m without her personal help. It was like dealing the man a
treacherous blow in the back, but she thought it would be kinder.

"Aunt Fanny," she began, with her face averted, "I promised you I
wouldn't write to Mr. Galbraith until after we reached home--until I had
told papa. I have been thinking about it since, and I--I think it must
be done at once."

Now Miss Gilman's conscience was also of the Puritan cast, and justice
had been given time to make its claim paramount to that of the
conventional proprieties. Hence the invalid yielded the point without
reopening the argument.

"I don't know but you are right, after all, Charlie, dear," she said.
"I've been thinking it over, too. But it seems like a very dreadful
thing for you to have to do."

"It _is_ very dreadful," said Charlotte, with a much deeper meaning in
the words than her aunt suspected. Nevertheless, she went away quickly
and locked herself in her state room to write the fateful letter which
should set the machinery of the law in motion and deliver the robber
deck-hand up to justice.

VII

GOLD OF TOLOSA

In yielding to the impulse which had prompted him to change places with
the broken-down deck-hand, Griswold had assumed that there was little
risk and at least an even chance that the substitution would never be
discovered. He knew that the river steamboats were manned by picked-up
crews, usually assembled at the last moment, and that it was more than
probable that the _Belle Julie's_ officers had not yet had time to
individualize the units of the main-deck squad. Therefore, he might take
the name and place of the disabled Gavitt with measurable safety.

But apart from this, he was not unwilling to add another chapter to his
experience among the toilers. He had been told that the life of a
roustabout on the Western rivers was the most dismal of all the gropings
in the social underworld, and he was the more eager to endure its
hardships as a participant. Being an enthusiast, he had early laid down
the foundation principle that one must see and feel and suffer if one
would write convincingly.

As to the experience, he immediately found himself in a fair way to
acquire it in great abundance. From the moment of his enlistment in the
_Belle Julie's_ crew it was heaped upon him unstintingly; good measure,
pressed down, shaken together, and running over. Without having
specialized himself in any way to M'Grath, the bullying chief mate, he
fancied