Gideon's Band Part 21

privileges he had ever thought of, got him a.s.signed to his sick brother's place at table, presented him to the committee of seven, called him Gideon by mistake, and at the right moment made him an instrument, not to say tool, by diverting his idle course through the crowd into a highly successful soliciting of signatures to the committee's, or let us say his own, the senator's, pet.i.tion.

Unlucky task! An exceptional feature of the _Votaress_ was that her pa.s.senger guards ran aft in full width all round her under the stern windows of the ladies' cabin. Beneath, the lower deck ended in a fantail of unusual overhang, around whose edge curved the stout bars of the "bull-ring," to fence it off from the billowing white surge that writhed after the rudder blade and the trailing yawl, so close below. Among the pet.i.tion's subscribers were several pretty girls of an age at which their only important business was beauty and levity and who gave small heed to the doc.u.ment's purport, readily a.s.suming that nothing _they_ were asked to sign needed to be taken seriously. There was much laughter over the performance. They turned it into a "Signing of the Declaration," patterned after the old steel engraving. One of them, as the scroll lay open on the rail under her pen hand, unwittingly set foot in a scrubbing bucket kept there with a line attached for bailing water from the river, and was so unnerved by the fun of it that all at once the scroll flirted back into scroll form and fell through the whirling air that eddied behind the boat. Yet it had the luck to drop upon the deck below, and there presently an immigrant stood mutely gazing up with it in his lifted hand. Otto Marburg came and stood looking up beside him.

Dropping the bucket's line through the bal.u.s.ters under the rail, Basile stepped over the guards and proceeded, while the girls acted out their girlish distresses, to let himself down. The foolish exploit was sufficiently unsafe and painful to be its own reward, the rough line cutting his hands and forcing him, as soon as he dared, to drop into the arms of the two men. With them and others he pa.s.sed from sight between the great wheels but soon was with the pretty signers again, coming up alone by way of the cook-house and pantry. His hands showed ugly red scars as he brushed away a few flies that liked his perfumery and had stubbornly followed him from below.

But the fun was over. It was not his galled palms but his pallid face that struck the young company with a frank dismay. His whole bearing was transformed and betrayed him smitten with emotions for which he found no speech. Had it made him ill, they asked, going down by that dreadful rope? No, he was not ill at all. But when they vacantly proposed to resume the signing he exclaimed almost with vehemence that he had names enough, and left them, to return the pet.i.tion to the senator.

This was an incident of the forenoon. As he delivered the paper the senator spoke a pleased word and then gazed on him in surprise. "Why, what's the matter? Sick?"

"No, I'm not sick."

"But, look here, where--where's your own signature?"

"You can't have it."

"Oh, you want to sign, don't you?"

"No." A sudden anguish filled the boy's face. "Not for all the gold in California. G.o.d A'mighty, sir, I've been down there and seen those people!"

"Oh! my! dear! fellow! If we let mere sights and sounds--of things that can't be helped--upset us--There's the dinner-bell--come, have a c.o.c.ktail with me--a Rofignac!... Ah! general--judge--wet your whistle with us?"

The general and the judge, accepting, looked sharply at Basile.

"Why--what's the matter? Sick?"

But he went with them to the bar and to the board.

XXIII

A STATE OF AFFAIRS

Watson was in the pilot-house, though not at the wheel.

So early of a Sabbath afternoon, in the middle of his partner's watch, he might well have been in his texas stateroom asleep, but to a Mississippi River pilot Sunday afternoon, or any afternoon, or forenoon, or midnight, or dusk or dawn, on watch or off, the one thing in this world was the river. Else what sort of a pilot would he be, when the whole lore of its thousands of miles of navigation was without chart, light, or beacon, a thing kept only in pilots' memories, a lamp in a temple?

Glancing down forward of the bell, he was reminded of a certain young lady the sight of whom on the previous evening just after his brush with Hayle's twins, standing there before Hugh Courteney with her arms akimbo, had led him to say: "If that's to be the game I'm in it." He wished she were there now, or up here again in the pilot-house asking her countless questions about this endlessly interesting world's highway. He would be answering that the mouth of Red River was now twenty miles behind, the mouth of Buffalo Bayou ten and of h.o.m.ochitto River four; that right here they were in the great cut-off of a hundred and fifty-odd years before. He would say they were pa.s.sing up the west sh.o.r.e because the current was over yonder on the east side, Palmetto Point, and that behind there, inland, lay the great loop of still water which had once been part of the river. He would explain that now the slender h.o.m.ochitto ran through that still water lengthwise, for miles, until, within forty rods of the Mississippi, it recoiled again to launch in at last farther down, opposite Black Hawk Point, still in sight astern. And he would tell how, over here on this west side, Red River was yet only four miles away and actually sent Grand Cut-off Bayou across into the Mississippi, but likewise swerved away southward through seven leagues more of wet forest before it finally surrendered to the mightier stream. All this would he tell, without weariness, to one who loved his great river.

