s father poorly saw,
received from Ramsey his brother's summons and with her was turning
away. He stopped and flashed back a look of agonized resentment, but
Gideon met it with a beetling frown and neither gaze fell until Ramsey
stepped between, facing the giant, and she and the brother backed away
and were gone.

They sought the passenger deck. Between anguish for Lucian's calamity
and anguish for his father's contumely there poured from Julian's lips
in hectoring questions to Ramsey a further anguish of chagrin for the
seeming triumph of Hugh's love. Two or three challenges she parried and
while in a single utterance he launched out as many more they
encountered at a wheel-house stair their mother and old Joy. He cut
short all inquiries with a proffer to return to them and Ramsey
post-haste and give a full account of the disaster.

Meantime down in the sick-room Lucian said to Phyllis, when they had
been a few minutes alone:

"And now give me my medicine."

"Yes, sir; where is it?"

"Oh, damnation! in my saddle-bags on the washstand. What are you trying
to talk white folks' English for?" He hardly spoke three words without a
moan or an oath. "Do you find a measuring-glass?"

She found it.

"See a small bottle--dark liquid--about twice the size--of the glass?"

"Yass, suh, but it's full, suh."

"Hell! what of that? Fill the glass and give it to me!"

She filled it but paused. "It--it looks like la'danum."

"Oh, damn you, so did your great-grandmother. It's not laudanum. Did you
ever smell vinegar in laudanum, or nutmeg? Give it here! God A'mighty,
if I could reach you with my fist--Give me that glass!"

"Misteh Lucian, if this is la'danum----"

"You hell-fired idiot, it isn't! And if it was, such an overdose would
only vomit me. Don't you know that?"

"Yass, suh, I know it would." But still she held back.

"Then give it here!"

Julian came in with alarm added to his other distresses.

"Oh, Luce! do you want to start that bleeding again?"

"I'd just as lief as not! Make that wench give me that glass or mash her
head! She knows if it was laudanum it would merely puke me. Damn it,
it's a simple euthanasia." The crafty sufferer felt assured his brother
would neither know nor ask the smooth word's meaning.

Julian turned, savagely upon the maid. Heated with drink, enraged at
himself, his father, Hugh Courteney, his sister, and his mother, he was
in no mood to humor the contumacy of any freed slave an