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.