After ten days the receipts began to drop. On the fifteenth day there was only a handful at the matinée, and in the evening half the benches were empty. "About milked dry," said Burlingham at the late supper. "We'll move on in the morning."
This pleased everyone. Susan saw visions of bigger triumphs; the others felt that they were going where dramatic talent, not to say genius, would be at least not entirely unappreciated. So the company was at its liveliest next morning as the mosquito-infested willows of the Bethlehem shore slowly dropped away. They had made an unusually early start, for the river would be more and more crowded as they neared the three close-set cities—Louisville, Jeffersonville, and New Albany, and the helpless little show boat must give the steamers no excuse for not seeing her. All day—a long, dreamy, summer day—they drifted lazily downstream, and, except Tempest, all grew gayer and more gay. Burlingham had announced that there were three hundred and seventy-eight dollars in the japanned tin box he kept shut up in his bag.
At dusk a tug, for three dollars, nosed them into a wharf which adjoined the thickly populated labor quarter of Jeffersonville.
Susan was awakened by a scream. Even as she opened her eyes a dark cloud, a dull suffocating terrifying pain, descended upon her. When she again became conscious, she was lying upon a mass of canvas on the levee with three strange men bending over her. She sat up, instinctively caught together the front of the nightdress she had bought in Bethlehem the second day there. Then she looked wildly from face to face.
"You're all right, ma'am," said one of the men. "Not a scratch—only stunned."
"What was it?" said the girl. "Where are they?"
As she spoke, she saw Burlingham in his nightshirt propped against a big blue oil barrel. He was staring stupidly at the ground. And now she noted the others scattered about the levee, each with a group around him or her. "What was it?" she repeated.
"A tug butted its tow of barges into you," said someone.
"Crushed your boat like an eggshell."
Burlingham staggered to his feet, stared round, saw her. "Thank
God!" he cried. "Anyone drowned? Anyone hurt?"
"All saved—no bones broken," someone responded.