"The exact truth; and it will be worth your while, my man, to brace up and listen. I am going to give you a chance to redeem yourself—a last chance. It will be a nice story to tell back in St. Louis that you helped to kidnap a wealthy young white woman, using your office as a cloak for the crime, and, besides that, killing two men to serve a river gambler. Suppose I was to tell that sort of tale to Governor Clark, and give him the proofs—where would you land?"
He breathed hard, scarcely able to articulate, but decidedly sober.
"What—what's that? Ain't you the fellar thet wus on the boat? Who—who the devil are yer?"
"I am an officer in the army," I said gravely, determined to impress him first of all, "and I worked on that steamer merely to learn the facts in this case. I know the whole truth now, even to your late quarrel with Kirby. I do not believe you realized before what you were doing—but you do now. You are guilty of assisting that contemptible gambler to abduct Eloise Beaucaire, and are shielding him now in his cowardly scheme to compel her to marry him by threat and force."
"The damn, low-lived pup—I told him whut he wus."
"Yes, but that doesn't prevent the crime. He's all you said, and more. But calling the man names isn't going to frighten him, nor get that girl out of his clutches. What I want to know is, are you ready to help me fight the fellow? block his game?"
"How? What do ye want done?"
"Give me a pledge first, and I'll tell you."
He took a long moment to decide, not yet wholly satisfied as to my identity.
"Did ye say ye wus an army offercer?"