The account which the newspaper made shift to give was but a bald,
disjointed recital of the superficial aspect of events to one whose
memory could so nearly reproduce the vivid fact; and where memory and
experience failed him, his imagination, conversant with the status
depicted, could paint the scene with all the tints of actuality. A
recent steamboat accident on the great Mississippi River had resulted
in much loss of life. The words, as Euphemia droned them, still holding
the newspaper with both arms outstretched, brought back to one of her
listeners the sensation of forging tremulously along in midstream at
nightfall, the shimmer of the shaking chandeliers of the great flimsy
floating palace, the white interior of the ladies’ cabin, with the
“china finish” of the painted and paneled walls, its velvet carpet and
furniture, its grand piano. He heard anew the throb of the engines,
and the rush of water from the great revolving wheels; he had the
sense, too, of the immensity of the vast river, gleaming with twinkling
points of light close at hand, where the waves caught the glitter
from the illuminated craft, and tossed it from one to another as the
surges of the displaced water broke about the hull; further away
could be seen the swift current hurrying on, a different dusky tint
from the darkness; and still further, where the limits of vision were
reached, one had even yet some subtle realization of that unceasing
irresistible flow, although unseen and unheard. He remembered leaning
over the guards and idly watching a number of mules on the deck below,
crowded so thickly that they seemed only a dark restlessly stirring
mass, until at some landing, when they were excited by the clamors
of the roustabouts loading on more cotton, the pallid glare of the
electric light rendered distinguishable the tossing snorting heads and
wild dilated eyes. An ill-starred cargo! The frantic struggles of this
animated mass caused much loss of human life; many a bold swimmer might
have gained the land but for the uncontrolled plunging of those heavy
hoofs. And there was no lack of light to reveal the full horrors of the
fate: those huge piles of bales of blazing cotton illumined the river
for twenty miles. How unprescient, how strangely stolid, the human
organism, the phlegmatic mind, the insensate soul, that no nerve, no
faint tremor of fear or forecast, no vague presentiment, heralded the
moment when every condition of life was reversed!
Up in the pilot-house he was now, with the captain and the pilot and
the great shadowy wheel. The ladies had all vanished, leaving the cabin
below deserted and a trifle forlorn. Once he had taken his way through
those sacred precincts, affecting to be searching for some one; and
so he was,--to discover if any one there was worth looking at twice:
and this he esteemed a justifiable if not a laudable enterprise, for
were the ladies not welcome to look at him? His trim business suit
he felt was quite the correct thing. He had entire confidence in his
tailor, and he swore by his barber! His proper thankfulness to his
Creator, too, was not impaired by any morbid self-depreciation. With
his strong, alert, handsome figure, his dark red-brown hair, his eyes
of the same tint, only kindled into fire, his long dark lashes, his
drooping mustache, and the features with which nature had taken some
very particular pains,--the ladies were quite welcome not to turn their
heads away, if they chose.
However, his vanity was not insatiable. He had made his triumphal
progress through the circle earlier in the evening, and now he was
relishing the captain’s surprised laughter at sundry feats that he was
exhibiting with a silver dollar and a goblet which did not always hold
water. One moment the silver dollar was under it, glimmering affably
through the thin glass; then, with no human approach to it, the goblet
was empty. It seemed the problem of life to the jolly captain to
discover how this was done, and being an ambitious wight, he assured
his passenger, with a wild wager of ten dollars to nothing, that, after
the boat should leave the bank again, he would be able to do the trick
himself before they could make another landing. Before they made
another landing he was initiated into deeper mysteries.
The boat was heading slowly for the shore. For the whistle, in loud
husky amplitudes of sound, overpowering when heard so close at hand,
had broken abruptly on the air, and the echoes of all the wild
moss-draped cypress woods on either hand were answering the accustomed
sound through the dark aisles of the swamp. To many a far cabin up
lonely bayous they carried the note of the progress of “de big boat up
de ribber.” The great tremulous craft was swinging majestically round
in midstream. Now and again sounded the sharp jangling of the pilot’s
bell. Then the boat paused with a quivering shock, backed, veered to
one side, approached the shore, paused again, and then smoothly glided
forward, trembled anew, and was still.
He had gone out on the hurricane deck. The wind blew fresh from the
opposite shore; he was sensible of a certain attraction in the aspect
of the gloom which was as above a darkling sea, for the further bank
was hardly visible by day, and utterly effaced by night. The stars
were in the water as well as in the sky. He looked up at them above
the two dusky columns of the boat’s chimneys, which were bejeweled now
with swinging lights. The sudden stillness of the machinery gave one
to hear the sounds from the land. A crane clanged out a wild woodsy
cry from somewhere in the darkness. An owl, hooting from the bank,
sent its voice of ill omen far along the currents of the great deep
silent river. The clamor from the landing caught his attention, and he
turned back to look down at the cluster of twinkling lights,--for the
place was a mere hamlet. And but for the shifting of his attitude,--oh,
could he but have contented his gaze with the sad spring night by the
riverside, the lonely woods, the waste of waters, the reflection of the
stars in the depths and the stars themselves in the infinite heights of
the dark sky,--could this have sufficed, he said to himself as the girl
read aloud the story of his fate, he might be living now.
