While our sour-faced boat-dealer made out his bill of sale, I wrote down a list of provisions and furnishings for the boat. Upon reading this to the señor, he suggested the addition of some articles which I would have regarded as needless luxuries. Leaving these to his own selection, I jogged to the store of a gruff old German ship-chandler, one of the Hessians against whom my father had fought at Monmouth and Trenton, and whose wife, on my last trip, I had been so fortunate as to cure of a quinsy.
The good Frau came in as I was giving my list into the charge of her husband, and would not take a refusal to her offer of hospitality. Horse, list, and all were taken from me before I could defend myself, and I am not sure but what the Frau would herself have put me into the tub she made ready in the bedroom had I not begged for a dish of her sauerkraut and corned beef.
and filled, I was given no peace until she had me safe between clean, dry sheets in their fourposter. Having then been given sufficient to write a note of explanation to the señor, I rolled over and sank into that profound of which I had so great need.
I awoke to find the sun up a good two hours and the couple beaming upon me as brightly as the sunrays which shone in through the diamond of the latticed window. The Frau held up my buckskins, all cleansed and dried and ; the man showed my list, with every item checked and double checked, and a receipt from the party to whom I had agreed to deliver my last mount.
Between them I soon learned that the flatboat was well stocked for the voyage, and that the señor had sent word he was about to go aboard with his party. This last would have forced me to rise and accept the good wife's intended assistance with my , had she not feared that I should rush off before she could serve my breakfast. I my coffee while she tied on my moccasins. There was no question of other garments than my buckskins, since saddle and all had been stored aboard the flat. When I at last made my escape, it was with a hot sausage in either hand. These German followed the rye bread and coffee which had gone before, while I was riding to the in my host's ox-cart.
Greatly to my relief, despite the pace of our beasts, we were first to reach the boat. I had time to the craft and say farewell to my good German friend. As he drove off, gruff-voiced but beaming, the well-remembered cherry-wood carriage came churning through the . The señor had retained the right to use it for this last service.
I was at the door, with my hand on the knob, as the driver swung around. The señor stepped out, with a , "Buenos dias, doctor!" For a fraction of a moment he seemed about to turn. Then he stepped aside, and left my way clear.
My lady drew out an arm from the depths of her great ermine muff. Her plump, bare little hand lay in my brown fingers like a snowy jasmine bloom. There was mockery in the depths of her eyes, but the lips arched in a not unkindly smile.
"Buenos dias, señor!" she greeted me.
"It is truly a good day which brings me sight again of Señorita Vallois," I replied. "May this clear sky prove true of the voyage we are to share!"
"May it prove true augury of clear sunshine to follow! These weeping skies of England and your Republic! I long for a week of dry weather." She shivered in her single-sleeved French cloak, whose white floss net and added little to the warmth of her gauzy muslins. As for her head, even her light mantilla would have been more suitable to the weather than the cap of and tigerskin.
"You are cold!" I said. "There is a fire aboard our craft."
I drew her hand beneath my arm and started to lead her down the wharf as a swarthy, hard-featured woman stepped from the carriage. The señorita a few words in Spanish, and the woman turned to help the driver lift down the chests and boxes from behind, under the direction of Señor Vallois.
Handing the señorita down into the boat's stern, I led her into the living-room, or kitchen, and laid more fagots upon the fire which I had . In another moment I had her seated before the blaze, with a blanket about her shoulders. As I knelt to place a stool for her little feet, she gazed down with the eyes which had looked out upon me from the coach window in Washington.
"Maria purisima!" she murmured. "There are tales of knights—"
"Who served and adored their ladies!" I added.
She glanced about at her uncle, who was entering through the middle room.
"Madre de los Dolores!" she called. "These physicians! Pray, him, my uncle. He is convinced I shall suffer a chill."
"Not after the precautions I have taken," I rejoined with professional gravity as I rose. "The wonder is that Señorita Vallois has so long survived the sudden changes of our seaboard climate. I know little of temperatures abroad, but on this side of the Atlantic these thin Empire gowns are sheer murder."
"Granted," replied the señor. "Yet as a physician you have doubtless long since learned the of arguing the cut or material of a gown with a woman."
"Only too well, señor! Fortunately every day will now carry us both nearer a milder climate and nearer the Summer. Your chests are all aboard?"
"All. And yours, señor?"
"Mine will be waiting on the wharf at Pittsburg. We will put in for it as we drift past."
