us, found the door locked and the window
open. But both men--Jack Despard and Seth Hall, the sheriff--weren't
to be found. Not a trace of 'em. The boat was searched, but all for
nothing. The idea is that the sheriff, arter getting his prisoner
comf'ble in the stateroom, took off Jack's handcuffs and locked the
door; that Jack, who was mighty desp'rate, bolted through the window
into the river, and the sheriff, who was no slouch, arter him.
Others allow--for the chairs and things was all tossed about in the
stateroom--that the two men clinched THAR, and Jack choked Hall and
chucked him out, and then slipped cl'ar into the water himself, for the
stateroom window was just ahead of the paddle box, and the cap'n allows
that no man or men could fall afore the paddles and live. Anyhow, that
was all they ever knew of it."

"And there wasn't no trace of them found?" said the second man, after a
long pause.

"No. Cap'n says them paddles would hev' just snatched 'em and slung 'em
round and round and buried 'em way down in the ooze of the river bed,
with all the silt of the current atop of 'em, and they mightn't come up
for ages; or else the wheels might have waltzed 'em way up to Sacramento
until there wasn't enough left of 'em to float, and dropped 'em when the
boat stopped."

"It was a mighty fool risk for a man like Despard to take," resumed the
second speaker as he turned away with a slight yawn.

"Bet your life! but he was desp'rate, and the sheriff had got him sure!
And they DO say that he was superstitious, like all them gamblers, and
allowed that a man who was fixed to die by a rope or a pistol wasn't to
be washed out of life by water."

The two figures drifted lazily away, but Morse sat rigid and motionless.
Yet, strange to say, only one idea came to him clearly out of this awful
revelation--the thought that his friend was still true to him--and that
his strange absence and mysterious silence were fully accounted for and
explained. And with it came the more thrilling fancy that this man was
alive now to HIM alone.

HE was the sole custodian of his secret. The morality of the question,
while it profoundly disturbed him, was rather in reference to its effect
upon the chances of Captain Jack and the power it gave his enemies than
his own conscience. He would rather that his friend should have proven
the proscribed outlaw who retained an unselfish interest in him than the
superior gentleman who was coldly wiping out h