The exploit was so well bruited abroad that the senior member of the firm, who had been a friend as well as a partner of his father’s, had given him what the old gentleman was pleased to term a “remonstrance,” and what he himself denominated a “blistering.” “Mark my words,” had been its conclusion, “that fellow Grayson will ruin you.” Was it possible that this prophet of evil would fail to note the fulfillment of the prognostication? Would this event give no color to the supposition that he had been gambling with the money, that Grayson had won it, and then was drowned and robbed? Oh, why, why had he so struggled to save his wretched life? The terrors of the water no longer shook his nerves. As he noted the trembling of the little craft,--the flimsiest thing, he thought, that he had ever seen afloat,--he said to himself that it would be the luckiest chance that had ever befallen him should the flatboat suddenly disintegrate, timber from timber, on the swelling centre of the tide, engulfing him never to rise again. “I would not move a hand to save my life. I wish I were dead,” he said, his white face turned to the wall. “I wish I were dead.” And then he realized that he had his wish. He was dead. For the flatboatmen were talking again, with a morbid revolving around the subject. From their disjointed dialogue it appeared that the “stiff” was not on the sand-bar now; it had been removed in obedience to a telegram from a firm in St. Louis,--Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, cotton commission merchants. One of their clerks had come down by train on the other side of the river, “nigh tore up” about the belt and the loss of the money. He recognized the dead man by his clothes, and the color of his hair and eyes,--“there was no other way to know him, he was such a s’prisin’ bruised-up sight.” This clerk had once given the man a meerschaum pipe that was in the breast-pocket yet, and some papers were dried off, and read and identified. He was shipped by train. They would bury him where he came from. The firm and its employees would turn out, probably, and do the handsome thing. “Good for trade, I reckon,” remarked the proprietor of the flatboat store, with an appreciation of sentiment as an agent of profit. “What’s the man’s name?” demanded the other. “He never left no name as I heard. He loafed round Kyarter’s sto’ over thar in the bend awhile, an’ a nigger rowed him over in a dug-out to see the stiff, an’ he give his orders an’ put out fur the up-country quick.” “I ain’t talkin’ ’bout _him_. I mean the stiff. What was the stiff’s name?” “Oh, Royce. Lucien Royce,--that’s the stiff’s name. Lucien Leonard Royce.” And thus it was that the juggler realized that he was dead.