For alive as the man looked, he was dead!
And the end of Lucien Royce--for this was his real name--came to pass
in this way.
That night, as he shifted his position on the hurricane deck, a young
fellow coming up the broad landing-stage amongst the neighborhood
loafers bound to take a drink at the bar of every passing steamboat,
caught sight of him in the steady pervasive radiance of the electric
search-light now aflare on the boat, and lifted his voice in a friendly
hail. This young fellow was very visible in the warm spring afternoon
in the far-away mountains, where he had never been. The juggler
inadvertently glanced down at the russet shoes on his feet, for this
man had then stood in them. It was he who wore, that night, the long
blue hose, the blue flannel shirt, the black-and-red blazer, the
knickerbockers, and the tan-colored belt, which was drawn an eyelet
or so tighter now, for the juggler was slighter of build. Notified
by the whistle of the boat of its approach, he had come down to the
landing on his bicycle, merely for the break in the monotony of a long
visit at a relative’s plantation. Royce remembered how this other
fellow had looked in this toggery, grown so familiar, as they stood
together at the bar, and he asked of the newcomer more than once what
he would take. Very jolly they were together at the bar. It was hard
to part. Lucien Royce could scarcely resist the pressing insistence to
return at an early day and visit this friend at his sister’s place, a
few miles back from the river, where he himself was a guest. But John
Grayson was the prodigal son in an otherwise irreproachable family,
and Royce preferred more responsible introduction to make his welcome
good. With this hampering thought in mind he was not apt at excuses.
John Grayson, noting that he was ill at ease, instantly attributed it
to commercial anxiety, and asked, with rude curiosity, how his firm
was weathering the flurry. For this was a time of extreme financial
stress. A general panic was in progress. Assignments were announced by
the dozen daily. The banks were going down one upon another, like a
row of falling bricks. With business much extended, with heavy margins
to cover and notes for large amounts about to fall due, the cotton
commission firm, Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, of St. Louis, of which his
late father had been a partner, and of which he was an employee, had
made great efforts to collect all the money due them in the lower
country, and Lucien Royce had been sent south on this mission. He had
succeeded beyond their expectations. Owing to the prevalent total
lack of confidence in the banks, he had been instructed to transmit a
considerable sum by express. This, however, was promptly attached in
the express office at St. Louis to satisfy a claim against the firm;
and although they were advised it could not be sustained in court, the
proceeding greatly embarrassed them, being, in fact, designed at this
crisis to force a compromise in order to release the surplus funds.
To furnish security proved impossible under the circumstances; and
the firm being thus balked, Royce telegraphed in cipher to them for
authority to bring the remainder home on his person, that it might be
in readiness to take up their paper. Although he was rarely troubled
by the weight of the money-belt which he thus wore, containing a large
sum in bills and specie, he was very conscious of it now when Grayson,
who with all the rest of St. Louis had heard of the attachment suit,
abruptly demanded, with a knitting of his brow, “How in the world
do you get your collections to them, if you can’t send the money by
express or draft?”
Royce controlled his face, and replied evasively, “Oh, the financial
situation is on the mend now. As to the firm, it will pull through all
right, without a doubt.”
John Grayson listened, his auburn head cocked to one side. He winked
a roguish dark eye. Then, with a sudden jocose lunge at his friend,
he slipped his arm around his waist, feeling there the heavy roll
of the belt, and burst into rollicking laughter. The scuffling
demonstration--for Royce had violently resisted--was eyed with stately
disapproval by an elderly planter of the old régime, who possessed now
more manners than means; evidently contrasting the public “horse-play,”
as he doubtless considered it, of these representatives of the present
day with the superior deportment of the youth of the punctilious past.
Lucien Royce remembered that he had been secretly perturbed after this,
for he knew that Grayson drank to excess and talked wildly in his cups;
and although, in view of his own safety, he would hardly have cared
to make public the character of his charge, he realized with positive
dismay that it might be fatal to the interests of the firm should he
encounter some legal process at the wharf in St. Louis, the result of
this discovery.
But he was simple-hearted, after all. He did not suspect John Grayson
of aught dishonorable. To the world at large he seemed a fine young
fellow, of excellent forbears, merely sowing his wild oats,--a crop
which many men have harvested in early years with scant profit, it is
true, but without derogation to common honesty and repute.
Royce subsequently sought to urge in compassion for his friend
that the turpitude of the crime was insomuch the less that it was
not deliberate and premeditated. Certain it was that Grayson’s cry
of amazement and his plunge toward the guards were very like the
precipitancy of dismay when he found that the huge boat was sheering
off; she was turning as he dashed down the stair, and was headed once
more on her course when he realized that in their conviviality he and
his friend had failed to hear the sonorous panting of the engines again
astir, the jangling of the bell, the heavy plashing of the buckets
striking the water as the wheels revolved anew, and that the landing
was now a mile down the river.
