after me."

"You'll look pretty foolish when you tell that thin tale to a jury."

"Then let me put something else on to the back of it. I'm not Cranze at
all. I'm Hamilton. I've been in the papers a good deal just recently,
because I'd been flinging my money around, and I didn't want to get
stared at on board here. So Cranze and I swapped names, just to confuse
people. It seems to have worked very well."

"Yes," said Kettle, "it's worked so well that I don't think you'll get a
jury to believe that either. As you don't seem inclined to make a clean
breast of it, you can now retire to your room, and be restored to your
personal comforts. I can't hand you over to the police without
inconvenience to myself till we get to New Orleans, so I shall keep you
in irons till we reach there. Steward--where's a steward? Ah, here you
are. See this man is kept in his room, and see he has no more liquor. I
make you responsible for him."

"Yes, sir," said the steward.

Continuously the dividends of Bird, Bird and Co. outweighed every other
consideration, and the _Flamingo_ dodged on with her halting voyage. At
the first place he put in at, Kettle sent off an extravagant cablegram
of recent happenings to the representative of the Insurance Company in
England. It was not the cotton season, and the Texan ports yielded the
steamer little, but she had a ton or so of cargo for almost every one of
them, and she delivered it with neatness, and clamored for cargo in
return. She was "working up a connection." She swung round the Gulf till
she came to where logs borne by the Mississippi stick out from the white
sand, and she wasted a little time, and steamed past the nearest outlet
of the delta, because Captain Kettle did not personally know its
pilotage. He was getting a very safe and cautious navigator in these
latter days of his prosperity.

So she made for the Port Eads pass, picked up a pilot from the station
by the lighthouse, and steamed cautiously up to the quarantine station,
dodging the sandbars. Her one remaining passenger had passed from an
active nuisance to a close and unheard prisoner, and his presence was
almost forgotten by every one on board, except Kettle and the steward
who looked after him. The merchant seaman of these latter days has to
pay such a strict attention to business, that he has no time whatever
for extraneous musings.

The _Flamingo_ got a clean bill from the doctor at the quarantine
station, and emerged tr