"I haven't," very quietly said the girl. "You have." Ramsey glanced cautiously at Watson, but the pilot's eyes were a league ahead. Hers returned to Hugh. "Wasn't it my brothers changed your mind--the twins?" "They helped." She looked him over absently: "I love my brothers." "I don't," said Hugh. She stared again and slowly remarked: "You haven't got to.... You're powerful queer, ain't you?" "Not by choice." "I'm queer. Wish I wasn't--wa'n't--weren't--but I am." "Yes," said Hugh, "you are." She tilted her chin, stepped to Watson's side, and called down over the breast-board to the Gilmores, who had finished with their two pupils for a time and had taken chairs with a newly found young married pair on the texas roof: "Oho, down there!" "Oho!" the group answered. "Do you want us to stay up here?" asked Ramsey. "'Cause if you do we'll come right down. Or if you'd rather we'd come down we'll stay up here!" It was a new note. The players laughed. "It's the long dress says that," they observed to the other pair. "It certain'y is," replied they; which is Southern form for "probably." XXX PHYLLIS AGAIN About eleven o'clock that same Sunday evening the _Votaress_, at full speed, was in a part of the river whose remarkable character sustained the son of John Courteney and the daughter of Gideon Hayle in the theory that their interest in it was all that had brought them to--all that detained them in--the unlighted pilothouse, on the visitors' bench, beside Watson. Below, the passengers were for the most part once more in slumber. The exhorter had loudly sung himself to sleep: "'Mahch-ign thoo Im-madn-uedl's groudnd Toe fahr-eh wordlds odn high.'" Madame Hayle was in her stateroom and berth, deep in sleep under the weight of her toils and assured by the players that Ramsey should go to bed when they did. Basile, too, slept, but talked and tossed in his sleep, while old Joy, sent to him by Ramsey and the Gilmores, crouched outside his door and dozed with an ear against it. The Yazoo squire, his children, his sister, her husband, the Vicksburgers, and they of Milliken's Bend, purposing to be called up an hour before day to leave the boat at their proper landings, had "retired" early, saying fond good-bys and hoping to meet every one again. The ladies had astonished Ramsey with kisses, given, doubtless, she thought, because her father was a hero and her mother a saint. The squire's brother-in-law had assured her that her brothers, all three--as Southern boys always, or almost always, did--would come out all right--every way; but on being asked for details he had slipped away to give his De Bow to the commodore and his last good-by to Hugh.