"I don't reckon any one'll drap down to-day," Slip muttered, looking up
the river.

"We'll keep our eyes open," Buck replied. "You needn't to worry, you're
plumb worn out, Slip. Git to bed, now, an' I'll slick up around."

It was a cold, dry gale. From sharp gusts with near calms between the
wind grew till it was a steady, driving storm that flattened against the
shanty-boat sides, and whistled and roared through the trees up the
bank. And instead of dying down at dusk, it increased so much that the
big acetylene light was not hung out, and if any one came down to the
opposite shore he saw that there would be no game that night.

Buck went in and sat down by the wounded man's bed, giving him the
medicines Doctor Grell had left. For the attentions Prebol, in lucid
intervals, showed wondering looks of gratitude, like an ugly dog which
has been trapped and then set free. What he had suffered during the
night even he could hardly recall in the enfeebled condition of his
mind, but the spoonfuls of broth, the medicine that thrilled his body,
the man's very companionship, lending strength, took away the feeling of
despair which a man in the extremities of anguish and alone in the world
finds hardest to resist.

Buck, sitting there, gazed at the wan countenance, studying it. Prebol
had forgotten, but when Buck first arrived on the river, the pirate, a
much younger man then, had carelessly and perhaps for display told the
stranger and softpaw many things about the river which were useful. It
occurred to Buck that he was now paying back a debt of gratitude.

Something boiled up in his thoughts, and he swore to himself that
he owed nothing, that the world owed him, and he bridged the years of
his disappointment and desolation back to the hour when he had stormed
out of the life he had known, to come down the Mississippi to be a
gambler. Prebol, in his lapses into delirium, called a woman's name,
Sadie--always Sadie! And if he would have cursed that name in his
consciousness, out of the depths of his soul it came with softness and
gentleness of affection.

Buck wondered what Jest Prebol had done to Sadie that she had driven him
down there, and he cursed with his own lips, while he stifled in the
depths of his own soul another name. His years, his life, had been
wasted, just as this man Prebol's life was wasted, just as Slip's life
was being wasted. Buck gave himself over to the exquisite torture of
memories and reflections