Just now the word had run all through the boat that the next turn would bring her into the "Raccourci," or, as every one but the players called it, "Raccourci Cut-off." Counting up-stream, it was the second of four great shortenings of the river, which, in the brief century and a half since the country had become a white man's possession, had reduced a hundred and twenty miles of its wandering course to half as many within a straight overland distance of thirty. Wonderful to Ramsey was the story of it. The kindly Gilmore told it with a pictorial and personal interest that made it seem as if he himself had planned and supervised the whole work. One of the shortenings was Shreve's Cut-off, made only twenty-one years before this birth year of the _Votaress_. Yonder it lay, just veering into the remotest view, where Red River, over twelve hundred miles from its source in the Staked Plains beyond the Rocky Mountains, swept, two thousand feet wide, into the Mississippi without broadening the "Father of Waters" a yard. Yet why look there, so distantly, when here between, right here under the boat's cut-water, was the Raccourci, barely four years old? The _Votaress_ was in it, half through it, before either Ramsey or Mrs. Gilmore could be fully informed, and now their attention was beyond even their own command. For yonder ahead, miles away in Shreve's Cut-off, riding the strong current under Turnbull's Island, came the _Regent_, finest and speediest of Gideon Hayle's steamers. So late in the season her passengers were few and she was not utterly smothered in a cargo of cotton bales, yet her freight deck showed a goodly brown mass of them, above which her snowy form gleamed against the verdant background of the forested island, as dainty as a swan, while her gliding stem raised on either side a silver ribbon of water that arched itself almost to her gunwales. "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: