"How about his wife?"
"And his wife. For her to be with him may help him if he goes. It can't if he stays." The speaker had let his voice rise. The pilot-house group caught his words. Also they saw the cub pilot detain Ned when he started forward.
"Let's go down there ourselves," repeated Ramsey; but the parson's wife had whisperingly laid both hands on the wife of the actor, and Ramsey chafed to no avail.
The senator's voice dropped again. "Good God, sir, you know the longer they're aboard the worse it will be for them, and they've got to go some time or at Louisville a mob will burn the Votaress to the water's edge with them on her."
The two stared at each other, the senator's mind bewailing the loss of each golden moment. The night was not too dark to show him the poker face fitting its nickname insufferably. But not until its owner spoke again did he frown—to hide an exultant surprise.
"They could leave their maid, you think, with Madame Hayle?" was Hugh's astonishing inquiry. The senator had expected of him nothing short of a grim defiance.
"They could—they can," replied both he and the soldier. "That'll satisfy everybody." The general saw only the surface of the proposition but the senator perceived in it all the opportunity their two modest accomplices of the boiler deck asked. That pair and their adherents—not followers—you wouldn't catch them leading—they and their gathering adherents would construe the landing of the players as an attempt to deliver them out of their hands and would undertake to seize and maltreat the actor, at least, the moment he should be off the boat. That they were likely to fail was little to the senator; there would be a tumult, so managed as to bring Hugh to the actor's rescue, and in the fracas Hugh was sure of a hammering he would not only never forget but would discern that he owed, first and last, to him, the senator.
Hugh glanced at the clerk. "You had just recommended Delta Landing." The clerk nodded and he turned back to the senator. "We'll be there inside of half an hour."
"Delta will do," said the senator, his frown growing.
Hugh nodded to the clerk. The clerk looked over to Ned.