middle of the room, threw herself on my berth, and
writhed and hid her face and beat her head and looked at me a
hundredfold more murderously than your uncle Dan had ever looked at her.
So once, while she lay still a moment, I slipped out onto the guards,
and as I lifted my hand to throw the fusees into the river she caught it
in hers, it and them. Then for the first time in my life I resisted her.
I fought. Do you know what a cow-eat is?"

Ramsey stared. "No. Is it a way of fighting?"

It was not a way of fighting. Cattle often eat deep holes into cotton
bales. "Ah, yes!" The tale went on.

"I fought her, and somehow the fusees, the whole box, got lighted and
were dropped. Whether she dropped them purposely or not, or I dropped
them, I'll never know; but they fell just over the rail, among the
cotton bales, and we saw the lint in a cow-eat about three tiers down
flash like gunpowder. She snatched me back into the stateroom, shut the
door, and stood clutching me wildly and listening. 'Say your prayers,'
she said, and knelt with me. She'd never knelt with me before. When I
finished she had me go over them again. She did not say them with me,
only whimpered and whispered, and fluttered her hands on my head and
back. She made me begin once more, but before I was half through we
heard the watchman run along the roof close over us and cry: 'Fire!' She
lifted me to my feet, whispering, 'Now! Now!' and began to put a
life-preserver on me, still saying over and over nothing but 'Now! Now!
Now!' until the sounds of alarm were everywhere, and just as she sprang
into the next stateroom to rouse the other children my mother came into
it from the main cabin. I got my little brother into my room and was
dressing him there while my mother dressed one sister and Phyllis the
other, when your father's overseer, who had once followed the river
himself, came down the cabin shouting to every one to come out and go
forward and was kicking in every door he found locked. At ours he told
my mother not to mind the smoke--which had grown thick and choking--but
to rush us all straight through it to the boiler deck and down the
forward stairs, and on her life not to stop for life-preservers but to
go at once. So she and Phyllis ran with the three little ones; but I,
childlike again, had got the notion that life-preservers were forbidden
and was so long getting mine off that Phyllis turned back for me.

"That delay saved my life, for, as we ran