Hugh could not tell him. Yet to Hugh the riddle was at least as old as his acquaintance with Ramsey. He pondered it as he and Mrs. Gilmore conversed in undertone while gazing on the wonderful changes of the sky, and while Ramsey, near by, visibly studied the exhorter, whom she was cross-examining together with the actor on the lore of the river as they had known it in the days before steam. For she had actually got those two antipodes face to face again in a sort of truce-rampant like that of the lion and the unicorn on the _Votaress's_ very thick plates and massive coffee-cups. She was not like most girls, Hugh thought. While their interrogations were generally for the entertainment, not to say flattery, of their masculine informants, hers were the outreachings of an eager mind free from self-concern and athirst for knowledge to be stored, honey-like, for future use. Some women have butterfly minds, that merely drink the social garden's nectar. Others are more like bees. The busy bee Ramsey, Hugh felt assured, was by every instinct a honey gatherer. But who, at a single cast, ever netted the whole truth as to any one? Even while he so mused--at the same time doing his best to give Mrs. Gilmore his whole attention--Ramsey, with her back turned yet vividly aware of him, willing--preferring--that he should hear alone from that lady what she would later draw from him, and ardently mindful of his word that he "wanted her help," was not merely gathering facts regarding her beloved river but was also deep in diplomacy, endeavoring with all her youthful arts, such as they were, to help him. Her manoeuvres were fairly good. To her it seemed as though this spirit of strife so electrically pervading the _Votaress_ might yet be tranquilized through a war of wits exclusively and she was using her own with the tactical nimbleness of the feminine mind. She knew the twins were down on the boiler deck again, one faint, yet both pursuing, egged on by him of the stallion's eye and him of the eagle's, and all the more socially and dangerously active because, by strict orders to every one, cut off from the gaming-table and the bar. She could not do a hundred things at once--though she could do six or seven--and it was well to grapple this one task first. Thus she kept Hugh free to confer with the player's wife as to "Harriet." Her husband, the wife told Hugh, had drawn "Harriet" from the water just as Dan Hayle sank, and husband and wife had concealed her on their flatboat, unable to resist her wild appeal not to be given back into slavery. "We didn't dream she'd done anything wrong; she didn't tell us that for years. Players, Mr. Hugh, don't meddle much in politics and we'd never thought whether we were for slavery or against it until there was the whole awful question sprung on us in an instant." "So you took her----?" "For my maid, yes--on wages, of course--down to New Orleans--we were bound there--and kept her when we went North and ever since."