Part 7

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.