"It is well," he replied. I moved toward the outer door. "A moment, if you please, doctor. We voyage together many leagues. Among my friends I am addressed as Don Pedro."
"And I as Alisanda," added the señorita gayly. Her uncle raised his brows, but said nothing. She called toward the inner door, "Chita!—Chita!"
The woman appeared, and at a sign from her mistress, crossed toward me.
"Dr. Robinson, you have not before met my faithful Chita, because she was ill and had to be left in Philadelphia when we went to Washington. Chita, this is he of whom I spoke."
The woman courtesied with a grace which her figure, her beady eyes upon my face. When she straightened I ventured to from the half smile which about her hard mouth that if she was not already well-disposed toward me, she was at least not an enemy.
"It is well," said Don Pedro.
"All well—and ready to cast off," I added. "If the señorita—"
"Alisanda!" she corrected, with a flashing glance.
"If—Alisanda is quite warm, she may wish to witness the event."
"I will join you immediately," she responded.
With that I led Don Pedro out to the steer-oar and showed him how to hold it to aid in bringing us about. As our craft lay in a slow , I had no difficulty in casting off. The townfolk and shipyard workers were far too busy with the rush of the Spring to give to so common an event as the departure of a flat. But it was enough to call out all my skill and strength that I thrust off under the eyes of Alisanda.
A side shove from the , and a rear thrust from the inner corner of the stern as the prow swung out, cleared us from the wharf and sent us out the eddy. The river was in such full flood that the bottom, even alongside the wharf, was beyond poling depth. But I called Don Pedro to aid me with the sweeps, and a few long strokes carried us out into the current of midstream.
Our voyage had begun. We were afloat in the grasp of the river, and for the time need only to fold our arms and gaze at the changing of forest-clad hills on either bank, past which the current swept us along at more than post speed.
Before the noon meal we had passed in turn the important shipping town of McKeesport, at the mouth of the Youghiogheny, and the hillside ravine near Turtle , where, within a gunshot of the river bank, the British General Braddock met with his defeat at the hands of the French and Indians, and where he whose life was to prove so precious to his countrymen came so near to losing it beneath the edge of the tomahawk.
In the midst of our meal we came so close under the heights of Pittsburg that I had need to leave the table to take advantage of a in the current which would bring us shoreward. Before the others joined me, I had the boat fast alongside the wharf where I hoped to find the chest of clothes I had sent on from Washington. My expectations were not of the firmest, for I knew the Cumberland Pike to be quite as miry as the Philadelphia road. It had been, indeed, a close shave, for on inquiring of the warehouse keeper, I learned that my box had come down from Redstone by skiff only the previous evening.
We had no letters to deliver in Pittsburg, and no desire either to the unpaved streets or to linger beneath a sky whose shower of bore out only too well the boast of the townsfolk that good coal could be bought in their streets at five cents a bushel. For my part, I would prefer to pay more for wood fires, and escape the of house and garments with lampblack. However, the residents may consider this inconvenience by their numerous social and cultural advantages, which are unequalled among all our trans-Alleghany towns, unless it may be at Lexington or Cincinnati.
As we put off again into the stream, I out the site of Fort Pitt, built by the British to replace the French Fort Duquesne. But a storm cloud drove down over the Pittsburg hills, and Alisanda hastened to withdraw with her uncle into the cabin to escape the April rain which soon poured upon us in . It was not, as I had hoped, a squall. With the passing of the first roaring wind that rocked our heavy craft, the rain settled into a steady , which obscured river and banks for the rest of the afternoon, and sheeted us in like a black throughout the night.
With the nightfall, trusting to the height of the flood to carry us over all shoals and rocks, I made no attempt to effect a landing or to tie up to the half-submerged along the bank. We had wood enough aboard to last for three days or more, and our fireplace, with its pots and , saved the necessity of a shore camp to prepare food.
As there was no call for Don Pedro to suffer a needless wetting, I argued that I could not trust him on watch so dark a night,—which was no more than the truth of the matter. My supper was brought to me in the prow by Chita, and her peppery was doubly welcome after my afternoon's . She carried back with her instructions to obtain one of my dry suits from Don Pedro and take it through to the kitchen. About midnight, the boat chancing to swing about stern foremost in the current, I left my watch long enough to shift into dry garments before a crackling fire.
With the first gray of dawn through the breaking rain clouds,............