y saw the actor at the stateroom door. He had beckoned. Hugh and
the grandfather were on their way. At a quieter pace the four women
followed and more slowly still the other four men. Reaching Gilmore, the
Courteneys paused and spoke, then looked back to Ramsey and madame, and
beckoned--Hugh to the mother, the commodore to Ramsey. Gilmore repeated
the gesture and they glided forward. At the same time the player
advanced to meet his wife, and, as if some intuition had rung the call,
the scene-loving twins appeared in the senator's halted group and stood
with them gazing, while Madame Hayle, the commodore, Ramsey, and Hugh
entered the captain's room.

LVI

EIGHT YEARS AFTER

"A hundred months," says the love-song that beguiled so many thousands
of hearts throughout the Mississippi Valley in those old "Lily Dale,"
"Nellie Gray," "What is Home Without a Mother?" days, when the
lugubrious was so blithely enjoyed at the piano. Its first wails date
nearly or quite back to October, 1860.

"A hundred months had passed" since that first up-stream voyage of the
_Votaress_, or, to be punctilious, something under a hundred and two. It
was the opening week of that mid-autumn month in which it became evident
that Abraham Lincoln would be the next president. Another new boat, new
pride of the great river, the fairest yet, still in the hands of her
contractors, and on her trial trip from Louisville to New Orleans, was
rounding, one after another, now far in the east, now as far in the
west, the bends nearest below Memphis: Cow Island, Cat Island, St.
Francis, Delta--so on.

The river was low. You would hardly have known a reach, a cut-off, a
point of it by any aspect remembered from that journey of April, '52.
Scantness of waters appeared to contract distances. "Paddy's Hen and
Chickens," just above Memphis, were all out on dry sands and seemed
closer under the "Devil's Elbow" than eight years before. Every towhead
and bar and hundreds of snags were above water and as ugly as mud, age,
sun bleach, and turkey-buzzards could make them. Many a chute
comfortably run by the _Votaress_ was now "closed for repairs," said one
of the pilots of the _Enchantress_. He was the whilom steersman we knew
as Watson's cub; a very capable-looking man now. At the moment, he was
off watch and had come out from the bar to the boiler deck with a trim,
supple man of forty, whose shirt of fine white flannel was open at the
throat, where a soft nec