"All right. When I catch up with him, you'll fall in for your share in the proceeds as an accessory after the fact. My men nabbed him on the levee at St. Louis, and when he euchred them he carried away a pair of handcuffs that somebody had to help him get shut of. He came back to the boat, and you are the man who took the handcuffs off!"
"'Tis a scrimshankin' lie, and ye can't prove ut!" said M'Grath.
"Maybe not; but there's one thing I can prove. This side-partner of yours didn't get his pay before he went ashore with the spring-line; but you drew it for him afterwards!"
M'Grath was cruelly cornered, but he still had the courage of his gratitude.
"Well, then, I did be taking the bracelets off av 'm. Now make the most av ut, and be damned to you! Did I know what he'd been doing? I did not. Do I know where he wint? I do not. Have I seen the naygur that skipped with him, from that day to this? I have not; nor would I be knowing 'm if I did see 'm. Anything else yez'd like to know? If there is, ye'll be taking ut on the tip av my fisht!" And he went back to his work, oozing profanity at every pore.
Thrown back upon the one remaining expedient, Broffin went ashore and became a student of railroad time-tables. Passing the incidents of the stubborn chase in review after many days, he wondered that it had not occurred to him to question Captain Mayfield. But that the captain would know anything at all about any particular bit of human driftwood in the ever-changing deck crew seemed easily incredible; and there was no good angel of clairvoyance to tell him that the captain had once been made the half-confidant of a distressed young woman who was anxious to be both just and merciful.
It was while he was waiting for the departure of the first northbound train that he planned the search for the young woman, arranging the names of the seven might-have-beens in the order of accessibility as indicated by the addresses given in the Belle Julie's register. In this arrangement Miss Charlotte Farnham's name stood as Number Three; the two names outranking hers being assigned respectively to Terre Haute, Indiana, and Baldwin, Kansas.
In his after-rememberings, Broffin swore softly under the drooping mustaches when he recalled how, in that morning waiting at Vicksburg, he had hesitated and changed his mind many times before deciding upon the first three zigzags of the search. Terre Haute, Baldwin, and Wahaska lay roughly at the three extremities of a great triangle whose sides, measured in hours of railroad travel, were nearly equal. Failing at Terre Haute, the nearest point, he could reach either of the two remaining vertices of the triangle with fairly equal facility; and it was surely an ironical fate that led him to decide finally upon the Kansas town as the second choice.
Some twenty-odd hours after leaving Vicksburg, Broffin the tireless found himself in Terre Haute. Here failure had at least the comfort of finality. The Miss Heffelfinger of his list, whom he found and interviewed within an hour of his arrival, was a teacher of German whose difficulties with the English language immediately eliminated her from the diminishing equation. Broffin got away from the voluble little Berliner as expeditiously as possible and hastened back to the railway station. Kansas came next in his itinerary, and a westbound train was due to leave in a few minutes.
It was here again that fate mocked him. Arriving at the station, he found that the westbound train was an hour late; also, that within the hour there would be a fast train to the north, with good connections for Wahaska. Once more he stumbled and fell into the valley of indecision. A dozen times during the forty-five minutes of grace he was on the point of changing his route; nay, more; at the last minute, when the caller had announced the northern train, he took a gambler's chance and spun a coin—heads for the north and tails for the west. The twirling half-dollar slipped from his fingers and rolled under one of the stationary seats in the waiting-room. Broffin got down on his hands and knees to grope for it, and while he was groping the chance to take the northbound "Limited" was lost. Moreover, when he finally found the coin it was standing upright in a crack in the floor.