In all riparian estimation the grotesque plight of a craft stranded is more or less a catastrophe. Even in this sequestered nook spectators were not slow to mark, at a distance, the grounding of the Cherokee Rose in the afternoon and to discuss the magnitude and the management of the mishap.

The earliest of these were two men summoned from the swamper’s shack situated in the “no man’s land,” thrown out between the levee and the high precipitous bank of the river. It was mounted on four pillars some twelve feet in height, and was entered by means of a ladder placed at the door. These supports not long before had been stanch cotton-wood trees, and their roots still held fast in the ground despite its frequent submergence. Having been sawn off at a height that lifted the little domicile to a level with the crest of the levee beyond, they served so far to render the hearth-stone safe from the dangers of flood. If the river should rise above this limit, why then was the deluge, indeed, and the swamper’s hut must needs share with the more opulent and protected holdings the common disaster of the overflow.

The two men were standing on the brink of the high bank, using alternately a binocle of elaborate finish and great power. The swamper, however, presently relinquished the glass altogether to his companion, who was evidently a stranger and of a much higher condition in life. He seemed to develop an inexplicable agitation as he continued to gaze through the lenses across the tawny expanse of the river at the big, white bulk of the steamer stranded on the bar, and the groups of passengers on the decks, easily differentiated as they loitered to and fro. His breath was coming in quick gasps,—he was suddenly a-quiver in every fiber. All at once he broke forth as if involuntarily: “Colonel Kenwynton, by God!”

There was a sort of frenzy of recognition in the tense bated tones, yet incredulity too, as one might doubt the reality of a vision, though incontestably perceived. The swamper watched in silence, patient, curious, sinister, this manifestation of emotion. It seemed to surprise him when the stranger spoke to him with a certain unthinking openness.

“Did you notice,—could you distinguish—a gentleman there on the hurricane deck walking to and fro,—his hair is white,—oh, how strange!—his hair is white!”

He asked the question in an eager, excited way, his dark, distended eyes wildly agaze.

“Yes, sir,—oh, yes, sir,—I seen him plain,” the swamper replied casually, but he did not relax the keenness of his inquisitive observation of the stranger beside him, nor even again glance at the boat.

“Did you ever before see him?” The question was less a gasp than a convulsive snap,—it was articulated in such a paroxysm of excitement.

“Yes, sir,—oh, yes, sir.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Yes, sir,—oh, yes, sir.”

The swamper’s replies were as mechanical as the ticking of a clock.

The stranger turned, lowered the binocle and glanced at him with an odd blending of animosity and contempt. The swamper was of an aspect queerly disheveled, water-soaked and damaged, collapsed almost out of all semblance of humanity. He suggested some distorted bit of unclassified and worthless flotsam of the great river, washed ashore in one of its stupendous floods and left high and dry with other foul detritus when the annual shrinkage regained once more low water mark. He was an elderly man with a pallid, pasty face, large, pouch-like cheeks and a sharp rodential nose. His small, bright eyes were so furtive of expression that they added to his rat-like intimations and he had a long bedraggled grizzled beard. He wore trousers of muddy corduroy, and a ragged old gray sweater. His sodden, diluvian, pulpy aspect would justify the illusion that he had been drowned a time or two, resuscitated and dried out, each immersion leaving traces in slime, and ooze, and water-stains on his garments and character. He must have seemed incongruous, indeed, with the acquaintance he claimed, for it was a most commanding and memorable figure focused by the lenses.

“Who is he, then,—what is his name?” the stranger asked with sudden heat, as if he fancied some deception was practiced upon him, and evidently all unaware that he had himself, in the surprise of the first glimpse, pronounced aloud the name he sought. His interlocutor discerned his incredulity and replied with a flout.

“Who? him?—that old blow-hard? Why ever’ body all up an’ down the ruver knows old Cunnel Kenwynton.”

