That was merely jealousy of a discharged employee; and it was easy as a case—easier I always thought, than the probate case I won over a contested signature charge filed by certain heirs under a will. In this case I merely went to the dead man’s earlier home and learned his history. Time out of mind he, a thrifty and respected German, had held some petty county office or other; and by going over old county warrants and receipts signed in forty years by my man, I discovered what I already knew—that a man’s signature changes many times during his life, especially if he begins life as an uncultured immigrant and advances to a fair business success later in his life: so that his later signatures on records proved his signature in his will.
Again, liking these simple mysteries, I had long ago learned to laugh at the old and foolish assertion that murder will out, that not the most skilful criminal can long conceal a capital crime. It is not true. No one knows how many murders and other crimes go unsolved or even unknown. The trouble with murderers, as I knew well enough, was that they lacked mentality. And often I said to myself that were it in my heart to kill a man, I assuredly could do so, and all my life escape unsuspected of the crime.
It may be that my fondness for these less obvious things in the law had rendered me a trifle different from my fellow men. I could never approach any question in life without wanting to go all about it and to the bottom and top, like a cooper with his barrel. I was thus actuated, without doubt, in my relations years since with Helena Emory—I knew the shrewdness and accuracy of my own trained mind. I confess I exulted in the infallible, relentless logic of my mind, a mind able and well trained, especially well trained in reason and argument. So, when I put the one great brief of all my life before Helena, my splendid argument why should she love me, I did so, at first, in the conviction that it must be convincing. Had I not myself worked it out in each detail, had not my calm, cool, accurate reason guarded each portal? Was it, indeed, not a perfect brief—that one I held in my first lost case—the lost case which sent me out of my profession, left me a stranded hulk of a man?
But then, when these two pirate youngsters had found me and touched me with the living point of some new flame of life, so that I knew a vast world existed beyond the nature of the intellect, the old ways clung to me, after all. Even as I swore to lay hold on youth and on adventure (and on love, if, in sooth, that might be for me now), I could not fight as yet wholly bare of the old weapons that had so long fitted my hand. So, even on that very morning when we set forth from my farm to be pirates, my mind ran back to its old cunning, and I recalled my earlier boast to myself that if I ever cared to be a criminal I knew I could be able to cover my tracks.
Those writing-folk, therefore, who now wasted thousands of dollars in pursuit of trace and trail of Black Bart, wealthy ex-lawyer, knew nothing of their man, and guessed nothing of his caliber or of his methods. They even failed to look in plain sight for their trail maker. And having done so, they forgot that water leaves no trail. Yet that simple thought had come to my mind as I had sat at breakfast in my own house, some weeks before this time! Even then I had planned all this.
Absorbed as I had been in this pursuit of Helena, baffled as I had been by her, unhappy as I now was over her own unhappiness, fierce as was my love for her, still and notwithstanding, some trace of my old self clung to me even now when, her hand on my arm, I guided Helena in silence over the creaking planks of the dock, and saw, at last, dim beyond the edge, the boom of the Mississippi’s tawny flood, rolling on and onward to the sea. Here was a task, a problem, a chase, an endeavor, an adventure! To it, I was impelled by my old training; into it I was thrust by all these fevers of the blood. Even though she did not love me, she was woman ... in the dark air of night, it seemed to me, I could smell the faint maddening fragrance of her hair.... No. It was too late! I would not release her. I would go on, now!
And with this resolution, formed when I caught sight of the passing flood, I found a sudden peace and calm, and so knew that I was fit for my adventure as yon other boy, L’Olonnois, was for his.
I paused at the edge of the wharf, at the side of our boat. We still were arm in arm, still silent, though she must have felt the beating of my heart.
“Helena,” I whispered, “yonder, one step, and your parole is over. Here it is not. That boat, just astern, is the one in which Cal Davidson chased us all the way from Natchez, in which I chased him all the way from Dubuque. His men do not know we are here, nor does he as yet. Now, what is it that you wish to do?”
She stood silent for some time, tightening her wrap at the throat against the river damp, and made no answer, though her gaze took in the dark hull of the low-lying craft made fast below us. When at last: