ast in the general company,
which, with the commodore at one end of the cabin and Hugh at the other,
had sat down when Old River and the mouth of the Yazoo were on the
starboard bow, and had risen while passing My Wife's Island. Finally
they had gone ashore in great elation, thanking Hugh with high voices
and fervent hand-shakings, and his father with wavings from the bank to
the roof, for the "most delightful trip anybody ever made"; careless as
infants of the hundreds of strangers gazing on them, both native and
alien, both woe-stricken and self-content, and, even when the great
wheels were backing the boat away, calling fond messages to Hugh for the
still invisible "Miss Ramsey" as if she were in his exclusive keeping
and all those strangers were trees.

So recounted the second clerk, not to criticise such innocent disdain of
the public eye and ear--to him an every-day sight--but with a feeling
for the picturesque and in mild humor making the point that such
messages, so given, were hardly calculated to make life easier for Hugh.
The mud clerk and the cub pilot grunted their accord yet privately
envied Hugh. To be message bearer to that young lady would have been
rapture to either of them under whatever hardness or peril of life, the
more the better. Oddly enough, with Milliken's Bend now forty miles
astern the messages had not been delivered.

"No fault of his," said the first clerk, the second said no, and the mud
clerk and the cub loyally echoed them. For they knew, at least the three
clerks knew, always knew, not by flat inquiry but by trained perceptions
and the alligator's eye, whatever was going on in each and every part of
the boat. Indeed, the boat's news naturally flowed to them; flowed to
and ran forth again from them, aerated and cleansed, as normally as
blood to and from the breast of a strong man. By the sound of the steam
they knew the water was right in the boilers. By the rhythm of the
machinery they knew all was right in the engine room. They could have
said, nearly enough, how soon the boat would have to stop again for
wood. To them the quiet of the populous boiler deck, where nearly every
man sat reading some stale newspaper of Louisville, Saint Louis, or
Cincinnati--brought aboard from the Vicksburg wharf-boat--was
informational, witnessing a general resigned admission that there was
already "trouble enough." Of three notables not there they knew that
one, the bishop, was in his berth, very wear