The captain showed much polite concern when the two young men resorted
hastily to the “texas” and found him seated at a table, eying, with
an air of great cunning and a robust intention to solve the mystery
forthwith, a silver dollar which was securely invested under an
inverted glass goblet, and which, so far as his powers were capable of
extricating it thence, save by the rule of thumb, as it were, was the
safest silver dollar ever known.
He desisted from this occupation for the moment to master the new
perplexity that confronted him, and to express his most affable and
ceremonious regret; for his boat carried all the cotton shipped from
the rich sister’s plantation, and the dictates of policy aided his
constitutionally kindly disposition.
“Why, I wouldn’t have kidnapped you this way for”--his eye fell on the
bit of silver shining through the goblet--“for a dollar,” he concluded
modestly. “I’ll put you ashore in the yawl, if you like. I would turn
down-stream and land again, but”--he faced half round from the table,
with the lightness characteristic of some portly men, and sat with one
hand on the back of the chair, and the other on the goblet--“but the
truth is I’m running pretty much on one wheel; there was an accident
to the other before we were a hundred miles from New Orleans, and with
this wind blowing straight across the river it’s mighty difficult
getting out from the left bank; she can hardly climb against the
current.”
John Grayson appeared for a moment to contemplate the suggestion of
going ashore in the yawl. The wind came in a great gust through the
towering chimneys, the lights flickered, the texas seemed to rock upon
the superstructure of the hurricane deck. “I don’t believe I care to
be on the river in a yawl in this wind, this dark night,” he said,
evidently debating the matter within himself.
“Then go to St. Louis and back with us!” exclaimed the hospitable
captain. “Shan’t cost you a cent, of course. We’ll make our next
landing a little after midnight, I reckon, and I’ll telegraph Mrs.
Halliday from there.”
The jovial evening seemed to the juggler, as he listened to the girl
reading aloud, and stared at her with eyes blank of expression and that
introverted look which follows mental processes rather than material
objects, like an experience in another planet, so far away it was,
as if so long ago. He remembered that he scarcely dared to touch a
glass, with the consciousness of the treasure he carried in the belt
he wore and all its interdependent interests, but John Grayson drank
blithely enough, and the generous liquor relaxed beyond all precedent
his loosely hinged tongue. Lucien Royce kept close by his side as he
wandered about the boat, having developed a fear that he would tell the
secret that had come so unwarrantably into his possession; and when the
captain asked as a favor that, on account of the crowded condition of
the boat, Royce would share his stateroom with the guest, he acceded at
once, preferring to have Grayson able to talk only to him until such
time as he should be once more duly sober.
He consigned the guest to the upper berth, thinking that thus Grayson
could not leave the stateroom without his knowledge. He lay awake by
a great effort until he was sure from the snores of his jovial friend
that Grayson was asleep; and when he dropped into slumber himself, as
he was young and tired, having been much in the open air that day, to
which he was unaccustomed in his clerical vocation, he slept like a log.
His consciousness was renewed, after a blank interval, with the sense
of being awakened in his berth by a violent jar, and of striving
to rouse himself, and of falling asleep again. Another interval of
blankness, and he remembered definitely the grasp of John Grayson’s
hand on his shoulder, roughly shaking him, with the terrified
announcement that there was something the matter. He experienced a
sort of surprise that John Grayson was in the stateroom; then--it was
strange that his mind should have thus taken cognizance of trifles--he
recalled the crowded condition of the boat, and realized that his
friend was leaping down from the upper berth. He stated, with drowsy
dignity, that he did not care a damn what was the matter; that he had
paid for his stateroom, which was more than _some_ people could say,
and that if he were not allowed to sleep in it, he would give bond that
he would know the reason why.
The next thing of which he was aware was a flash of light in the room.
The door had opened from the saloon, and a clerk had put in his head
to say that there was no danger. The boat had struck a snag, it was
true, but the damage was slight. Somehow Royce slept but lightly after
this. The unreasoning sense of impending misfortune had come to him at
last. Presently he was awake and conscious that he was alone. He lifted
himself on his elbow and listened. What was that low roar? The wind?
That sound of banging timbers must be the flapping of shutters or doors
as the gust rushed across the river. He heard a clamor on the boiler
deck. Voices?--or was it the wind, screaming wildly as it went? And
why did they run the engines at that furious rate? He could feel the
strain of the machinery in the very floor under his feet.
As he slipped out of the lower berth he perceived that the gray dawn
was in the contracted little room; he could see through the glass of
the door opening on the guards the tawny-tinted stretches of water, the
sad-hued cypress woods on a distant bank, draped with fog as well as
with hanging moss, and down the stream the whiter tints of an island of
sand covered with sparse vegetation, locally known as a “tow-head,” for
which the disabled boat was running with every pound of pressure which
the engines could carry. There was, in truth, something the matter, for
the tow-head would have been given a wide berth in a normal state of
affairs; getting aground, when the lesser of two evils, showed a crisis
indeed.
