e headway: commands and
threats and cries of defiance and rage, faint but intense, and which all
at once ceased at the crack of a shot! The judge's sister let out a soft
note of affright and looked here and there for explanation. In vain. The
Vicksburg merchant lightly spoke across the table:

"Shooting alligators, bishop?"

"Oh!" broke in the judge's sister, aggrieved, "that was for no
alligator." She appealed to a white-jacket bringing coffee: "Was that
for an alligator?"

"I dunno'm. Mowt be a deer. Mowt be a b'ar."

His bashful smirk implied it might be none of the three. Ramsey looked
at Hugh and Hugh said quietly to a boy at his back:

"Go, see what it is."

XXI

RAMSEY AND THE BISHOP

"High water like this," casually said the planter, next to Ramsey,
"drives the big game out o' the swamps, where they use, and makes 'em
foolish."

"Yes," said the bishop. "You know, Dick"--for he and the planter were
old acquaintances--"not far from here, those long stretches of river a
good mile wide, and how between them there are two or three short pieces
where the shores are barely a quarter of a mile apart?"

"Yes," replied Dick and others.

"Well, last week, on my down trip, as we rounded a point in one of those
narrow places, there, right out in mid-river, was a big buck, swimming
across. Two swampers had spied him and were hot after him in a skiff."

"Oh," cried Ramsey, "I hope he got away!"

"Why, _I_ partly hoped he would," laughed the bishop, "and partly I
hoped they'd get him."

"Characteristic," she heard the planter say to himself.

"And sure enough," the tale went on, "just as his forefeet hit the
bank--" But there Hugh's messenger reappeared, and as Hugh listened to
his murmured report the deer's historian avoided oblivion only by
asking:

"Well, Mr. Courteney, after all, what was it?"

"Tell the bishop," said Hugh to the boy.

"'T'uz a man, suh," the servant announced, and when the ladies exclaimed
he amended, "leas'wise a deckhan', suh."

"Thank Heaven!" thought several, not because it was a man but because
the bells jingled again and the moving boat resumed her own blessed
sounds. But the bishop was angry--too angry for table talk. He had his
suspicions.

"Did deckhands make all that row?"

"Oh, no, suh; not in de beginnin', suh."

"Wasn't there trouble with the deck passengers?"

"Yassuh, at fus'; at fus', yassuh; wid dem and dey young leadeh. Y'see,
dey be'n so long aboa'