Chapter III: Part 3

"Not among the black boys, I'm afraid. Now and then a white man drifts into a crew, but that's a different matter."

"Better or worse?" she queried.

"Worse, usually. It's a pretty poor stick of a white man that can't find something better than 'rousting' on a steamboat."

Here was her chance, and she took it courageously.

"Haven't you one man in the _Belle Julie's_ crew who has earned a better recommendation than that, Captain Mayfield?"

"You mean that sick hobo who went into the river after M'Grath last night? I didn't know that story had got back to the ladies' cabin."

"It hasn't. But I know it because I was looking on. I couldn't sleep, and I had gone out to see them make a night landing. Why do you call him 'the sick hobo'?"

The captain was paying strict attention now, looking at her curiously from beneath the grizzled eyebrows. But he saw only the classic profile.

"That's what he is--or at least, what he let on to be when he shipped with us," he replied. Then: "You say you saw it: tell me what happened."

"I am not sure that I quite understood the beginning of it," she said doubtfully. "Two men, the white man and a negro, went ashore to untie the boat. They both jumped from the stage while it was going up, and it was the white man who untied the rope alone. After the boat began to swing away from the bank, he saw that the other man was hurt and went to help him. Mr. M'Grath was angry and he shouted at them to come aboard. With the boat going away from the shore, they couldn't; so the white man ran and tied the rope again. Am I getting it awfully mixed up?"

"Not at all," said the captain. "What happened then?"

"The white man lifted the negro to the deck, untied the rope again, and climbed on just as the boat was swinging away the second time. Mr. M'Grath was furious. He fought his way to where the white man was standing over the hurt negro and struck at him. The next thing I knew, Mr. M'Grath was overboard and right down here in front of the paddle-wheel, and the man he had tried to strike was jumping in after him. I thought they would both be ground to death under the wheel."

"Is that all?"

"All but the rescue. The pilot turned the _Belle Julie_ around and they were picked up. Mr. M'Grath was unconscious, and the other man was too weak to stand up."

Captain Mayfield nodded. "He was sick when he came to us: consumption, Mac said."

Miss Farnham was a doctor's daughter, and she had seen many victims of the white death.

"I think that must have been a mistake," she ventured. "He doesn't look at all like a tuberculosis patient."

Again the captain was curious.

"How could you tell, at that distance and in the night?" he asked quizzically.

Embarrassment quickly flung down a handful of obstacles in Charlotte's path, but she picked her way among them.

"I saw him yesterday morning quite close, and I looked at him because--because I thought I had seen him somewhere before. Do you know anything about him, Captain Mayfield?--who he is, I mean?"

"Not any more than I do about the rest of them. They're driftwood, mostly, you understand. We pick them up and drop them, here and there and everywhere. This fellow's name is Gavitt--John Wesley Gavitt--on the clerk's book. Mac said he was a sick hobo, working his way to St. Louis."

"How long before the beginning of a voyage do you hire the crew?" asked Charlotte, trying not to seem too pointedly interested.

"Oh, they string along all through the loading for two or three days, and from that right up to the last minute."

It was discouraging, and she was on the point of giving up. Her one hope now lay in the fixing of the exact time of the man Gavitt's enlistment in the _Belle Julie's_ crew, and there appeared to be only one way of determining this.

"Does anybody know--could anybody tell just when this particular man was hired, Captain Mayfield?" she asked.

"Not unless Mac happens to remember. No, hold on; I recollect now; it was the day we left New Orleans--day before yesterday, that was."

"In the morning?"

If the good-natured captain was beginning to wonder why his pretty passenger was cross-examining him so closely, he did not betray it.

"It was about noon; I believe. Two or three of the black boys had skipped out at the last minute, as they always do, and we were short-handed. Mac said the fellow didn't look as if he could stand much, but he took him anyhow."

Once more the slender thread of investigation lay broken in her hands. The robbery had been committed at or very near eleven o'clock, and an hour would have given the robber time enough to disguise himself and reach the steamer. But since the captain did not seem altogether positive as to the exact hour, she tried again.

"Please try to remember exactly, Captain Mayfield," she pleaded. "I _must_ find out, if I can--for reasons which I can't explain to any one. Was it just at noon?"

Now this veteran master of packet boats was the last man in the world to be heroically accurate when his sympathies were appealed to by a winsome young woman in evident distress; and while he would cheerfully have sworn that it was eleven o'clock or one o'clock when John Gavitt came aboard, if he had known certainly which statement would relieve her, her query left him no hint to steer by.

So he said: "Oh, I say, 'about noon,' but it might have been an hour or two before, or any time after, till we cleared. But we'll find out. We'll have the fellow up here and put him on the witness stand. Or I'll go below and dig into him for you myself, if you say so."

"Not for the world!" she protested, aghast at the bare suggestion; and for fear it might be repeated in some less evadable form, she made an excuse of her duty and ran away to her aunt.

Later in the day, when she had sought in vain for some other, this suggestion of Captain Mayfield's came back. While there was the smallest chance that she had been mistaken, she dared not send the letter to Mr. Galbraith; yet it was clearly her duty to get at the truth of the matter, if she could.

But how? If Captain Mayfield could not remember the exact time of John Gavitt's enrolment as a member of the _Belle Julie's_ crew, it was more than probable that no one else could; no one but the man himself. It was at this point that the captain's suggestion returned to strike fire like steel upon reluctant flint. Could she go to the length of questioning Gavitt? If she should, would he tell her the truth? And if he should tell the truth, would it make the distressing duty any easier? Not easier, she concluded, but possibly less puzzling.

Thus far the suggestion: but without the help of some third person, she did not see how it could be carried out. She could neither go to him nor summon him; and the alternative of taking the captain into her confidence was rejected at once as being too hazardous. For the captain might not scruple to take the matter into his own hands without ceremony, sending the suspected man back to New Orleans to establish his innocence--if he could.

Charlotte worried over the wretched entanglement all day, and was so distrait and absent-minded that her aunt remarked it, naming it malaria and prescribing quinine. Whereat Charlotte dissembled and put on a mask of cheerfulness, keeping it on until after the evening meal and her aunt's early retiring. But when she was released, she was glad enough to go out on the promenade just forward of the starboard paddle-box, where there were no after-dinner loungers, to be alone with her problem and free to plunge once more into its intricacies.

It was possibly ten minutes later, while she stood leaning against a stanchion and watching the lights of a distant town rise out of the watery horizon ahead, that chance, the final arbiter in so many human involvements, led her quickly into the valley of decision. She heard a man's step on the steeply pitched stair leading down from the hurricane-deck. Before she could turn away he was confronting her; the man whose name on the _Belle Julie's_ crew roster was John Wesley Gavitt.

XI

THE ANARCHIST

Griswold's appearance was less fortuitous than it seemed to be. As a reward of merit for having saved the mate's life, he had been told off to serve temporarily as man-of-all-work for the day pilot, who chanced to be without a steersman. His watch in the pilot-house was over, and he was on his way to the crew's quarters below when he stumbled upon Miss Farnham. Mindful of his earlier slip, he passed her as if she had been invisible. She let him go until her opportunity was all but lost; then, plucking courage out of the heart of desperation, she spoke.

"One moment, if you please; I--I want to ask you something," she faltered; and he wheeled obediently and faced her.

Followed a pause, inevitable, but none the less awkward for the one who was responsible. Griswold felt, rather than saw, her embarrassment, and was generous enough to try to help her.

"I think I know what you wish to say: you are quite at liberty to say it," he offered, when the pause had grown into an obstacle which she seemed powerless to surmount.

"Do you? I have been hoping you wouldn't," was the quick rejoinder. Then: "Will you tell me at what time you joined the crew of the _Belle Julie_?"

The question did not surprise him, nor did he attempt to evade it.

"Between twelve and one o'clock, the day before yesterday."

"Will you tell me where you were at eleven o'clock that day?"

"Yes, if you ask me."

"I do ask you."

"I was in a certain business building in New Orleans, as near to you as I am now. Is that sufficiently definite?"

"It is. I thought perhaps--I had hoped--Oh, for goodness' sake, why did you do it?" she burst out, no longer able to fence with the weapons of indirectness.

He answered her frankly.

"It was the old story of one man's over-plenty and another man's need. Have you ever known what it means to go hungry for sheer poverty's sake?--but, of course, you haven't."

"No," she admitted.

"Well, I have; I was hungry that morning; very hungry. I know this doesn't excuse the thing--to you. But perhaps it may help to explain it."

"I think I can understand--a little. But surely----"

He stopped her with a quick little gesture.

"I know what you are going to say: that I should have been willing to work, or even to beg, rather than steal. I was willing to work; I was not willing to beg. I know it is all wrong from your point of view; but I should be sorry to have you think that I did what _I_ believed to be wrong."

"Surely you must know it is wrong?"

"Pardon me, but I can't admit that. If I could, you would be relieved of what is doubtless a very painful duty. I should surrender myself at once."

"But think of it; if you are right, every one else must be wrong!"

"No; not quite every one. But that is a very large question, and we needn't go into it. I confess that my method was unconventional; a little more summary than that of the usurers and the strictly legal robbers, but quite as defensible. For they rob the poor and the helpless, while I merely dispossessed one rich corporation of a portion of its exactions from the many."

"Then you are not sorry? I saw you yesterday afternoon and hoped you were."

He laughed unpleasantly. "I was sorry, then, and I am now; for the same reason. I have lost the money."

"Lost it?" she gasped, "How?"

"I had hidden it, and I suppose some one else has found it. It is all right, so far as the ownership is concerned; but I am still self-centred enough to be chagrined about it."

"But that is nothing!" she protested, with sharp regret in her voice; "now you can never return it!"

"I didn't intend to," he assured her, gravely. "I did have some notion of redistributing it fairly among those who need it most; but that was all."

"But you must have returned it in the end. You could never have been content to keep it."

"Do you think so?" he rejoined. "I think I could have been quite content to keep it. But that is past; it is gone, and I couldn't return it if I wanted to."

"No," she acquiesced; "and that makes it all the harder."

"For you to do what you must do? But you mustn't think of that. I shouldn't have made restitution in any event. Let me tell you what I did. I had a weapon, as you have read. I tied it up with the money in a handkerchief. There was always the chance of their catching me, and I had made up my mind that my last free act would be to drop the bundle into the river. So you see you need not hesitate on that score."

"Then you know what it is that I must do?"

