rt of the city of St. Louis, crowded
with motley and misfit shipping of one sort or other, where our craft
might moor without fear of exciting any suspicion, in spite of our
ominous name; for I had the precaution to lower our flag of the skull
and cross-bones.

I sought out the man most apt to know of any considerable vessels
docking there, and made inquiry for any power yacht one hundred and
twenty-five feet long, white and black ventilators, white hull with
blue line, flying the burgee _Belle Helene_, or some such name. None
could advise me for a time, and I looked in vain, as I had in every
dock in six hundred miles, for the trim hull of my yacht. At last one
old mariner, in rubber boots, himself skipper of a house-boat
south-bound for a winter's trapping, admitted that he had seen such a
craft three days before!

"Did she dock?" I demanded.

"Sure she did, and lay over night. I remember it well enough, for I
saw her tie up; and that evening her owner went ashore and up-town,
and with him his bride, I reckon--handsomest girl in all the town.
They must have been married, for he was lookin' like he owned her.
That was lemme see, two days ago or maybe four. They came aboard her
next morning, all three--there was a old party along, girl's mother
likely--around eleven o'clock, and in a little while cast off and went
on down-river. As fine a boat as ever made the river run--still as a
mouse she was, but quick as a cat, and around Ste. Genevieve, I
reckon, before I got back to my own scow after helping them off here.
No wonder her owner was proud. He stood on the quarter-deck like a
lord. Why shouldn't he, ownin' a boat an' a girl like that?"

"He doesn't own either!" I retorted hotly.

"Why, how do you know he don't?" demanded my sea-going man.

"Who should know, if not myself?"

"Sho! You talk like you owned her!"

"I do own her!"

"It looks like it. Which do you mean--her the yacht, or her the girl?"

"Both--no! That is, well at least I own the boat."

"That may all be, or it all mayn't," he replied, openly scoffing; "at
least so far's the boat goes. Anybody kin buy anything that has the
price. But as to the girl, you'd have to prove it, if I was him. And
if he didn't look like he owned her, or was goin' to, I'll eat your
own gas tank there, an' them two kids in it fer good measure."

Of course I could not argue or explain, and therefore turned away. But
all the answer of my soul came from the lips of L'Ol