The darky led him upstairs to a large, bare room with two beds and a small cot. One of the beds was already occupied by a snoring guest, and the other had a shabby pair of boots beside it. Tad left his satchel under the cot and returned to the lower floor. In the great kitchen just back of the bar he found a long table at one end of which a few river-men were noisily finishing their supper. And sitting down at the other end, he was soon served with hot beef stew and potatoes. The long, cold ride had made him hungry. He did full justice to the meal and arose feeling better. The fiddlers were still playing when he returned to the main room. He watched awhile, then took his cloak and went out of the stuffy atmosphere of the bar into the cool night. A few steps down the hill brought him to the river front, and just below was the big gray shape of a steamboat, tied up at the landing. There were a few lights aboard her, and an occasional rumble of barrels came from the lower deck where sleepy stevedores were loading the last of her cargo for the long voyage down river. Tad saw a small, lighted office at the landward end of the dock and picked his way through and around the scattered piles of freight till he reached it. “I want to take passage to New Orleans,” he said to the sour-visaged clerk. The man continued to write an entry in his book, scowling importantly. Then he cast a slow, scornful glance in the boy’s direction. “To New Orleans,” he replied, “the fare is forty-five dollars-- _forty-five--dollars_--with yer stateroom an’ meals, that is. I reckon you mean Cincinnati or maybe Louisville, don’t you?” “No, New Orleans,” Tad repeated patiently and drew forth his wallet. “Here’s fifty. The name is Thaddeus Hopkins of New York.” Subdued, the clerk gave him his change and his receipt, and Tad climbed the hill once more to Burke Howard’s place with a great sense of being a man of the world. It was not until a half hour later, when he lay in his cot in the big, dark bedroom at the Inn, that his lonesomeness returned. The man in the farther bed snored steadily with a purring sound, and Tad could not go to sleep, try as he would. Instead he lay there thinking of the events of the last few days and of the journey ahead of him. It was amazing to realize that less than a week had passed since he received his father’s letter. Back at the Academy for Young Gentlemen in southern Pennsylvania, where he had spent the last two winters, it had seemed, five days ago, as if the long routine of lessons would never end. And then, one morning, had come the long envelope from New Orleans, addressed in his father’s big, bold hand, and in it had been news! It was in the breast pocket of his coat now, but he did not need to look at it, for he knew it by heart. “Dearest Tad,” his father had written: