The Price - Lynde Francis

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      Embarrassment quickly flung down a handful of obstacles in Charlotte's path, but she picked her way among them.

      "I saw him yesterday morning quite close, and I looked at him because—because I thought I had seen him somewhere before. Do you know anything about him, Captain Mayfield?—who he is, I mean?"

      "Not any more than I do about the rest of them. They're driftwood, mostly, you understand. We pick them up and drop them, here and there and everywhere. This fellow's name is Gavitt—John Wesley Gavitt—on the clerk's book. Mac said he was a sick hobo, working his way to St. Louis."

      "How long before the beginning of a voyage do you hire the crew?" asked Charlotte, trying not to seem too pointedly interested.

      "Oh, they string along all through the loading for two or three days, and from that right up to the last minute."

      It was discouraging, and she was on the point of giving up. Her one hope now lay in the fixing of the exact time of the man Gavitt's enlistment in the Belle Julie's crew, and there appeared to be only one way of determining this.

      "Does anybody know—could anybody tell just when this particular man was hired, Captain Mayfield?" she asked.

      "Not unless Mac happens to remember. No, hold on; I recollect now; it was the day we left New Orleans—day before yesterday, that was."

      "In the morning?"

      If the good-natured captain was beginning to wonder why his pretty passenger was cross-examining him so closely, he did not betray it.

      "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.

      It was possibly ten minutes later, while she stood leaning against a stanchion and watching the lights of a distant town rise out of the watery horizon ahead, that chance, the final arbiter in so many human involvements, led her quickly into the valley of decision. She heard a man's step on the steeply pitched stair leading down from the hurricane-deck. Before she could turn away he was confronting her; the man whose name on the Belle Julie's crew roster was John Wesley Gavitt.

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      Griswold's appearance was less fortuitous than it seemed to be. As a reward of merit for having saved the mate's life, he had been told off to serve temporarily as man-of-all-work for the day pilot, who chanced to be without a steersman. His watch in the pilot-house was over, and he was on his way to the crew's quarters below when he stumbled upon Miss Farnham. Mindful of his earlier slip, he passed her as if she had been invisible. She let him go until her opportunity was all but lost; then, plucking courage out of the heart of desperation, she spoke.

      "One moment, if you please; I—I want to ask you something," she faltered; and he wheeled obediently and faced her.

      Followed a pause, inevitable, but none the less awkward for the one who was responsible. Griswold felt, rather than saw, her embarrassment, and was generous enough to try to help her.

      "I think I know what you wish to say: you are quite at liberty to say it," he offered, when the pause had grown into an obstacle which she seemed powerless to surmount.

      "Do you? I have been hoping you wouldn't," was the quick rejoinder. Then: "Will you tell me at what time you joined the crew of the Belle Julie?"

      The question did not surprise him, nor did he attempt to evade it.

      "Between twelve and one o'clock, the day before yesterday."

      "Will you tell me where you were at eleven o'clock that day?"

      "Yes, if you ask me."

      "I do ask you."

      "I was in a certain business building in New Orleans, as near to you as I am now. Is that sufficiently definite?"

      "It is. I thought perhaps—I had hoped—Oh, for goodness' sake, why did you do it?" she burst out, no longer able to fence with the weapons of indirectness.

      He answered her frankly.

      "It was the old story of one man's over-plenty and another man's need. Have you ever known what it means to go hungry for sheer poverty's sake?—but, of course, you haven't."

      "No," she admitted.

      "Well, I have; I was hungry that morning; very hungry. I know this doesn't excuse the thing—to you. But perhaps it may help to explain it."

      "I think I can understand—a little. But surely——"

      He

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