He looked about hastily for his clothes. They were gone, and in their
place John Grayson’s toggery lay in a heap. In his panic and the
darkness Grayson had probably caught the garments nearest to his hand.
His deserted friend hastily invested himself in the suit of clothes
that John Grayson had left. As he was drawing on the blazer, suddenly a
hoarse cry smote his ear. “No bottom!” sang out the leadsman. They were
taking soundings. “No-o bottom!” And he felt the vibrations of the tone
in the very fibres of his quaking heart.
He plunged out at the door on the guards, and as he stood there gasping
for a moment he realized the situation. The boat was sinking fast;
evidently in striking a snag the craft had sprung a leak. He saw on
the deck the frightened passengers huddled together in groups, here
and there a man anxiously fastening life-preservers on the women and
children of his kindred. Again the leadsman’s cry, “No-o bottom!”
floated mournfully over the water, and the frantic panting of the
engines seemed redoubled. He saw the captain, cool and collected, at
his post; the other officers appeared now and again among the groups
of passengers, soothing, reassuring, and doubtless their lies were
condoned for the mercy of the intention. As he passed on amongst them
all, nowhere did he catch a glimpse of John Grayson. “If I didn’t know
the fellow wouldn’t play such a fool trick at such a time, I’d think
he was dodging me,” he muttered. The next moment he had forgotten him
utterly.
“Deep four!” called the leadsman.
As Royce listened he stood still, holding his breath in suspense.
“Mark three!” called the leadsman, sounding again.
Royce heard the plunging of his heart as distinctly as the echoes of
the cry clanging from the shore. But suddenly they were blended with a
new refrain,--“A quarter twain!”
He gave a great sigh of relief, and checked it midway to listen anew.
“Mark twain!” called the leadsman, with a new intonation.
There was no longer doubt,--they were in shallow water. A great
exclamation of delight rose from the crowd. The very hope was like
a rescue,--the relief from the blank despair! Here and there the
hysterical sobbings of the women told of the slackening of the tension
of suspense.
“Quarter less twain!” cried the leadsman, sounding anew.
The juggler remembered how free he had felt, how safe. The boat, even
if her engines could not run her aground, would soon settle in shallow
water, and rescue would come with some passing steamer.
A blinding glare, a thunderous detonation that seemed to shatter his
every nerve, and he was weltering in the river; now sinking down with
a sense of the weight of infinite fathoms of water upon him, and
now mechanically trying to strike out with an unreasoning instinct
like an animal’s. When he could understand what had happened he was
swimming fairly well, although greatly hampered by the clinging
blazer that John Grayson had left on the floor, and which he now
wore. The long reaches of the river, the shore, the dim dawn, were
all lighted with a lurid glare; for the boat had taken fire with the
explosion of the overstrained boiler. The roar of the flames mingled
with the heart-rending screams of those whom hope had so cruelly
deluded. But the sounds were all faint at the distance, and he never
could understand how he had been thrown, unhurt, so far away. He
saw none of the human victims of the disaster. Now and again charred
timbers, shooting by on the current, threatened him, and to avoid
them necessitated some skillful management. A far greater danger was
the proximity of two horses, also gallantly swimming, who followed
him with loud whinnies of inquiry and distress, appealing in their
way for aid and guidance, leaning on the humankind as if recognizing
his superior capacity. More than once, one of them, a spirited mare,
intended for new triumphs at the Louisville races, swam close in front
of him, pausing, as if to say, “Mount, and let us gallop off on dry
ground;” deflecting his course, which was already beset with abnormal
difficulties. For when almost exhausted, he saw that the land he was
approaching, half veiled with the gray fog, was a bluff bank, thirty
feet high at least, and as far as eye could reach up and down the
river there was no lower ground. To scale it was impossible. His heart
sank within him. He felt that his stroke was the feebler when hope no
longer nerved it. In his despair he could hardly make another effort.
And although he had feared the horses, with their lashing hoofs and
their unearthly cries, when the mare--the more importunate in dumb
insistence that he would succor them--threw up her head, and with a
wild inarticulate scream went struggling down into the depths to rise
no more, he felt a choking sob in his throat, his eyes were blurred,
he could scarcely keep his head above the surface. If he were further
conscious, the faculty was not coupled with that of memory, for he
never knew how he came to be in a flatboat floating swiftly down the
stream from the scene of the disaster, and he never saw his other
comrade again. Once more there came an interval void of perception;
then he was vaguely aware that the flatboat was tied up in the bight of
a bend; the shadowy cypresses towered above it,--he heard their waving
boughs,--the water lapped gently about it; then blankness again, and he
never knew how long this continued.
One morning he awoke, restored to his senses, in a bunk against the
wall; he felt the motion of the river, and he knew that the flimsy
craft with the rickety little cabin in its centre was again afloat upon
the stream. Every pulse of the current set his own pulses a-quiver.
