De Mas—sis—sip—pi aw de O—hi—o.
LIX
"CONCLUSIVELY"
Alone in the wide light of a harvest-moon that wrapped all shores in deep shadow and turned the mid-channel to silver, Hugh and Ramsey stood at the low front rail of the texas roof.
There were but few to see them, but every eye in range was aware of her and of a refined simplicity of dress adorning a figure whose pliant grace was the finishing touch to her joyous erectness. Hugh's gaze was frankly on her, and his mind on the first night he had ever seen her, when, with her hair wind-tossed in loose curls, she had stood at this spot on the Votaress and in carelessness of a whole world had sung "The Lone Starry Hours."
Equally distant from them were the pilot-house behind and above and the bell down forward on the skylight. To right and left on a thwartship line just back of them towered the chimneys softly giving out their titanic respirations. Watson, though off watch, was up at the wheel beside his partner, pretending not to see the two beneath. In other words, he was still, after eight and a half years, "in the game." The Gilmores were with him, both in body and spirit.
Out forward of the bell, below it on the main roof, one of the boat's builders, responsible for her till she should reach New Orleans, sat in the captain's chair.
"After eight years and a half," Hugh himself had gravely begun to say to Ramsey, when two men, "California" and a fellow smoker, sauntered across the skylight roof close below. Gilmore, up in the pilot-house, was annoyed.
"Our poet," he murmured to his wife, "will spill the fat into the fire yet, if we don't stop him."