I shall be your grateful debtor
for what you have done to-night. May I go now?"

She gave him leave, and when he was gone, she went to her state-room to
write as he had suggested. An hour later she gave the newly written
letter to the night clerk; and the thing was done.

During the remainder of the slow up-river voyage to St. Louis, Charlotte
Farnham lived as one who has fired the fuse of a dynamite charge and is
momently braced for the shock of the explosion. Each morning she assured
herself that the strange man who could be a self-confessed felon one
moment and a chivalrous gentleman the next was still a member of the
_Belle Julie's_ crew; but she became a coward of landings, not daring to
look on for fear she should see him arrested and taken away.

And while the _Belle Julie_ put landing after landing astern and the
voyage grew older, Griswold, too, began to feel the pangs of suspense.
Though he had no thought of breaking his promise, the dread of capture
and trial and punishment grew until it became a threatening cloud to
obscure all horizons. It was to no purpose that he called himself hard
names and strove to rise superior to the overshadowing threat. It was
there, and it would not be ignored. And when he faced it fairly a new
dread arose in his heart; the fear that his fear might end by making him
a criminal in fact--a savage to slay and die rather than be taken alive.

In the ordinary course of things, Miss Farnham's letter should have
reached New Orleans in time to have procured Griswold's arrest at any
one of a score of landings south of Memphis. When the spires of the
Tennessee metropolis disappeared to the southward, he began to be afraid
that her resolution had failed, and to bewail his broken ideal.

He had no means of knowing that she had given her letter to the night
clerk within the hour of their interview on the saloon-deck promenade;
nor did he, or any one else, know that it had lain unnoticed and
overlooked on the clerk's desk until the _Belle Julie_ reached Cairo.
Such, however, was the pregnant fact; and to this purely accidental
delay Griswold owed his first sight of the chief city of Missouri lying
dim and shadowy under its mantle of coal smoke.

The _Belle Julie_ made her landing in the early evening, and Charlotte
was busy up to the last moment getting her own and her aunt's belongings
ready for the transfer to the upper river steamer on which they were to
complete their journey to Minn