"You heard. He's a funny little cuss; like you, a trifle puny. Has coughin' fits. Coughs six times each fit. Spits up a chunk o' lead ev'y time he coughs. Want to see him?" Lucian's unaffrighted eyes blazed down, though his reply was as if to himself. "Great God! if my brother----" "Oh," kindly said the Californian, "he ain't fur off. Go, get him. I'll follow you, lock-step." Lucian turned and went, the speaker adding as he followed close: "Ladder's no place for scienced fighting, you know." They found Julian, evidently waiting, on the passenger guards just forward of the pantry gangway. But before words could be exchanged the cub pilot came along by way of the main staircase, escorting the physician from the lower deck. The latter passed on up the wheel-house steps to the roof, but the "cub" hung back. "California" faced him. "What's the fraction? The captain?" The youth nodded. His inquirer waved him away. "All right. I'll come. You go on." The boy complied. Julian had swelled for encounter, but a warning look from Lucian checked him and he let the Californian speak first. "Here," said the gold-digger, "I'm fixed. You're not. True, I could loan you the twin to mine, but----" Julian's lip curled. "'But'--you're not hungry to fight." "Oh, other things being equal, I have an appetite! Yes, sir-ee, Bob Hoss-Fly, and a red dog under the wheelbarrow! But"--smiling again--"let's do things in scientific order. You two claim that you Hayle folks own that forty-year-old white gal down-stairs which you call a runaway niggeh, and which we'll allow she is one. Well, I'll buy you two's share in her--providing I can buy the rest of her from your two ladies up-stairs--and fight you afterward or not as the case may require. Now, what'll you take for your said two shares, right here, cash down, gold; not dust but coin, New Orleans Branch Mint? Going at--what do I hear?" The spendthrift pair stared on each other, thinking with all their might. But they failed to think that on the deck above them, in group with Mrs. Gilmore, Hugh, the parson's wife, Ramsey, and old Joy, the ownership of Phyllis was being fully set forth by their mother to their own whilom champions the senator and the general, or that Ramsey was about to be sent down to the stateroom of the mother and daughter for documentary evidence. "What do I hear?" repeated the Californian, watching his own hands as the right drew double-eagles from his belt and stacked them in the left.