"On Turnbull's or Natchez Island!"
Ramsey breathed an audible amazement.
"Exactly," said the player. "Well, I had the ill luck to call their scheme a bad name or two."
"Good! Now, sir, up they come here a-demanding o' me to put you ashore, 'where he'll get himself lynched,' says they."
"Oh, bless my soul!" cried the actor. "If that was all and you want to please us, just let them alone."
The mate smiled to Hugh and shook his head. "It wa'n't all. You know it wa'n't. Gad, Mr. Hugh, they got to go!"
"Oh, they must not!" begged both players. A few steps away the bishop and the judge were holding an earnest conversation with the grandfather Courteney, and his eye tried to call the mate. But Ramsey, holding to Hugh by his sleeve, gave the old gentleman a toss of her chin, a jerk of her curls, and took the mate by a coat button. Her slim, silken figure intercepting him, and his rude bulk smiling down into her upturned face with a commanding yet amiable restiveness, made a picture to the players and to the distant pilot, but much more than a picture to the captive himself. He had thought he had been fending off the banter of a child, but now, suddenly, this was not a child. A being was here not entirely mundane nor quite supernal yet surpassing all his earlier knowledge of feminine quality, something for which a year's hard thinking would not have found him a definition. Holding his button, she spoke low:
"Please change that order." What mysterious compulsion there was in that "please"! Her fingers tapped Hugh. "He wants it changed—for me. We'll be responsible!"
"Oh, you will!" The big man did not look at Hugh; his smile broadened on their common captor. Her answering eyes laughed, but even in them, deep down, he saw a pleading ardor at once so childlike, so womanly, and so celestial that suddenly the deck seemed gone.
"Please change it! quick!" she murmured again, "for us!"