A blinding glare, a thunderous detonation that seemed to shatter his every nerve, and he was weltering in the river; now sinking down with a sense of the weight of infinite fathoms of water upon him, and now mechanically trying to strike out with an unreasoning instinct like an animal’s. When he could understand what had happened he was swimming fairly well, although greatly hampered by the clinging blazer that John Grayson had left on the floor, and which he now wore. The long reaches of the river, the shore, the dim dawn, were all lighted with a lurid glare; for the boat had taken fire with the explosion of the overstrained boiler. The roar of the flames mingled with the heart-rending screams of those whom hope had so cruelly deluded. But the sounds were all faint at the distance, and he never could understand how he had been thrown, unhurt, so far away. He saw none of the human victims of the disaster. Now and again charred timbers, shooting by on the current, threatened him, and to avoid them necessitated some skillful management. A far greater danger was the proximity of two horses, also gallantly swimming, who followed him with loud whinnies of inquiry and distress, appealing in their way for aid and guidance, leaning on the humankind as if recognizing his superior capacity. More than once, one of them, a spirited mare, intended for new triumphs at the Louisville races, swam close in front of him, pausing, as if to say, “Mount, and let us gallop off on dry ground;” deflecting his course, which was already beset with abnormal difficulties. For when almost exhausted, he saw that the land he was approaching, half veiled with the gray fog, was a bluff bank, thirty feet high at least, and as far as eye could reach up and down the river there was no lower ground. To scale it was impossible. His heart sank within him. He felt that his stroke was the feebler when hope no longer nerved it. In his despair he could hardly make another effort. And although he had feared the horses, with their lashing hoofs and their unearthly cries, when the mare—the more importunate in dumb insistence that he would succor them—threw up her head, and with a wild inarticulate scream went struggling down into the depths to rise no more, he felt a choking sob in his throat, his eyes were blurred, he could scarcely keep his head above the surface. If he were further conscious, the faculty was not coupled with that of memory, for he never knew how he came to be in a flatboat floating swiftly down the stream from the scene of the disaster, and he never saw his other comrade again. Once more there came an interval void of perception; then he was vaguely aware that the flatboat was tied up in the bight of a bend; the shadowy cypresses towered above it,—he heard their waving boughs,—the water lapped gently about it; then blankness again, and he never knew how long this continued.
One morning he awoke, restored to his senses, in a bunk against the wall; he felt the motion of the river, and he knew that the flimsy craft with the rickety little cabin in its centre was again afloat upon the stream. Every pulse of the current set his own pulses a-quiver. The very proximity of the fearful river induced a physical terror that his mind could not control. It was only by a mighty wrench that his thoughts could be forced from the subject, and fixed as an alternative on his surroundings. The interior of the cabin consisted of two apartments: one for bunks and cooking purposes; the other, apparently, from the glimpse through a door, fitted up as a store, with small wares, such as threads and perfumery, soaps and canned goods, and showy imitation jewelry calculated to take the eye and the earnings of the negroes at the various landings where the craft, locally called the “trading-boat,” tied up. Through a further door he had an outlook upon the deck. An elderly woman with rough red arms was sitting there on a stool, peeling potatoes; a half-grown boy, cross-legged on the floor, tailor-wise, was sawing away on an old fiddle. Beyond still was the vast spread of the tawny-tinted rippling floods and the sad hues of the nearer shore. Lucien Royce recoiled at the very sight and turned away his eyes. Within, much of the wearing apparel of the proprietors dangled from the rafters. There were bunks on the opposite wall, imperfectly visible through the smoke from the tiny stove, which, despite a great crackling of driftwood, seemed to labor with an imperfect draft. Two men were seated close to it, and were talking with that security which presumes no alien ear to listen. A certain crime of robbery absorbed their interest, and Royce gathered that, fearing they might be implicated in it, they had silently fled from the locality before their presence was well recognized. They had evidently had naught to do with it. They only wished they had!
A great swag it was, to be sure. The man had worn a money-belt,—a rare thing in these times. Heavy it must have been and drawn tight, for both hands had stiffened on its fastenings as if striving to tear it off. Its weight had doubtless drowned him. It was no joke to swim the Mississippi at high water, completely dressed and with a tight belt stuffed with money—gold or silver? And how much could the sum have been? Whenever this point was broached, a glitter of greed was in the eyes of each which made the grizzled-bearded faces alike despite the variations of contour and feature. Always a long pause of silent speculation ensued, and whenever the supposititious sum total was mentioned, it had augmented in the interval. No one knew where the man went down; the body—the face beaten and bruised by floating timbers out of all semblance to humanity—had been swept upon a sand-bar. There some pirates of the river-bank had found it, had cut the belt open, had taken the money and fled, leaving the empty belt to tell its own futile story. At this point the flatboatmen would pause, and once more gloomily shake their heads and spit tobacco juice on the tiny stove, till it was as vocal as a frying-pan, and obviously wish that the chance had been theirs.