“God!” exclaimed the wild-eyed stranger, with a most poignant intonation, “to doubt my own sight,—my own memory,—my”—he became suddenly conscious of that sinister scrutiny, so much more discriminating and intelligent than accorded with the status of the water-rat that it had an inimical suggestion. He broke off with an abrupt air of explanation. “I have been under treatment for—for—an ocular difficulty, my eyes, you know.”

“Edzac’ly,” exclaimed the swamper, with a tone of bland acceptance of the statement. “Well, now, Mister, I thought your eyes appeared queer.”

“Do they?” asked the stranger with an inexplicable eagerness. “Have they an odd expression,—to your mind?”

“Why, I dunno ez I would have tooken notice of it, but my darter-in-law, Jessy Jane, remarked it las’ night. She is mighty keen, though, Jessy Jane is,—an’ spies out mos’ ever’ think.”

The stranger was a conventional, reputable looking person, not remarkable in any respect save for that recurrent optical dilatation. He was neatly dressed in one of the smart hand-me-down suits to be had anywhere in these times and he wore a dark derby hat. He was himself an elderly man, although he had a certain fresh pallor that bespeaks an indoor life and that gave him an unworn aspect of youth. His clean-shaven face was notably delicate, but the years were registered in the fine script of wrinkles about the eyes and were obvious to the careful observer. He had dark, straight, thin hair, and keen features, and there was an intent look in his wild, dark eyes. He cast over his shoulder so lowering a glance at the daughter-in-law under discussion, a young woman who was sitting in the door of the cabin, that even at the distance she marked the expression of disfavor, of suspicion, of resentment that informed it. She could not divine the nature of their communication but, justifying old Josh Berridge’s account of her powers of discernment, she knew, in some subtle way, that she was its subject. She tossed her head with a flirt of indifference and spat out on the ground below her contempt for the stranger’s displeasure.

Her red calico dress and her tousled mass of copper red hair made a bit of flare amidst the dull hues of the somber scene. As she sat on the elevated threshold at the summit of the ladder that led to the door she was dandling a muscular though small infant in her arms, who with his blond, downy head almost inverted twisted here and there with motions so sudden and agile that he might have been expected presently to twist quite out of the negligent maternal clasp and fall to the earth below. But, suddenly, she rose and, tossing the child to her shoulder, went within the house.

So definite was the impression of something abnormal about the stranger that she experienced a sentiment of relief when the swamper came in to his supper alone. “Jessy Jane,” he said, pausing in the doorway and jerking his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the subject of his discourse, “that man is as queer a fish as ever war cotched. Says he is waitin’ fur a boat an’ has hired my old dugout an’ is paddling out to that air steamboat whut’s aground on the sand-bar.”

She gazed dully at him, a big spoon in her hand with which she had been lifting a mass of cat-fish from a skillet on a red-hot monkey-stove. “Nuthin’ queer in that as I kin see,—Hesh up!” she broke off in jocose objurgation of the baby who was beaming upon the supper table from where he was tied in one of the bunks and who lifted his voice vociferously, apparently in pÆans of praise of the great smoking cat-fish spread at length on a dish. “You ain’t goin’ ter have none,—fish-bone git cotched in yer gullet, an’ whar-r would Tadpole-Wheezie be then.” Resuming the conversation in her former serious tone, “What’s queer in waitin’ fur a boat? Plenty folks have waited fur boats, an’ cotch ’em an’ rid on ’em too.”

“But this feller is goin’ ter cotch a boat what can’t go nowhar. He is right now paddlin’ fur dear life out to the Cher’kee Rose, old stick-in-the-mud, out thar on the sand-bar.”

Josh Berridge flung himself down in a chair at the half prepared table, and awaited there in place the completion of the “dishing up” of supper.

She stood eyeing him doubtfully, the big spoon still in her hand. “I wonder all them passengers don’t come ashore, an’ track off through the woods, like he spoke of doin’ las’ night an’ flag the train.”

“Gosh, Jessy Jane,—it’s a durned sight too fur. Ten mile, at least, ez the crow flies, an’ thar ain’t no road nor nuthin’.”

