detection would be greater than elsewhere, and he decided that there was
no good reason why he should incur it. Besides, he argued, there were
other fields in which the sociological studies could be pursued under
conditions more favorable than those to be found in a great city. In his
mind's eye he saw himself domiciled in some thriving interior town,
working and studying among people who were not unindividualized by an
artificial environment. In such a community theory and practice might go
hand in hand; he could know and be known; and the money at his command
would be vastly more of a moulding and controlling influence than it
could possibly be in the smallest of circles in New York. The picture,
struck out upon the instant, pleased him, and having sufficiently
idealized it, he adopted it enthusiastically as an inspiration, leaving
the mere geographical detail to arrange itself as chance, or subsequent
events, might determine.
That part of the problem disposed of, there yet remained the choice of a
line of flight; and it was a small thing that finally decided the manner
of his going. For the third time in the hour of aimless wanderings he
found himself loitering opposite the berth of the _Belle Julie_, an
up-river steamboat whose bell gave sonorous warning of the approaching
moment of departure. Toiling roustabouts, trailing in and out like an
endless procession of human ants, were hurrying the last of the cargo
aboard. Griswold stood to look on. The toilers were negroes, most of
them, but with here and there among the blacks and yellows a paler face
so begrimed with sweat and dust as to be scarcely distinguishable from
the majority. The sight moved Griswold, as thankless toil always did;
and he fell to contrasting the hard lot of the laborers with that of the
group of passengers looking on idly from the comfortable shade of the
saloon-deck awning. Griswold's thought vocalized itself in compassionate
musings.
"Poor devils! They've been told that they are freemen, and perhaps they
believe it. But surely no slave of the Toulon galleys was ever in
bitterer bondage.... Free?--yes, free to toil and sweat, to bear
burdens and to be driven like cattle under the yoke! Oh, good
Lord!--look at that!"
The ant procession had attacked the final tier of boxes in the lading,
and one of the burden-bearers, a white man, had stumbled and fallen like
a crushed pack-animal under a load too heavy for him. Griswold was
beside him in a moment. The man could not rise, and Griswold dragged him
not untenderly out of the way of the others.
"Why didn't you stand from under and let it drop?" he demanded gruffly,
as an offset to the womanish tenderness; but when the man gasped for
breath and groaned, he took another tone: "Where are you hurt?"
The crushed one sat up and spat blood.
"I don't know: inside, somewheres. I been dyin' on my feet any time for
a year or two back."
"Consumption?" queried Griswold, briefly.
"I reckon so."
"Then you have no earthly business in a deck crew. Don't you know that?"
The man's smile was a ghastly face-wrinkling.
"Reckon I hain't got any business anywheres--out'n a horspital or a hole
in the ground. But I kind o' thought I'd like to be planted 'longside
the woman and the childer, if I could make out some way to git there."
"Where?"
The consumptive named a small river town in Iowa.
"And you were going to work your passage on the boat?"
"I was allowin' to try for it. But I reckon I'm done up, now."
In Griswold impulse was the dominant chord always struck by an appeal to
his sympathies. His compassion went straight to the mark, as it was sure
to do when his pockets were not empty.
"What is the fare by rail to your town?" he inquired.
"I don't know: I never asked. Somewheres between twenty and thirty
dollars, I reckon; and that's more money than I've seen sence the woman
died."
Griswold hastily counted out a hundred dollars from his pocket fund and
thrust the money into the man's hand.
"Take that and change places with me," he commanded, slipping on the
mask of gruffness again. "Pay your fare on the train, and I'll take your
job on the boat. Don't be a fool!" he added, when the man put his face
in his hands and began to choke. "It's a fair enough exchange, and I'll
get as much out of it one way as you will the other. What is your name?
I may have to borrow it."
"Gavitt--John Wesley Gavitt."
"All right; off with you," said the liberator, curtly; and with that he
shouldered the sick man's load and fell into line in the ant procession.
Once on board the steamer, he followed his file-leader aft and made it
his first care to find a safe hiding-place for the tramp's bundle in
the knotted handkerchief. That done, he stepped into the line again, and
became the sick man's substitute in fact.