Thus it was that Lucien Royce had been apprised of John Grayson’s death and of the loss of the funds with which he himself had been entrusted. Until this moment he had never missed the belt. Doubtless Grayson took it from him at the first alarm of striking the snag before the dawn, when he vainly sought to rouse his friend to a sense of danger. Was it possible, he marveled, that Grayson, leaving him to drown, as he supposed, had thought that the good money need not be wasted? Had its custodian been rescued, however, probably Grayson would have restored it; otherwise suspicion would have fallen upon him, since they had occupied the same stateroom. But if not, if Lucien Royce’s body had gone to the bottom of the river, and no one the wiser that the money-belt did not go with it,—was it upon this chance, in that supreme moment of terror, that Grayson had had the forethought to act? He was not a man who made much account of the rights of others when his own comfort or his own pleasure was at stake. But his life—did he risk the precious moment that might mean existence to save a sum of money for a St. Louis cotton commission firm of which he did not know a single member? Would he have jeopardized his chances in the water with this weight, with this fatally close-gripping python of a belt, for a mere commercial matter? It was needless to argue the question. Royce knew right well, both then and now, that in no event, had he not survived, did Grayson intend to restore the money. Evidently the idea had flashed upon him when, in seeking to rouse his companion, his hands came in contact with the belt and the opportunity was his own. And so Grayson had gone to his death, drowned by the weight and the pressure of the stolen money. It seemed a grim sort of justice that with the last movements of his hands in life, the last effort of his will, he sought to tear it off, to cast it from him, as he went down into the hopeless depths.
Royce experienced hardly a regret for his false friend,—not more than a physical pang of sympathy, an involuntary shudder, his very nerves instinct with the terror of the water. Had Grayson not tampered with a secret that was not his own, the belt would now be safe. Royce himself had had the strength to sustain its weight in the water. He was used to it, and its size had been carefully adjusted to his slender figure. Now the money was gone,—the belt was found on another man. They would seem to have been confederates in the robbery of the fund. He was responsible for it. He could not reasonably account for its being out of his own possession without incriminating himself. Should he seek to inculpate the dead man alone, he was aware that the fact that Grayson could not speak for himself would speak for him. Nothing could palliate the circumstance that the belt was found on another man than its proper custodian, and that the leather had been slit and the money extracted. He would have to account for this, and improbable excuses would not go far with men smarting under a ruinous loss from the carelessness or the drunkenness or the cupidity of their employee. He could not go back. He could never face the firm!
So light of heart he had always been, so light of heel, so light, so very light of head, that the anguish which pierced him at the idea of the loss of public esteem, of his commercial honor, of the confidence of the firm, involved in his seeming failure of probity, subacutely amazed him at its keen poignancy. He had hardly known how he valued these spiritual, immaterial assets. More than life,—far, far more than life! He began to contemn the struggle he had made in the water; he had been wondering and calculating, with an early gleam of consciousness and an athlete’s stalwart vanity, how far he had swum, how long he had sustained himself in the great flood; for what purpose, he thought now, what melancholy purpose, to save his life for the ignominy of an episode behind the bars for breach of trust, embezzlement, robbery—he hardly cared what might be the technical rank of the crime of which he would so certainly be accused. Every reflection brought confirmations of the popular suspicion which would be so false, and which could not, alas, be disproved. With a mechanical review, as of a life when it is closed, sundry gambling escapades of John Grayson’s recurred to his mind, in which he had been nearly concerned and which had attained a certain degree of notoriety. On one occasion, indeed, when he was younger and more easily led by his friend, a gambling establishment had been raided by the police, the two had been among the captured players, and being arraigned, although under false names, were nevertheless recognized. The exploit was so well bruited abroad that the senior member of the firm, who had been a friend as well as a partner of his father’s, had given him what the old gentleman was pleased to term a “remonstrance,” and what he himself denominated a “blistering.” “Mark my words,” had been its conclusion, “that fellow Grayson will ruin you.” Was it possible that this prophet of evil would fail to note the fulfillment of the prognostication? Would this event give no color to the supposition that he had been gambling with the money, that Grayson had won it, and then was drowned and robbed?
Oh, why, why had he so struggled to save his wretched life? The terrors of the water no longer shook his nerves. As he noted the trembling of the little craft,—the flimsiest thing, he thought, that he had ever seen afloat,—he said to himself that it would be the luckiest chance that had ever befallen him should the flatboat suddenly disintegrate, timber from timber, on the swelling centre of the tide, engulfing him never to rise again. “I would not move a hand to save my life. I wish I were dead,” he said, his white face turned to the wall. “I wish I were dead.” And then he realized that he had his wish. He was dead.
For the flatboatmen were talking again, with a morbid revolving around the subject. From their disjointed dialogue it appeared that the “stiff” was not on the sand-bar now; it had been removed in obedience to a telegram from a firm in St. Louis,—Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, cotton commission merchants. One of their clerks had come down by train on the other side of the river, “nigh tore up” about the belt and the loss of the money. He recognized the dead man by his clothes, and the color of his hair and eyes,—“there was no other way to know him, he was such a s’prisin’ bruised-up sight.” This clerk had once given the man a meerschaum pipe that was in the breast-pocket yet, and some papers were dried off, and read and identified. He was shipped by train. They would bury him where he came from. The firm and its employees would turn out, probably, and do the handsome thing. “Good for trade, I reckon,” remarked the proprietor of the flatboat store, with an appreciation of sentiment as an agent of profit.
“What’s the man’s name?” demanded the other.
“He never left no name as I heard. He loafed round Kyarter’s sto’ over thar in the bend awhile, an’ a nigger rowed him over in a dug-out to see the stiff, an’ he give his orders an’ put out fur the up-country quick.”