The captain shook his head. "I don't know: being only a riverman, I'm not even a sea-lawyer. But maybe Mr. Latrobe could tell you. Oh, Mr. Latrobe!"
The loquacious one was on his way forward to smoke, but he turned and came back at the captain's call.
"The penalty?" he said, when the query had been repeated to him; "that would depend upon a good many things that could only be brought out at the trial. But under the circumstances—threatening to shoot the president, and all that, you know—I should say it would go pretty hard with him. He'll probably get the full limit of the law."
"And that is?" persisted Charlotte, determined to know the worst.
"In Louisiana, twenty years, I believe."
"Thank you; that is what I wished to find out."
The little man bowed and went his way; and Captain Mayfield, who was an observant man in the field of river stages and other natural phenomena, but not otherwise, did not remark Miss Farnham's sigh which was more than half a sob.
"Twenty years!" she shuddered; "it might as well be for life. He would be nearly fifty years old, if he lived through it."
It did not occur to the captain to wonder how Miss Farnham came to know anything about the bank robber's age, but he spoke to the conditional phrase in her comment.
"Yes; if he lives through it: that's a mighty big 'if' down here in the levee country. Twenty years of the chain-gang would be about the same as a life sentence to most white men, I judge."