He said no more for his mouth was full, and the attention of the woman was diverted by the entrance of her husband, with the declaration that he was as hungry as a bear. He was of a bulky presence, seeming to crowd the restricted little apartment, which was more like the cabin of a shanty-boat than a room in a stationary dwelling. It was of a hazy aspect, low-ceiled and soot-blackened, as shown by a lamp swinging from the central beam, smoking portentously from an untrimmed protrusion of charring wick. Two tiers of bunks were arranged nautically on either side, and the windows still above were small oblong apertures, suggestive of cabin lights or transoms; perhaps this had been their earlier use, for several articles about the place betokened an origin inapposite to the culture and condition of its occupants. A fine barometer in a shining mahogany case graced the wall near a door leading to an inner apartment. The handsome binocular glass lay on a shelf so rough that the undressed wood offered an opportunity for splinters to every unwary touch. Each of the pillow-cases bore a rude patch where the name of a steamboat had been cut out, and the dirty cloth on the table was of linen damask suited to the requirements of the somewhat exacting traveling public. Even the bowl into which the woman was heaping a greasy mass of potatoes and pork from the pot was of the decorated china affected by the packet usage, and a compote filled with doughy fat biscuits bore the title of a steamer that went to the bottom one windy night some years ago.

Now and again the ladder without would creak beneath the weight of a sudden footfall when the woman would desist from her occupation, the big spoon brandished in her hand, and her red hair flying fibrous in the hot breath of the stove, to mark in eager excitement the entrance of first one and then another figure that seemed evolved from the falling night, cogeners of the gloom and the solitude, normal to the place and the hour.

“Ye’re sharp on time,—how did ye know the Cher’kee Rose had struck?” she cried, as a pallid, wiry, small man with close cropped sandy hair, wearing jockey boots and riding breeches, with a stable cap on one side of his head, climbed into view up the ladder without.

He vouchsafed her a wink of his lashless, red-lidded left eye, in full of all accounts of greeting and reply. He stood flicking his boots with a crop and wagged his sandy head knowingly at the group of men about the stove.

“I was at Cameron Landing, the last p’int she teched. I went aboard an’ seen her passenger list. She’s got some swell guys aboard.”

“Pity, then, she didn’t go down when she struck,” said a lowering, square-faced man, of a half sailor aspect, the master of a shanty-boat lying snugly under the willows in a bayou hard by. “The water on this side the bar is full twenty fathom, even at dead low water.”

“Bless my stirrups, that’s one hundred an’ twenty feet!” cried “Colty” Connover, palpably dismayed by the loss of the opportunities of the accident.

“The wind is fixin’ ter blow,” said Daniel Berridge from the table, with his mouth full, but glancing up through the open door at the darkening skies. “Mought h’ist the old tub off the tow-head after all’s come an’ gone.”

“Oh, oh, oh, oh,” said Connover, wagging his head expressively,—“there’d be rich pickings for true in those passengers’ baggage.” He smacked his lips wistfully.

For this was a coterie of riverside harpies brought together by the rumor of the disaster in the hope of the opportunity of spoils. They had long infested the riparian region, not only baffling the law and justice but even evading suspicion. Their operations were cleverly diversified, restricted to no special locality. By the aid of the swift and inconspicuous dug-out an emissary could drop down the river twenty miles and abstract a bale of cotton, from a way-landing, awaiting shipment, or roll off a couple of boxes or a barrel, under cover of the water, till such time as the shanty-boater should find it practicable to fish them thence some dark midnight,—while the suits for their non-delivery dragged on in the courts between the shipper and the consignee. A bunch of yearlings driven off from the herds that were wont to be grazed in the “open swamp” throughout seasons of drought when these dense low-lying woodlands are clear of water, would seem the enterprise of professed cattle thieves, and suspicion pointed to rogues of bucolic affiliations, but the beef had been slaughtered and salted and shipped down the Mississippi by the small craft of the tramp or pirate proclivities and sold in distant markets before the depletion in the numbers of the herd was discovered by the owner.

