st fitting partnership!"

"No, it was entirely his own enterprise. While you and your brother were
getting your information from him he got your weapons from both of you.
I have them in the clerk's safe."

XXXIV

THE PEACEMAKERS

Some four of the _Votaress's_ "family," one seated, three standing at
ease, were allowing their mild, slow conversation its haphazard way
under barely enough constraint to hold it in the channel of discretion.
It drifted as unpretentiously as a raft or flatboat, now and then merely
floating without progress, like a floating alligator; that is, with one
small eye imperceptibly open to every point of the compass.

He who sat was the first clerk, a man of thirty-seven or so, and
therefore, as age then counted, fairly started on the decline of life.
He occupied the high stool in the clerk's office, his limp back against
its standing desk. Nearest him the second clerk, standing, leaned on an
elbow thrown out upon the desk and rested one foot on a rung of the
stool. A second clerk might do that; a third or "mud" clerk would hardly
have made so free. The youthful mud clerk, with his hat under his folded
arms, leaned on the jamb of a door that let back into the clerks'
stateroom. Opposite him the youngest of the four, latest come among
them, stood out in the cabin and hung in over the broad window counter,
across which the office did business with the world. Watson's "cub
pilot" he was, on the sick list, thin and weak with swamp-fever.

The forenoon watch was half gone. The boat was fluttering along at high
speed under a bright but fickle sky, and the clerks and the "cub" hardly
needed to glance out the nearest larboard window to know that she was
already turning northward into a pleasant piece of river called Nine
Mile Reach. A certain Point Lookout was some five miles behind in the
east, and the town of Providence, negligibly small, with Lake
Providence, an old cut-off, hid in the woods behind it, was close ahead.
One of the number mentioned the boat's failure during the night to make
the miles expected of her, but the four agreed that the cause was not
any lack of speed power but an overplus of landings below Vicksburg--two
being for burials--and a long delay at Vicksburg itself, providing for
the sick.

This explanation, the second clerk said, had been as gratifying to the
planter of Milliken's Bend and his "lady" as their not having to be
called up before day. They had taken breakf