“Oh, horrible! Horrible!” Hugh Treherne cried, poignantly. “Do you wonder now that I have forgotten? _I_ can only wonder that I remember anything. They pretend that it was the wound at Franklin--the injury to the medulla substance.” “Hugh! Hugh!” the old Colonel was near to falling into the marshy slough at his feet. “You don’t mean--you can’t mean--the--asylum--the private sanatorium for the insane. Oh, my poor boy, my poor boy. Wait, wait, give me your hand, I shall fall, wait, wait.” But there were sudden voices on the wind, calling here, calling there. Colonel Kenwynton heard his own name, but he did not respond. He only sought to detain his old comrade in his endearing clasp. The younger man was the stronger. Treherne wrested himself away, though not without repeated efforts, seized the paddle, pushed off the dug-out, and in a moment was lost in the gloom, for the moon was down, mists were rising from the low-lying borders of a bayou delta, and the frail craft was invisible on the face of the waters. Colonel Kenwynton was not devoid of a certain kind of policy. He rallied his composure, realizing that the Captain of the steamboat had been alarmed by his absence on this precarious spot which the sound of his voice had betrayed, and before the emissaries sent out to seek him had reached the old man he had determined on his line of conduct. He maintained a studied reticence, the more easily since Treherne’s presence had not been observed to excite curiosity and he himself was in a state of exhaustion and cold that precluded more than a shivering gasp in reply to questions. For he was determined to take counsel within himself before he indulged in explanations. He said to himself that he could better afford misconstruction of his conduct as some fantastic freak of drunkenness than run the risk of divulging the interests of another man to his possible detriment,--this man, who had so obviously, so appealingly suffered. He steeled himself in this, although he loved the approval, or rather the admiration, of his fellows, and he felt that his position in some sort forfeited it, not being aware how thoroughly established he was as a public favorite, so that, indeed, he could hardly incur reprobation. “Ain’t the old Colonel game--must have been tight as a drum last night,” the Captain said to the clerk. “He was making the tow-head fairly sing when I heard him, luckily enough.” Then to the Boots, who was looking from one to the other of the miry shoes into which he had thrust each hand: “Take his clothes and get them dried and pressed and see that you are careful about it. Colonel Kenwynton shall have the best service aboard as long as I have a plank afloat.”