"Assuredly. I knew it yesterday, when I saw that you had recognized me. It was very merciful in you to reprieve me, even for a few hours; but you will pardon me if I say it was wrong?"

"Wrong!" she burst out. "Is it generous to say that to me? Are you so indifferent yourself that you think every one else is indifferent, too?"

He smiled under cover of the darkness, and the joy of finding that his ideal was not going to be shattered was much greater than any thought of the price he must pay to preserve it. When she paused, he had his answer ready.

"I know you are not indifferent; you couldn't be. But you must be true to yourself, at whatever cost. Will you go to Captain Mayfield now?"

She hesitated.

"I thought of doing that, at first," she began, postponing to a more convenient season the unnerving reflection that she was actually discussing the ways and means of it with him. "It seemed to be the simplest thing to do. But then I saw what would happen; that I should be obliged----"

Again he stopped her with a gesture.

"I understand. We must guard against that at all hazards. You must not be dragged into it, you know, even remotely."

"How can you think of such things at such a time?" she queried.

"I should be unworthy to stand here talking to you if I didn't think of them. But since you can't go to Captain Mayfield, what will you do? What had you thought of doing?"

"I wrote a letter to--to Mr. Galbraith," she confessed.

"And you have not sent it?"

"No. If I had, I shouldn't have spoken to you."

"To be sure. I suppose you signed the letter?"

"Certainly."

"That was a mistake. You must rewrite it, leaving out your name, and send it. All you need to say is that the man who robbed the Bayou State Security is escaping on the _Belle Julie_; that he is disguised as a deck-hand, and that his name on the steamer's books is John Wesley Gavitt. That will be amply sufficient."

"But that isn't your name," she asserted.

"No; but that doesn't matter. It is the name that will find me."

She was silent for a moment. Then: "Why mustn't I sign it? They will pay no attention to an anonymous letter. And, besides, it seems so--so cowardly."

"They will telegraph to every river landing ahead of us within an hour after your letter reaches New Orleans; you needn't doubt that. And the suppression of your name isn't cowardly; it is merely a justifiable bit of self-protection. It is your duty to give the alarm; but when you have done that, your responsibility ceases. There are plenty of people who can identify me if I am taken back to New Orleans. You don't want to be summoned as a witness, and you needn't be."

She saw the direct, man-like wisdom of all this, and was quick to appreciate his delicate tact in effacing the question of the reward without even referring to it. But his stoicism was almost appalling.

"It is very shocking!" she murmured; "only you don't seem to realize it at all."

"Don't I? You must remember that I have been arguing from your point of view. My own is quite unchanged. It is your duty to do what you must do; it is my affair to avert the consequences to myself, if I can manage it without taking an unfair advantage of your frankness."

"What will you do?"

"It would be bad faith now for me to try to run away from the steamer, as I meant to do. So far, you have bound me by your candor. But beyond that I make no promises. My parole will be at an end when the officers appear, and I shall do what I can to dodge, or to escape if I am taken. Is that fair?"

"It is more than fair: I can't understand."

"What is it that you can't understand?"

"How you can do this; how you can do such things as the one you did last night, and still----"

He finished the sentence for her.--"And still be a common robber of banks, and the like. I fancy it is a bit puzzling--from your point of view. Sometime, perhaps, we shall all understand things better than we do now, but to that time, and beyond it, I shall be your grateful debtor for what you have done to-night. May I go now?"

She gave him leave, and when he was gone, she went to her state-room to write as he had suggested. An hour later she gave the newly written letter to the night clerk; and the thing was done.

During the remainder of the slow up-river voyage to St. Louis, Charlotte Farnham lived as one who has fired the fuse of a dynamite charge and is momently braced for the shock of the explosion. Each morning she assured herself that the strange man who could be a self-confessed felon one moment and a chivalrous gentleman the next was still a member of the _Belle Julie's_ crew; but she became a coward of landings, not daring to look on for fear she should see him arrested and taken away.

And while the _Belle Julie_ put landing after landing astern and the voyage grew older, Griswold, too, began to feel the pangs of suspense. Though he had no thought of breaking his promise, the dread of capture and trial and punishment grew until it became a threatening cloud to obscure all horizons. It was to no purpose that he called himself hard names and strove to rise superior to the overshadowing threat. It was there, and it would not be ignored. And when he faced it fairly a new dread arose in his heart; the fear that his fear might end by making him a criminal in fact--a savage to slay and die rather than be taken alive.

In the ordinary course of things, Miss Farnham's letter should have reached New Orleans in time to have procured Griswold's arrest at any one of a score of landings south of Memphis. When the spires of the Tennessee metropolis disappeared to the southward, he began to be afraid that her resolution had failed, and to bewail his broken ideal.

He had no means of knowing that she had given her letter to the night clerk within the hour of their interview on the saloon-deck promenade; nor did he, or any one else, know that it had lain unnoticed and overlooked on the clerk's desk until the _Belle Julie_ reached Cairo. Such, however, was the pregnant fact; and to this purely accidental delay Griswold owed his first sight of the chief city of Missouri lying dim and shadowy under its mantle of coal smoke.

The _Belle Julie_ made her landing in the early evening, and Charlotte was busy up to the last moment getting her own and her aunt's belongings ready for the transfer to the upper river steamer on which they were to complete their journey to Minnesota. Hence, it was not until the _Belle Julie_ was edging her way up to the stone-paved levee that Charlotte broke her self-imposed rule and slipped out upon the port promenade.

