The new Cotton Blossom and the new grandchild had a trial by flood on their entrance into life. The Mississippi, savage mother that she was, gave them both a baptism that threatened for a time to make their entrance into and their exit from the world a simultaneous act. But both, after some perilous hours, were piloted to safety; the one by old Windy, who swore that this was his last year on the rivers; the other by a fat midwife and a frightened young doctor. Through storm and flood was heard the voice of Parthenia Ann Hawks, the scold, berating Captain Hawks her husband, and Magnolia Ravenal her daughter, as though they, and not the elements, were responsible for the predicament in which they now found themselves.
There followed four years of war and peace. The strife was internal. It raged between Parthy and her son-in-law. The conflict of the two was a chemical thing. Combustion followed inevitably upon their meeting. The biting acid of Mrs. Hawks’ discernment cut relentlessly through the outer layers of the young man’s charm and grace and melting manner and revealed the alloy. Ravenal’s nature recoiled at sight of a woman who employed none of the arts of her sex and despised and penetrated those of the opposite sex. She had no vanity, no coquetry, no reticences, no respect for the reticence of others; treated compliment as insult, met flattery with contempt.
A hundred times during those four years he threatened to leave the Cotton Blossom, yet he was held to his wife Magnolia and to the child Kim by too many tender ties. His revolt usually took the form of a gambling spree ashore during which he often lost every dollar he had saved throughout weeks of enforced economy. There was no opportunity to spend money legitimately in the straggling hamlets to whose landings the Cotton Blossom was so often fastened. Then, too, the easy indolence of the life was beginning to claim him—its effortlessness, its freedom from responsibility. Perhaps a new part to learn at the beginning of the season—that was all. River audiences liked the old plays. Came to see them again and again. It was Ravenal who always made the little speech in front of the curtain. Wish to thank you one and all . . . always glad to come back to the old . . . to-morrow night that thrilling comedy-drama entitled . . . each and every one . . . concert after the show . . .
Never had the Cotton Blossom troupe so revelled in home-baked cakes, pies, cookies; home-brewed wine; fruits of tree and vine. The female population of the river towns from the Great Lakes to the Gulf beheld in him the lover of their secret dreams and laid at his feet burnt offerings and shewbread. Ravenal, it was said by the Cotton Blossom troupe, could charm the gold out of their teeth.
Perhaps, with the passing of the years, he might have grown quite content with this life. Sometimes the little captain, when the two men were conversing quietly apart, dropped a word about the future.
“When I’m gone—you and Magnolia—the boat’ll be yours, of course.”
Ravenal would laugh. Little Captain Andy looked so very much alive, his bright brown eyes glancing here and there, missing nothing on land or shore, his brown paw scratching the whiskers that showed so little of gray, his nimble legs scampering from texas to gangplank, never still for more than a minute.
“No need to worry about that for another fifty years,” Ravenal assured him.
The end had in it, perhaps, a touch of the ludicrous, as had almost everything the little capering captain did. The Cotton Blossom, headed upstream on the Mississippi, bound for St. Louis, had struck a snag in Cahokia Bend, three miles from the city. It was barely dawn, and a dense fog swathed the river. The old Cotton Blossom probably would have sunk midstream. The new boat stood the shock bravely. In the midst of the pandemonium that followed the high shrill falsetto of the little captain’s voice could be heard giving commands which he, most of all, knew he had no right to give. The pilot only was to be obeyed under such conditions. The crew understood this, as did the pilot. It was, in fact, a legend that more than once in a crisis Captain Andy on the upper deck had screamed his orders in a kind of dramatic frenzy of satisfaction, interspersing these with picturesque and vivid oaths during which he had capered and bounced his way right off the deck and into the river, from which damp station he had continued to screech his orders and profanities in cheerful unconcern until fished aboard again. Exactly this happened. High above the clamour rose the voice of Andy. His little figure whirled like that of a dervish. Up, down, fore, aft—suddenly he was overboard unseen in the dimness, in the fog, in the savage swift current of the Mississippi, wrapped in the coils of the old yellow serpent, tighter, tighter, deeper, deeper, until his struggles ceased. She had him at last.
“The river,” Magnolia had said, over and over, “The river. The river.”