guards just
forward of the pantry gangway. But before words could be exchanged the
cub pilot came along by way of the main staircase, escorting the
physician from the lower deck. The latter passed on up the wheel-house
steps to the roof, but the "cub" hung back. "California" faced him.

"What's the fraction? The captain?"

The youth nodded. His inquirer waved him away.

"All right. I'll come. You go on." The boy complied.

Julian had swelled for encounter, but a warning look from Lucian checked
him and he let the Californian speak first.

"Here," said the gold-digger, "I'm fixed. You're not. True, I could loan
you the twin to mine, but----"

Julian's lip curled. "'But'--you're not hungry to fight."

"Oh, other things being equal, I have an appetite! Yes, sir-ee, Bob
Hoss-Fly, and a red dog under the wheelbarrow! But"--smiling
again--"let's do things in scientific order. You two claim that you
Hayle folks own that forty-year-old white gal down-stairs which you call
a runaway niggeh, and which we'll allow she is one. Well, I'll buy you
two's share in her--providing I can buy the rest of her from your two
ladies up-stairs--and fight you afterward or not as the case may
require. Now, what'll you take for your said two shares, right here,
cash down, gold; not dust but coin, New Orleans Branch Mint? Going
at--what do I hear?"

The spendthrift pair stared on each other, thinking with all their
might. But they failed to think that on the deck above them, in group
with Mrs. Gilmore, Hugh, the parson's wife, Ramsey, and old Joy, the
ownership of Phyllis was being fully set forth by their mother to their
own whilom champions the senator and the general, or that Ramsey was
about to be sent down to the stateroom of the mother and daughter for
documentary evidence.

"What do I hear?" repeated the Californian, watching his own hands as
the right drew double-eagles from his belt and stacked them in the left.

Eagerly asking themselves what might be their tempter's motive, the pair
thought primarily of the white slave's well-preserved beauty and the
rarity of women in the far West. With that came a stinging remembrance
of her glaring Hayle likeness and then of their father's old
scheme--averted by their mother--to sell the girl forever out of sight
and reach. And then came the pleasanter thought that at any rate here
was a chance to put this daredevil at odds with the hated Gilmores as
well as with their own mother and sist