wn forward on the skylight. To right and left on a thwartship
line just back of them towered the chimneys softly giving out their
titanic respirations. Watson, though off watch, was up at the wheel
beside his partner, pretending not to see the two beneath. In other
words, he was still, after eight and a half years, "in the game." The
Gilmores were with him, both in body and spirit.

Out forward of the bell, below it on the main roof, one of the boat's
builders, responsible for her till she should reach New Orleans, sat in
the captain's chair.

"After eight years and a half," Hugh himself had gravely begun to say to
Ramsey, when two men, "California" and a fellow smoker, sauntered across
the skylight roof close below. Gilmore, up in the pilot-house, was
annoyed.

"Our poet," he murmured to his wife, "will spill the fat into the fire
yet, if we don't stop him."

But the Californian had purposely encumbered himself with this stranger
to make it plain that, hover as he might, he waived all claim to her
attention. What better could a man do? And now he forbore even to look
her way. The abstention was as marked as any look could have been. As
they passed, Hugh was silent, but Ramsey spoke, her speech a light blend
of response and evasion.

"On the _Votaress_," she said, "the front of the texas didn't stand out
forward of the chimneys, like this."

"Doesn't this make a handsomer boat," the lover asked, "seen either
aboard or from the shore?"

Ramsey said yes, she had noticed the improvement from the Memphis
wharf-boat. "She was a splendid sight; yes, out in the stream, just
before her wheels first stopped. At least she was to any one loving
boats and the river."

"Then you haven't changed?" asked Hugh, not for information but in the
tone that always meant so much beneath the speech.

Her answer was merely to meet his gaze with a gentle steadfastness, each
knowing that the other's mind was overcircling all the years that had
divided them. Through those years they had exchanged no spoken or
written word. Yet according to Watson true love finds ways, large love
large ways, pure love pure ways. Sometimes love's friends really help;
help find ways, or keep ways found; even make chutes and cut-offs.
Gilmore, Watson, and the Vicksburg merchant happened to be Odd Fellows,
and the Gilmores, to whom letter-writing was, next to their profession,
their main pleasure, had been a sort of clearing-house for Friendship,
Love, and