Yet really he was in the pilot-house at this time not chiefly for the river, nor the girl, nor the _Votaress_, though the _Votaress_ was new, with kinks of character quite her own and important to be learned. He was there because the stateroom given Hayle's twins in the texas was next to his, and they, rarely in their life having restricted themselves to tones of privacy and being now especially in a state of storm and stress, had made sleep impossible even to a pilot off watch after a midday Sunday dinner. Lounging in his berth, he had overheard things which ought to be told to one Courteney or another early, though, of course, casually.

Meantime he enjoyed not telling his partner, at whose back he quietly chatted while the partner stood with hands and foot on the wheel and with eyes well up the river, holding the jack-staff close to his "mark"

far ahead in the next bend.

"I couldn't stay," drawled Watson. "Noth'n' 'twixt the sick one an' me but a half-inch bulkhead."

"Cholery can't scratch through a half-inch bulkhead," said the partner.

"Sounds kin. Funny what little bits o' ones kin. An' the sawt o' keen, soft way he hollas an' cusses through his sot teeth an' whines an' yaps into his piller--why, he's suffered enough by now to be dead five times over."

"That sufferin', that ain't the peggin'-out stage."

"No, I know that, an' I don't mis...o...b.. but what he's a-goin' to git well."

"Hmm!--sorry fo' that. What's goin' to kyore him?"

"His simon-pyo' cussedness! He's so chuck full of it--looks like it's a-p'isonin' the p'ison o' the cholery."

"Pity!" said the partner.... "Humph! _Now_ what's up?"

To see what was up, Watson rose and looked down. On the roof below, evidently having come there for privacy, were the commodore, the senator, and Hugh. Watson loitered from the pilot-house and disappeared.

Down on the roof the commodore and the senator conversed across Hugh's front. The statesman, with heavy "dear sirs" and heavier smiles, was b.u.t.tonholing the elder Courteney, who at every least pause affably endeavored to refer him to Hugh. The grandson's turn to speak seemed not to have arrived. The senator was trying to keep it from arriving and Hugh was glum. Hence it may be doubted if the senator's cigar was really c.o.c.ked as high, or that his silk hat was as dingy, his very good teeth as yellow, his cheeks as hard, or his forehead as knotty as they appeared to Hugh, or that his tone of superiority, so overbearing last night, so ingratiating to-day, was any worse for the change. Hugh was bia.s.sed--felt bias and anger as an enc.u.mbering and untimely weight. In self-depreciating contrast he recalled a certain young lady's airy, winning way--airy way of winning--and coveted it for himself here and now: a wrestler's nimble art of overcoming weight by lightness; of lifting a heavy antagonist off his feet into thin air where his heaviness would be against him. His small, trim grandfather had it, in good degree; was using it now. Would it were his own in this issue, where the senator held in his hand the folded pet.i.tion, having already vainly proffered it to the commodore, who had as vainly motioned him to hand it to Hugh. Would the art were his! But he felt quite helpless to command it, lacking the joyous goodness of heart which in the young lady so irresistibly redeemed what the senator, the bishop, and the judge's sister, to themselves, called her amazing--and the Gilmores to each other called her American--bad manners. It made Hugh inwardly bad-mannered just to feel in himself this lack, and tempted him to think what a comfort it would be to apply the wrestler's art physically and heave the senator overboard.

Said that gentleman--"For you saw I wouldn't let the matter come up at the table. A lot of those men who signed this paper--which your grandson suggested last night, you know--" He smiled at Hugh. "Now, I am never touchy, and I know, commodore, that you're not. But, Lord, so many of us--maybe Democrats a little more than Whigs--are! We take our politics, like our bread, smokin' hot." He put away his smile. "My dear sir, to us the foreigner--as you saw last night at supper--has become a political problem, a burning question. Yet I propose to keep this whole subject so unmenacing to you personally, you owners of this boat, that I won't let a word be risked where any one might take even a tone of voice unkindly."

"So, then, Hugh can take care of it."

The senator tossed a hand in amiable protest: "Oh, sir, you see it much too small! My half of it is large enough for me, with forty times this young gentleman's experience. I don't see just this one boat and trip and these few hundred native-American citizens in deadly contact with a few hundred of Europe's refuse. I see--your pa.s.sengers see--we view with alarm--a state of affairs--and a test case!"

The old commodore's eyes flashed to retort, but the senator forced a propitiative smile, adding: "However, let that pa.s.s just now, here's something else."

"Is it also in that paper?"

"It is."

"Tell it to Hugh--or let him read it."

But as the old gentleman would have moved away, the senator, ignoring the suggestion, stepped across his path:--

"Last night, commodore, this matchless new boat"--he paused to let the compliment sink in, his eye wandering to Watson, who had sauntered down from the texas roof--"this _Votaress_, swept past everything that had backed out at New Orleans ahead of her."

"Built to do it," put in Hugh while the commodore, by a look, drew Watson to them and the senator flowed on.

XXIV

A SENATOR ENLIGHTENED

"But, lying at Bayou Sara this morning," said the senator, "everything worth counting left us behind again."

"For the time being," said Hugh.