Inured to hard living as he was, the substitute roustabout had made no
more than a half-dozen rounds between the levee and the cargo-deck of
the _Belle Julie_ before he was glad to note that the steamer's lading
was all but completed. It was toil of the shrewdest, and he drew breath
of blessed relief when the last man staggered up the plank with his
burden. The bell was clanging its final summons, and the slowly
revolving paddle-wheels were taking the strain from the mooring lines.
Being near the bow line Griswold was one of the two who sprang ashore at
the mate's bidding to cast off. He was backing the hawser out of the
last of its half-hitches when a carriage was driven rapidly down to the
stage and two tardy passengers hurried aboard. The mate bawled from his
station on the hurricane-deck.
"Now, then! Take a turn on that spring line out there and get them
trunks aboard! Lively!"
The larger of the two trunks fell to the late recruit; and when he had
set it down at the door of the designated state-room, he did
half-absently what John Gavitt might have done without blame: read the
tacked-on card, which bore the owner's name and address, written in a
firm round hand: "Charlotte Farnham, Wahaska, Minnesota."
"Thank you," said a musical voice at his elbow. "May I trouble you to
put it inside?"
Griswold wheeled as if the mild-toned request had been a blow, and was
properly ashamed. But when he saw the speaker, consternation promptly
slew all the other emotions. For the owner of the tagged trunk was the
young woman to whom, an hour or so earlier, he had given place at the
paying teller's wicket in the Bayou State Security.
She saw his confusion, charged it to the card-reading at which she had
surprised him, and smiled. Then he met her gaze fairly and became sane
again when he was assured that she did not recognize him: became sane,
and whipped off his cap, and dragged the trunk into the state-room.
After which he went to his place on the lower deck with a great
thankfulness throbbing in his heart and an inchoate resolve shaping
itself in his brain.
Late that night, when the _Belle Julie_ was well on her way up the great
river, he flung himself down upon the sacked coffee on the engine-room
guard to snatch a little rest between landings, and the resolve became
sufficiently cosmic to formulate itself in words.
"I'll call it an oracle," he mused. "One place is as good as another,
just so it is inconsequent enough. And I am sure I've never heard of
Wahaska."
Now Griswold the social rebel was, before all things else, Griswold the
imaginative literary craftsman; and no sooner was the question of his
ultimate destination settled thus arbitrarily than he began to prefigure
the place and its probable lacks and havings. This process brought him
by easy stages to pleasant idealizings of Miss Charlotte Farnham, who
was, thus far, the only tangible thing connected with the
destination-dream. A little farther along her personality laid hold of
him and the idealizings became purely literary.
"She is a magnificently strong type!" was his summing up of her, made
while he was lying flat on his back and staring absently at the flitting
shadows among the deck beams overhead. "Her face is as readable as only
the face of a woman instinctively good and pure in heart can be. Any man
who can put her between the covers of a book may put anything else he
pleases in it and snap his fingers at the world. If I am going to live
in the same town with her, I ought to jot her down on paper before I
lose the keen edge of the first impression."
He considered it for a moment, and then got up and went in search of a
pencil and a scrap of paper. The dozing night clerk gave him both, with
a sleepy malediction thrown in; and he went back to the engine-room and
scribbled his word-picture by the light of the swinging incandescent.
"Character-study: Young woman of the type Western Creole; not the
daughter of aliens, but born in the West, of parents who have migrated
from one of the older States. (I'll hazard that much as a guess.)
"_Detail_: Titian blonde, with hair like spun bronze; the complexion
which neither freckles nor tans; cool gray eyes with underdepths in them
that no man but her lover may ever quite fathom; a figure which would
be statuesque if it were not altogether human and womanly; features cast
in the Puritan mould, with the lines of character well emphasized; lips
that would be passionate but for--no, lips that _will_ be passionate
when the hour and the man arrive. A soul strong in the strength of
transparent purity, which would send her to the stake for a principle,
or to the Isle of Lepers with her lover. A typical heroine for a story
in which the hero is a man who might need to borrow a conscience."
He read it over thoughtfully when it was finished, changing a word here
and a phrase there with a craftsman's fidelity to the exactnesses. Then
he shook his head regretfully and tore the scrap of paper into tiny
squares, scattering them upon the brown flood surging past the
engine-room gangway.