The very proximity of the fearful river induced a physical terror that
his mind could not control. It was only by a mighty wrench that his
thoughts could be forced from the subject, and fixed as an alternative
on his surroundings. The interior of the cabin consisted of two
apartments: one for bunks and cooking purposes; the other, apparently,
from the glimpse through a door, fitted up as a store, with small
wares, such as threads and perfumery, soaps and canned goods, and showy
imitation jewelry calculated to take the eye and the earnings of the
negroes at the various landings where the craft, locally called the
“trading-boat,” tied up. Through a further door he had an outlook
upon the deck. An elderly woman with rough red arms was sitting there
on a stool, peeling potatoes; a half-grown boy, cross-legged on the
floor, tailor-wise, was sawing away on an old fiddle. Beyond still
was the vast spread of the tawny-tinted rippling floods and the sad
hues of the nearer shore. Lucien Royce recoiled at the very sight
and turned away his eyes. Within, much of the wearing apparel of the
proprietors dangled from the rafters. There were bunks on the opposite
wall, imperfectly visible through the smoke from the tiny stove,
which, despite a great crackling of driftwood, seemed to labor with an
imperfect draft. Two men were seated close to it, and were talking with
that security which presumes no alien ear to listen. A certain crime of
robbery absorbed their interest, and Royce gathered that, fearing they
might be implicated in it, they had silently fled from the locality
before their presence was well recognized. They had evidently had
naught to do with it. They only wished they had!
A great swag it was, to be sure. The man had worn a money-belt,--a rare
thing in these times. Heavy it must have been and drawn tight, for
both hands had stiffened on its fastenings as if striving to tear it
off. Its weight had doubtless drowned him. It was no joke to swim the
Mississippi at high water, completely dressed and with a tight belt
stuffed with money--gold or silver? And how much could the sum have
been? Whenever this point was broached, a glitter of greed was in
the eyes of each which made the grizzled-bearded faces alike despite
the variations of contour and feature. Always a long pause of silent
speculation ensued, and whenever the supposititious sum total was
mentioned, it had augmented in the interval. No one knew where the man
went down; the body--the face beaten and bruised by floating timbers
out of all semblance to humanity--had been swept upon a sand-bar. There
some pirates of the river-bank had found it, had cut the belt open,
had taken the money and fled, leaving the empty belt to tell its own
futile story. At this point the flatboatmen would pause, and once more
gloomily shake their heads and spit tobacco juice on the tiny stove,
till it was as vocal as a frying-pan, and obviously wish that the
chance had been theirs.
Thus it was that Lucien Royce had been apprised of John Grayson’s death
and of the loss of the funds with which he himself had been entrusted.
Until this moment he had never missed the belt. Doubtless Grayson
took it from him at the first alarm of striking the snag before the
dawn, when he vainly sought to rouse his friend to a sense of danger.
Was it possible, he marveled, that Grayson, leaving him to drown,
as he supposed, had thought that the good money need not be wasted?
Had its custodian been rescued, however, probably Grayson would have
restored it; otherwise suspicion would have fallen upon him, since
they had occupied the same stateroom. But if not, if Lucien Royce’s
body had gone to the bottom of the river, and no one the wiser that
the money-belt did not go with it,--was it upon this chance, in that
supreme moment of terror, that Grayson had had the forethought to act?
He was not a man who made much account of the rights of others when
his own comfort or his own pleasure was at stake. But his life--did he
risk the precious moment that might mean existence to save a sum of
money for a St. Louis cotton commission firm of which he did not know
a single member? Would he have jeopardized his chances in the water
with this weight, with this fatally close-gripping python of a belt,
for a mere commercial matter? It was needless to argue the question.
Royce knew right well, both then and now, that in no event, had he not
survived, did Grayson intend to restore the money. Evidently the idea
had flashed upon him when, in seeking to rouse his companion, his hands
came in contact with the belt and the opportunity was his own. And so
Grayson had gone to his death, drowned by the weight and the pressure
of the stolen money. It seemed a grim sort of justice that with the
last movements of his hands in life, the last effort of his will, he
sought to tear it off, to cast it from him, as he went down into the
hopeless depths.
Royce experienced hardly a regret for his false friend,--not more than
a physical pang of sympathy, an involuntary shudder, his very nerves
instinct with the terror of the water. Had Grayson not tampered with a
secret that was not his own, the belt would now be safe. Royce himself
had had the strength to sustain its weight in the water. He was used
to it, and its size had been carefully adjusted to his slender figure.
Now the money was gone,--the belt was found on another man. They would
seem to have been confederates in the robbery of the fund. He was
responsible for it. He could not reasonably account for its being out
of his own possession without incriminating himself. Should he seek to
inculpate the dead man alone, he was aware that the fact that Grayson
could not speak for himself would speak for him. Nothing could palliate
the circumstance that the belt was found on another man than its proper
custodian, and that the leather had been slit and the money extracted.
He would have to account for this, and improbable excuses would not go
far with men smarting under a ruinous loss from the carelessness or the
drunkenness or the cupidity of their employee. He could not go back. He
could never face the firm!
