.e.nt to note that the grandson's face was as quiet as the old man's, yet as hard and heavy as any of the _Antelope's_ big castings. He thought how much better it were to have this chap for an adherent than opponent.

"Yet you're all willing," slowly pressed Hugh, while--with their pull on the paper increasing--they here and the commodore and Watson yonder returned the bow of the bishop as he came from below and pa.s.sed on up to the sick-room--"you're willing to send the cholera aboard the _Antelope_?"

"Willing, my G.o.d, no, sir! compelled!--to risk it--for the sake of Gideon Hayle and his people and of you and yours, in a great public interest centring in you and them." The speaker smilingly tapped the hard-pulled doc.u.ment so lately urged upon the grandfather. "We couldn't _write_ that--in this paper. When I've explained _that_ I'll hand you _this_--don't pull it."

"Well, then, let go of it," said Hugh, with a light jerk which put it wholly into his possession.

The senator's eyes blazed, but when he saw that Hugh's, though as much too wide as his own, looked out of a face as set and hard as ever, he recovered his suavity, puffed his cigar, waved it abroad, and said: "That's all right. Take that to the captain at once, will you?"

"No," replied Hugh, the wrestler's nimble art being as far, far away from him as the "happy land" of the children's hymn, which the cornet was essaying below.

"No?" questioned the tolerant senator.

"No." Small knots of pa.s.sengers, the squire in one, the general in another, had drawn within eavesdropping range and Hugh lowered his voice. "Not till I hear what you couldn't write," he said. "When you've explained _that_ I'll hand him _this_. No one's in his room, come there."

As they reached its door and the senator pa.s.sed in, Hugh was joined by the grandfather and Watson and detained some moments in private council, with Watson as chief speaker. Then the commodore returned leisurely forward toward the captain's chair while Watson sought the texas roof and pilot-house, and Hugh shut himself in with the senator.

They sat with the writing-table between them. "I wish," said the senator, "I had a son like you. I'd say: 'My son, the worst notion in this land to-day is that always the first thing to do is fight, and that the only thing to fight with is hot shot. Don't you believe it! Don't think every man's your enemy the moment he differs with you. He may be your best friend. And don't think every enemy wants to stab you in the back.' But, Lord! I needn't offer a father's advice to you, with such a father--and grandfather--as you've got.

"Now, here we are. It's idle for me to tell you what we wanted to put in that paper and couldn't, if you can't believe that maybe, after all, I'm a peacemaker and your friend, hunh? I don't set up to be your only friend or only your friend or your friend only for your sake. Frankly, my ruling pa.s.sion is for the community as a whole; the old Jacksonian pa.s.sion for the people, sir. If I'm meddling it's because I see a situation that right on its surface threatens one misfortune, and at bottom another and bigger one, to them, the people--a public misfortune.

I don't want to avert just the cholera, here to-day, gone to-morrow; I want to avert the lasting public misfortune of a Courteney-Hayle feud.

There, sir! That's my hand! Cards right down on the table! Oh, I'm nothing if not outspoken, flat-footed! A lot of those signers don't see that bottom meaning. They don't need to. But, sir, _you_ know--your grandfather's always known--that by every instinct the Hayles, even to the sons-in-law, are fighters. They don't know any way to succeed, in anything, but to fight. It's the Old Hickory in them. Old Hickory always fought, your Harry of the West has always compromised. The Hayles loathe tact. They don't know the power of concession as you Courteneys do. And that's why your only way to succeed with them is to _con_cede something.

Not everything, not principle--good Lord, not principle! yet something definite, visible, conciliatory, hunh?

"Mind you, I hold no brief for them. I know those twins haven't behaved right a minute. But no Hayle's been let into this affair, from first to last."

The falsehood was so rash a slip that its author paused, but when Hugh's face showed no change he resumed: "Sir, it is in your interest we ask you to put those foreigners off. If you don't you'll rouse public resentment up and down this river a hundred miles wide for a thousand miles. And if, keeping them aboard, you don't put Madam Hayle and her daughter on some other boat, and anything happens to them on this one, you'll have Gideon Hayle and his sons--and his sons-in-law--for your mortal enemies the rest of your lives, long or short--and with public sympathy all on their side. Oh, I'm nothing if not outspoken! Why, my dear boy, if you don't think I'm telling you this in friends.h.i.+p----"

"Call it so. But stop it, at once."

"Why--you say that--to me?"

"I do. Stop it, at once, or we'll call it----"

"Ridiculous! What will you call it, sir?"

"Mutiny. The captain has so ordered--and arranged."

The inquirer drew breath, leaned forward on an elbow, and stared. The stare was returned. The senator began to smile. Hugh did not. The smile grew. Hugh's gaze was fixed. The smiler smiled yet more, but in vain.

Abruptly he ha-haed.

"We'll call it that till you prove it's not," said Hugh.

"Did you ever hear of a poker face?" asked the senator.

"No, sir."

"You've got one, now; youngest I ever saw. I wish I had it--haw, haw!

