is gratitude. He thought
he understood now the reason of his visitor's strange and varying
moods--even his bitter superstitious warning in regard to the probable
curse entailed upon one who should save a drowning man. Of this he
recked little; enough that he fancied that Captain Jack's concern in
his illness was heightened by that fear, and this assurance of his
protecting friendship thrilled him with pleasure.

There was no reason now why he should not at once go back to his farm,
where, at least, Captain Jack would always find him; and he did so,
returning on the same boat. He was now fully recovered from his illness,
and calmer in mind; he redoubled his labors to put himself in a position
to help the mysterious fugitive when the time should come. The remote
farm should always be a haven of refuge for him, and in this hope he
forbore to take any outside help, remaining solitary and alone, that
Captain Jack's retreat should be inviolate. And so the long, dry season
passed, the hay was gathered, the pasturing herds sent home, and the
first rains, dimpling like shot the broadening surface of the river,
were all that broke his unending solitude. In this enforced attitude of
waiting and expectancy he was exalted and strengthened by a new idea. He
was not a religious man, but, dimly remembering the exhortations of some
camp meeting of his boyhood, he conceived the idea that he might have
been selected to work out the regeneration of Captain Jack. What might
not come of this meeting and communing together in this lonely spot?
That anything was due to the memory of the murdered sheriff, whose bones
were rotting in the trench that he daily but unconcernedly passed, did
not occur to him. Perhaps his mind was not large enough for the double
consideration. Friendship and love--and, for the matter of that,
religion--are eminently one-ideaed.

But one night he awakened with a start. His hand, which was hanging out
of his bunk, was dabbling idly in water. He had barely time to spring
to his middle in what seemed to be a slowly filling tank before the door
fell out as from that inward pressure, and his whole shanty collapsed
like a pack of cards. But it fell outwards, the roof sliding from over
his head like a withdrawn canopy; and he was swept from his feet against
it, and thence out into what might have been another world! For the
rain had ceased, and the full moon revealed only one vast, illimitable
expanse of water! It was not a