We came, I knew not after how many days forgotten in detail—after passing, each avoided as a pestilence, many cities prosperous in commerce—alongside the river port of the city of St. Louis, crowded with motley and misfit shipping of one sort or other, where our craft might moor without fear of exciting any suspicion, in spite of our ominous name; for I had the precaution to lower our flag of the skull and cross-bones.
I sought out the man most apt to know of any considerable vessels docking there, and made inquiry for any power yacht one hundred and twenty-five feet long, white and black ventilators, white hull with blue line, flying the burgee Belle Helène, or some such name. None could advise me for a time, and I looked in vain, as I had in every dock in six hundred miles, for the trim hull of my yacht. At last one old mariner, in rubber boots, himself skipper of a house-boat south-bound for a winter’s trapping, admitted that he had seen such a craft three days before!
“Did she dock?” I demanded.
“Sure she did, and lay over night. I remember it well enough, for I saw her tie up; and that evening her owner went ashore and up-town, and with him his bride, I reckon—handsomest girl in all the town. They must have been married, for he was lookin’ like he owned her. That was lemme see, two days ago or maybe four. They came aboard her next morning, all three—there was a old party along, girl’s mother likely—around eleven o’clock, and in a little while cast off and went on down-river. As fine a boat as ever made the river run—still as a mouse she was, but quick as a cat, and around Ste. Genevieve, I reckon, before I got back to my own scow after helping them off here. No wonder her owner was proud. He stood on the quarter-deck like a lord. Why shouldn’t he, ownin’ a boat an’ a girl like that?”
“He doesn’t own either!” I retorted hotly.
“Why, how do you know he don’t?” demanded my sea-going man.
“Who should know, if not myself?”
“Sho! You talk like you owned her!”
“I do own her!”
“It looks like it. Which do you mean—her the yacht, or her the girl?”