native of taking the captain into her
confidence was rejected at once as being too hazardous. For the captain
might not scruple to take the matter into his own hands without
ceremony, sending the suspected man back to New Orleans to establish his
innocence--if he could.

Charlotte worried over the wretched entanglement all day, and was so
distrait and absent-minded that her aunt remarked it, naming it malaria
and prescribing quinine. Whereat Charlotte dissembled and put on a mask
of cheerfulness, keeping it on until after the evening meal and her
aunt's early retiring. But when she was released, she was glad enough to
go out on the promenade just forward of the starboard paddle-box, where
there were no after-dinner loungers, to be alone with her problem and
free to plunge once more into its intricacies.

It was possibly ten minutes later, while she stood leaning against a
stanchion and watching the lights of a distant town rise out of the
watery horizon ahead, that chance, the final arbiter in so many human
involvements, led her quickly into the valley of decision. She heard a
man's step on the steeply pitched stair leading down from the
hurricane-deck. Before she could turn away he was confronting her; the
man whose name on the _Belle Julie's_ crew roster was John Wesley
Gavitt.

XI

THE ANARCHIST

Griswold's appearance was less fortuitous than it seemed to be. As a
reward of merit for having saved the mate's life, he had been told off
to serve temporarily as man-of-all-work for the day pilot, who chanced
to be without a steersman. His watch in the pilot-house was over, and he
was on his way to the crew's quarters below when he stumbled upon Miss
Farnham. Mindful of his earlier slip, he passed her as if she had been
invisible. She let him go until her opportunity was all but lost; then,
plucking courage out of the heart of desperation, she spoke.

"One moment, if you please; I--I want to ask you something," she
faltered; and he wheeled obediently and faced her.

Followed a pause, inevitable, but none the less awkward for the one who
was responsible. Griswold felt, rather than saw, her embarrassment, and
was generous enough to try to help her.

"I think I know what you wish to say: you are quite at liberty to say
it," he offered, when the pause had grown into an obstacle which she
seemed powerless to surmount.

"Do you? I have been hoping you wouldn't," was the quick rejoinder.
Then: "Will you tell m