he positive contempt the commodore--who is a foreigner himself--showed
for the direst needs of our country?" To be sure that had little to do
with the management of the boat, but it made it easier to think that the
Courteneys, the captain himself being half Dutch in his origin, might
incline to do more for those people down-stairs than was just to those
above them--every way above them. The general called it a criminal error
to plant the victims of a deadly contagion along a great national
highway, like fertile seed in a fertile furrow. The bishop counted it no
mercy to the aliens themselves to keep them aboard when they could be
set ashore in a rough sort of roofless quarantine on some such isolated
spot as Prophet's Island, which should be reached by sunrise, was
heavily wooded, and lay but six miles below the small town of Port
Hudson.

Nor could he call it a mercy to consult the immigrants' wishes. How
could they be expected to view the matter unselfishly?

A deputation of seven elected itself to wait on the captain. The
masterful twins, finding themselves not of its number, sought him in
advance, alone. But their interview was brief. We pass it. The first
_watch_ turned in. The men who had served through the first two hours'
run came again on duty as "middle watch," and in their care, after their
four hours' rest, the shining _Votaress_, teeming with slumberers,
breasted the strenuous flood as regally as ever.

XII

HUGH AND THE TWINS

In the captain's chair, between the derricks and the bell, far above and
behind which the chimneys' vast double plume of smoke and sparks trailed
down the steamer's wake, sat Hugh Courteney, quite uncompanioned.

So his father had just left him, leaving with him the thought, though
without hint of it in word or tone, that some night, on some boat as
deeply freighted with cares as this one, he must sit thus, her master.
The wonder of it, with the wonder of the boat herself and all she
carried, sounded a continuous stern alarum through his spirit like a
long roll sounding through a camp: "Be a man! Make haste! See even those
Hayle twins, with all their faults, and up! Make haste! Rise up and be a
man!" Had the wonder-loving Ramsey been there she must have laughed
again; looking into his round, heavy visage was so much like looking
into the back of a watch--one saw such ceaseless movement of mind yet
learned so little from it. Amid his wonderings he wondered of her; not