Altering a final hatpin, she smiled a query to him. "Is it on straight, beloved? The train wobbles so.... Dresses were hooked up the back ten years ago; of course, you've had practice on Mother Judson's.... Stand up a moment." With great gravity she readjusted his stick-pin. "There!"
He pulled her to the window. "Look—Back Bayou! Though it's really a pudgy finger of the gulf. And schooners ... this side.... Isn't it gorgeous?"
The train, perched on a spidery trestle, crawled high above the sloshing waves, broken by blackened oyster-bed stakes and a skiff slapping against the dismembered head of a narrow pier. Seabirds rose in glancing curves, the red face of the sun lit the waters on both sides of the three-masters tacking out beyond Horn Island. Abruptly the water was blotted out at the end of the bridge by stumpy sedge fields, stretching to a fringe of low pines framing the sparkling water beyond ... then trim white houses. The train slowed.
| Pascagoula | | | 7.13| |
"Here we are," Pelham's joyful tones fathered the last of the luggage, laboriously lowered by the stout porter.
The husband beckoned the nearest hackman, a darky patriarch venerable as his grizzle-flanked steed. "The Ocean House, please."
Jane settled into Pelham's crescenting arm.
"We're here," he added fatuously. "Isn't it——"
"Glorious!"
They stared ahead together, to the sandy beach and the sun-glitter of the water.