Such adventurers pa.s.sed often through his hands and their ways were nothing new.

The fugitives drove hurriedly to the designated house, knocked at the door, were admitted and in a few moments the final act which sealed their fate had been performed.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE DERELICTS

"Born but to banquet and to drain the bowl."

--Homer.

The "Mary Ann" had just returned from a trip to New Orleans, and while waiting for her cargo lay moored at the foot of Broadway. As the quack ascended her gang-plank the captain and mate rose to greet him. There was not on the entire river, where so many extraordinary characters have been evolved, a more remarkable pair.

The captain was five feet four inches in height, round, ruddy, mellow and jocund. A complete absence or suppression of moral sense, together with health as perfect as an animal's, had rendered him insensible to all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He had never shed a tear save in excessive laughter, and sorrow had never yet struck a dart through the armor of fat in which he was sheathed.

The mate was his counterpart and foil. Six feet and three inches tall, he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his const.i.tution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its amus.e.m.e.nts but those of the table, which his poor digestion made more painful than pleasurable, all of its ambitions but those of getting money And all friendships but those of the captain, to whom he was attached like a limpet to a rock.

Such were the leading characteristics of the two worthies who rose from their deck-stools to meet the doctor as he rolled up the gangway.

"Howdy, doctor?" said the mate, in the peculiar drawling vernacular of the poor whites of the south, extending a hand as cold and hard as an anchor.

"Welcome, prince of quacks! For a man who has made so many others walk the plank with poison drugs, you do it but poorly yourself," cried the captain, merrily.

"You will d-d-draw your last breath with a joke, as a d-d-drunkard sips his last drop with a sigh," responded the doctor.

"The captain was born with the corners of his mouth turned up like a dead man's toes," drawled the lugubrious mate.

"Where is the judge?" asked the doctor, hitting the captain a hearty slap on the back.

"He will be here a little later," the host replied.

The three boon companions seated themselves by the gunwale of the vessel, basking in the mellow light of the moon and quaffing the liquor which a negro brought them.

While they were drinking and recalling the many revels which they had held together, an hour pa.s.sed by, and at its close a form was seen coming leisurely down the sloping bank of the river. It was the justice of the peace, come to make merry with the husband of the woman he had just betrayed. Upon that cynical countenance a close observer might have noted even in the pale light of the moon an expression of sardonic pleasure when he returned the hearty greetings with which his coming was hailed.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," he said.

"We have all the b-b-better appet.i.te," responded the doctor.

"If, as the old saw says, the time to eat is when the stomach rings the bell, I am ready!" the captain piped, in his high-pitched voice.

"Diogenes being asked what time a man ought to eat, responded, 'The rich, when he is hungry, and the poor, when he has food,'" said the judge, whose mind threw up old sc.r.a.ps of cla.s.sical knowledge as the ocean throws up sh.e.l.ls.

"As for hunger, my appet.i.te is sharper than a scythe; but my indigestion is duller than a whetstone," said the mate, to whom a feast was always prophetic of subsequent fasting.

"Good digestion waits on appet.i.te; but waits too long, eh?" the judge replied.

The captain led the way to the cabin. It was a low, dingy room, but ruddy with the light of a dozen tallow candles. On the table was spread a feast that would have tempted the palates of the epicures who gathered about the festive board of the immortal Lucullus. There was neither art nor display in the accompaniments of the food, but every luxury that an ample market could supply had been prepared by a cook who could have won immortality in a Paris restaurant, and the finest whisky that could be distilled in old Kentucky, the rarest wines that could be imported from the Rhine or from sunny Italian slopes, were ready to flow.

Four slaves received the banqueters and then took their places behind the chairs at the table. The captain's face was shining like a full moon; the doctor's was swarthy, sinister and piratical; the judge's possessed the dignity of a splendid ruin; the mate's was haunted by an expression of unsatisfied and insatiable desire. Observing it and calling the attention of the others, the justice remarked, "Like the old Romans, we have a skeleton at our table to remind us of death."

"You would look like death yourself if you had to sit staring at these bounties like a muzzled dog in a market," snarled the mate.

"Be like the dyspeptic who was about to be hanged," said the doctor.

"The sheriff asked him to make his last request. 'I will have a dozen hot waffles well b-b-b.u.t.tered; and let there be a _full_ dozen, for I shall not suffer from the cramps t-t-this time,' says he."

