As the craft approached, it swung out a little to one side, and they saw that it was a good-sized barge, rowed by six powerful negroes. Four white men sat in the stern sheets, cradling shot-guns in the crook of their arms. They drew up alongside the _Katy Roby_, perhaps twenty yards distant, and at a word of command the blacks rested on their oars. For a moment the occupants of the two boats studied each other in silence. The white men aboard the barge were dressed in the elegant, careless fashion of southern planters. Their faces were unsmiling, very polite, very hard-eyed. One of them nodded. “We’re out after a runaway nigger,” he said, in an even tone. “Maybe you can tell us where he is, suh.” Abe straightened up, towering from the fore deck like a young Goliath. His voice had the ring of steel in it, and his speech, as always at tense moments, was singularly free from the slipshod backwoods dialect. “He’s not aboard here,” he answered, “and as far as we know we haven’t seen him.” There were whispers among the men in the barge. Then the spokesman, with another look at Abe, made an impatient gesture to the rowers, and the craft was speedily under way once more. “What did I tell ye last night?” said Allen, when they were out of earshot. “That’s what all the noise was about on shore. They must ha’ tracked him to the river with bloodhounds. Gosh all fishhooks, Abe! I figgered they was goin’ to search us, sure. Did ye see them guns!” “Yep,” said Abe. “They could ha’ done it fast ’nough if they’d wanted to.” The _Katy Roby_ held her course all day, proceeding at the leisurely gait that seemed so well suited to her buxom lines. The sky grew more and more overcast, and by afternoon a steady drizzle of rain began to fall. There was little to do but stay under cover as much as possible, swap yarns, and play with Poke, now apparently quite at home in his new surroundings. It was during Allen’s trick at the oars, when Tad and Abe were lying under the shelter of a tarpaulin, that the younger boy brought up a subject always close to the surface of his mind. “Abe,” he said, “how long ought it to take that letter of mine to reach New Orleans?” Abe put down the tattered copy of Shakespeare’s tragedies he was reading. “Let’s see,” he pondered. “That was a week ago yesterday we went ashore, up thar. S’pose the steamboat happened along right off the next day, like the store feller said. That would give a week--sartin sure--that’s time enough fer ’em to git to New Orleans, easy. I’ll jest wager your Paw is a-readin’ that letter an’ congratulatin’ hisself right this minute.” “Gee,” sighed the boy, “I’ll feel better when I know for sure that he’s got it and isn’t worrying any longer!”