miles. From zenith to farthest east the clouds that
overhung it were pink and ashes-of-roses in a sea of blue. The entire
west was one splendor of crimson and saffron, scarlet and gold, with
intervals of black and green. Even the turbid river between was an
unbroken rosy glow. The vast wooded swamps over on that shore were in
Arkansas. Louisiana had been left behind in that vivid moment when
Ramsey and Hugh were making their discovery of "Harriet" and when Hugh,
we may here add, was handing back her "veil of mystery."

"When I saw you do that," Ramsey had later said to him, "I knew she was
safe--and she knew she was!" The laughing girl's mind was brimful yet of
the amazing incident, at every pause in her talk, which was now with
this one, now with that, and often with the cub.

It was interesting to note the masterful-careless air with which
Watson's apprentice more than once endeavored to make it clear to Hugh,
concerning this daughter of Gideon, that, whereas the mud clerk, at his
desk below, was utterly love-bemired, his, the cub's, liking for her was
solely for her countless questions, of which he said that "you never
could tell where the next one would hit." No singed moth he! To prove it
he offered Hugh a very blase query: "What do women ever do with all the
answers we men give 'em, hey?"

Hugh could not tell him. Yet to Hugh the riddle was at least as old as
his acquaintance with Ramsey. He pondered it as he and Mrs. Gilmore
conversed in undertone while gazing on the wonderful changes of the sky,
and while Ramsey, near by, visibly studied the exhorter, whom she was
cross-examining together with the actor on the lore of the river as they
had known it in the days before steam. For she had actually got those
two antipodes face to face again in a sort of truce-rampant like that of
the lion and the unicorn on the _Votaress's_ very thick plates and
massive coffee-cups. She was not like most girls, Hugh thought. While
their interrogations were generally for the entertainment, not to say
flattery, of their masculine informants, hers were the outreachings of
an eager mind free from self-concern and athirst for knowledge to be
stored, honey-like, for future use. Some women have butterfly minds,
that merely drink the social garden's nectar. Others are more like bees.
The busy bee Ramsey, Hugh felt assured, was by every instinct a honey
gatherer.

But who, at a single cast, ever netted the whole truth as to any one?
Even