ring abreast of each other and above all else--higher than the two
soaring derrick posts at the two forward corners of the passenger and
hurricane decks, higher even than the jack-staff's peak--stood the two
great black chimneys.

And what a populace teemed round and through all! Here was the Creole,
there the New Englander. Here were men of oddest sorts from the
Missouri, Ohio, and nearer and farther rivers. Here were the Irishman,
the German, the Congo, Cuban, Choctaw, Texan, Sicilian; the Louisiana
sugar-planter, the Mississippi cotton-planter, goat-bearded raftsmen
from the swamps of Arkansas, flatboatmen from the mountains of Tennessee
and Kentucky; the horse trader, the slave-driver, the filibuster, the
Indian fighter, the circus rider, the circuit-rider, and men bound for
the goldfields of California.

More than half the boats, this April afternoon, flew from the jack-staff
of each, to signify that it was her day to leave, a streaming burgee
bearing her name. A big-lettered strip of canvas drawn along the front
guards of her hurricane-deck told for what port she was "up," and the
growing smoke that swelled from her chimneys showed that five was her
time to back out.

In the midst of the scene, opposite the head of Canal Street--the
streets that run to the New Orleans levee run up-hill and get there head
first--lay a boat which specially belongs to this narrative. A pictorial
poster, down in every cafe and hotel rotunda of the town, called her
"large, new, and elegant," and such she was in fair comparison with all
the craft on all the sixteen thousand navigable miles of the vast river
and its tributaries. Her goal was Louisville, more than thirteen hundred
miles away. Her steam was up, a velvet-black pitch-pine smoke billowed
from her chimneys, and her red-and-white burgee, gleaming upon it, named
her the _Votaress_.

II

THE "VOTARESS"

Her first up-river trip! The crowd waiting on the wharf's apron to see
her go was larger and included better types of the people than usual,
for the _Votaress_ was the latest of the Courteney fleet, hence a rival
of the Hayle boats, the most interesting fact that could be stated of
anything afloat on Western waters.

So young was she, this _Votaress_, so bridally fresh from her Indiana
and Kentucky shipyards, that the big new bell in the mid-front of her
hurricane roof shone in the low sunlight like a wedding jewel. Its
parting strokes had sounded once but would s