Gideons Band | Page 9

said his mate.
Which made Watson even more rhetorical. "Yes, it's their only
salvation from their rotten insignificance." He meditated. "And
yet--hnn!" He was about to say something much kindlier when
suddenly he laughed down from a side window upon the twins returned.
"Well, I'll swear!"
"We heard, sir," said Julian with a lordly bow.
"And you," chimed Lucian, "shall hear later." Rather aimlessly they
turned and again disappeared, and after a moment or two the man at the
wheel asked, with playful softness, with his eyes on the roof below:
"D'you reckon yon other two will ever manage to offset the tricks o'
Hayle's twins?"

His partner rose and looked down. The old nurse and the third Hayle
brother stood side by side watching the beautiful low-lying plantations
unbrokenly swing by behind the embankments of the eastern shore.
The level fields of young sugar-cane reposed in a twilight haze, while
the rows of whitewashed slave cabins, the tall red chimneys of the great
sugar-houses, and the white-pillared verandas of the masters' dwellings
embowered in their evergreen gardens, still showed clear in the last
lights of day. But the query was not as to the nurse and the boy. Near
them stood Ramsey, with arms akimbo, once more conversing with
Hugh.
"Oh!" said the glowing Watson. "If that's to be the game, Ned, I'm in it,
sir! I'm in it!"
"Just's well, Watsy. You're in the twins' game anyhow."
Meantime Ramsey's talk flowed on like brook water, Hugh's meeting it
like the brook's bowlders:
"Guess who's at the head of the table!"
"Who? my grandfather?"
"No, he's 'way down at the men's end."
"Well, then, father?"
"Yes! And who's sitting next him--on his right?"
"Your mother?"
"Yes! And guess who's going to sit at the head of the children's table.
You!"
"How do you know that?"
The reply was chanted: "I asked the steward to put you there." She
laughed and glanced furtively at her unheeding brother. Then her eyes
came back: "And I'm to be the first on your right!" She spread her arms

like wings.
"Why, Miss Ramsey!" protested the nurse.
Hugh blushed into his limp, turn-down collar. "I don't believe you'd
better," he said.
"I will!" said Ramsey, lifting her chin.

VII
SUPPER
Deep in love with the river life was Ramsey.
She had tried it now, thoroughly, for an hour, and was sure! The
twenty-four hours' trip down from her plantation home, on the first boat
that happened along, a rather poor thing, had been her first experience
and a keen pleasure; but this, on the Votaress, was rapture.
One effect was that her mind teemed with family history. Her grizzly,
giant father, whom she so rarely saw, so vehemently worshipped, son
of a wild but masterful Kentucky mountaineer who had spent his life
floating "broadhorns" and barges down the Ohio and Mississippi,
counted it one of the drawbacks of his career that so few of his kindred
cared for the river. One of his brothers was an obscure pilot somewhere
on the Cumberland or Tennessee. Another, once a pilot, then a planter,
and again a pilot, had been lost on a burning boat, she knew not how
nor when. The third was a planter in the Red River lowlands. Her three
sisters, as we have heard her tell, were planters' wives, and the father's
home, when ashore, was on a plantation of his Creole wife's inheritance,
four or five miles in behind the old river town of Natchez.
There Ramsey had been born and had grown up, knowing the great
Mississippi only as a remote realm of poetry and adventure out of
which at intervals her mighty father came to clasp to his broad breast
her sweet, glad mother, tarry a few days or hours, and be gone again.

She, herself, had seldom seen it even from the Natchez bluffs, yet she
could name all its chief boats apart, not by sight but by the long, soft
bellow of their steam-whistles, wafted inland. But now, at last, she was
a passenger on its waters. As Hugh, so well grown up as to breadth and
gravity, took his seat at the head of the dazzling board that filled the
whole middle third of the cabin, and as she sat down next him with all
the other adolescents and juveniles in places of inferior dignity, the
affair seemed the most significant as well as most brilliant in which she
had ever taken part.
Most significant, because to love the river for itself would be to find
herself easily and lastingly first in her father's love and favor--her only
wish in this world. And most brilliant: without an angle or partition the
cabin extended between the two parallel lines of staterooms running aft
through the boat's entire length from boiler