"No." A sudden anguish filled the boy's face. "Not for all the gold in California. God A'mighty, sir, I've been down there and seen those people!"
"Oh! my! dear! fellow! If we let mere sights and sounds—of things that can't be helped—upset us—There's the dinner-bell—come, have a cocktail with me—a Rofignac!... Ah! general—judge—wet your whistle with us?"
The general and the judge, accepting, looked sharply at Basile. "Why—what's the matter? Sick?"
But he went with them to the bar and to the board.
XXIII
A STATE OF AFFAIRS
Watson was in the pilot-house, though not at the wheel.
So early of a Sabbath afternoon, in the middle of his partner's watch, he might well have been in his texas stateroom asleep, but to a Mississippi River pilot Sunday afternoon, or any afternoon, or forenoon, or midnight, or dusk or dawn, on watch or off, the one thing in this world was the river. Else what sort of a pilot would he be, when the whole lore of its thousands of miles of navigation was without chart, light, or beacon, a thing kept only in pilots' memories, a lamp in a temple?
Glancing down forward of the bell, he was reminded of a certain young lady the sight of whom on the previous evening just after his brush with Hayle's twins, standing there before Hugh Courteney with her arms akimbo, had led him to say: "If that's to be the game I'm in it." He wished she were there now, or up here again in the pilot-house asking her countless questions about this endlessly interesting world's highway. He would be answering that the mouth of Red River was now twenty miles behind, the mouth of Buffalo Bayou ten and of Homochitto River four; that right here they were in the great cut-off of a hundred and fifty-odd years before. He would say they were passing up the west shore because the current was over yonder on the east side, Palmetto Point, and that behind there, inland, lay the great loop of still water which had once been part of the river. He would explain that now the slender Homochitto ran through that still water lengthwise, for miles, until, within forty rods of the Mississippi, it recoiled again to launch in at last farther down, opposite Black Hawk Point, still in sight astern. And he would tell how, over here on this west side, Red River was yet only four miles away and actually sent Grand Cut-off Bayou across into the Mississippi, but likewise swerved away southward through seven leagues more of wet forest before it finally surrendered to the mightier stream. All this would he tell, without weariness, to one who loved his great river.