The cunning and capacity that devised these exploits tolerated no policy of repetition. Never did the gang fit their feet into their old tracks. Thus the thwarted authorities failed of even a clew to forward conviction and certain tempting baits dangled unnoticed and ineffective, while the miscreants for a season went their ways with circumspection and kept well within the law. Only once did they attempt the exploit of a railroad hold-up, and so entirely did it succeed that at the mere recollection the small, light gray eyes of the shanty-boater narrowed to a mere slit as he gazed speculatively from his chair across the room and through the open door at the great dim bulk of the stranded steamboat, lying there on the bar in the midst of the weltering surges of deep, swift water on every side. There was no smoke from her chimneys, no stir now on her decks, but a series of shining yellow points had just begun to gleam from her cabin lights, and a circlet of shifting topaz reflections gemmed the turgid waters. Purple and gray were the clouds; the sky was starless and blank; the great bare terraces of the bank on either side were like a desert in extent, uninhabited, unfrequented. Anything more expressive of helplessness than the steamer aground it were difficult to conceive,—bereft of all power of locomotion, of volition, of communication.

“Now, just how many of those ‘swell guys’ are on that boat?” a deep bass voice queried.

The speaker was of more reputable aspect than any of the others. He was the only man in the room with a clean-shaven jaw and wearing a coat; the abnormal size of his right arm, visible under the sleeve, indicated the vocation of a blacksmith. He had a round bullet head that implied a sort of brute force, and his black hair was short and close-clipped. In view of his mental supremacy and his worldly superiority as a respectable mechanic the authority he arrogated was little questioned, and, as he flung himself back in his chair, tilted on the hind legs and fixed his sharp black eyes on the half tipsy jockey, Connover sought to justify his statement by adducing proofs.

“Why,” still flicking his boots and thrusting his stable-cap far back on his sparse sandy hair, “there is Edward Floyd-Rosney and family, and he is a millionaire. You are obliged to know that.”

Jasper Binnhart nodded his head in acceptance of the statement.

“And, Lord, what a string he had before he sold out when he went abroad. He owned ‘County Guy,’ the third son of imported Paladin, dam Fortuna, blood bay, stands sixteen hands high, such action.” He smote his meager thigh in the abandonment of enthusiasm. “I saw him in Louisville at the training stables—such form!”

“And who else?” demanded Binnhart.

“Why, a beautiful roan filly—three years old—Floyd-Rosney gave only three thousand dollars for her, but speedy! And he owned——”

“Who else is on that boat?” reiterated Binnhart raucously. “I don’t want to hear ’bout no horses, without I’m on my shoeing stool,” he added with a sneer.

“Oh, yes, I know, of course.” The jockey felt the bit himself and adapted his pace to the pressure of control. It seems strange to contemplate, but even such a nature as his has its Æsthetic element, its aspirations and enthusiasms, its dreams and vicissitudes of hope. All these just now had a string on them, as he would have phrased it, and were dragging in the dust. He had ridden with credit in several events elsewhere, but he was the victim of intemperance and his weak moral endowment offered special material for the fashioning of a cat’s paw. It was said and believed that he had “pulled” more than one horse in a race, and although this was not indisputable, the suspicion barred him from the employ of cautious turfmen. In connection with his frequent intoxication, it had brought him down at last to work as a groom for his daily bread, and what was to him more essential, his daily dram, in a livery stable in the little inland town of Caxton, some ten or twelve miles distant, for there was scant opportunity in view of the stringent laws against gambling to ply his vocation as a jockey in Mississippi.

“Oh, you are talkin’ about the passenger list. The Cherokee Rose has sure got swells aboard. There are Mrs. Dean and Miss Hildegarde Dean. You must have read a deal about her in the society columns of the newspapers. She won hands down in Orleans las’ winter. Reg’lar favorite, an’ distanced the field.”

“I ain’t talkin’ about the wimmen,” said the smith.

“Well, mebbe old Horace Dean ain’t as rich as some, but they are dressed as winners, sure. I seen ’em in a box at the horse-show—I was there with Stanley’s stable—an’ the di’monds Mrs. Dean had on mos’ put out my eyes.”

