is bended knees, while out on the boiler
deck the disputation concerning them steadily warmed and spread, the
committee of seven feeling themselves for the moment baffled but by no
means beaten--baffled, for their casual brush with Ramsey had most
surprisingly, not to say unfairly, discredited their cause. "Gideon
Hayle's daughter" had become as universally known by sight as "John
Courteney's son," and all about among the male cabin passengers her
method of debate--"It won't! They don't! He wouldn't! We
shouldn't!"--with a mirth often provokingly unlike hers--was the fashion
and had won two or three small victories.

"The side that laughs, nowadays and hereabouts," agreed the two players,
"wins." But they said it aside from Ramsey, who, they had begun to fear,
would be sadly spoiled, the juveniles were so humbly looking up to her,
and so many grown-ups sought her to draw out her brief but prompt
utterances upon the situation and repeat them elsewhere to those who
liked their seats so much more than anything else. They tried to keep
her with them and off the absorbing theme and were not without success.

Just now the word had run all through the boat that the next turn would
bring her into the "Raccourci," or, as every one but the players called
it, "Raccourci Cut-off." Counting up-stream, it was the second of four
great shortenings of the river, which, in the brief century and a half
since the country had become a white man's possession, had reduced a
hundred and twenty miles of its wandering course to half as many within
a straight overland distance of thirty. Wonderful to Ramsey was the
story of it. The kindly Gilmore told it with a pictorial and personal
interest that made it seem as if he himself had planned and supervised
the whole work. One of the shortenings was Shreve's Cut-off, made only
twenty-one years before this birth year of the _Votaress_. Yonder it
lay, just veering into the remotest view, where Red River, over twelve
hundred miles from its source in the Staked Plains beyond the Rocky
Mountains, swept, two thousand feet wide, into the Mississippi without
broadening the "Father of Waters" a yard.

Yet why look there, so distantly, when here between, right here under
the boat's cut-water, was the Raccourci, barely four years old? The
_Votaress_ was in it, half through it, before either Ramsey or Mrs.
Gilmore could be fully informed, and now their attention was beyond even
their own command. For yonder ah