w below with his hands tied while we were gone. And
up on deck I says, quick and sharp: "Look here, mate, what's this about
you and the old chap's daughter? Is it all straight?"

"Straight?" repeats the gen'ral, puzzled like. "Straight? Ah-h--listen,
my friend," and he pours out on me what I wasn't huntin' for--his
autobie-ography. It was her father who had kept them apart so. Her
father, he did not love his--the gen'ral's--father. An old family
quarrel, yes. Oh, for a long time back. Politics. He was of the Reds,
her father, and his own father of the Blues. Her uncle he had been
vice-president of the Red republic. It was true. But why should he and
the beautiful daughter suffer for a quarrel which was so old, and the
girl and himself all that were left of both families? Why? And I
scratched my head and said I couldn't see why either.

And love her! Before he got through I could hear whole poems in the
little wavelets lappin' under our run, and in the evenin' breeze which
was kissin' my cheek. And the smell of oranges and pineapples and
molasses and good West India rum coming up from the main hold--'twas the
breath of roses--only I stopped to hope the captured crew in the
forehold wasn't drinkin' up all the rum in their end of the ship--and to
this side and that the lights of passin' ships were showin' and the
voices of men and women floatin' over the water, darky voices mostly,
and some were chorusin', chorusin' a shanty air which I'd last heard
from a crowd of Georgia darkies loadin' a lumber schooner, a four-masted
lumber schooner, through a great square hole in her bow from a railroad
dock on the Savannah River--one time, that was, my ship put into
Savannah and I got to know a girl lived in the Yamacraw there, and on
Sunday afternoons we used to walk up and sit on the lumber piles on
that same railroad wharf and watch the yellow river flowing by and dream
o' things that never did happen an' never could--not for her and me. And
now, aboard the little Caribbean trader, the moon was beginnin' to poke
over our starboard rail and the first little white stars were peekin'
out over the foretopsail, and the gen'ral was still talking. And when
he'd done he laid his hand on my shoulder and said: "Straight, my brave
American friend? As straight as a tall palm-tree. And all this"--he
pulls on the end of a couple of cords on his gold-mounted coat--"I
thought it would look well in her eyes." And he stops.

"But you are of the N