So light of heart he had always been, so light of heel, so light, so
very light of head, that the anguish which pierced him at the idea of
the loss of public esteem, of his commercial honor, of the confidence
of the firm, involved in his seeming failure of probity, subacutely
amazed him at its keen poignancy. He had hardly known how he valued
these spiritual, immaterial assets. More than life,--far, far more than
life! He began to contemn the struggle he had made in the water; he had
been wondering and calculating, with an early gleam of consciousness
and an athlete’s stalwart vanity, how far he had swum, how long he had
sustained himself in the great flood; for what purpose, he thought
now, what melancholy purpose, to save his life for the ignominy of an
episode behind the bars for breach of trust, embezzlement, robbery--he
hardly cared what might be the technical rank of the crime of which he
would so certainly be accused. Every reflection brought confirmations
of the popular suspicion which would be so false, and which could not,
alas, be disproved. With a mechanical review, as of a life when it is
closed, sundry gambling escapades of John Grayson’s recurred to his
mind, in which he had been nearly concerned and which had attained
a certain degree of notoriety. On one occasion, indeed, when he was
younger and more easily led by his friend, a gambling establishment had
been raided by the police, the two had been among the captured players,
and being arraigned, although under false names, were nevertheless
recognized. The exploit was so well bruited abroad that the senior
member of the firm, who had been a friend as well as a partner of his
father’s, had given him what the old gentleman was pleased to term a
“remonstrance,” and what he himself denominated a “blistering.” “Mark
my words,” had been its conclusion, “that fellow Grayson will ruin
you.” Was it possible that this prophet of evil would fail to note the
fulfillment of the prognostication? Would this event give no color to
the supposition that he had been gambling with the money, that Grayson
had won it, and then was drowned and robbed?
Oh, why, why had he so struggled to save his wretched life? The terrors
of the water no longer shook his nerves. As he noted the trembling of
the little craft,--the flimsiest thing, he thought, that he had ever
seen afloat,--he said to himself that it would be the luckiest chance
that had ever befallen him should the flatboat suddenly disintegrate,
timber from timber, on the swelling centre of the tide, engulfing him
never to rise again. “I would not move a hand to save my life. I wish I
were dead,” he said, his white face turned to the wall. “I wish I were
dead.” And then he realized that he had his wish. He was dead.
For the flatboatmen were talking again, with a morbid revolving around
the subject. From their disjointed dialogue it appeared that the
“stiff” was not on the sand-bar now; it had been removed in obedience
to a telegram from a firm in St. Louis,--Greenhalge, Gould & Fife,
cotton commission merchants. One of their clerks had come down by
train on the other side of the river, “nigh tore up” about the belt
and the loss of the money. He recognized the dead man by his clothes,
and the color of his hair and eyes,--“there was no other way to know
him, he was such a s’prisin’ bruised-up sight.” This clerk had once
given the man a meerschaum pipe that was in the breast-pocket yet, and
some papers were dried off, and read and identified. He was shipped
by train. They would bury him where he came from. The firm and its
employees would turn out, probably, and do the handsome thing. “Good
for trade, I reckon,” remarked the proprietor of the flatboat store,
with an appreciation of sentiment as an agent of profit.
“What’s the man’s name?” demanded the other.
“He never left no name as I heard. He loafed round Kyarter’s sto’ over
thar in the bend awhile, an’ a nigger rowed him over in a dug-out to
see the stiff, an’ he give his orders an’ put out fur the up-country
quick.”
“I ain’t talkin’ ’bout _him_. I mean the stiff. What was the stiff’s
name?”
“Oh, Royce. Lucien Royce,--that’s the stiff’s name. Lucien Leonard
Royce.”
And thus it was that the juggler realized that he was dead.
He made haste to leave the trading-boat as soon as he could stand,
however unsteadily, on his feet. And the boatmen were not ill pleased
to see him go. The humane search for all survivors of the wreck and the
rescue of the bodies had been in progress for some days, but with a
vague terror of implication in crime which must indeed be appalling to
the poor, who believe that justice is meted out according to the price
the victim can pay for it, the flatboatmen were drifting night and
day further and further away from the dreaded locality. When they had
chanced to meet the skiffs sent out by the search-parties for victims
of the disaster, they had said naught of the man whom they had rescued,
who lay between life and death in the bunk. They had even relinquished
the opportunity of “scrapping” about the waters for floating articles,
of scant value in themselves, hardly worth the gathering of them
together by the owners, but precious indeed to those of so restricted
opportunities,--tins of edibles, cutlery, bedding, cooking utensils,
bits of furniture, table-ware, garments, and the like. Once a stranger
had boarded the craft, but he came no further than the door of the
store, where he was furnished with a flask of whiskey needed for a
half-drowned man lying hard by on a sand-bar. So when their guest was
at last on his feet again they bade him farewell with a right good
will, and the trifle of change that was in the pocket of poor John
Grayson’s knickerbockers was a superfluity to their satisfaction.