The swing-stage was poised in the air ready to be lowered, and two of the deck-hands were dropping from the shore end to trail the bow line up the paved slope to the nearest mooring-ring. There was an electric arc-light opposite the steamer's berth, and Charlotte shaded her eyes with her hands to follow the motions of the two bent figures under the dripping hawser.

One of the men was wearing a cap, and there was a small bundle hanging at his belt. She recognized him at once. At the mooring-ring he was the one who stooped to make the line fast, and the other, a negro, stood aside. At that moment the landing-stage fell, and in the confusion of debarkation which promptly followed, the thrilling bit of by-play at the mooring-ring passed unnoted by all save the silent watcher on the saloon-deck.

While the man in the cap was still on his knees, two men stole from the shadow of the nearest freight pyramid and flung themselves upon him. He fought fiercely for a moment, and though he was more than doubly outweighted, rose to his feet, striking out viciously and dragging his assailants up with him. In the struggle the bundle dropped from his belt, and Charlotte saw him kick it aside. The waiting negro caught it deftly and vanished among the freight pyramids; whereupon one of the attacking pair wrenched himself out of the three-man scuffle and darted away in pursuit.

This left but a single antagonist for the fugitive, and Charlotte's sympathies deserted her convictions for the moment. But while she was biting her lip to keep from crying out, the fugitive stepped back and held out his hands; and she saw the gleam of polished metal reflecting the glare of the arc-light when the officer snapped the handcuffs upon his wrists.

It was with a distinct sense of culpability oppressing her that she went back to her aunt, and she was careful not to let the invalid see her face. Fortunately, there was a thing to be done, and the transfer to the other steamer came opportunely to help her to re-establish the balance of things distorted.

She was sorry, but, after all, the man had only himself to blame. None the less, the wish that some one else might have been his betrayer was promising to grow later into remorseful and lasting regret when, with her aunt, she left the _Belle Julie_, and walked up the levee to go aboard the _Star of the North_.

XII

MOSES ICHTHYOPHAGUS

After suffering all the pangs of those who lose between the touch and the clutch, Griswold had found the red-handkerchief bundle precisely where it had been hidden; namely, buried safely in the deck-load of sacked coffee on the engine-room guard.

It came to light in the final half-hour of the voyage, when he and his mates were transferring the coffee to the main-deck, forward. It had not been disturbed; and what had happened was obvious enough, after the fact. After its hiding, arm's-length deep, in a cranny between the sacks, some sudden jar of the boat had slightly shifted the cargo, closing one cranny and opening another.

With the money once more in his possession he had a swift return of the emotions which had thrilled him when he found himself standing on the sidewalk in front of the Bayou State Security with the block of bank-notes under his arm. Once more he was on fair fighting terms with the world, and the star of hope, which had gone out like a candle in a gust of wind at the discovery of his loss, swung high in the firmament, shining all the more brightly for its long occultation.

As to the battle for the keeping which was probably awaiting him at the St. Louis landing, the prospect of coming to blows, man-fashion, with the enemy, was not wholly unwelcome. With all of his incompletenesses this young rebel of life was no coward. If the New Orleans thief-takers were waiting for him in the shadows of the great city's landing-place, so be it; he would try to give them their money's worth: and an eager impatience to be at it got into his blood.

The few necessary preliminaries were arranged while the _Belle Julie_ was backing and filling for the landing. Since to be taken with the money in his possession was to give the enemy the chance of winning at one stroke both the victory and the spoils, he made a confederate of the negro whose part he had taken in the quarrel with M'Grath. The man was grateful and loyal according to his gifts; and Griswold's need was too pressing to stick at any trifle of unintelligence.

"Mose, you'll go ashore with me on the spring line," he said, when he had found his man at the heel of the landing-stage.

"Yes, suh, Mars' Gravitt; dat's me, sholy."

"All right. You see this bundle. If anybody tackles me while we're making fast, I'm going to drop it, and you must get it and run away. Do you understand?"

The negro eyed the bundle suspiciously.

"Ain't no dinnymite, 'r nothin' er that sawt in hit, is dey, Cap'm?"

"No."

"Whut-all mus' I do when I's done tuk out wid hit?"

"Get away, first; then keep out of sight and hang around the levee for an hour or two. If I don't turn up before you get tired, pitch the thing into the river and go about your business. How much money does the captain owe you?"

"Cap'm Mayfiel'? Shuh! he don't owe me nothin'. I done draw de las' picayune dat was comin' to me yistiday--an' dat yaller nigger over yonder got it in de crap-game, same as turrers."

Griswold put a twenty-dollar bill into the black palm, and when the crap victim made out the figure of it by the glow of the furnace fires, his eyes bulged. "Gorra-mighty!" he gasped; and would have given it back.

"No, keep it; it's yours. Do exactly as I have told you, and if I'm able to keep my date with you, I'll double it. But if I don't show up, remember--the bundle goes into the river just as it is. If you open it, it'll conjure you worse than any Obi-man you ever heard of."

"No, _suh_! I ain't gwine open hit, Cap'm--not if dey's cunjah in hit; no, suh!"

"Well, there is--the worst kind of conjure this old world has ever known. But it won't hurt you if you don't meddle with it. Keep your wits about you and be ready to grab it and run. Here we go."