The first few courses of the feast were eaten in almost uninterrupted silence; but as the keen edge of their appet.i.tes became a little dulled, the tongues of the banqueters were unloosed and a torrent of talk began to flow, interlarded with oaths and stories of a more than questionable character. Corks popped from bottles with loud explosions, the darkies greeted the sallies of wit with boisterous laughter and surrept.i.tiously emptied the gla.s.ses.

The fun grew fast and furious, the thoughts of the revelers flowing in the usual channels of such feasts. At a certain pitch of this wild frenzy, a desire for music invariably recurs and so at a signal from the captain the slaves who performed the functions of deck-hands, waiters or musicians as the exigencies of the occasion demanded, brought in their musical instruments and the rafters were soon ringing with their simple melodies to the accompaniment of banjos and guitars. The deep rich voices blended harmoniously with the tingle of the stringed instruments and the clicking of the bones. Plantation songs were followed by revival hymns, and these by coa.r.s.e and licentious ditties. At a second stage of every orgie, desire for the dance is kindled by music, and so, at the command of their master, two of the slaves began to execute a "double shuffle."

The clatter and the beating of negro feet to the accompaniment of the banjo and the bones, and the shouting of the spectators gave vent to the boisterous emotions of the revelers. Even the melancholy mate caught the enthusiasm, and for a time at least forgot his misery. Of them all, the judge alone preserved his gravity. He sat looking unmoved at these wild antics, and murmured to himself:

"If music be the food of love, play on.

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appet.i.te may sicken and so die.

That strain again! It had a dying fall.

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets Stealing and giving odor."

Nothing could be more horrible than the sight of this gifted man herding with these beasts. It was like a lion devouring carrion with wolves.

Aside from the pleasure of the palate, his enjoyment of the scene was derived from the cynical contempt with which he regarded it. Having descended to the lowest depths of human degradation, he had arrived at a point where he drew his keenest relish from the inconsistencies, the absurdities and the sufferings of his fellow-men. In order that he might behold a scene in which all the elements of the horribly grotesque were combined, he determined to provoke the egotism and complacency of the quack to the very highest activity at this moment when his fortunes and his hopes were being undermined.

After the excitement of the dance had abated, the concluding phase of all such orgies came in its inevitable sequence, and they began to drink great b.u.mpers to each other's health. After all had been pledged, the judge proposed a toast to the "gypsy bride."

The tongue of the quack was loosened in an instant and he poured forth an extravagant eulogy of her beauty and her devotion.

"If she were mine, I should be on the ragged edge with jealousy every hour of the day and night," said the judge, as they set their gla.s.ses down.

"Y-y-you'd have reason to! B-b-but I'm a horse of a different c-c-color, old boy! W-w-women have p-p-preferences," the doctor replied, pulling out the ends of his mustache and winking at the captain and his mate, who stupidly nodded their appreciation of the hit.

"When honeysuckles close their petals to hummingbirds, Venus will shut the door on Adonis," responded the judge, draining his gla.s.s and smiling into its depths.

The quack was too far gone in his cups to comprehend or even to be curious as to the significance of this sneer and went on sounding his own virtues and Pepeeta's beauty while the judge provoked him to the fullest exhibition of his colossal vanity. He took a sinister delight in drawing him out. It was the pleasure of a cat playing with the mouse, which it is about to devour, or of savages mocking the man who is about to run the gauntlet. He exulted in the contrast of this proud man's present confidence, and the humiliation which awaited him within the next few hours.

The quack was an easy victim. His career of prosperity had met with but a single serious interruption and he had so entirely forgotten his dangerous sickness in his perfect health that he was seldom troubled by foreboding as to the future. Never had he possessed more confidence of life than at the very moment when all his hopes, all his confidence, all his faith, were about to be shattered.

Our misfortunes draw a train of shadows behind them; but they often project a glowing light before them. Sickness is often preceded by the most bounding health, failure by unexampled success, misery by irrepressible emotions of exultation. Too bright a sunshine as well as too dark a shadow is often the herald of a storm upon the sea of life.

But ebullitions of happiness and confidence did not excite the apprehension of the quack. Each b.u.mper of wine was followed by a new outburst of vanity. The captain and the mate had already succ.u.mbed to the potent influence of the liquors which they had been drinking, and amidst his maudlin speeches the quack's tongue was becoming hopelessly tangled.

The judge was as sober as at the beginning of the feast and with a smile upon his lips in which cynicism was incarnate, waited until the doctor had just begun to snore and then aroused him by another question.

"Who is this paragon of virtue to whom you so confidently trust the chast.i.ty of your wife?"

"This w-w-what?"

"This paragon of virtue--this ice-cold Adonis?"