He led her back to her chair, and was not sorry that he had done so when he opened the door into the hall and saw there all the negro watchmen, trembling and agitated, with a look of abject terror shown in the swinging chandelier. “No, no! Nathan,—I am astonished at you. You know that a dead man cannot knock at the door! No, Bob! You can’t have the dugout. I have got it chained and padlocked. If you leave us here, you will have to swim. Seth—you, too! It _must_ be a drift log. I am going to see. I might have been afraid of that man alive, but I have got a cinch on him, sure, now that he is dead. Nobody in the house knows that he is there, but Reginald and me. You tell that fat old cook in the kitchen that the Mississippi River hasn’t swept him away from here, or that the other pirates didn’t take him with them, and she’ll die of fright. I should want no ghost of her size after me, if I were you. Keep quiet here and I’ll see.” It proved to be a drift log, and with the aid of a stout cane Desmond leaned over the railing and pushed it clear of the entrance to the house. The body of the flatboat-man had not yet risen, and as the log was on the surface, it struck against the floor of the veranda. Unluckily, as it floated down a little farther on, it caught in the angle between the flooring and the projection of the steps, and there it swung on the oscillations of the current,—knock, knock, knock,—and there it was destined to hang and, as if it were the dead man clamoring for admittance, knock, knock, knock in a dull monotone at intervals all the livelong night. Desmond could not rally his energies again for a show of cheerful spirits. He could no longer direct the trivial conversation and evolve ebullitions of satisfaction and pleasure. Despite his gratitude for the crowning mercy of his rescue of the household, he had a sentiment of infinite repugnance for the taking of life, necessary, justifiable, even laudable though it was. That dull knock, knock, knocking at the door where lay the man he had killed beat upon more sensitive nerves than he had yet known he possessed, and set them all a-quiver. When Desmond induced the negroes to return to their posts, old Joel made a great show of self-ridicule and abasement that so little a matter should have shaken his equilibrium. “’Fore Gawd, boss, I done turned fool, fur a fack! _Drift log!_ Gawd A’mighty! I wuz cradled in a _drift log_! I been paddlin’ in dugout hollowed out’n _drift log_ dese six or seben hunderd years. I been loadin’ up an’ firin’ powder fur Chris’mus in de _drift log_—Lawd! eber sence Noah fust went a-wadin’ in de overflow. An’ now—done took a skeer ob a _drift log_! Ye-all will have ter hire somebody to wait on de table at Great Oaks besides a _dee_stracted ole nigger whut is afeard ob a _drift log_.”