Gideon's Band Part 47

Hugh could only dry the damp from the cold brow. He grew fiercely ashamed not so much of his tears, which those around him were too tearful to observe, as of the boy's praises, before which he could only stand dumb.

"He's brave, sis'," Basile went on, "and he's clean, and he's square, mother, boys. You were on the _Quakeress_ when she burned, wa'n't you?

Ah, me!--wish I'd known you then. I'd be a different man now. I don't believe I'd be dying. My heavenly Father wouldn't 'a' had to call me in out of the storm."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "My heavenly Father wouldn't 'a' had to call me in out of the storm"]

His mother sank to her knees against the berth's side, covered her face, and shook with grief. The daughter sank too, weepingly caressing her, yet was still able so to divide her thought as yearningly to wish Hugh, for his own sake, well away, as she saw his hand softly endeavor to draw free from Basile's. But it was on that instant that the great tree root came thundering up through the wheel-house and the dying clasp tightened. The shock of surprise revived him. "Hugh--do something for me?... Thank you. Bishop's gone, you know. Read my burial service. I don't want the--play-actor--though he's fine; nor the priest, though he's fine, too. Mom-a'd be a saint in any--persuasion, and pop and us boys are Methodists, if anything, and I--I didn't get religion in Latin and I don't want to be buried in it." He waited. Hugh was silent.

The Creole mother, still kneeling, drew closer. "Ya.s.s," she said, "he shall read that."

But plainly there was one thing more though the tired eyelids sank. "Let down your ear," murmured the lips.

Hugh knelt, bent, waited. The distressed twins watched them. The hold on his hand relaxed. He lifted and looked.

"What do he say?" tearfully asked old Joy, pressing in.

"Nothing," said Hugh; and then to the twins: "He's gone."

Out in the benign starlight and caressing breeze Hugh hastened to his father's door.

XLVII

INSOMNIA

Down in the cabin, in one of its best staterooms, where all were choice, the senator wooed slumber.

In vain. Sounds were no obstacle. They abounded but they were normal.

Except--"Peck-peck-peck" and so on, which the steady pulse of normal sounds practically obliterated. The peck-pecking was not for him.

An unwelcome odor may keep one awake, but the senator's berth was fragrant of fresh mattresses and new linen, the wash-stand of jasmine soap, and the room at large of its immaculate zinc-white walls and doors and their gilt tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. Nor could the cause be his supper of beefsteak and onions, black coffee, hot rolls, and bananas, for every one about him had had those, and every one about him was sound asleep. It could not be for lack of the bath; he had already slept well without it too many nights hand-running. Nor could it be a want of special nightclothes; he had won his election over a nights.h.i.+rt aristocrat, as being not too pampered to sleep, like the sons of toil, in the s.h.i.+rt he had worn all day and would wear again to-morrow. Nor yet was it nicotine or alcohol, the putting of which into him was like feeding cottonwood to Hayle's old _Huntress_. Such, at least, was his private conviction. Oh, he knew the cause! He believed he could drop into sleep as this boat's sounding-lead could drop to the river's bottom, if for one minute he could get his mind off that singularly old, contemptibly young poker-face.

Recalling that face and the grandfather's as he had confronted them together earlier in the journey, they were a double reminder of the Franklinian maxim--he kept a store of such things for stump use--that an old young man makes a young old man. But maxims didn't bring sleep; he turned the pillow and d.a.m.ned the maxim and the men, with Benjamin Franklin to boot.

It tossed him from his right side to his left, to think of his own part in this two days' episode, and of the flocks of pa.s.sengers stepping ash.o.r.e at various landings who, as sure as--hmm!--would at every step drop that story into the public ear as corn is dropped into the furrow.

It tossed him back again, to think how his adversaries in the political game, where cunning was always trumps, would light down on that story like crows behind the plough. He mixed his metaphors by habit; the people loved them mixed. Another maxim, his own invention, was, Take care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself. The ---- it will! You've got to take _at least_ as much care of reputation.

