ins, the tall red chimneys of the great
sugar-houses, and the white-pillared verandas of the masters' dwellings
embowered in their evergreen gardens, still showed clear in the last
lights of day. But the query was not as to the nurse and the boy. Near
them stood Ramsey, with arms akimbo, once more conversing with Hugh.

"Oh!" said the glowing Watson. "If that's to be the game, Ned, I'm in
it, sir! I'm in it!"

"Just's well, Watsy. You're in the twins' game anyhow."

Meantime Ramsey's talk flowed on like brook water, Hugh's meeting it
like the brook's bowlders:

"Guess who's at the head of the table!"

"Who? my grandfather?"

"No, he's 'way down at the men's end."

"Well, then, father?"

"Yes! And who's sitting next him--on his right?"

"Your mother?"

"Yes! And guess who's going to sit at the head of the children's table.
You!"

"How do you know that?"

The reply was chanted: "I asked the steward to put you there." She
laughed and glanced furtively at her unheeding brother. Then her eyes
came back: "And I'm to be the first on your right!" She spread her arms
like wings.

"Why, Miss Ramsey!" protested the nurse.

Hugh blushed into his limp, turn-down collar. "I don't believe you'd
better," he said.

"I will!" said Ramsey, lifting her chin.

VII

SUPPER

Deep in love with the river life was Ramsey.

She had tried it now, thoroughly, for an hour, and was sure! The
twenty-four hours' trip down from her plantation home, on the first boat
that happened along, a rather poor thing, had been her first experience
and a keen pleasure; but this, on the _Votaress_, was rapture.

One effect was that her mind teemed with family history. Her grizzly,
giant father, whom she so rarely saw, so vehemently worshipped, son of a
wild but masterful Kentucky mountaineer who had spent his life floating
"broadhorns" and barges down the Ohio and Mississippi, counted it one of
the drawbacks of his career that so few of his kindred cared for the
river. One of his brothers was an obscure pilot somewhere on the
Cumberland or Tennessee. Another, once a pilot, then a planter, and
again a pilot, had been lost on a burning boat, she knew not how nor
when. The third was a planter in the Red River lowlands. Her three
sisters, as we have heard her tell, were planters' wives, and the
father's home, when ashore, was on a plantation of his Creole wife's
inheritance, four or five miles in behind the old river town of Natchez