The steamer was the _Nourmahal_, Bulstrode commander. She was half full of invalided soldiers and other folks going home, and when our own people were aboard she was an overloaded craft, humanly speaking; but after a consultation with me the captain resolved to proceed. He was flush with water and provisions, and had the security besides of paddles, which slapped an easy ten knots into the hull. And then, again, she lifted the yards of a ship of twelve hundred tons, and showed as big a topsail to the wind as a frigate’s.
All that could be done was done for us. Men turned out of their cabins to accommodate the ladies and children, and a cot was slung for me in the chief officer’s berth. But I needed no pillow for my head that first night. There was nothing in laudanum short of a death-draught that could have given me sleep.
But to pass by my own state of mind, that came very near to a suicidal posture. At eight bells next morning, the mate whose cabin I shared stepped in and exclaimed, “Did you know you had a woman dressed up as a man amongst your passengers?”
“No!” I exclaimed, “not likely. I should not permit such a thing.”
“It’s so, then,” said he: “our doctor twigged her at once, and handed her over to the stewardess, who has berthed her aft. She’s a lady, and a devilish pretty woman,—mighty pale, though, with a scared, wild blind look, as though she had been dug up out of darkness, and couldn’t get used to the light.”
I wished immediately to see her. An extraordinary suspicion worked in my head. The mate told me she was in the stewardess’s berth, and directed me to it. I knocked. The stewardess opened the door, and I immediately saw standing in the middle of the berth, with her hands to her head, pinning a bronze tress to a bed of glowing coils, Miss Minnie Mills!
I stared frantically, shouted “Good God!” and rushed in. She screamed and shrank, then clasped her hands, and reared herself loftily with a bringing of her whole shape, so to speak, together.
“So,” said I, breathing short with astonishment and twenty conflicting passions, “and this is how they commit suicide in your country, hey?”
“I don’t mean to marry Mr. Joseph Moxon,” said the girl.
“In what part of the ship did you hide?” I exclaimed.