“Government be sugared! She wasn’t the right build, to start with. Besides, if Government knew this channel at all, you bet it’d be said so in all the papers. And _she_ did know it, or she wouldn’t have gone buzzing past at six knots without a leadsman. Seems to me someone’s split, and she’s some darned Britisher come to cut out our game for themselves.” “You tire me. Plume-hunting’s illegal by these bub-bub-blessed bird laws, and so’s selling whisky to Injuns. As it is, we’ve trouble enough to sneak in and out of the ’Glades in this sus-sus-sus-s-s-lip of a sloop, so how in snakes d’you expect they’d do it in a thousand-ton——” Here the man’s infirmity blocked his speech for a minute. He snarled out: “Oh, I’ve no use for a blank puttyhead like you!” Hank laughed, and put tobacco into his mouth. “Go it!” he said—“go it, right close to the end if you like; but bring up short of that, or I’ll gouge you, sure’s death!” The steersman grinned a spasm of fury. He longed much to use again the unpardonable phrase, but he forbore. He felt that his friend would be as good as his word. So he ceased from speech altogether, and a negro on the fore-deck enlivened the silence with the Jordan Hymn, giving full value to every possible shake and turn. A porpoise surged past them, making for the open after a day’s fresh-water fishing, and once or twice an alligator’s eyebrows and snout showed like knots of black wood floating up against the current, for this was territory where the skin-hunter’s rifle had not scared them altogether into night-work. The sloop’s pace up-stream was small and it was not till just before nightfall that she rounded a cape where high black pines stood up like soldiers on parade around the water’s edge, and there saw the intruder. The steamer was grounded on a sandbank athwart the stream, and lay, with a two-foot list, away from the current. Not until they were close aboard of her could those on the sloop see the gold lettering on her counter. “B-b-both lifeboats gone! Say, that’s rum!” “‘_Port Edes_, of London,’” Hank read. “_Port Edes_? I seem to know that name.” He swung his long legs down over the cabin doorway, and sat staring at his companion with open-mouthed wonder. “Hallo, Nutt!” he said, “what’s wrong now! I haven’t seen you wear that kind o’ face before. You couldn’t look pleaseder if I’d said your rich uncle had gone dead. There’s no pards of ours aboard of her, is there?” The one-eyed man’s face was lit up with an unholy joy. “Don’t you know?” he stuttered out. “The biz was in all the papers. That steamboat was bringing out half a million of sovereigns. Her port was New Orleans; and she’s got here. By gum, I s’pose they think they’re going to s-s-steal it all by themselves.” “Steal? What do you mean?” “Oh, you idiot! What would they come here at all for if it was all right?” “Who’s they?” inquired Hank.