The pilot had found his wharfage and was edging the _Belle Julie_ up to it. The bow men paid out slack, and Griswold and the black, dropping from the swinging stage, trailed the end of the wet hawser up to the nearest mooring-ring. Though haste in making fast is the spring-line man's first duty, Griswold took a fraction of a second to look around him. The mooring-ring lay fair in the mock noonday of electric light, and there was no cover near it save a tarpaulined pyramid of sugar barrels. Up the levee slope the way was open to the one-sided river-fronting street; and beyond the tarpaulin-covered sugar were more freight pyramids, with shadowy alleys between them.

Satisfied with what he saw, Griswold bade the negro keep watch and knelt to knot the hawser in the ring. The line was water-soaked and stiff, and in the momentary struggle with it his caution relaxed its eyehold on the pyramid of sugar barrels. The lapse was hardly more than a glance aside, but it sufficed. While the negro sentinel was stammering, "L-l-lookout, Mars' Cap'm!" the trap was sprung.

In deference to the up-coming passengers from the _Belle Julie_, the two man-catchers tried to do their job quietly. But Griswold would not have it so, and he was up and had twisted himself free when a blow from a clubbed pistol drove him back to his knees. Half stunned by the clubbing, he still made shift to spring afoot again, to drop his handkerchief bundle and kick it aside, and to close with his assailants while the negro was snatching up the treasure and darting away among the freight pyramids. After that he had but one thought; to keep the two plain-clothes men busy until the negro had made his escape. Even this proved to be a forlorn hope, since the smaller of the two instantly broke away to give chase, while the other stepped back, spun his weapon in air, and levelled it.

Rage-blinded as he was, Griswold knew that the levelled pistol meant surrender or death. In the fine battle-frenzy of the moment he was on the verge of accepting the alternative. Life and the love of it were merged in a fierce desire to rush Berserk-mad upon the weapon and the man behind it, and his muscles were hardening for the spring when he chanced to look past the levelled weapon to the _Belle Julie_; to the saloon-deck guard where a solitary, gray-coated figure stood clinging to a stanchion and looking on with what agonies of soul none might know. Like a flash of revealing light it came to him that the death which would be the lesser of two evils for him would brim a life-long cup of trembling for the woman whose duty it had been to betray him, and he thrust out his wrists for the manacles.

Quite naturally, the upflash of self-abnegation gave birth to renewed hope; and when his captor had handcuffed him and was walking him toward a closed carriage drawn up before the nearest saloon in the river-fronting street, he ventured to ask what he was wanted for.

"You'll find that out soon enough," was the curt reply, and nothing more was said until the carriage was reached and the door had been jerked open. "Get in!" commanded the majesty of the law, and when the door was slammed upon the captive, the plain-clothes man turned to the driver, a little wizened Irishman with a face like a shrivelled winter apple. "What time does that New Orleans fast train pull out?"

Griswold heard the reply: "Sivin-forty-five, sorr," and something in the thin, piping voice gave him fresh courage. Through the open window of the carriage he saw his captor glance at his watch and begin an impatient sentry-beat up and down under the electric transparency advertising the particular brand of whiskey specialized by the saloon. He was evidently waiting for his colleague to bring in the negro, and time pressed.

While he looked, Griswold was conscious of a curious change creeping into heart and brain. From typifying himself as an escaping criminal the psychological objective was slowly but surely becoming the subjective. He _was_ a criminal. The conclusion brought no self-accusation, no prickings of conscience. On the contrary, it swept the ground clear of all the ethical obstructions, leaving only a vast subtlety and furtiveness, the sly ferocity of the trapped animal.

Through half of the sentry-beat the big man's back was turned: Griswold's eyes measured the distance, and the new subtlety weighed the chances of a cautious opening of the carriage door, a tiger spring to the pavement, and a battering out of the man's brains with the handcuffs. There were few passers: it might be done.

It was not because it was too cold-blooded that he put the suggestion aside. It was rather because the man-catcher himself suggested another expedient. The spring evening was raw and chilly, and the open doors of the saloon volleyed light and warmth and a beckoning invitation. Griswold's gift, prostituted to the service of the changed point of view, bade him read in the red face, the loose lip, and the bibulous eyes the temptation that was gripping the plain-clothes man. "Wait," whispered the colorless inner voice; "wait, and be ready when he goes in to get the drink he has promised himself he will never again be weak enough to take while he is on duty. It won't be long."

Griswold waited. By a careful contortion of the manacled hands, which seemed suddenly to have become endowed with the crafty deftness of the hands of a pickpocket, he found his working capital in a pocket of the short-sleeved coat. It had been diminished only by the hundred dollars put into John Gavitt's hands, and the twenty he had given the negro. He wished he might have had a glimpse of the little Irish cabman's face. Since he had not, he made two hundred dollars of the money into a compact roll and put the remainder back into the inner pocket.

It was only a minute or two after this that the red-faced man's impatience blossomed into the thirst that will not be denied, and he went into the saloon to get a drink, first putting the cabman on guard.

"Get down here and keep an eye on this dicky-bird," he ordered. "Slug him if he tries to make a break."

But the cabman hung back.

"I'm no fightin' man, sorr; an', besides, I don't dare lave me harrses," he objected. But the officer broke in angrily.

