Lucien Royce remembered that he had been secretly perturbed after this, for he knew that Grayson drank to excess and talked wildly in his cups; and although, in view of his own safety, he would hardly have cared to make public the character of his charge, he realized with positive dismay that it might be fatal to the interests of the firm should he encounter some legal process at the wharf in St. Louis, the result of this discovery. But he was simple-hearted, after all. He did not suspect John Grayson of aught dishonorable. To the world at large he seemed a fine young fellow, of excellent forbears, merely sowing his wild oats,--a crop which many men have harvested in early years with scant profit, it is true, but without derogation to common honesty and repute. Royce subsequently sought to urge in compassion for his friend that the turpitude of the crime was insomuch the less that it was not deliberate and premeditated. Certain it was that Grayson’s cry of amazement and his plunge toward the guards were very like the precipitancy of dismay when he found that the huge boat was sheering off; she was turning as he dashed down the stair, and was headed once more on her course when he realized that in their conviviality he and his friend had failed to hear the sonorous panting of the engines again astir, the jangling of the bell, the heavy plashing of the buckets striking the water as the wheels revolved anew, and that the landing was now a mile down the river. The captain showed much polite concern when the two young men resorted hastily to the “texas” and found him seated at a table, eying, with an air of great cunning and a robust intention to solve the mystery forthwith, a silver dollar which was securely invested under an inverted glass goblet, and which, so far as his powers were capable of extricating it thence, save by the rule of thumb, as it were, was the safest silver dollar ever known. He desisted from this occupation for the moment to master the new perplexity that confronted him, and to express his most affable and ceremonious regret; for his boat carried all the cotton shipped from the rich sister’s plantation, and the dictates of policy aided his constitutionally kindly disposition. “Why, I wouldn’t have kidnapped you this way for”--his eye fell on the bit of silver shining through the goblet--“for a dollar,” he concluded modestly. “I’ll put you ashore in the yawl, if you like. I would turn down-stream and land again, but”--he faced half round from the table, with the lightness characteristic of some portly men, and sat with one hand on the back of the chair, and the other on the goblet--“but the truth is I’m running pretty much on one wheel; there was an accident to the other before we were a hundred miles from New Orleans, and with this wind blowing straight across the river it’s mighty difficult getting out from the left bank; she can hardly climb against the current.”