Nex' come de hoss and den de flea,
De camomile and de bumblebee.
Do you belong to Gideon's Band?
. . . . . . . .
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"
On the last line the singers were half a mile downstream, in Raccourci Cut-off, and Ramsey and the Votaress were well started up the ten-mile reach from Red River Landing to Fort Adams.
How swiftly and incessantly the scene changed. Down in a stateroom near the boiler deck some beginner on the horn was dejectedly playing "A Life on the Ocean Wave," but even with pestilence aboard and a brother stricken with it what an exalted, exalting life was a life on this mighty stream! Flat lands? Flat waters? It was the highest, widest outlook into the world of nature and of man she had ever had. Monotonous?—when one felt oneself a year older to-day than yesterday and growing half a month's growth every hour? In yesterday's childishness she had begun at Post Forty-six to keep count of all the timber rafts and flatboats met, and here in this long stretch came three more of the one and five of the other, with men hurrahing to her from them—men as wild as the wilderness, yet with homes and families away back up the great tributaries and their tributaries. And here were mile-wide cotton fields, with the black people hoeing in them and looking no bigger than flocks of birds feeding. And here came another steamboat—and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall. Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow and cottonwood jungles of the creeping shores; but while the "labboard" shore was still Louisiana the "stabboard" was now her own native Mississippi.
Yes, these wild shores were States—States of the great Union, the world's hope; Jackson's, Clay's, Webster's Union, which "must and shall be preserved," "now and forever, one and inseparable." Somewhere between these shores, moreover, and not behind but away on up-stream, probably, Mr. Watson said, in Dead Man's Bend, was, once more, the Antelope. In the long wait at Bayou Sara, where Hugh and the outlandish Otto—who could speak French—had found the priest while the commodore and the mate were getting the doctor, the Antelope had reappeared, swept up, and foamed by, and now was so far ahead that in hardly less than another hundred and sixty miles could she be again overtaken. But to Ramsey, even without the Antelope or any or all of the sights and facts of landscape and history, no moment could go stale while the tale of Phyllis and the Quakeress waited like funds in a bank, and while the commodore, the captain, and Hugh, the pilots, the mate, the Gilmores, the judge, general, bishop, squire, senator, Otto Marburg in his green coat, and dozens and scores of others were all over the boat, each more and more a story, a study, as hourly she grew older.
On the bench close behind her in the pilot-house a lady with needlework, a gentleman with De Bow's Review (the squire's sister and brother-in-law), had begun to talk with the Gilmores and presently mentioned the twins, speaking in such a tone of doom as to give Ramsey a sudden panic.
"It's fine!" said the husband, praising Julian's devotion to his stricken brother. "And they are fine. Their faults—which you've had occasion to discover, sir—are spots on the sun; the faults, madam, of all our young Southern gentlemen——"