"It won't do," he confessed reluctantly, as one who sacrifices good
literary material to a stern sense of the fitness of things. "It is
nothing less than a cold-blooded sacrilege. I can't make copy of her if
I write no more while the world stands."
VI
THE DECK-HAND
Charlotte Farnham's friends--their number was the number of those who
had seen her grow from childhood to maiden--and womanhood--commonly
identified her for inquiring strangers as "good old Doctor Bertie's
'only,'" adding, men and women alike, that she was as well-balanced and
sensible as she was good to look upon.
As Griswold had guessed, she stood but a single remove from an American
lineage much older than the America of the Middle West. Her father had
been a country physician in New Hampshire, migrating to the dry winters
of Minnesota for his young wife's health. The migration had been too
long postponed to save the mother's life; but it had made a beautiful
woman of the daughter, dowering her with the luxuriant physical charm
which is the proof that transplantation to fresher soil is not less
beneficial to human- than to plant-kind.
She had been spending the winter at Pass Christian with her aunt, who
was an invalid; and it was for the invalid's sake that she had decided
to make the return journey by river. Patient little Miss Gilman was the
least querulous of sufferers, but she was always very ill on a railway
train. Hence Charlotte, who was at once physician, nurse, mentor, and
dutiful kinswoman to the frail little lady who looked old enough to be
her grandmother, had chosen the longer, but less trying, route to the
far North.
So it had come about that their state-rooms had been taken on the _Belle
Julie_; and on the morning of the second day out from New Orleans, Miss
Gilman was so far from being travel-sick that she was able to sit with
Charlotte in the shade of the hurricane-deck aft, and to enjoy, with
what quavering enthusiasm there was in her, the matchless scenery of the
lower Mississippi.
At Baton Rouge the New Orleans papers came aboard, and Miss Farnham
bought a copy of the _Louisianian_. As a matter of course, the
first-page leader was a circumstantial account of the daring robbery of
the Bayou State Security, garnished with startling head-lines. Charlotte
read it, half-absently at first, and a second time with interest
awakened and a quickening of the pulse when she realized that she had
actually been a witness of the final act in the near-tragedy. Her little
gasp of belated horror brought a query from the invalid.
"What is it, Charlie, dear?"
For answer, Charlotte read the newspaper story of the robbery,
head-lines and all.
"For pity's sake! in broad daylight! How shockingly bold!" commented
Miss Gilman.
"Yes; but that wasn't what made me gasp. The paper says: 'A young lady
was at the teller's window when the robber came up with Mr.
Galbraith--' Aunt Fanny, _I_ was the 'young lady'!"
"You? horrors!" ejaculated the invalid, holding up wasted hands of
deprecation. "To think of it! Why, child, if anything had happened, a
terrible murder might have been committed right there before your very
face and eyes! Dear, dear; whatever are we coming to!"
Charlotte the well-balanced, smiled at the purely personal limitations
of her aunt's point of view.
"It is very dreadful, of course; but it is no worse just because I
happened to be there. Yet it seems ridiculously incredible. I can hardly
believe it, even now."
"Incredible? How?"
"Why, there wasn't anything about it to suggest a robbery. Now that I
know, I remember that the old gentleman did seem anxious or worried, or
at least, not quite comfortable some way; but the young man was smiling
pleasantly, and he looked like anything rather than a desperate
criminal. I can close my eyes and see him, just as I saw him yesterday.
He had a good face, Aunt Fanny; it was the face of a man whom one would
trust almost instinctively."
Miss Gilman's New England conservatism, unweakened by her long residence
in the West, took the alarm at once.
"Did you notice him particularly, Charlotte? Would you recognize him if
you should see him again?" she asked anxiously.
"Yes; I am quite sure I should."
"But no one in the bank knew you. They couldn't trace you by your
father's draft and letter of identification, could they?"
Charlotte was mystified. "I should suppose they could, if they wanted
to. But why? What if they could?"
"My dear child; don't you see? They are sure to catch the robber, sooner
or later, and if they know how to find you, you might be dragged into
court as a witness!"
Miss Farnham was not less averse to publicity than the conventionalities
demanded, but she had, or believed she had, very clear and well-defined
ideas of her own touching her duty in any matter involving a plain
question of right and wrong.
