imes
he scarcely cared to--and speculated upon ending his sufferings by a
quick plunge downward. In other moments of lucid misery he was conscious
of having wandered in his mind; of having seen the dead face of the
murdered sheriff, washed out of his shallow grave by the flood, staring
at him from the water; to this was added the hallucination of noises. He
heard voices, his own name called by a voice he knew--Captain Jack's!

Suddenly he started, but in that fatal movement lost his balance and
plunged downward. But before the water closed above his head he had had
a cruel glimpse of help near him; of a flashing light--of the black
hull of a tug not many yards away--of moving figures--the sensation of
a sudden plunge following his own, the grip of a strong hand upon his
collar, and--unconsciousness!

When he came to he was being lifted in a boat from the tug and rowed
through the deserted streets of a large city, until he was taken in
through the second-story window of a half-submerged hotel and cared
for. But all his questions yielded only the information that the
tug--a privately procured one, not belonging to the Public Relief
Association--had been dispatched for him with special directions, by a
man who acted as one of the crew, and who was the one who had plunged in
for him at the last moment. The man had left the boat at Stockton.
There was nothing more? Yes!--he had left a letter. Morse seized it
feverishly. It contained only a few lines:

We are quits now. You are all right. I have saved YOU from drowning, and
shifted the curse to my own shoulders. Good-by.

CAPTAIN JACK.

The astounded man attempted to rise--to utter an exclamation--but fell
back, unconscious.

Weeks passed before he was able to leave his bed--and then only as an
impoverished and physically shattered man. He had no means to restock
the farm left bare by the subsiding water. A kindly train-packer offered
him a situation as muleteer in a pack train going to the mountains--for
he knew tracks and passes and could ride. The mountains gave him back
a little of the vigor he had lost in the river valley, but none of its
dreams and ambitions. One day, while tracking a lost mule, he stopped
to slake his thirst in a waterhole--all that the summer had left of a
lonely mountain torrent. Enlarging the hole to give drink to his beast
also, he was obliged to dislodge and throw out with the red soil some
bits of honeycomb rock, which were so queer-lo