"What the devil are you afraid of? He's got the clamps on, and couldn't hurt you if he wanted to. Come down here!"

The little Irishman clambered down from his box reluctantly, with the reins looped over his arm. When he peered in at the open window of the carriage the big man had passed beyond the swinging screens of the saloon entrance and Griswold seized his opportunity quickly.

"What's your job worth, my man?" he whispered.

The cabman snatched a swift glance over his shoulder before he ventured to answer.

"Don't yez be timptin' a poor man wid a wife an' sivin childer hangin' to um--don't yez do it, sorr!"

Griswold, the brother-keeping, would have thought twice before opening any door of temptation for a brother man. But the new Griswold had no compunctions.

"It's two hundred dollars to you if you can get me away from here before that red-faced drunkard comes back. Have a runaway--anything! Here's the money!"

For a single timorous instant the cabman hesitated. Then he took the roll of money and crammed it into his pocket without looking at it. Before Griswold could brace himself there was a quick _whish_ of the whip, a piping cry from the driver, and the horses sprang away at a reckless gallop, with the little Irishman hanging to the reins and shouting feebly like a faint-hearted Automedon.

Griswold caught a passing glimpse of the red-faced man wiping his lips in the doorway of the saloon as the carriage bounded forward; and when the critical instant came, he was careful to fall out on the riverward side of the vehicle. It was a desperate expedient, since he could not wait to choose the favorable moment, and the handcuffs made him practically helpless. Chance saved the clumsy escape from resulting in a speedy recapture. When he tumbled out of the lurching carriage he was hurled violently against something that figured as a wall of solid masonry and was half stunned by the concussion. None the less, he had wit enough to lie motionless in the shadow of the wall, and the hue and cry, augmented by this time to a yelling mob, swept past without discovering him.

When it was safe to do so, he sat up and felt for broken bones. There were none; and he looked about him. The wall of masonry resolved itself into a cargo of brick piled on the levee side of the street, and obeying the primary impulse of a fugitive, he quickly put the sheltering bulk of it between himself and the lighted thoroughfare.

The next step had to be resolutely thought out. How was he to get rid of the handcuffs? Any policeman would have a key, and there were doubtless plenty of locksmiths in St. Louis. But both of these sources of assistance were out of the question. Whom, then? The answer came in one word--M'Grath. On a day when the up-river voyage was no more than fairly begun, one of the negroes in the crew had procured a bottle of bad whiskey. To pacify him the mate had put him in irons, using two pairs of handcuffs for the purpose. Therefore, M'Grath must have a key.

But would M'Grath do it? That remained to be seen; and since hesitation was no part of Griswold's equipment, he covered the fetters as well as he could with a scrap of bagging, and walked boldly down the levee and aboard the _Belle Julie_, falling into line with the returning file of roustabouts.

The mate was at the heel of the foot-plank, and he saw at once what the scrap of sacking was meant to hide.

"Hello, there, Gavitt!" he called, not less gruffly than of yore, but without the customary imprecation; "What are ye doing with thim things on?"

Griswold told a straight story, concealing nothing: not even the detective's refusal to tell him what he was arrested for.

M'Grath was smiling grimly when the tale was finished. "And did he let ye come back to collect yer day-pay, then?" he asked, ironically.

"Hardly. He shoved me into a cab and then went into a saloon to get a drink. While he was gone, the horses ran away and I got out," said Griswold, still adhering to the exact facts.

"Ye'd ought to find that cabby and buy him a seegyar," was the mate's comment. "So ye legged it, did ye?"

"Yes; when I got a show. But I can't get these things off."

This time M'Grath's smile was a grin.

"I'll bet ye can't. They ain't made f'r to come off. Never mind; peg along afther me. You did be doing me a good turn wan black night, and I'm not forgetting it."

He led the way up to his quarters in the texas, and telling Griswold to wait, went down on his knees to rummage in the locker beneath the berth.

"I've got a couple o' pair av thim things in here, somewhere, and maybe the key to 'em will fit yours," he went on, adding: "What's become av Mose?"

Again Griswold told the exact truth.

"The last I saw of him he was making a run for it up the levee, with one of the plain-clothes men chasing him."

M'Grath found his handcuffs and tried the key in those upon Griswold's wrists. It fitted.

"Now ye're fut- and hand-loose, I'll say to ye what I wouldn't say to a cripple. If ye've been telling me the truth, 'tis only the half av it. What have ye been doing, Gavitt?"

Griswold smiled. "Toting cargo on the _Belle Julie_, since you've known me. You'd swear to that, wouldn't you?"

"But before that?"

"Loafing around New Orleans for a month or two."

The big mate pushed him to a seat on the after berth and sat down opposite.

"Because ye fished me out o' the river whin ye had good cause to lave me be, I'll tell ye a thing or two for the good av yer soul. Thing number wan is that ye're not Gavitt; ye're no more like him than I am. Let that go, an' come to thing number two; ye've been up to some deviltry. How do I know? Because, at the last landing below this a little man comes aboard an' spots you. Is that all? It is not. Whin the _Belle Julie_ swings in, he's the first man off, making a clane jump av a good tin feet from the engine-room guards. I saw 'im."

Griswold nodded and said, "I was wondering how they came to place me so easily. This fellow knew I would be one of the two to carry out the spring line?"

"He did, f'r I told him."

"Meaning to get me pulled?"

