"Six cups," counted the pilot, "six--You go down with Miss Hayle's
compliments to Mr. Courteney, and----"

"No-o-o-o!" sang Ramsey, running up the scale.

But Watson was firm. "Boy, you heard me, didn't you?"

Ned, with his eyes down on the bell, interposed: "Hold on, Wats', three
into one you can't. Hugh's in a confab with the senator and the
general."

Ramsey, eating like a hunter come home, suddenly stood. "Now look,
everybody, at the _Antelope_. She's right abeam. Ain't she abeam, Mr.
Watson?"

Watson drawled that she wasn't anything else, and Ramsey failed to see
that he saw her cast an anxious glance down to the bell and the
captain's chair beyond it.

L

"DELTA WILL DO"

In Horseshoe Cut-off the course was east. When Ned directed Ramsey's
sight to its upper end, where the flood came into view from the north,
she feared he would name the point it turned; but he forbore and she
gazed on the thin old moon off in the southeast.

"Make out yan bunch o' sycamores?" was his nearest venture. The
sycamores were on the point. Across the river where it ran concealed
beyond those sycamores--he went on to tell--at the up-stream end of a
low pencil stroke of forest between the head of the cut-off and the
eastern stars, was another turn, Friar's Point. But her interest in
points had faded, and whether friars abounded on that one or not she
took pains not to inquire.

Instead, she was about to ask the cause of a strange silvering in the
sky close over the black pencil stroke, when, as on Sunday, the morning
star sprang into view and cast its tremulous beam on the waters. She
gazed on the white splendor as genuinely enthralled as ever, though at
the same time her eye easily, eagerly took in the first clerk, the
senator, the general, and Hugh, standing about the captain's empty
chair. They loomed as dimly as the sycamores, yet when a fifth figure
drew near them she knew by his fine gait that it was the actor, relieved
from the captain's sick-room by "California" and the cub pilot. A
gesture from Hugh stopped him some yards off and he stood leaning on the
bell.

For the actor was their theme. This was plain to every one in the
pilot-house, the two waiters being gone. A remnant of the food was being
consumed by "Harriet" and Joy. All the others were observing, like
Ramsey, the morning star and the five men under it. Among her own and
Mrs. Gilmore's draperies Ramsey found that lady's hand. Except a few low