In the evening, before we started, Warrick brought her aboard and into the cabin where I was. I found that she had some exaggerated notions about one or two good turns I had done her husband, and a trifle which I had sent to her when he was lost; so, after that, I held aloof from her. I hate philandering. I kept an eye, though, to see how she fared,—on the little body in her rusty black gown, shying round with Joe in the corners, out of the way of the ladies who went sweeping their long dresses up and down.
I soon found, however, that all the men on board who had known Wylie, from Warrick down, vied with each other in treating her with a sort of patronizing respect; even Jake, the black cook, was continually sending up little messes for her and Joe. She was but a poor mouse of a woman, who had made a god of that stupid little weak-eyed fellow, and of his boy after he was gone; take her on politics, or even gossip, anything outside of Wylie and her child, and there was nothing in her. Warrick told me that she had never been outside of Cairo before, and the near village of Blandville, where she had been a sempstress before her marriage; this journey was like a glimpse of a new world to her. I used to see her sitting in a dark corner on deck until late in the night, her eyes strained over the long stretch of shore as we floated by; and I could understand how the heavy, wooded hills, crouching like sullen beasts along the water’s edge, or the miles and miles of yellow cane-brake lying flat and barren in the desolate, homesick twilight of a winter’s day, might have a different meaning to the lonely woman, and to us, who counted them only as “a run” of so many hours.
She was sitting this way one evening on our back trip, when the boat stopped to wood at a place called by the boatmen Dead Man’s Riffle. Warrick was near me, watching her.
“She wears black,” he said, at last. “Now for me,” cutting off a quid of tobacco, “I never believed Joe Wylie was dead. No, it was a bad bit of work, dead or alive,—bad.”
“It is work I would give much to see cleared up, before I die,” I said. Warrick and I were walking up and down the hurricane-deck.
“Would you?” he said, slowly, chewing and glancing up at me,—“would you? There’s a way. But no matter—” stopping short and looking ashamed.
I said nothing. I never urge a man to speak, if he has ever so little mind to hold his tongue quiet. But Warrick had some notion that troubled him. He walked nearer at each turn to the place where a stout, short young woman was sitting, dressed in brown linsey. There was nothing remarkable about her face, which was heavy and dull, if we except a pair of thick, dead, fishy gray eyes.
“Do you see that girl?” he jerked out. “Many of the men aboard would say that she could tell you anything you want to know; the dead are about her all the time, they say. I don’t say it, Captain, mind; I’m not such a fool.”
“I should hope not, Warrick,” I said, gravely, and began to talk of something else. But somehow the matter stuck in my mind. The next day we stopped for freight at Natchez. I went up into the city with one of the passengers. Old Jimmy A. it was,—anybody on the Western waters will know who I mean; for strangers I will only say that A. was one of the most thorough misers I ever knew. He was an extensive stock-broker and speculator in Western lands. When his wife lived he had always consulted her, and abode by her advice in his business. I believe he mourned for the old woman sincerely, though when she died he had taken the ribbon away with which the women had bound her chin and put twine instead, to save a penny.
A. was my companion, as I said. Coming down into the old town a sudden idea struck me.