The Price

by Francis Lynde

"It was about noon; I believe. Two or three of the black boys had skipped out at the last minute, as they always do, and we were short-handed. Mac said the fellow didn't look as if he could stand much, but he took him anyhow."

Once more the slender thread of investigation lay broken in her hands. The robbery had been committed at or very near eleven o'clock, and an hour would have given the robber time enough to disguise himself and reach the steamer. But since the captain did not seem altogether positive as to the exact hour, she tried again.

"Please try to remember exactly, Captain Mayfield," she pleaded. "I must find out, if I can—for reasons which I can't explain to any one. Was it just at noon?"

Now this veteran master of packet boats was the last man in the world to be heroically accurate when his sympathies were appealed to by a winsome young woman in evident distress; and while he would cheerfully have sworn that it was eleven o'clock or one o'clock when John Gavitt came aboard, if he had known certainly which statement would relieve her, her query left him no hint to steer by.

So he said: "Oh, I say, 'about noon,' but it might have been an hour or two before, or any time after, till we cleared. But we'll find out. We'll have the fellow up here and put him on the witness stand. Or I'll go below and dig into him for you myself, if you say so."

"Not for the world!" she protested, aghast at the bare suggestion; and for fear it might be repeated in some less evadable form, she made an excuse of her duty and ran away to her aunt.

Later in the day, when she had sought in vain for some other, this suggestion of Captain Mayfield's came back. While there was the smallest chance that she had been mistaken, she dared not send the letter to Mr. Galbraith; yet it was clearly her duty to get at the truth of the matter, if she could.

But how? If Captain Mayfield could not remember the exact time of John Gavitt's enrolment as a member of the Belle Julie's crew, it was more than probable that no one else could; no one but the man himself. It was at this point that the captain's suggestion returned to strike fire like steel upon reluctant flint. Could she go to the length of questioning Gavitt? If she should, would he tell her the truth? And if he should tell the truth, would it make the distressing duty any easier? Not easier, she concluded, but possibly less puzzling.

Thus far the suggestion: but without the help of some third person, she did not see how it could be carried out. She could neither go to him nor summon him; and the alternative of taking the captain into her confidence was rejected at once as being too hazardous. For the captain might not scruple to take the matter into his own hands without ceremony, sending the suspected man back to New Orleans to establish his innocence—if he could.

Charlotte worried over the wretched entanglement all day, and was so distrait and absent-minded that her aunt remarked it, naming it malaria and prescribing quinine. Whereat Charlotte dissembled and put on a mask of cheerfulness, keeping it on until after the evening meal and her aunt's early retiring. But when she was released, she was glad enough to go out on the promenade just forward of the starboard paddle-box, where there were no after-dinner loungers, to be alone with her problem and free to plunge once more into its intricacies.