tivity,
moved all kinds of merchandise between the boats and the great piles on
the sloping river bank, two long lines of them passing each other on the
bridging gangplanks reaching far ashore. Opposed to this scene of labor
and turmoil was a canoe well offshore, whose two occupants, drifting
with the current, lazily fished for the great channel catfish which the
negro population loved so much.

On a packet, which we will call the _Missouri Belle_, a whistle blew
sharply and as the sound died away several groups of passengers hurried
across the levee, scurrying about like panicky bugs when a log is rolled
over, darting this way and that amid the careless bustle of the traffic,
as eager to reach a place of safety as are chickens affrighted by the
shadow of a drifting hawk. The crowd was cosmopolitan enough to suit the
most exacting critic. Freighters, merchants, hunters, trappers, and
Indians returning to the upper trading posts or to their own country;
gamblers; a frock-coated minister who suspiciously regarded every box
and barrel and bale that he saw rolled up the freight gangplank, and who
was a person of great interest to many pairs of eyes on and off the
boat; a priest; a voluble, chattering group of _coureurs des bois_; a
small crowd of soldiers going up to Fort Leavenworth; emigrants,
boatmen, and travelers made up the hurrying procession or stood at the
rails and watched the confusion on the levee.

Tom joined the animated stream, swinging in behind an elderly gentleman
who escorted a young lady of unflurried demeanor through the maelstrom
of wagons, carts, mules, horses, passengers, and heavily laden negroes.
Caught in a jam and forced to make a quick decision and to follow it
instantly, the young lady dropped her glove in picking up her skirts and
a nervous horse was about to stamp it into the dirt and dust when Tom
leaped forward. Grasping the bridle with one hand, he bent swiftly and
reached for the glove with the other. As he was about to grasp it, a man
dressed in nondescript clothes left his Mexican companion and bent
forward on the other side of the horse, his lean, brown fingers eagerly
outstretched.

Tom's surprise at this unexpected interference acted galvanically and
his hand, turning up from the glove, grasped the thrusting fingers of
the other in a grip which not only was powerful but doubly effective by
its unexpectedness. He swiftly straightened the wrist and forearm of his
rival into perfect