either English or Americans. She'd heard us talking in the smoking-room, hadn't she?"
"Yes; she'd remember that, of course," Mr. Jones said thoughtfully. "Do you suppose the barbarians would allow us any peace up there by this time? Let's go and see."
Agreeing, his friends ascended with him to the deck above; but long before they reached the smoking-room door they understood that their hopes to find there a quiet nook in which to talk of art—and Mme. Momoro—were not to be fulfilled. Song still prevailed, and a solo in a too familiar voice, hoarser now, but still from leathern lungs and brazen throat, lamented in ballad form a Kansas tragedy of the long ago. And then in all that part of the vessel and out upon the salty air through which the vessel sped, and out over the rushing black seas and the shimmering starlit foam that edged them, rolled the chorus of eighteen convivial middle-aged men, far from home and feeling few of their customary responsibilities:
Pore Jesse James!
I'll never see my Jesse any more.
Oh, the awnry little coward
That shot Mr. Howard
And laid Jesse James in his grave!"
