Jimmy, for it was he, stood panting over the prostrate Mose. “I wanted to get through lickin’ him,” he explained. “I was afraid if I said who I was he’d leave me for one of the real robbers.”
“And so I would have,” said Mose, sitting up and mopping a bleeding nose with his sleeve. “I don’t think you’ve any right to settle private quarrels when there’s something that wants doing like this.” He was incensed that he had expended his valor on a friend and neighbor, when the others had repelled real enemies. He got to his feet and felt of himself in high discontent. “You’ve broken one of my ribs, Jim Claiborne, and you’ll have to pay for it,” he said, fumbling with both hands to minister to his bleeding nose and his internal injuries at one and the same time.
It was such an absurd finish to a very grave danger, that those who witnessed it leaned against the cabin and the rail, laughing until they held their sides. Even Kenton was laughing, although a torn ligament twisted his face with pain the next minute.
The deck showed littered with scraps of clothing and two dead bodies, in the moonlight. The members of the crew who were unhurt fell to straightening up, and Jimmy, in his feathered head-dress and uncouth paint, took command of the obsequies of his recent companions. The two on deck he helped to drop overboard, where the river received them as it had often received their victims.
“There’s one in the boat you want to keep,” he said to Marion. “Whoever shot him gets a reward at Natchez from the government. He’s got a price on his head. I’ll show you which he is in the morning—one of Mason’s gang.”
Mason, the leader of a band of outlaws who had infested the river for years, had been killed and his head brought into the fort for ransom the year previous.
“The chap we’ve got back there,” Jimmy explained, condescendingly to Moses, “is Big Harp.”
At the name, familiar to all rivermen, the ark’s crew gazed upon Jimmy with something akin to reverence. He accepted the tribute for a full minute, growing tall in the pride of it. Then, as if he thought of something that touched him more closely than pride, his uncouth, painted face changed. He went over to Marion.
“I couldn’t get to you any other way,” he explained. “If I’d come aboard when that fellow dragged Lewis into the river, I ran a good chance of getting killed even before I could warn you. And if I hadn’t joined in the attack, they’d have killed me. I had to lead the party. You see, don’t you, Marion? There wasn’t no other way.”
He looked anxiously into Marion’s face. “You can trust me,” he added. “I’ve seen all I want of——of revenge, and outlawry.”