Chapter 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

MOSES ICHTHYOPHAGUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The negro eyed the bundle suspiciously.

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the cabman hung back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again Griswold told the exact truth.

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

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

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

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

"But before that?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Meaning to get me pulled?"

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

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

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

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

"Not any."

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

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

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

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

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

Griswold suffered a sudden return to the meliorating humanities.

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

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

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