"Are you the man—?" Hayle began to ask with grim humor.
"I think so."
"Well, my boy, I've been wanting to see you for better than eight years." The speaker glanced around for privacy.
"Come up," said the pilot; "I'm just going on watch." They followed him. On the roof he continued:
"Seen Captain Hugh yet, commodore? He's sure enough captain now, you know; youngest on the river. He was looking for you a bit ago. This is a beautiful boat he's going to have, eh?"
"Humph, yes. Votaress over again." The critic gave her a fresh scrutiny from cutwater to stern rail, from freight guards to the oak-leaf crown on either chimney-top.
"Why, commodore, she knocks the hindsights off the old Votaress every way. You'll see that mighty quick."
"Humph, yes; best yet, of the Courteney type. Ridiculous, how they hang to that. I'll build a boat to beat her inside a year if old Abe ain't elected. If he is, we'll just build gunboats and raise particular hell." On the skylight the speaker amiably declined to climb any higher.
"No, us two Kentuck's will try it here." The pair found seats together, and soon the Californian was making the best of an opportunity he, no less than Gideon Hayle, had coveted for eight years. It interested him keenly, as affording a glimpse into the famous boatman's character, that the latter showed a grasp of the dreadful voyage's story as vivid and clear in each of its two versions—the mother and daughter's and the twins'—as though the intervening months had been one instead of a hundred—and two.
They rehearsed together the arrival of the Votaress at Louisville in the dead of night; confessed the folly of any "outsider" seeking the grief-burdened Gideon's ear in that first hour of reunion with his family, and the equal unwisdom of his pressing, in such an hour, an acute personal question upon Hugh and his grandfather who, at Paducah, had just buried John Courteney.