"I shouldn't wait to be dragged," she asserted quietly. "It would be a
simple duty to go willingly. The first thing I thought of was that I
ought to write at once to Mr. Galbraith, giving him my address."
Thereupon issued discussion. Miss Gilman's opinion upon such a momentous
question--a question involving an apparent conflict between the
proprieties and an act of simple justice--leaned heavily toward silence.
There could be no possible need for Charlotte's interference. Mr.
Galbraith and the teller would be able to identify the robber, and a
thousand eye-witnesses could do no more. At the end of the argument the
conservative one had extorted a conditional promise from her niece. The
matter should remain in abeyance until the question of conscientious
obligation had been submitted to Charlotte's father and decided by him.
Being by nature and inclination averse to shacklings, verbal or other,
Charlotte gave the promise reluctantly, and the subject was dismissed.
Not from the younger woman's thoughts, however. In the reflective field
the scene in the bank recurred again and again until presently it became
a haunting annoyance. To banish it finally she went to her state-room
and got a book for herself and a magazine for her aunt.
An hour later, when Miss Gilman had finished cutting the leaves of the
magazine, and was deep in the last instalment of the current serial,
Charlotte let her book slip from her fingers and gave herself to the
passive enjoyment of the slowly passing panorama which is the chief
charm of inland voyaging.
It was a delectable day, sweet-scented with the mingled perfume of roses
and jasmine and chinaberry trees wafted from the open-air conservatories
surrounding the plantation mansions on either bank. The majestic onrush
of the steamer, the rhythmic drumbeat of the machinery, the alternating
crash and pause of the great paddle-wheels, the unhasting backward sweep
of the brown flood, all these were in harmony with the sensuous languor
of time and place.
For the moment Charlotte Farnham yielded in pure delight to the spell of
the encompassments, fancying she could deny her lineage and look upon
this sylvan Southland world through the eyes of those to whom it was
the birthland. Then the haunting scene in the New Orleans bank returned
to disenchant her; and after striving vainly to put it aside, she
reopened her book. But by this time the story had lost its hold upon
her, and when she had read a page or two with only the vaguest possible
notion of what it was all about, she gave up in despair and let the
relentless recollection have its will of her.
From where she was sitting she could see the steamer's yawl swinging
from its tackle at the stern-staff; and after many minutes it was slowly
borne in upon her that the ropes were working loose. When it became
evident that the boat would shortly fall into the river and go adrift,
she got up and put the book aside, meaning to go forward and tell the
captain. But before she had taken the first step a man came aft to make
the loosened tackle fast, and she stood back to let him pass.
It was Griswold. Up to that moment he had thrown himself so zealously
into the impersonation of his latest rôle as to be able to stand
indifferently well in the shoes of the man whom he had supplanted. But
at this crisis the machinery of dissimulation slipped a cog. Where the
ordinary deck-hand would have gone about his errand heedless of the
presence of the two women passengers, the proxy John Wesley Gavitt must
needs take off his cap and apologize for passing in front of them.
Something half familiar in his manner of doing it attracted Charlotte's
attention, and her eyes followed him as he went on and hoisted the yawl
into place. When he came back she had a fair sight of his face and her
eyes met his. In the single swift glance half-formed suspicion became
undoubted certainty; she looked again and her heart gave a great bound
and then seemed suddenly to forget its office. While he was passing she
clung to the back of her chair and forebore to cry out or otherwise to
advertise her emotion. But when the strain was off she sank into her
seat and closed her eyes to grapple with the unnerving discovery. It was
useless to try to escape from the dismaying fact. The stubble-bearded
deck-hand with the manners of a gentleman was most unmistakably a later
reincarnation of the pleasantly smiling young man who had courteously
made way for her at the teller's wicket in the Bayou State Security; who
had smiled and given place to her while he was holding his pistol aimed
at President Galbraith.
It was said of Charlotte Farnham that she was sensible beyond her years,
and withal strong and straightforward in honesty of purpose. None the
less, she was a woman. And when she saw what was before her, conscience
turned traitor and fled away to give place to an uprush of hesitant
doubts born of the sharp trial of the moment.