"Meaning nothing but wanting to be rid av the bothering little man. He said he was a friend av yours, and didn't care to be speaking to ye while ye was mixing with the naygurs. But that's all over and gone. What'll ye be doing next?"

Griswold took a leaf out of the past. Safety in a former peril had grown out of a breakfast deliberately eaten in a café next door to the Bayou State Security.

"What would I do but finish my job on the _Julie_?" he said, pushing the theory to its logical conclusion.

The mate shook his head. "Ye needn't do that; the cops might be coming down here and running you in again. How much pay have ye drawn?"

"Not any."

M'Grath took a greasy wallet from his pocket and counted out a deck-hand's wages for the trip.

"Take this, and I'll be getting it back from the clerk. It might not be good f'r ye to show up at the office. Where's yer hat?"

"It was lost in the shuffle out yonder at the mooring-ring."

The mate found an old one of his own, together with a long-tailed coat, much the worse for wear.

"Do you be taking these. They'll not be so likely to pick you up before ye can get up-town if ye look a little less like a hobo."

Griswold suffered a sudden return to the meliorating humanities.

"I've been calling you all the hard names I could lay tongue to, M'Grath, and there have been times when I would have given the price of a good farm for the privilege of standing up to you on a bit of green grass with nobody looking on. I take it all back. You say you haven't forgotten: neither will I forget, and maybe my turn will come again, some day."

"Go along with you," growled the rough-tongued Irishman, whose very kindness had a tang of brutality in it. "If you're coming across the naygur, Mose, anywhere, sind him back and tell him I'll see that he gets real money f'r helping us unload. Off with ye, now, whilst they're catching up with yer runaway cab."

Griswold went leisurely, as befitted his theory, and upon reaching the levee, turned aside among the freight pyramids in search of his confederate. Now that there was time to recall the facts he feared that the negro had been taken. He had secured but a few yards' start in the race, and his pursuer was a white man, able to back speed with intelligence. Griswold had a sickening fit of despair when he contemplated the possibility of failure with the goal almost in sight; and the reaction, when he stumbled upon the negro skulking in the shadows of a lumber cargo, was sharp enough to make him faint and dizzy.

The negro did not recognize him at first and was about to run away when Griswold shook off the benumbing weakness and called out.

"T'ank de good Lawd! is dat you-all, Cap'm Gravitt? I's dat shuck up I couldn' recconize my ol' mammy! Tek dishyer cunjah-bag o' yourn 'fo' I gwine drap hit. Hit's des been _bu'nin'_ my han's ev' sense I done tuk out wid it!"

Griswold took the handkerchief bundle, and the mere touch of it put new life into him.

"Where is the fellow who was chasing you, Mose?" he asked.

"I's nev' gwine tell you dat; no, suh. Las' time I seed him, he's des t'arin' off strips up de levee after turrer fellah."

"What other fellow?"

The negro laughed and did a double shuffle at the mere recollection of it.

"Hi-yah! Turrer fellah is de fellah what done tuk my job. Hit was des dis-a-way: when I t'ink dat white man gwine catch me, sho_ly_, I des drap down in de darkes' cawneh I kin fin'; dat's what I done, yas, suh. He des keep on agoin', _spat, spat, spat_, an' when he come out front de _Gineral Jackson_ over yondeh, one dem boys what's wukkin' on her, _he_ tuk out, an' dat white man des tu'n hisself loose an' mek his laigs go lak he gwine shek 'um plum off; yas, sah!"

Griswold suffered another lapse into the humanities when he saw the list of participants in his act growing steadily with each fresh complication, and he said, "I'm sorry for that, Mose."

"Nev' you min' 'bout dat, Cap'm. Dat boy he been doin' somepin to mek him touchous, 'less'n he nev' tuk out dat-a-way, no, suh!"

"Maybe so. Well, we can't help it now. Here is the other twenty I promised you."

"T'ank you, suh; t'ank you kin'ly Cap'm. You-all's des de whites' white man ev' I knowned. You sholy is."

"What are you going to do with yourself, now?" Griswold inquired.

"Who, me? I's gwine up yondeh to dat resteraw an' git me de bigges' mess o' fried fish I kin hol'--dat's me; yas, suh."

"M'Grath says he'll pay you levee wages if you'll come back to the boat and help get the cargo out of her."

"Reckon I ain't gwine back to de _Julie_: no, suh. Dat'd be gittin' rich too fas' for dis niggeh. Good-night, Cap'm Gravitt; an' t'ank you kin'ly, suh."

Griswold went his way musing upon the little object-lesson afforded by the negro's determination. Here was a fellow man who was one of the feeblest of the under dogs in the great social fight; and with money enough in hand to give him at least a breathing interval, his highest ambition was a mess of fried fish.

The object-lesson was suggestive, if not specially encouraging, and Griswold made a mental note of it for further study when the question of present safety should be more satisfactorily answered.

XIII

GRISWOLD EMERGENT

Half an hour or such a matter after the hue-and-cry runaway from the curb in front of the saloon two doors above, Mr. Abram Sonneschein, dealer in second-hand clothing and sweat-shop bargains, saw a possible customer drifting across the street, and made ready the grappling hooks of commercial enterprise.