“She don’t wear di’monds on a steamboat, I reckon,” put in Mrs. Berridge. “Them I have seen on deck ginerally don’t look no better ’n—’n—me.”

“But you are a good-looker, ennyways, Mrs. Berridge,” said the jockey, and he paid her the tribute of another facetious wink.

“But the woman would carry her di’monds in her trunk or hand-bag,” suggested the shanty-boater.

“Horace Dean ain’t aboard, eh? Let us have the men’s names,” said the smith. He was turning the matter over exactly as if he had it in some raw material on the anvil before him, striking it here and there, testing its malleability, shaping it to utility.

“Oh, well, there’s one of the Ducies, the fellow that has been abroad so long—registers from Lyons, France. Adrian Ducie.”

The younger Berridge turned half around from the table, chewing hard to clear his mouth before he spoke impressively: “One of the Ducies? Now you are coming to the Sure-enoughs! They used to own Duciehurst. They did for a fack. Finest place in Mississippi; in the world, I reckon.”

“But, used to be ain’t now, by a long shot,” said Jorrocks, the shanty-boater, sustaining the intention of the investigation. “No Ducie nowadays would be worth a hold-up.”

“This is a young man?” Binnhart queried.

“Rising thirty, I reckon,” replied the jockey.

“You dunno—you ain’t seen his teeth,” said Mrs. Berridge. “That’s the way you jockeys jedge of age.” She could be facetious, too.

“Then there’s old Colonel Kenwynton?” said Connover.

“He has got a deal of fight left in him yet,” observed Binnhart, reflectively. “He would put up a nervy tussle.”

“Yes, sir,” corroborated the shanty-boater, with emphasis. “The devil himself will have a tough job when he undertakes to tow old Jack Kenwynton in.”

“There are several other men, names I don’t know—dark horses,” said the jockey seriously, seeing at last the trend of the discussion.

Binnhart was slowly, thoughtfully, shaking his head. “A good many men, I misdoubts. Then there are the captain and the clerks and the mate, but they would all be took by surprise, an’ mos’ likely without arms.”

“An’ then there’s another man, besides,” suggested the elder Berridge. A certain wrinkled anxiety had corrugated the bedraggled limpness of his countenance and he was obviously relieved by the effect of the computation of the odds.

“Oh, yes,” cried Mrs. Berridge, “that comical galoot what bided here las’ night, an’ this evenin’ hired our dugout an’ paddled out to the steamboat. He ain’t back yit.” She paused at the door and peered into the gathering gloom.

“Jessy Jane,” cried her husband with an accession of interest, “tell ’em all what you heard him say las’ night. Every other word was ‘Duciehurst.’”

The younger Berridge was a stalwart fellow, in attire and features resembling his father, save that his straw-tinted beard and shock of hair were not yet bleached by the river-damp and the damage of time to the dull drab hue of the elder’s locks. The woman had evidently intended to reserve such values as she had discovered for the benefit of her own, her husband and his father. But Dan Berridge, all improvident and undiscerning, was gobbling a second great supply of the cat-fish, and did not even note the expanding interest that began to illumine Binnhart’s sharp eyes as they followed her around the table while she again set on the platter. She sought to gain time and perchance to effect a diversion by inviting him to partake of the meal, but he replied that he had eaten his supper already, “and a better one,” he added as he cast a disparaging glance at the cloth. The rude jeer would have served to balk his curiosity, one might have thought,—that in resentment she would have withheld the disclosure he coveted. But the jeer tamed her. She realized and contemned their poverty, and despised themselves because they were so poor. The dignity of labor, the blessedness of content, the joy of health and strength, the relative values of the gifts of life, the law of compensation, no homilies had ever been preached here on these texts. She could not controvert nor contend. It was indeed a coarse, cheap meal brought to the door by the river, a poverty-cursed home on its fantastic stilts, where they might live only so long as the waters willed, and she was all at once ashamed of it, and of her own compact of rude comfort and quiescence with it. She had a certain spirit, however, and when the other visitors chuckled their enjoyment of her discomfiture she included them in the invitation after this wise, “Mebbe you-all ain’t too proud to take a snack with us.” The shanty-boater, who permitted nothing good to pass him, compromised on a slice of pork, eaten sandwich-wise, in a split pone of corn-bread held in his hands as he crouched over the monkey-stove at the other end of the room. Nevertheless, she was submissive and in some sort constrained to respond when Binnhart said with a suave intonation: “Yes, ma’am, we would like to hear from you about that talk of Duciehurst.”

