while she spoke--and he
saw--that Julian had at length sighted Hugh and that at least
three-fourths of the audience, the whole male portion, was eying that
pair with the alertness of man's primitive interest in man-to-man
encounter. At her mention of the sick boy the gold hunter ceased to nod.
His countenance fell.

"Oh," she whispered, "won't _you_ go and tell them, all three, Mr.
Courteney and both twins, how bad off he is, and that he sent me, and
mom-a says come quick?"

He went. Forgetting to sit down, she watched him go and let Gilmore pass
her as Hugh had done. Now, what was his errand? The actor and the
Californian reached Hugh together. The three drew a step back from the
exhorter and his advisers and conferred in the aisle while Julian's
tirade went straight on as completely ignored by them as though it were
the most normal sound of the boat's machinery. The sight so amused the
audience that laughter came again and then clapping and pounding, in a
succession of outbreaks, each coming so close after one of Julian's
utterances that his dizzy head took it for approval, though to every one
else, and especially to Ramsey, the meaning was weariness of him and
impatience of Gilmore's delay.

He spoke with his face to his associates but with his voice addressed to
those other three in the aisle: "We were invited on this boat in pure
cowardly malice." (Applause.) "To have our weapons stolen from us by
servants and locked up by underlings and to have the boat's ordinary
refreshments forbidden us." (Laughter and applause.) "To be thrust into
contact with a deadly pestilence and to be insulted or assaulted by
hired blackguards on one or another of every deck from forecastle
gangway to pilot-house." (Long and loud applause.) "And all this, sirs,
we have overlooked; but to be made a public laughing-stock we will not
endure if I have to pull every Courteney's nose to stop it!" (Loud
laughter and prolonged applause.) Amid the din Ramsey recognized the
voice of old Joy moaning with grief and consternation in the gloom
behind her, and caught the words of the cub pilot, said for his soul's
relief, not dreaming she would hear: "If you two ornery cusses wa'n't
Gid Hayle's boys we'd clap you in irons quicker'n you could lick out
your tongue."

But amid the same din what, she laughingly, painfully wondered, were the
three standers in the aisle so privately, calmly saying together--with
the actor as chief speaker, Hugh grim, an