They set Royce ashore one night at a point which they stated was half
a mile from the railroad; it seemed a league or more through the dense
oak forests, clear of undergrowth, level as a park, before he sighted a
red lantern and an empty box car on a siding near a great tank. There
was apparently not another soul in the world, so unutterably lonely
was the spot. He clambered into the car, knowing that he could not
well play the rôle of tramp on any discerning train-man while wearing
Grayson’s expensive russet shoes, albeit somewhat the worse for water,
and his natty knickerbockers and blazer. He would invent some story and
beg a ride. He lay down behind a pile of bagging, and when he awoke he
saw that the car was moving rapidly, that it was half full of freight,
that an afternoon sun was streaming in dusty bars through the chinks
in the door, that he must have traversed many a mile of the inland
country from the scene of the disaster; so many miles that, the next
morning, when the car was opened in the yard of the freight depot of
a small town, the whole landscape was as strange to him as if he had
entered a new world. Great purple mountains, wooded to their crests,
encircled the horizon, itself seeming lifted to a great height, in
contrast with the low-lying skies of the swamp country; and now and
again, where the summit-lines were broken by gaps, further visions of
enchanted heights in ethereal tints of blue and alluring sun-flooded
slopes met his gaze. There was a river, too, narrow, smoothly flowing,
but cliff-bound, crystal-clear in a rocky channel that curved between
the mountains it reflected. The sunshine was so dazzling that he made
scant shift to see the men, who, in moving the freight, discovered
him. The first demonstration of the yardmaster was wrathful bluster
because of the impudent device of the supposed tramp and his success in
stealing a ride. But as Lucien Royce rose to his feet, and his costume
that of a young gentleman of bucolic proclivities taking his ease and
dispensing with ceremony, became visible, he was received with banter
and laughter. He was presumed to be engaged in some kind of adolescent
escapade,--stealing a ride for a wager, perhaps; and as, with his
quick intelligence, he perceived this fact, he answered in the same
vein. He leaped out of the car, made his way from the yard and up the
main street of the town, and when, reaching its opposite extremity,
he was out in the country, he walked as if for his life. All day long
he trudged at the top of his speed. Pedestrianism had been one of his
many fads, and he wished more than once for his pedometer, that he
might have his score to boast of and break the record of the pedestrian
club of which he was an active member; and then he would check himself
suddenly, remembering that it was decreed that he should never see his
old comrades again. He was dead! His safety imperatively required that
he should remain dead.
Apparently he left the sunshine behind him; the wind flagged and fell
back; only certain clouds maintained an equal pace, congregating about
the summits of the mountains, showing tier on tier above them, so
darkly purple that sometimes he could hardly tell which was shadowy
earth and which over-shadowing sky. Always, as he clambered over
the flank of some great ridge and looked upon the deep dells of the
valley, these clouds were already crossing it, and rising, peak on
peak and towering height over height, above the crest of the mountains
still beyond. In one of these sequestered nooks among the vast ranges,
when the swift lightnings were unleashed and the thunder reverberated
from dome to dome and the weighty rain fell in tumultuous torrents,
he dragged his stumbling feet to a lighted window dimly flickering in
the gloom, and found the latch-string of Tubal Cain Sims’s door on the
outside, as the hospitable mistress of the cabin said it always should
be, when she welcomed the wayfarer.
And thus it came to pass that within a fortnight after the disaster the
juggler sat listening to the miller’s daughter as she read the account
of the terrible death of young Lucien Royce. He could have given the
journalist many points on the details of the accident. But his mind
ceased its retrospection, and he hearkened with keen interest, for one
so very dead, to the narrative of the supplemental events occurring in
the city of his home. As Euphemia droned drearily on, he gathered that
the firm had made an assignment, the result of the loss of the funds
of which Lucien Royce had been robbed, and their consequent inability
to take up their paper. The amount was stated at thrice the reality,
and his lips curved with a scornful wonder as to whether this was a
commercial device to render the failure more seemly and respectable,
or was merely due to the magnifying proclivities natural to the race of
reporters. “It lets the house down easier,--that’s one good thing,” he
reflected. And then he checked himself, marveling if other people who
were dead could not immediately dissever their interests and affections
from those subjects and associations that had once enthralled them.
“It must take a long time to get thoroughly acclimated to another
world,” he thought, realizing that the impulse of satisfaction which
he had experienced because the “break” had its justification in the
eyes of the commercial world was the loyal sentiment to the firm shared
by every man on their pay-roll. “We could have weathered the flurry
easily enough but for this,” he knew the various employees were all
severally saying to their personal friends and such of the general
public as came within their opportunity. It seems that cynicism is not
a growth exclusively native to this sphere, for he presently found
himself attributing to a wish to fix general attention on this subject
of the loss of the money the firm’s elaborate attention to the details
of the obsequies of their unfortunate employee. But they would not
overdo it, he realized even before Euphemia, hobbling painfully among
words whose existence had hitherto been undreamed-of by her, and whose
structure would serve to render them obsolete forever in her vocabulary
after this single usage, had reached the description of the funeral
arrangements. He had feared she would flag, and would thus balk his
palpitating curiosity; but the mournful pageantry of death has its
fascination for certain temperaments, and it is fair to say she would
not have read so long, nor would Tubal Sims and his wife have waking
listened, had the theme been more cheerful.
