bite at breakfast that morning. After that the men loafed
around, in twos and threes, and talked low together. But none of them
herded with Dick Allbright. They all give him the cold shake. If he
come around where any of the men was, they split up and sidled away.
They wouldn't man the sweeps with him. The captain had all the skiffs
hauled up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam, and wouldn't let the
dead men be took ashore to be planted; he didn't believe a man that got
ashore would come back; and he was right.

'After night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going to be
trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering going on. A
good many wanted to kill Dick Allbright, because he'd seen the bar'l on
other trips, and that had an ugly look. Some wanted to put him ashore.
Some said, let's all go ashore in a pile, if the bar'l comes again.

'This kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched
together forrard watching for the bar'l, when, lo and behold you, here
she comes again. Down she comes, slow and steady, and settles into her
old tracks. You could a heard a pin drop. Then up comes the captain,
and says:--

'"Boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; I don't want this bar'l
to be dogging us all the way to Orleans, and YOU don't; well, then,
how's the best way to stop it? Burn it up,--that's the way. I'm going
to fetch it aboard," he says. And before anybody could say a word, in he
went.

'He swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men spread to
one side. But the old man got it aboard and busted in the head, and
there was a baby in it! Yes, sir, a stark naked baby. It was Dick
Allbright's baby; he owned up and said so.

'"Yes," he says, a-leaning over it, "yes, it is my own lamented darling,
my poor lost Charles William Allbright deceased," says he,--for he could
curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a
mind to, and lay them before you without a jint started, anywheres.
Yes, he said he used to live up at the head of this bend, and one night
he choked his child, which was crying, not intending to kill it,--which
was prob'ly a lie,--and then he was scared, and buried it in a bar'l,
before his wife got home, and off he went, and struck the northern trail
and went to rafting; and this was the third year that the bar'l had
chased him. He said the bad luck always begun light, and lasted till
four men was killed, and then the