He desisted from this occupation for the moment to master the new perplexity that confronted him, and to express his most affable and ceremonious regret; for his boat carried all the cotton shipped from the rich sister’s plantation, and the dictates of policy aided his constitutionally kindly disposition.
“Why, I wouldn’t have kidnapped you this way for”—his eye fell on the bit of silver shining through the goblet—“for a dollar,” he concluded modestly. “I’ll put you ashore in the yawl, if you like. I would turn down-stream and land again, but”—he faced half round from the table, with the lightness characteristic of some portly men, and sat with one hand on the back of the chair, and the other on the goblet—“but the truth is I’m running pretty much on one wheel; there was an accident to the other before we were a hundred miles from New Orleans, and with this wind blowing straight across the river it’s mighty difficult getting out from the left bank; she can hardly climb against the current.”
John Grayson appeared for a moment to contemplate the suggestion of going ashore in the yawl. The wind came in a great gust through the towering chimneys, the lights flickered, the texas seemed to rock upon the superstructure of the hurricane deck. “I don’t believe I care to be on the river in a yawl in this wind, this dark night,” he said, evidently debating the matter within himself.
“Then go to St. Louis and back with us!” exclaimed the hospitable captain. “Shan’t cost you a cent, of course. We’ll make our next landing a little after midnight, I reckon, and I’ll telegraph Mrs. Halliday from there.”
The jovial evening seemed to the juggler, as he listened to the girl reading aloud, and stared at her with eyes blank of expression and that introverted look which follows mental processes rather than material objects, like an experience in another planet, so far away it was, as if so long ago. He remembered that he scarcely dared to touch a glass, with the consciousness of the treasure he carried in the belt he wore and all its interdependent interests, but John Grayson drank blithely enough, and the generous liquor relaxed beyond all precedent his loosely hinged tongue. Lucien Royce kept close by his side as he wandered about the boat, having developed a fear that he would tell the secret that had come so unwarrantably into his possession; and when the captain asked as a favor that, on account of the crowded condition of the boat, Royce would share his stateroom with the guest, he acceded at once, preferring to have Grayson able to talk only to him until such time as he should be once more duly sober.
He consigned the guest to the upper berth, thinking that thus Grayson could not leave the stateroom without his knowledge. He lay awake by a great effort until he was sure from the snores of his jovial friend that Grayson was asleep; and when he dropped into slumber himself, as he was young and tired, having been much in the open air that day, to which he was unaccustomed in his clerical vocation, he slept like a log.
His consciousness was renewed, after a blank interval, with the sense of being awakened in his berth by a violent jar, and of striving to rouse himself, and of falling asleep again. Another interval of blankness, and he remembered definitely the grasp of John Grayson’s hand on his shoulder, roughly shaking him, with the terrified announcement that there was something the matter. He experienced a sort of surprise that John Grayson was in the stateroom; then—it was strange that his mind should have thus taken cognizance of trifles—he recalled the crowded condition of the boat, and realized that his friend was leaping down from the upper berth. He stated, with drowsy dignity, that he did not care a damn what was the matter; that he had paid for his stateroom, which was more than some people could say, and that if he were not allowed to sleep in it, he would give bond that he would know the reason why.
The next thing of which he was aware was a flash of light in the room. The door had opened from the saloon, and a clerk had put in his head to say that there was no danger. The boat had struck a snag, it was true, but the damage was slight. Somehow Royce slept but lightly after this. The unreasoning sense of impending misfortune had come to him at last. Presently he was awake and conscious that he was alone. He lifted himself on his elbow and listened. What was that low roar? The wind? That sound of banging timbers must be the flapping of shutters or doors as the gust rushed across the river. He heard a clamor on the boiler deck. Voices?—or was it the wind, screaming wildly as it went? And why did they run the engines at that furious rate? He could feel the strain of the machinery in the very floor under his feet.
As he slipped out of the lower berth he perceived that the gray dawn was in the contracted little room; he could see through the glass of the door opening on the guards the tawny-tinted stretches of water, the sad-hued cypress woods on a distant bank, draped with fog as well as with hanging moss, and down the stream the whiter tints of an island of sand covered with sparse vegetation, locally known as a “tow-head,” for which the disabled boat was running with every pound of pressure which the engines could carry. There was, in truth, something the matter, for the tow-head would have been given a wide berth in a normal state of affairs; getting aground, when the lesser of two evils, showed a crisis indeed.
He looked about hastily for his clothes. They were gone, and in their place John Grayson’s toggery lay in a heap. In his panic and the darkness Grayson had probably caught the garments nearest to his hand. His deserted friend hastily invested himself in the suit of clothes that John Grayson had left. As he was drawing on the blazer, suddenly a hoarse cry smote his ear. “No bottom!” sang out the leadsman. They were taking soundings. “No-o bottom!” And he felt the vibrations of the tone in the very fibres of his quaking heart.