forebears' beautiful values deep hid somewhere in his
inside pockets, and had wondered, as she tossed away to the pilot-house,
if he was destined ever to show the father's special gift of winning and
holding the strongest and best men's allegiance. A very mature thought
for her, but she sometimes had such, and had once heard her father
frankly confess that therein lay the Courteneys' largest advantage over
him, he being signally able to rule the rudest men by a more formidable
rudeness, but not to command the devotion of men superior to that sort
of rule.

At length the stars of midnight hung overhead. The amber haze of Queen
Berenice's hair glimmered to westward. Where the river had so writhed
round on itself as to be sweeping northeastward, the _Votaress_, midway
of a short "crossing" from left shore to right, was pointing southwest.
An old moon, fairly up, was on the larboard quarter, and in the nearest
bend down-stream the faint lights of a boat recently outstripped were
just being quenched by the low black willows of an island. In the bend
above shone the dim but brightening stern lights of the foremost and
speediest of the five-o'clock fleet. A lonely wooded point beneath the
brown sand of whose crumbling water's edge the poor German home-seeker
had found the home he least sought lay miles behind; miles by the long
bends of the river, miles even straight overland, and lost in the night
among the famed sugar estates that occupied in unbroken succession
College Point and Grandview Reach, Willow Bend, Bell's Point, and Bonnet
Carre. Past was Donaldsonville, at the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, and
yonder ahead, that boat just entering Bayagoula Bend, and which the
_Votaress_ was so prettily overhauling, was the _Antelope_.

"Fast time," ventured the watchman to the first mate.

"Yes, fast enough for a start."

No word from either as to any trouble aboard.

A cub pilot risked a remark to his chief: "'--Chase the antelope over
the plain,' says the song, but I reckon we won't quite do that, sir."

No, they wouldn't quite do that. Not a breath as to any unfortunate
conditions anywhere. But on every deck, wherever equals met, the fearful
plight of the queer folk down nearest the water was softly debated.
Distressing to feminine sympathy was the necessity of instant burials,
first revealed up-stairs by that woman's cry of agony down on the lower
gangway. But masculine nerve explained that such promptness would save
live