All penal laws are founded upon vengeance. The passion of revenge is necessary for protection. But it is ugly, like the crimes and wrongs that awake it. Mr. Waddy, sternly intent upon the punishment of a scoundrel, whom society could not fully punish, repelled all softer thoughts. He concentrated the whole ire of his nature on this one object. He would not think tenderly of his old love, perhaps still his faithful love. He forgave her for the wrong of his exile, for her imagined falseness: it was inevitable. But what she had become; whether she still remembered him with loving bitterness, with sorrowful despair of disappointed love like his own—this he knew not, would not think of. He would not perplex himself with tender uncertainties.
“Vengeance, vengeance,” said his fifteen dreary years. But would she, if she still remembered him kindly, receive him to the old friendship if he came with blood on his hands? He swept away the thought; he saw before him a duty to society.
On, on, silent pair! wronged husband, wronged lover. On, deadly thoughts! voiceless purposes! Fate goes with you and Vengeance and Death!
An ugly muddy ditch, the Mississippi, divides our continent with its perpendicular line of utility. It is not a stream that one used to vivifying seaside waters, or the clear sparkle of New England brooks, would wish to drown in, if drowning was his choice.
The vehicles that run upon this muddy pathway are worthy of its ugliness. At night, majestical moving illuminations, by day they are structures of many-tiered deformity. One of these monsters, a favourite, Spitfire No. 5, was to start one sultry afternoon of this same September for up the river. Spitfire No. 5 wore over her pilot-house the gilded elk-horns of victory; all the passengers were sure of being speedily borne to their destination.
As the boat backed out into the stream and hung there a moment motionless, two men, who had been a little belated in searching for someone they wished to find at the different hotels, pushed off in a row-boat and overtook the steamer. The strong current drifted them out of their course and they boarded the boat unobserved, on her starboard side, away from the town.
Mr. Saunders and his lady, a handsome but rather faded person, had remained in their stateroom until the Spitfire was fairly out in the stream. The rail was not yet put up at the forward gangway, and Mr. Saunders stood there, looking at the crowded levee and its hundred monster steamboats, including Spitfires from 1 to 10. He was in a moment’s pause between two journeys. One long journey was over; another was about to begin. How long he could not say; voyages on Mississippi steamboats may be short, may be lingering. All voyages are uncertain. Fatal accidents often happen. Mr. Saunders, so he entered his name on the books, was just beginning a journey of unknown length.
A greenish gardener from near Boston, emigrating to Iowa, who thought he had seen Mr. Saunders somewhere before, was a little frightened at that gentleman’s brutal reply to an innocent question, and observing him nervously fingering at something like a cocked pistol in his breast pocket, shrank back.
“A border ruffian,—perhaps Atchison or Titus,” he said to himself, and thanked his stars for his fortunate escape.