at that stage of water
without the intervention of the wharf-boat. A full hour was consumed in
finding a landing, and in rigging the double-staging and temporary
planks necessary to get the molasses and coffee and household "plunder"
ashore. Some hint that Parkins was on the river had already reached
Paducah, and the sheriff and two deputies and a small crowd were at the
landing looking for him. A search of the boat failed to discover him,
and the crowd would have left the landing but for occasional hints slyly
thrown out by the mud-clerk as he went about over the levee collecting
freight-bills. These hints, given in a non-committal way, kept the crowd
alive with expectation, and when the rumors thus started spread abroad,
the levee was soon filled with an excited and angry multitude.

If it had been a question of delivering a criminal to justice, August
would not have hesitated to tell the sheriff where to look. But he very
well knew that the sheriff could not convey the man through the mob
alive, and to deliver even such a scoundrel to the summary vengeance of
a mob was something that he could not find it in his heart to do.

In truth, the sheriff and his officers did not seek very zealously for
their man. Under the circumstances, it was probable he would not
surrender himself without a fight, in which somebody would be killed,
and besides there must ensue a battle with the mob. It was what they
called an ugly job, and they were not loth to accept the captain's
assurance that the gambler had gone ashore.

While August was unwilling to deliver the hunted villain to a savage
death, he began to ask himself why he might not in some way use his
terror in the interest of justice. For he had just then seen the
wretched and bewildered face of Norman looking ghastly enough in the fog
of the morning.

At last, full of this notion, and possessed, too, by his habit of
accomplishing at all hazards what he had begun, August strolled back
through the now quiet engine-room to the deck-passengers' quarter. It
was about half an hour before six o'clock, when the dog-watch would
expire and he must go on duty again. In one of the uppermost of the
filthy bunks, in the darkest corner, near the wheel, he discovered what
he thought to be his man. The deck-passengers were still asleep, lying
around stupidly. August paused a moment, checked by a sense of the
dangerousness of his undertaking. Then he picked up a stick of wood and
touched the