He would probably have found it hard to furnish a reasonable explanation. When he landed in the State it seemed sufficient rapture for the moment to feel that he was once more on the same continent with his wife, and that no terrible width of ocean any longer divided them.
Still he could not forget that he was a fugitive from justice, and that in all probability the “hue and cry” had been raised against him as the murderer of his brother-in-law. He shuddered as he thought that on his first visit to a railway station he might be confronted by a reward offered for his own apprehension.
And so, satisfied with the thought that day by day he was creeping or drifting nearer to the woman for whom his whole soul and body hankered, he seemed to find a temporary contentment in his lot.
His preoccupation of mind rendered him the most unsuspicious of mortals, and so hastened a catastrophe which came near terminating prematurely his wanderings.
In taking a bundle of papers from his pocket one day a package of notes of large denomination fell to the bottom of the boat. As a matter of fact the parcel represented five thousand dollars, and with a five-hundred-dollar bill as its outward symbol looked, it must be confessed, its full value.
As the eyes of the boatman fell upon the parcel they glared at it with a greed of covetousness which De Leon read at a glance and carefully noted. The owner of the notes neither saw nor recked of the commotion aroused by his carelessness. De Leon, however, not only saw the error, but made it quite clear to the boatman that he understood him.
“Ah! my dear friend, there is trouble for us both ahead,” De Leon muttered, as he softly soaked the boatman’s cartridges in the limpid waters of Lake Okeechobee while that worthy slept. “I,” he resumed, “am a Soldier of Fortune, you, my worthy ruffian, are simply a murderer! but beware, De Leon watches!”
As he referred to himself as a Soldier of Fortune, it is possible that he was endeavoring to discriminate to the satisfaction of his conscience between a genius of la haute finance, who, in extremity, and with the touch of a master, borrows a telegraphic cipher and uses it with brilliant, if ephemeral, result, and a simple highway robber.
It is but just, however, to the brave De Leon to say that his cheeks tingled with shame whenever he thought of the very scurvy trick he had once played on his old and unsuspecting friend in stealing his code and suppressing the message from his wife.
“Ah! it is a sorry business to rob a whole-souled generous man who trusts you blindly.”