"Each to her own starboard," answered the _Regent's_ mellow bell to the bell of the _Votaress_. Her whistle whitened and trumpeted in salute, and on jack-staff and verge-staff her rippling flags ran up and dipped, twice, thrice, to the answering flags of the Courteney boat. Well forward on her hurricane-deck her captain, whom many on the _Votaress_ pointed out by name, stood alone. Amid-ships her cabin-boys lined her cook-house guards. Her negro crew swarmed round her capstan with their chantey-man on its head and sent over the gliding waters the same stalwart perversion of the wilderness hymn of "Gideon's Band" to which the twins had danced the night before. Now the lone, high voice of the leader sang:
"Fus' come de animals, two by two, Fus' come de animals, two by two, Fus' come de animals, two by two, De elephantine and de kanguiroo,"
and now, while he held the key-note through the refrain's whole first line, the chorus rolled up from an octave below:
"Do you belong to Gideon's Band? Here's my heart an' here's my hand! Do you belong to Gideon's Band? Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"
No song is so poor that it may not thrill a partisan devotion. Ramsey stood on her toes. Down in his berth and in torture the shut-in Lucian faintly heard, turned his gaze to his brother, whispered "the _Regent_!" and listened for another verse. The boats were passing widely apart, and when it came only memory made its foolish lines plain to his doting ear:
"Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, Nex' come de hoss and den de flea, De camomile and de bumblebee. Do you belong to Gideon's Band? . . . . . . . .
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.