-road or rail, or by some later boat.

The emergency called for swift action, and his determination to leave
the steamer was taken at once. While he was weighing the manifest
dangers of a daylight desertion against the equally manifest hazard of
waiting for darkness, the whistle was blown for a landing and he
concluded not to wait. If Miss Farnham had identified him she would
doubtless lose no time in giving the alarm. She might even now be in
conference with the captain, he thought.

Griswold had a shock of genuine terror at this point in his reflections
and his skin prickled as at the touch of something loathsome. Up to that
moment he had suffered none of the pains of the hunted fugitive; but he
knew now that he had fairly entered the gates of the outlaw's inferno;
that however cunningly he might cast about to throw his pursuers off the
track, he would never again know what it was to be wholly free from the
terror of the arrow that flieth by day.

The force of the Scriptural simile came to him with startling emphasis,
bringing on a return of the prickling dismay. The stopping of the
paddle-wheels and the rattling clangor of the gang-plank winch aroused
him to action and he shook off the creeping numbness and ran aft to
rummage under the cargo on the engine-room guards for his precious
bundle. When his hand reached the place where it should have been, the
blood surged to his brain and set up a clamorous dinning in his ears
like the roaring of a cataract. The niche between the coffee sacks was
empty.

VIII

THE CHAIN-GANG

While Griswold was grappling afresh with the problem of escape, and
planning to desert the _Belle Julie_ at the next landing, Charlotte
Farnham was sitting behind the locked door of her state-room with a
writing pad on her knee over which for many minutes the suspended pen
merely hovered. She had fancied that her resolve, once fairly taken,
would not stumble over a simple matter of detail. But when she had tried
a dozen times to begin the letter to Mr. Galbraith, the simplicities
vanished and complexity stood in their room.

Try as she might to put the sham deck-hand into his proper place as an
impersonal unit of a class with which society is at war, he perversely
refused to surrender his individuality. At the end of every fresh effort
she was confronted by the inexorable summing-up: in a world of phantoms
there were only two real persons; a man who had sinned, and a woman who
was abo