The Price. Lynde Francis
and staring stonily at the back of his file leader in the endless round; a picture of misery and despair, Charlotte thought, and she was turning away with the dangerous rebellion against the conventions swelling again in her heart when Captain Mayfield joined her.
"I just wanted to show you," he said; and he pointed out a gang of men repairing a slip in the levee embankment below the town landing. It was a squad of prisoners in chains. The figures of the convicts were struck out sharply against the dark background of undergrowth, and the reflection of the sunset glow on the river lighted up their sullen faces and burnished the use-worn links in their leg-fetters.
"The chain-gang;" said the captain, briefly. "That's about where the fellow that robbed the Bayou State Security will bring up, if they catch him. He'll have to be mighty tough and well-seasoned if he lives to worry through twenty years of that, don't you think?"
But Miss Farnham could not answer; and even the unobservant captain of river boats saw that she was moved and was sorry he had spoken.
IX
THE MIDDLE WATCH
In any path of performance there is but one step which is irrevocable, namely, the final one, and in Charlotte Farnham's besetment this step was the mailing of the letter to Mr. Galbraith. Many times during the evening she wrought herself up to the plunging point, only to recoil on the very brink; and when at length she gave up the struggle and went to bed, the sealed letter was still under her pillow.
Now it is a well-accepted truism that an exasperated sense of duty, like remorse and grief, fights best in the night-watches. It was of no avail to protest that her intention was still unshaken. Conscience urged that delay was little less culpable than refusal, since every hour gave the criminal an added chance of escape. The logic was unanswerable, and trembling lest the implacable inward monitor should presently insist upon the immediate revealment of the fugitive's identity to Captain Mayfield, she got up and dressed hurriedly, meaning to end the agony once for all by giving the letter to the night clerk.
But once again the chapter of accidents intervened. While she was unbolting her door, the mellow roar of the whistle and the jangling of the engine-room bells warned her that the Belle Julie was approaching a landing. Remembering the cause of her earliest failure, she ran quickly to the office, only to find it deserted and the door locked.
This time, however, she determined not to be diverted. Going back to the state-room for a wrap she returned to wait for the clerk's reappearance. This final pause soon proved to be the severest trial of all. The minutes dragged leaden-winged; and to sit quietly in the silence and solitude of the great saloon became a nerve-racking impossibility. When it went past endurance, she rose and stepped out upon the promenade-deck.
The electric search-light eye on the hurricane-deck was just over her head, and its great white cone seemed to hiss as it poured its dazzling flood of fictitious noonday upon the shelving river bank and the sleeping hamlet beyond. The furnace doors were open, and the red glare of the fires quickened the darkness under the beam of the electric into lurid life. Out of the dusky underglow came the freight-carriers, giving birth to a file of grotesque shadow monsters as they swung up the plank into the field of the search-light.
The stopping-place was an unimportant one, and a few minutes sufficed for the unloading of the small consignment of freight. The mate had left his outlook upon the hurricane-deck and was down among the men, hastening them with harsh commands and epithets which owed their mildness to the presence of the silent onlooker beneath the electric.
The foot-plank had been drawn in, the steam winch was clattering, and the landing-stage had begun to come aboard, when the two men whose duty it was to cast off ran out on the tilting stage and dropped from its shore end. One of them fell clumsily, tried to rise, and sank back into the shadow; but the other scrambled up the steep bank and loosened the half-hitches in the wet hawser. With the slackening of the line the steamer began to move out into the stream, and the man at the mooring-post looked around to see what had become of his companion.
"Get a move on youse!" bellowed the mate; but instead of obeying, the man ran back and went on his knees beside the huddled figure in the shadow.
At this point the watcher on the promenade-deck began vaguely to understand that the first man was disabled in some way, and that the other was trying to lift him. While she looked, the engine-room bells jangled and the wheels began to turn. The mate forgot her and swore out of a full heart.
She put her fingers in her ears to shut out the clamor of abusive profanity; but the man on the bank paid no attention to the richly emphasized command to come aboard. Instead, he ran swiftly to the mooring-post, took a double turn of the trailing hawser around it and stood by until the straining line snubbed the steamer's bow to the shore. Then, deftly casting off again, he darted back to the disabled man, hoisted him bodily to the high guard, and clambered aboard himself, all this while M'Grath was brushing the impeding crew aside to get at him.
Charlotte saw every move of the quick-witted salvage in the doing, and wanted to cry out in sheer enthusiasm when it was done. Then, in the light from the furnace doors, she saw the face of the chief actor: it was the face of the man with the stubble beard.
The night was summer warm, but she shrank back and shivered as if a cold wind had breathed upon her. Why must he make it still harder for her by posing as the defender of the wretched negro? She would look on no longer; she would. … The harsh voice of the mate, dominating the noise of the machinery and the churning of the paddle-wheels, drew her irresistibly to the rail. She could not hear what M'Grath was saying, but she could read hot wrath in his gestures, and in the way the men fell back out of his reach. All but one: the stubble-bearded white man was facing him fearlessly, and he appeared to be trying to explain.
Griswold was trying to explain, but the bullying first officer would not let him. It was a small matter: with the money gone, and the probability that capture and arrest were deferred only from landing to landing, a little abuse, more or less, counted as nothing. But he was grimly determined to keep M'Grath from laying violent hands upon the negro who had twisted his ankle in jumping from the uptilted landing-stage.
"No; this is one time when you don't skin anybody alive!" he retorted, when a break in the stream of abuse gave him a chance. "You let the man alone. He couldn't help it. Do you suppose he sprained an ankle purposely to give you a chance to curse him out?"
The mate's reply was a brutal kick at the crippled negro. Griswold came closer.
"Don't try that again!" he warned, angrily. "If you've got to take it out on somebody, I'm your man."
This was mutiny, and M'Grath's remedy for that distemper was ever heroic. In a flash his big fist shot out and the crew looked to see its lighter champion go backward into the river at the impact. But the blow did not land. Griswold saw it coming and swerved the necessary body-breadth. The result was a demonstration of a simple theorem in dynamics. M'Grath reeled under the impetus of his own unresisted effort, stumbled forward against the low edge-line bulwark, clawed wildly at the fickle air and dropped overboard like a stone.
At the splashing plunge Griswold saw, planned, and acted in the same instant. The Belle Julie was forging ahead at full speed, and if the mate did not drown at once, the projecting paddle-wheel would batter the life out of him as he passed under it.
Clearing the intervening obstacles in a hurdler's leap, Griswold raced aft on the outer edge of the guards and jumped overboard in time to grapple the drowning man when he was within a few feet of the churning wheel. The struggle was short but fierce. Griswold got a strangling arm around the big man's neck and strove to sink with him so that the wheel might pass over them. He was only partly successful. The mate was terror-crazed and fought blindly. There was no time for trick or stratagem,