d
_Westwood_. The intervening shore and waters glowed and quivered in
exquisite tints that renewed the world's youth and quite ignored all
human, especially all young human, troubles. Suddenly it lighted up the
black chimneys and scapes and white pilot-houses of the two boats ahead,
as, a league or so apart, they came doubling back northwest, up Walnut
Bend, to save in Bordeaux Chute the wide circuit of Bordeaux and Whiskey
Islands, to hurry on round the long north-and-south loop of Council Bend
and so have done with one of the most tortuous forty miles of the
Mississippi.

We mention these things because Hugh and Ramsey were students of them,
now and then together but never quite comfortable so, and now and then
apart but never quite comfortable so. Everywhere the boat's people were
awake. On the freight deck the crew squatted in circles, eating from
tubs. Away aft on the roof, from their quarters in the far end of the
texas, the whole flock of white-jackets had risen like gulls and were
down in the cook-house, pantry, and cabin rattling the crockery till it
echoed in every waking stomach. Already the _Votaress's_ divine breath
smelt of coffee, real coffee--_chaud comme l'enfer et noir comme le
diable--smelt_ of it, as, we fear, we shall never smell it again in this
trust-ridden world. It was Ned's watch at the wheel. Watson and his cub
had turned in. So had the first clerk. So had the twins, the senator,
the general. Few of us, at that hour, not having slept, are skylarks.

Yet the actor and the Californian still held vigil by the captain's bed.
Joy still hovered after her "young missy," and "Harriet" after Mrs.
Gilmore and the parson's wife. Ramsey and "Harriet" betrayed a vivid
interest in each other, a wonderfully generous thing on the maid's part,
Ramsey thought, the two being who they were. The commodore was better,
but the captain was not, and together or apart Hugh and Ramsey were more
consciously the prisoners, albeit the undaunted prisoners, of care and
sorrow than of anything else. When their feeling for the river's lore
drew them, by a spiritual gravitation, to a common centre--to learn, for
instance, that Council Bend and Council Island were named for one of
those historic "confabs" between the white man and the red which
shouldered the red brother once and forever away from the sunrise and
across the great river--that centre of gravity was the captain's chair,
their tutor the first mate.

Under the cir