“Dan,” I said, “did your spiritual craft ever hang out a purple pennant?”

“No,” said Dan.

“Well,” says I. And we all saw a little purple ribbon running up the rope and streaming on the air behind us.

“And why do we not hoist our own?” said Mr. Gabriel, putting on his hat.  And suiting the action to the word, a little green signal curled up and flaunted above us like a bunch of the weed floating there in the water beneath and dyeing all the shallows so that they looked like caves of cool emerald, and wide off and over them the west burned smoulderingly red like a furnace.  Many a time since, I’ve felt the magical color between those banks and along those meadows, but then I felt none of it; every wit I had was too awake and alert and fast-fixed in watching.

“Is it that the phantoms can be flesh and blood?” said Mr. Gabriel laughingly; and lifting his arm again, he hailed the foremost.

“Boat ahoy!  What names?” said he.

The answer came back on the wind full and round.

“‘Speed,’ and ‘Follow.’”

“Where from?” asked Dan, with just a glint in his eye,—­for usually he knew every boat on the river, but he didn’t know these.

“From the schooner Flyaway, taking in sand over at Black Rocks.”

Then Mr. Gabriel spoke again, as they drew near,—­but whether he spoke so fast that I couldn’t understand, or whether he spoke French, I never knew; and Dan, with some kind of feeling that it was Mr. Gabriel’s acquaintance, suffered the one we spoke to pass us.

Once or twice Mr. Gabriel had begun some question to Dan about the approaching weather, but had turned it off again before anybody could answer.  You see he had some little nobility left, and didn’t want the very man he was going to injure to show him how to do it.  Now, however, he asked him that was steering the Speed by, if it was going to storm.

The man thought it was.

“How is it, then, that your schooner prepares to sail?”

“Oh, wind’s backed in; we’ll be on blue water before the gale breaks, I reckon, and then beat off where there’s plenty of sea-room.”

“But she shall make shipwreck!”

“‘Not if the court know herself, and he think she do,’” was the reply from another, as they passed.

Somehow I began to hate myself, I was so full of poisonous suspicions.  How did Mr. Gabriel know the schooner prepared to sail?  And this man, could he tell boom from bowsprit?  I didn’t believe it; he had the hang of the up-river folks.  But there stood Mr. Gabriel, so quiet and easy, his eyelids down, and he humming an underbreath of song; and there sat Faith, so pale and so pretty, a trifle sad, a trifle that her conscience would brew for her, whether or no.  Yet, after all, there was an odd expression in Mr. Gabriel’s face, an eager, restless expectation; and if his lids were lowered, it was only to hide the spark that flushed and quenched in his eye like a beating pulse.