“I dunno what you mean,” she said, still with an effort to fence: “oh, yes, the man jus’ talks in his sleep, that’s all.”

“He’s got secrets,” said her husband, over his shoulder to Binnhart. He paused suddenly with an appalled countenance to extract from his mouth a great spiny section of fishbone, which seemed to have caught on the words. “Tell on, Jesse Jane. I can’t. I’m eatin’.”

It was obviously useless to resist. “Why,” she said, “when the baby had the croup las’ night an’ kep’ me up an’ awake—don’t you dare to look at me an’ laugh, you buzzard!” she broke off to speak to the infant, who was bouncing and crowing jovially at the end of his tether where he was tied in the bunk, “he knows I’m talkin’ about him. Why, what was I saying? Oh, I was in the back room there, an’ the man was sleepin’ in here. An’ he talked, an’ talked in his sleep, loud fur true every wunst in a while. I wonder he didn’t wake up everybody in the house.”

“What did he say?” asked Binnhart with a look of sharp curiosity.

“I didn’t take time to listen much,” replied the woman, fencing anew. “Old ‘Possum thar,” nodding at the baby, “looked like he’d choke every other minute. He’ll smell of turkentine fur a month of Sundays. I fairly soaked his gullet with that an’ coal-oil.”

“A body kin make money out of other folks’ secrets ef they air the right kind of secrets.” Binnhart threw out the suggestion placidly.

The woman hesitated. She noted her father-in-law behind the stove, almost collapsing over his pipe, so inert he might scarcely make shift to fill it; her husband, his younger image, was still at the table, lazily chasing the last morsel of fish about his greasy plate with a bit of cornbread. Little might they hope to metamorphose the babble of a dreamer into discoveries of value. Jasper Binnhart, on the contrary, was a man of force, of action, the leader, the prime mover, in every scheme that had brought to them some measure of success and gain, and then, too, would she not be present, to aid, to hear, invested with the mystery and controlling its preservation.

She took on the air of retrospective pondering as she sank down in a chair on one side of the table, putting her bare elbows on the cloth and supporting her chin in her hands. “Lemme see,” she said, “ef I kin call any of his gabble to mind.” She glanced up to find Binnhart’s eyes, contracted to mere points of light, fixed upon her, and once more she bent her gaze on the pattern of the damask.

“’Twar mos’ly ’bout Duciehurst, all night, all night. Duciehurst was the word.”

“That sounds like something doing,” Binnhart remarked. “All my life I have heard of hidden money at Duciehurst.”

Jessy Jane ceased to pose. She lifted her head suddenly with the contempt of the uninformed, her lips thickening with a sneer. “Now, what fool would put money in that old ruined shell, instead of a bank?”

“Why, lots of folks, during the war,” explained Binnhart. “The banks were not open then, and people hid their vallybles wherever they could. After the peace some things, here and there, were never found again.”

“Why, shucks, Mrs. Berridge, the name of Duciehurst is famous for hidden treasure, has been ever since I could remember,” the shanter-boater said. “You see, Major Ducie and two of his sons were killed in the war, an’ only one was left, this passenger’s father.” He jerked his thumb toward the bar, where the boat lay so still in the night, amidst its element of surging waters. “This son, being so young at the time, just a child, didn’t know anything about where they had stowed the family silver and jewels, and a power of gold money, they say.”

“The family gave up the search more than forty years ago, and the place was sold to satisfy a mortgage,” Binnhart commented.

“But the river folks take up the search every wunst in a while, an’ go thar and dig around the walls,” said the younger Berridge.

