Gideons Band | Page 6

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 for the last ten, he had sojourned
much abroad in many ports and capitals, but mainly in Paris.
The girl's note of mirth softly persisted, irrepressible but self-oblivious,
a mere accent of her volatile emotions, most frequent among which was
a delighted wonder in looking on the first man of foreign travel, first
world-citizen, with whom she had ever awarely come face to face. So
guessed the youth, well pleased.
Presently, as if she too had guessed something, she asked if the boat's

master was not this man's son.
He now running it? Yes, he was.
"And was he, too, born in England?--or in Holland?"
"In Philadelphia, 1803."
"And did he, too, marry a--Dutch--wife?"
"No, a young lady of Philadelphia, in 1832; an American."
"Did you ever see Andrew Jackson?"
"Yes, I knew him."
"Were you in the battle of New Orleans?"
"Yes, I commanded a battery."
"Did you know anybody else besides Jackson? Who else?"
"Oh, I knew them all; Claiborne, Livingston, Duncan, Touro, Sheppard,
Grimes, the two Lafittes, Dominique You, Coffee, Villeré,
Roosevelt----"
"I know about Roosevelt; he brought the first steamboat down the
Mississippi. My grandfather knew him. Did you ever have any
grandchildren?"
Yes, he had had several, but before she could inquire what had become
of them the attention of every one was arrested by the second approach
of the cab bearing the two hotspurs who had missed the boat at Canal
Street. All the way up from there their labored gallop, by turns hid,
seen, and hid again, had amused many of her passengers, and now, as
the pair shouldered their angry way across the ship's crowded deck and
down the steep gang-plank, a general laugh from the boat's upper rails
galled them none the less for being congratulatory. So handsome and
dangerous-looking that the laugh died, they halted midway of the

narrow incline, impeding the stream of immigrants at their heels, and
sent up a fierce stare in response to the propitiatory smiles of the boat's
commander and the youth standing near him. Only one of the twins
spoke, but the eyes of his brother vindictively widened till they
gleamed a flaming concurrence in his fellow's high-keyed, oath-bound
threat:
"We'll get even with you for this, Captain John Courteney. We warn
you and all your tribe."
The old nurse on the roof, to whose arm her slim charge was clinging
with both hands, moaned audibly: "Oh, Lawd, Mahs' Julian! Mahs'
Lucian!"
The girl laughed, laughed so merrily and convincingly--as if to laugh
was the one reasonable thing to do--that most of the passengers did
likewise. Even the grave youth whose back was to her inwardly granted
that the lamentable habit could make itself useful in an awkward
juncture. While he so thought, he observed the unruffled owner of the
Votaress motion to the chagrined young men to clear the way by
coming aboard, and as they haughtily did so he heard the commander's
father say to the girl still at his side:
"I believe those are your brothers?"
"Yes," she responded, for once without mirth, "my brothers," and the
peace-loving but conscientious nurse added with a modest pretence of
pure soliloquy:
"One dess as hahmless as de yetheh."
The bell boomed. The last transatlantic stranger shuffled aboard, wan
and feeble. Now to one wheel, now to the other, the pilot jingled to
back away, then to stop, then to go ahead, then to both for full speed,
and once more the beautiful craft moved majestically up the river. Her
course shifted from south to west, the shores for a time widened apart,
the low-roofed city swung and sank away backward, groves of