She gave him leave, and when he was gone, she went to her state-room to write as he had suggested. An hour later she gave the newly written letter to the night clerk; and the thing was done.
During the remainder of the slow up-river voyage to St. Louis, Charlotte Farnham lived as one who has fired the fuse of a dynamite charge and is momently braced for the shock of the explosion. Each morning she assured herself that the strange man who could be a self-confessed felon one moment and a chivalrous gentleman the next was still a member of the _Belle Julie's_ crew; but she became a coward of landings, not daring to look on for fear she should see him arrested and taken away.
And while the _Belle Julie_ put landing after landing astern and the voyage grew older, Griswold, too, began to feel the pangs of suspense. Though he had no thought of breaking his promise, the dread of capture and trial and punishment grew until it became a threatening cloud to obscure all horizons. It was to no purpose that he called himself hard names and strove to rise superior to the overshadowing threat. It was there, and it would not be ignored. And when he faced it fairly a new dread arose in his heart; the fear that his fear might end by making him a criminal in fact--a savage to slay and die rather than be taken alive.
In the ordinary course of things, Miss Farnham's letter should have reached New Orleans in time to have procured Griswold's arrest at any one of a score of landings south of Memphis. When the spires of the Tennessee metropolis disappeared to the southward, he began to be afraid that her resolution had failed, and to bewail his broken ideal.
He had no means of knowing that she had given her letter to the night clerk within the hour of their interview on the saloon-deck promenade; nor did he, or any one else, know that it had lain unnoticed and overlooked on the clerk's desk until the _Belle Julie_ reached Cairo. Such, however, was the pregnant fact; and to this purely accidental delay Griswold owed his first sight of the chief city of Missouri lying dim and shadowy under its mantle of coal smoke.
The _Belle Julie_ made her landing in the early evening, and Charlotte was busy up to the last moment getting her own and her aunt's belongings ready for the transfer to the upper river steamer on which they were to complete their journey to Minnesota. Hence, it was not until the _Belle Julie_ was edging her way up to the stone-paved levee that Charlotte broke her self-imposed rule and slipped out upon the port promenade.