“Sure!” exclaimed the shanty-boater. “I have been thar myself with a git-rich-quick gang.” He leered humorously at the party from behind the stove-pipe. Presently he continued reminiscently:—

“Then pirates tore all the hearths up, mighty nigh, that night. They had a stonemason along, with crowbars and chisels, an’ such like tools. He was a tombstone worker, an’ I reckon his biz queered the job, for we found nothing at all.”

“’Tain’t in a hearthstone,” said the woman, suddenly. “Is there anything about a house named pillow? He kep’ a-talkin’ about a pillow—I thought he meant the one he had his head on.”

Jasper Binnhart started as with a galvanic shock. He suddenly let down the forelegs of his chair and sat stiff and upright.

“Pillar?” he said, in a curiously muffled tone. “Has this mansion of Duciehurst got anything like a porch with posts? I have never seen the river-front of the house.”

“Posts!” exclaimed the younger Berridge. “The porch has got posts the size of a big gum tree, a round dozen, too, an’ mighty nigh as high as a gum tree.” He fell to steadily picking his teeth with a fish-bone, and idly riding his chair to and fro.

“What did he say about ‘pillars,’ Mrs. Berridge?” asked the blacksmith, eagerly.

“He talked about a base, an’ a pilaster, an’ columns, an’ a capital.”

“That’s Jackson, capital o’ Miss’ippi, seat of government, second to none in the Union,” explained her husband.

“Sometimes he would call ‘Archie, Archie.’”

“Lieutenant Archibald Ducie as sure as you are born,” said the shanty-boater, solemnly. “He died in Vicksburg, an’ he war the one rumored to have had charge of hidin’ the money.”

“This man never said nothin’ ’bout no money. Jes’ kept on ’bout docyments, an’ a chist,” persisted Mrs. Berridge, incredulously.

“Money mought have been in the chist,” remarked her husband.

“He war specially concerned ’bout a ‘pilaster’—he went back to that ag’in an’ ag’in. He’d whisper, sly an’ secret, ‘in the pilaster.’ What is a pilaster?”

There was no information forthcoming, and she presently resumed, with a drawling voice and a dispirited drooping head. “He seemed to say the docyments was there, though I thought he meant something about a pillow. I wish I had paid mo’ attention, though I had never heard ’bout a pot o’ money bein’ hid at Duciehurst. I wish I could git the chance to hear him talk agin in his sleep.”

“But will he come back?” asked Binnhart, eagerly.

“Sure. He said so when he hired the dugout,” said the old water-rat; “but I made him pay fust, as much as it is wuth—two dollars. He’s got plenty rocks in his pocket.”

“Well, I should think he’d stay the night with the steamboat, a man of his sort,” Binnhart said. He cast a glance of gruff distaste about the squalid and malodorous place, reeking with the greasy smell of fish, and the sullen lamp. He thought of the contrast with the carpeted saloon, the glittering chandeliers, the fine pure air, the propinquity of people of high tone and good social station. Strange! Indeed, it would seem that no man in his senses would resort instead to this den of thieves and cut-throats.

“He’ll come back fast enough,” protested the elder Berridge. “There’s something queer about that man, though he made no secret o’ his name, Captain Hugh Treherne.”

“There’ll be something mighty queer about me if I don’t git a-holt of some of them rocks in his pockets ye war tellin’ about,” declared the shanty-boater.

“What ailed him to take out for the steamer?” demanded Binnhart.

“He seemed all struck of a heap when he seen old Cunnel Kenwynton through the spy-glass. He claims he knows the old Cunnel,” replied the water-rat.

“And yet he is coming back here,” exclaimed Binnhart, incredulously. “I wish I could have heard him talk.”

He rose, still with that intent and baffled look, and went to the door staring out into the gloomy night to descry, if he might, the course of the little craft on the face of the waters and its progress; to canvass the object of the man who wielded the paddle and the nature of the business he could have with old Colonel Kenwynton; and to speculate in futile desperation as to the knowledge he might possess of the storied treasure of Duciehurst, and how this secret might be wrested from him.