The drifter was apparently a passenger from some lately arrived steamboat; but even to the trained eye of so acute an observer as Mr. Sonneschein he presented difficulties in the way of classification. Only temporarily, however. The long-tailed coat and the wide-brimmed, soft felt hat were the insignia of the down-river, back-country planter, and the merchant drew his conclusions accordingly.

"My, my! Rachel," he remarked to his helpmate behind the counter. "See dis chay from de backvoods across der street coming! Maype ve could sell him some odder t'ings to go vit dot coat, ain'd it? Come right in, _mein_ frient; dis is der blace you vas looking for," this last to the drifter, with a detaining finger hooked persuasively into a buttonhole of the long-tailed coat.

So much for the grappling. But the possible customer was not to be landed so easily. Twice and yet once again he broke away from the detaining finger; and when at last he finally allowed himself to be drawn into the garish, ill-smelling little shop, he proved to be discouragingly indifferent and hard to please in the matter of prices, hanging back and taking refuge in countrified reticence when Mr. Sonneschein's eloquence grew pathetically pressing.

"I did think maybe I'd buy me a suit of clothes," he admitted, finally, drawling the words to make his speech fit the countrified rôle, "but there isn't any hurry. I reckon I'll wait a spell and look around and see what kind of fashions they're wearing now."

This was a tacit acknowledgment that he had money to spend, and the eager merchant redoubled his efforts. His perseverance was rewarded, at length, and when the ship of bargain and sale was bowling merrily along before a fair breeze of suggestion, Mr. Sonneschein interlarded his solicitations with an account of the recent miscarriage of justice in front of the near-at-hand saloon.

The customer listened with apparent incuriosity, as one whom these doings in the city world touched but remotely; but the two or three questions he asked were nicely calculated to bring out the more important facts. The detectives had cautiously kept their own counsel as to the details of their quest. Mr. Sonneschein had gossiped with the policeman on the beat, and the policeman had talked with the red-faced man who had come alone in the cab, and had taken an unofficial drink with the roundsman before going down to the steamboat landing. He and his "partner" were from New Orleans, and they were after a man who was wanted for big money: that was all he would tell the roundsman.

"I suppose they've caught him again long before this," said the hesitant customer, trying on a coat which might have been modelled upon a man twice his size, and surveying himself in the shop looking-glass while Mr. Sonneschein lovingly smoothed the lapels into place and gathered a generous handful of the surplus material at the back.

"I don't know if dey have--ain'd dot der elegantist fit in der vorld, now. See, Rachel; ain'd dot schplendit?"

"They didn't happen to mention the fellow's name, did they?" asked the prospective purchaser.

"Not much dey didn't! Dem dedectifs iss too schmart for dot. Dey don't give it avay when somepody else might got der rewards. How you like dot schplendit coat, now?"

"Seems tolerable big, doesn't it?" said the customer, whose speech still fitted his part to the final drawl. "Suppose we try something else. So there is a reward, is there?"

Mr. Sonneschein took the reward for granted and expressed a devout wish that he might be able to finger it. Whereupon the customer said he wished _he_ might; and here the topic died a natural death and the business of buying and selling went on without further interruption.

There was little suggestion of the tramp roustabout, and still less, perhaps, of the gentleman, about the person who presently emerged from the Sonneschein emporium. Nevertheless, he appeared to be well satisfied with his acquisitions, bearing himself as a purchaser who has by no means had the worse in the bargaining. At the first street corner he inquired his way of a policeman and was directed cityward. A square farther on he selected a barber's shop of cleanly promise, went in, tossed his newly acquired hand-bag to the porter, and took the first vacant chair.

"A hair-cut, a clean shave--not too close, and a bath afterward," was his laconic order; and a modest tip facilitated things and provided the little luxuries.

An hour later no one who had known him bearded and unkempt would have recognized the clean-shaven, athletic-looking young man who ran down the steps of the barber's shop and went swinging along on his way up-town. But the transformation was still incomplete. Reaching the retail district, he strolled purposefully up one street and down another, passing many brilliantly lighted shops until he found one exactly to his liking. A courteous salesman caught him up at the door, and led the way to the designated departments.

By this time Mr. Sonneschein's hesitant and countrified customer had undergone a complete metamorphosis. No longer reluctant and hard to please, he passed rapidly from counter to counter, making his selections with man-like celerity and certainty and bargaining not at all. When he was quite through, there was enough to furnish a generous travelling wardrobe; a head-to-foot change of garmentings with a surplus to fill two lordly suit-cases; so he bought the suit-cases also, and had them taken with his other purchases, to the dressing-room.

Here, in quiet and great comfort, he made his second change of clothing, first carefully removing from each garment all the little tags and trademarks which declared it St. Louis-bought. These tags, together with the Gavitt and the Sonneschein costumes, were crowded into the Sonneschein hand-bag, with the soiled red handkerchief to keep them company; and he was carrying this hand-bag when he reappeared to the waiting salesman.

"I see you have steam heat," he remarked. "Is your boiler-room accessible?"

"Yes, sir; it's in the basement," was the reply, and the courteous clerk wondered if his liberal customer were thinking of adding the heating plant to his purchases.

Griswold saw the wonder and smiled. "No; I don't want to buy it," he explained, with the exact touch of familiarity which bridges all chasms. "But I'm just up from the coast, where they have a good bit of fever the year round, and it's as well to be on the safe side. May I trouble you to show me the way?"