She decided at once that there could be no question as to her duty. Of
all those who were seeking the escaping bank robber, it was doubtful if
any would recognize him as she had; and if she should hold her peace he
would escape, perhaps to commit other crimes for which she could then
justly be held accountable.
But, on the other hand, how could she bring herself to the point of
giving him over to the vengeance of the law--just vengeance, to be sure,
but cruel because it must inevitably crush out whatever spark of
penitence or good intention there might be remaining in him? What did
she know of his temptations? of the chain of circumstances which had
dragged him down into the company of the desperately criminal? Some such
compelling influence there must have been, she reasoned, since a child
might see that he was no hardened felon. It was a painful conflict, but
in the end the Puritan conscience triumphed and turned mercy out of
doors. Her duty was plain; she had no right to argue the question of
culpability.
She got upon her feet, steadying herself by the back of the chair. She
felt that she could not trust herself if she once admitted the thin edge
of the wedge of delay. The simple and straightforward thing to do was to
go immediately to the captain and tell him of her discovery, but she
shrank from the thought of what must follow. They would seize him: he
had proved that he was a desperate man, and there would be a struggle.
And when the struggle was over they would bring him to her and she would
have to stand forth as his accuser.
It was too shocking, and she caught at the suggestion of an alternative
with a gasp of relief. She might write to President Galbraith, giving
such a description of the deck-hand as would enable the officers to
identify him without her personal help. It was like dealing the man a
treacherous blow in the back, but she thought it would be kinder.
"Aunt Fanny," she began, with her face averted, "I promised you I
wouldn't write to Mr. Galbraith until after we reached home--until I had
told papa. I have been thinking about it since, and I--I think it must
be done at once."
Now Miss Gilman's conscience was also of the Puritan cast, and justice
had been given time to make its claim paramount to that of the
conventional proprieties. Hence the invalid yielded the point without
reopening the argument.
"I don't know but you are right, after all, Charlie, dear," she said.
"I've been thinking it over, too. But it seems like a very dreadful
thing for you to have to do."
"It _is_ very dreadful," said Charlotte, with a much deeper meaning in
the words than her aunt suspected. Nevertheless, she went away quickly
and locked herself in her state room to write the fateful letter which
should set the machinery of the law in motion and deliver the robber
deck-hand up to justice.
VII
GOLD OF TOLOSA
In yielding to the impulse which had prompted him to change places with
the broken-down deck-hand, Griswold had assumed that there was little
risk and at least an even chance that the substitution would never be
discovered. He knew that the river steamboats were manned by picked-up
crews, usually assembled at the last moment, and that it was more than
probable that the _Belle Julie's_ officers had not yet had time to
individualize the units of the main-deck squad. Therefore, he might take
the name and place of the disabled Gavitt with measurable safety.
But apart from this, he was not unwilling to add another chapter to his
experience among the toilers. He had been told that the life of a
roustabout on the Western rivers was the most dismal of all the gropings
in the social underworld, and he was the more eager to endure its
hardships as a participant. Being an enthusiast, he had early laid down
the foundation principle that one must see and feel and suffer if one
would write convincingly.
As to the experience, he immediately found himself in a fair way to
acquire it in great abundance. From the moment of his enlistment in the
_Belle Julie's_ crew it was heaped upon him unstintingly; good measure,
pressed down, shaken together, and running over. Without having
specialized himself in any way to M'Grath, the bullying chief mate, he
fancied he was singled out as the vessel into which the man might empty
the vials of his wrath without fear of reprisals. Curses, not
loud--since a generation of travellers has arisen to whom profanity,
however picturesque, is objectionable--but deep and corrosive; contumely
and abuse; tongue-lashings that stung like the flick of a whip; and now
and then, at a night landing when there were no upper-deck people
looking on to be shocked, blows. All these slave-drivings, or at least
his share of them, Griswold endured as became a man who had voluntarily
put himself in the way of them. But they were hardening. Griswold fought
manfully against the brutalizing effect of them, but with only partial
success. Because of them, he was sure that his theories in the
compassionate warp and woof of them must always afterward be shot
through with flame-colored threads of fiery resentment reaching back
through M'Grath to every master who wielded the whip of power; the power
of the man who has, over the man who has not.