But here both were concerned. He could not, for the sake either of his character _or_ his reputation, let himself be made a fool of by any one, however small, anywhere. He had got to recover a personal importance solemnly pilfered from him by a half-grown Shanghai still in his pin-feathers. Against Hayle's girl he was excusably helpless, but him he had got to get the upper hand of and get it quick. Memphis in the morning! More pa.s.sengers to be dropped there and the whole town's attention to be attracted by the burial of the bishop. Good Lord! That "verbatim report for the newspapers"! And of all papers the Memphis papers! _Avalanche_--_Appeal_--it was all one, he happening to be at the moment equally at odds with both. It, the "report," would not take a defensive att.i.tude. Poker-face was too sharp for that. It would take the offensive from the start and it would take the start. Gentlemen of the jury, in a war of words there's just one word better than the last, and that's the first! And moreover! the brief "report's" main theme would not be he, the senator, nor his vanished committee of seven. No, sir-ee, it would be the cholera, and he would be dished up in a purely casual way; as the French say "on, pa.s.s on."

He rubbed his head and sat up. There was a chance that he might find Hugh awake and on duty. If so his cast-iron lords.h.i.+p might yet be browbeaten, or wheedled, into inaction. Or if sleeping he might yet be circ.u.mvented. Was he worth circ.u.mventing? How absurdly troubles magnify on a waking pillow. Despise your enemy and sleep! Well--hardly. Let _him_ do that, especially when _you can't_.

He threw off the light cover, rose, and dressed. He began to see a way to win. He would countermine. He would raise a counter-issue--"Harriet."

Loitering by the twins' door he listened and rightly judged they were asleep, Lucian being so feeble and Julian so full. The office was open but empty. Its clock read two. The card-tables were vacant. The bar was closed. Out on the dim boiler deck he found only the two who had fleeced Basile. They sat at the very front, elbow to elbow, with their feet up on the rail. Their quiet talk ceased as he came near and stood looking out over the gliding bow and the waters beyond, which were out of their banks and stretched everywhere off into the night, a veritable deluge.

"A good forty miles wide, no doubt," he remarked to the pair, and they a.s.sured him he was right.

"What piece of river is this?" he inquired, and was told that they were in the long, winding, desolate sixty-mile stretch between White River and Horseshoe Bend; that they had just put Islands Sixty-two and Sixty-three astern and would be more than two hours yet in reaching Helena.

"Arkansas your State?" he asked. "Helena your town?"

"No," they said, they were of the "hoop-pole State," meaning Indiana. He knew better but changed the subject. "The Ohio," he remarked, "must be up on her hind legs."

"Yes, everything was up: the Saint Francis, the Tennessee, c.u.mberland, Illinois, Wabash, Kentucky, Miami, Scioto--" The pair did not talk like men narrowly of the hoop-pole commonwealth. Modestly speaking on, they seemed to know the whole great valley quite by heart.

So the senator, to show how quite by heart he knew this whole little world, said affably: "The pan-fish ain't biting so very lively this trip."

The reply was as flawless for candor as though they had the same hope to use him which he had to use them. Said one:

"No, we ain't paying expenses."

And his mate: "We've caught a few little flappers."

"Captain's son make it hard to do business?"

"Oh, he--we've all got our prejudices, you know."

"Yes, you ought to have some against him by now."

"Maybe so. You've got yourn, senator, we've noticed."

"I? No! I admire him. The way he runs this cabin----"

"Makes her keep up with the boat," they admitted.

"I never saw his like," laughed the statesman.

"Wouldn't want to, would you?"

"N-no, he makes big mistakes. But--he's got a future!"

"So mind his heels," said one of the pair. They were enjoying their politician. He saw that by their gravity. In their world men looked gravest when amused, and saved their smiles for emergencies. While he offered, and they accepted, cigars he spoke absently:

"The young gentleman's making a mistake right now that he ought to be saved from."

"Another?" they dryly asked as they used his cigar for a light. So far had he fallen in the general esteem.

He chose not to hear. "I wish," he insisted, "we could save him from it."

"Why, yes!--wish you could. But 'we' ain't us. We sporting men, we're mighty bashful, you know."

"Naturally," admitted the senator.

"Yes, gla.s.s, with care. But there's another mistake maker we wish you wished you could save. We ev'm might help."