Where'd you find it? I doubt if ever in your life you've had any real contact with any real guile."

"I have," said Hugh, very quiet, very angry, yet with a joy of disclosure, communicative at last by sheer stress of so much kept unsaid. "And I've never got over it."

"Well, well! When was that?"

"All through the most important ten years of my life."

"Of your life! Good gracious! Which were they?"

"The first ten. A guile seemingly so guileless that yours, compared with it, is botch work."

The two were still looking into each other's eyes when the latch clicked and John Courteney stepped in.

XXV

"PLEASE a.s.sEMBLE"

Out from behind Fritz Island the _Votaress_ swept northward into a deluge of light from a sun just finis.h.i.+ng the first half of his afternoon decline.

Before her lay, far and wide, an expanse of river and sh.o.r.e so fair, without a noticeable sign of man's touch, that one traveller of exceptional moral daring--conversing with the Gilmores and Ramsey--personified the scene as "Nature in siesta." At the steamer's approach the picture--or, as the daring traveller might have insisted, the basking sleeper--seemed to awaken and in a repletion of smiling content to stir and stretch and every here and there to darken and lighten by turns as though closing and opening upon the intruder a mult.i.tude of eyes as unnumbered as those of a human sort that looked on the scene, the sleeper, from the beautiful boat.

So for several minutes. Then the _Votaress_ curved into the west till the great twin shadows of her chimneys crept athwart the pilot-house and texas, while more than one pa.s.senger of the kind who tell all they know to whoever will hear said that yonder bright ma.s.s of cottonwoods and willows, bathing in sunlight directly up the stream, with open water s.h.i.+mmering all round it, was Gla.s.sc.o.c.k Island; that Gla.s.sc.o.c.k Towhead lay hidden behind it just above, and that a towhead was an island in the making. The whole view was such a stimulus to the outpouring of sentiment as well as of information, that one young pair, each succeeding flutter of whose heart-strings was more tenderly entangling them, agreed in undertone that the river's incessant bendings were steps of a Jacob's ladder with these resplendent white steamers for ascending and descending angels.

"Yonder comes another now," said both at once. They pressed forward to the foremost boiler-deck guards, among the many sitters and standers who were trying to determine, by the ornamental form of the stranger's chimney-tops or the peculiar note of her scape-pipes, before her name might show out on paddle-box or pilot-house, whether she was the _Chancellor_, the _Aleck Scott_, the _Belle Key_, or the _Magnolia_. To be either was to be famous. The next moment she swept into view on the island's sunward side, as pre-eminent in all the scene as though the sun were gone and she were the rising moon. The moon was not her equal in the eyes of those beholders. On every deck, from forecastle to after hurricane roof, there were big spots of vivid color, red, green, blue, never seen in the moon and which were quickly made out to be a high-piled freight of ploughs, harrows, horse-mills, carts, and wagons destined for the ever-widening Southern fields of corn and cotton, sugar and rice. The pa.s.senger with the pocket spy-gla.s.s--there is always one--proclaimed that her boiler deck was hung full--as no deck of the moon ever is--of the finest spoils of the hunt: geese, swan, venison, and bear; while the nakedest eye could see at a glance that from forward gangway to sternmost guard her bull railings were up, and a closer scrutiny revealed that the main load of her freight deck was every farm-bred sort of living four-footed beast: horses, mules, beeves, cows, swine, and sheep. She did not pa.s.s near though unaware of the distress she avoided; but in courtly exaggeration she sent across the intervening mile a double salute, white plumes of sunlit steam from her whistle--the new mode--and the gentler voice of her bell, the older form. The course of the _Votaress_ lay on the island's eastern side, and the hail and response of the two crafts had hardly ceased to echo from the various sh.o.r.es, or hats to wave and handkerchiefs to flutter, when the flood between them began to widen, a thousand feet to the half minute, and they parted.

At the same time, from the middle of the boiler deck floated a sound ordinarily most welcome but at this time a distasteful surprise: the dinner-bell again. Not with festal din, however, it called, but with each solitary note drawn out through a full second or more, church-steeple fas.h.i.+on, and with a silken veil tied on its tongue to give each stroke a solemn softness and illusion of distance. Small wonder that the most of the company, just risen from "a plumb bait,"

turned that way and stared, seeing old Joy, with joyless face, tolling out the notes in persistent monotone while in front of her stood the Gilmores at either side of a chair, and on the chair, also standing, the daughter of Gideon Hayle. With her hands and eyes fastened upon a written notice and with the bell tolling steadily at her back she tremblingly read aloud:

"Fellow travellers: Please a.s.semble at once in the ladies' cabin to supplicate the divine mercy for a stay of the scourge on this boat, and in concerted wors.h.i.+p to seek spiritual preparation for whatever awaits us in the further hours of our voyage. In the absence of Bishop So-and-So, who is ministering to the sick, and at his request, the meeting will be conducted by the celebrated comedians Mr. and Mrs.

Gilmore, late of Placide's Varieties, New Orleans."