No, the firm would not overdo it. They were men of good taste and
acumen. The public received sundry reminders that Lucien Royce’s
deceased father had been a member of the firm for many years, and much
of the quondam prosperity had been due to his sagacity and sterling
qualities. The young man’s inherited interest in the business was of
course swamped with the rest. And all this made the presence of each of
the partners and of all the employees, together with large and showy
floral tributes at St. ---- Church, the more appropriate and natural.
As no simple interment could have done, however, it had also riveted
attention on that especial feature, the loss of the money, which was
in itself calculated to excite much sympathy and commiseration in the
commercial heart, and to be of service in securing a composition with
creditors and the possibility of continuance.
“They needn’t have been so mighty particular,” he said to himself a
moment afterward, his eyes bright and shining, the color in his cheeks.
“I could have gotten up a big enough blow-out all by myself.”
For that meed of popularity which many better men never achieve had
been a gratuitous gift to Lucien Royce, who had never done aught to
secure it or given it a thought in his life. His gay young friends
were bereaved. All experiencing a sense of personal loss, all struck
aghast with dismay and pity, those attended in a body who were of
his many clubs and societies, and others singly if they happened to
be merely friends outside the bonds of fraternities. The church was
densely thronged; a wealth of flowers filled the chancel. The words
of a popular hymn were sung by a member of the Echo Quartet, a singer
of local renown, to an air composed by the late Lucien Royce,--so
pathetic, with such sudden minor transitions, such dying falls (it had
been a love-song, and he had written the words as well as the music),
that the congregation were in tears as they listened.
“Ah ha, my fine first tenor!” the juggler said to himself in prideful
triumph at the praise of print. “And how about that final phrase of
each refrain that you persisted ought to resolve itself into the major,
and not the minor chord? Oh, oh! Mightily pleased to stand up before a
big crowd and sing it now, for all its faulty harmony!”
But if he had already been gratified, he was shortly delighted. The
account digressed to the personal qualities of the deceased, his
exceptional popularity, the high esteem in which he was held by his
business associates, the great affection which his personal friends
entertained for him, the extraordinary versatility of his talents.
He was a wonderful athlete for an amateur. (The juggler listened with
a critical jealous ear to the detail of certain feats of lifting,
walking, and swimming. “I can break that record now,” he muttered.) He
was a very acceptable amateur actor. He sang delightfully, and composed
charming songs with words of considerable merit; in fact, he had a
gift of light, easy versification. He was hospitable and joyous, and
fond of entertaining his friends, to whom he was much attached,--the
more as he was so alone in the world, having no near kindred since the
death of his father. There was no bitterness in his mirth; he laughed
with you rather than at you. (“Don’t be too sure of that,” said the
juggler, in his sleeve.) He was wonderfully quick in learning, even
quick in acquiring any mechanical art that struck his attention. He had
really become a skillful prestidigitator (how the juggler blessed the
six-pronged unpronounceable word as Euphemia struggled to take hold
of it, and finally left it as incomprehensible!): and this came about
partly through his extraordinary quickness, and partly because no one
could resist his fascinating _bonhomie_, and many a traveling artist
in legerdemain had imparted his professional secrets to him from sheer
good will and liking. He was the same to all classes; he had an easy
capacity for adapting himself to the company he was in for the time
being, as if it were his choice. Many a pleasant haunt of his friends
would lack its relish after this, and it would be long before the name
or face of Lucien Royce would be forgotten in St. Louis city.
“Well,” mused the juggler, with a sigh, as the reading concluded, “it’s
worth dying once in a while, to get a send-off like that.”
“Pore young man!” ejaculated Mrs. Sims, looking up with a sigh too, the
relief from the long tension, her big creased solemn face bereft of
every dimple.
The juggler caught himself hastily. “The paper doesn’t say what
Sabbath-school he was a member of,” he observed, with mock seriousness.
“That’s a fac’,” returned Euphemia, unfolding the upper part of the
journal to reperuse with a searching eye the portion relating to
biographical detail. After an interval of vain scrutiny she remarked,
“Nor it don’t say nuther whether he war a member o’ the Hard-Shell
Baptis’ or Missionary or Methody.”
“He mought be a sinner, an’ the paper don’t like ter say it, him bein’
dead,” wheezed Mrs. Sims lugubriously, intuitively seizing upon a
salient point of polite modern journalism. The anxious speculation
in her fat overclouded countenance was painful to see, for Mrs. Sims
believed in a material hell with a plenitude of brimstone and blue
blazes.
“I dare say he _was_ a sinner!” exclaimed the juggler, with his manner
of half-mocking banter. “Poor Lucien Royce!”
Only late that night, when all the house was still, and darkness was
among the sombre mountains, and the absolute negation of vision seemed
to nullify all the world, did his mood change. He lay staring with
unseeing eyes into the void gloom about him, yet beholding with a
faculty more potent than sight the decorated chancel, the clergyman
in his surplice, the crowds of sympathetic faces, the casket with the
funeral wreaths covering it,--the hideous mockery that it all was, the
terrible hoax!