Gideons Band | Page 5

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