ow with
medicine, now with the crucifix, amid the hammer's unflagging din. To
this Hugh was reconciled; but it would never, never do, he felt, to let
the daughter share such an experience. Better to find her, even at that
hour, on the boiler deck.

But on the boiler deck he found only its wide semicircle of chairs quite
empty and no one moving among the high piles of trunks and light freight
under the hanging bunches of pineapples and bananas. He looked into the
saloon. It was bright though with half its lamps cold, but the barber's
shop and the clerk's office were shut, and double curtains of silk and
wool cloistered off the ladies' cabin. The fragrant bar stood open, and
at two or three card-tables sat heavy-betting, hard-chewing quartets,
but no one else was to be seen; even the third Hayle brother had gone to
bed. Halfway down the double front stairs to the lower deck, on a
landing where the two flights merged into one, Hugh paused. All about
beneath him forward of the wheels, clear out to the capstan and
jack-staff, slept the deckhands, except a few on watch, a few more who
with eager crouchings, snapping fingers, and soft cries gambled at dice
in the red glare of the furnaces, and one who had become an amused
onlooker of the Hayle twins--the negro who, six hours before, by merely
putting out a hand had saved their sister's life.

And there, close before Hugh, at the stairs' foot, under the open sky,
were the twins. In their hunger for notice, their equal disdain of the
captain and the deputation of seven, and their belief that the gayest
defiance of the plague was its best preventive, they had set their
bottle on the deck and in opposite directions were daintily pacing round
it in a long ellipse and chanting to a camp-meeting tune their song of
Gideon:

"O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
An' shingle it wid cinnamon bahk.
Do you belong to Gideon's band?

Here's my heart an' here's my hand!
Do you belong to Gideon's band?
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"[1]

A glance at Hugh gave them new life. Singing on, they halted at opposite
ends of the beat, patted thighs, called figures, leaped high, crossed
shins, cracked heels, cut double-shuffles, balanced, swung round the
bottle, lifted it, drank, replaced it, and resumed their elliptical
march to another stanza:

"He couldn't tote de whole worl' breed,
H