rt-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 alter