pilot was a man for an emergency. Before the little-used yawl could be
lowered, the steamer had swept a wide circle in mid-stream and the
search-light picked up the castaways. From that to placing the _Belle
Julie_ so that the two bits of human flotsam could be hauled in over the
bows was but a skilful hand's-turn of rudder-work, accomplished as
cleverly as if the great steamboat had been a power-driven launch to be
steered by a touch of the tiller.
All this Charlotte saw. She was looking on when the two men were dragged
aboard, the big Irishman still unconscious, and the rescuer in the final
ditch of exhaustion--breathless, sodden, reeling with weariness.
And afterward, when the _Belle Julie's_ prow was once more turned to the
north, Miss Farnham had no thought of stopping at the clerk's office
when she flew back to her state-room with the letter to Mr. Galbraith
hidden in her bosom and clutched tightly as if she were afraid it might
cry out its accusing secret of its own accord.
X
QUICKSANDS
On the morning following the rescue of the mate, Charlotte Farnham awoke
with the conviction that she had been miraculously saved from incurring
the penalties dealt out to those who rush blindly into the thick of
things without due thought and careful consideration.
In the light of a new day it seemed almost incredible that, only a few
hours earlier, she could have been so rash as to assume that there was
no possibility of a mistake; that she had been on the verge of sending a
possibly innocent man to answer as he could for the sins of the guilty.
Who could be sure? Could she go into court and swear that this man and
the man she had seen in the bank were one and the same? Yesterday she
had thought that she could; but to-day she was equally sure that she
could not.
But the Puritan conscience was not to be entirely silenced. Reason sits
in a higher seat than that occupied by the senses, and reason argued
that a man who would forgive his enemy, and instantly risk his life in
proof of the forgiveness, could not be a desperate criminal. Conscience
pointed out the alternative. A little careful investigation would
remove the doubt--or confirm it. Somebody on the boat must know the
deck-hand, or know enough about him to establish his real identity.
Naturally, Charlotte thought first of Captain Mayfield; and when
breakfast was over, and she had settled her aunt in the invalid's chair
under the shade of the after-awning, she went on her quest.
The captain was on the port promenade, forward, and he was about to
light his after-breakfast cigar. But he threw the match away when Miss
Farnham came out and took the chair he placed for her.
"Please smoke if you want to," she said, noting the clipped cigar; "I
don't mind it in the least."
"Thank you," said the master of the _Belle Julie_, shifting his chair to
leeward and finding another match. He had grown daughters of his own,
and Miss Farnham reminded him of the one who lived in St. Louis and took
her dead mother's place in a home which would otherwise have held no
welcome for a grizzled old river-sailor.
For a time Miss Farnham seemed to have forgotten what she came to say,
and the ash grew longer on the captain's cigar. It was another
delectable day, and the _Belle Julie_ was still churning the brown flood
in the majestic reaches of the lower river. Down on the fore-deck the
roustabouts were singing. It was some old-time plantation melody, and
Charlotte could not catch the words; but the blending harmony, rich in
the altogether inimitable timbre of the African song-voice, rose above
the throbbing of the engines and the splash of the paddles.
"They are happy, those men?" said Charlotte, turning suddenly upon the
silent old riverman at her side.
"The nigger 'rousties,' you mean?--oh, yes. I guess so."
"But it is such a hard life," she protested. "I don't see how they can
sing."
The captain smiled good-naturedly.
"It is a pretty hard life," he admitted. "But they're in a class by
themselves. You couldn't hire a river nigger to do anything else. Then,
again, a man doesn't miss what he's never had. They get a plenty to eat,
and the soft side of a cargo pile makes a pretty good bed, if you've
never slept in a better one."
Miss Farnham shook her head thoughtfully. "Isn't that putting them
terribly low in the scale of humanity? Surely there must be some among
them who are capable of better things." She was trying desperately hard
to lead up to the stubble-bearded man, and it was the most difficult
task she had ever set herself.
"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.