It may be that my fondness for these less obvious things in the law

had rendered me a trifle different from my fellow men. I could never

approach any question in life without wanting to go all about it and

to the bottom and top, like a cooper with his barrel. I was thus

actuated, without doubt, in my relations years since with Helena

Emory--I knew the shrewdness and accuracy of my own trained mind. I

confess I exulted in the infallible, relentless logic of my mind, a

mind able and well trained, especially well trained in reason and

argument. So, when I put the one great brief of all my life before

Helena, my splendid argument why should she love me, I did so, at

first, in the conviction that it must be convincing. Had I not myself

worked it out in each detail, had not my calm, cool, accurate reason

guarded each portal? Was it, indeed, not a perfect brief--that one I

held in my first lost case--the lost case which sent me out of my

profession, left me a stranded hulk of a man?

But then, when these two pirate youngsters had found me and touched me

with the living point of some new flame of life, so that I knew a vast

world existed beyond the nature of the intellect, the old ways clung

to me, after all. Even as I swore to lay hold on youth and on

adventure (and on love, if, in sooth, that might be for me now), I

could not fight as yet wholly bare of the old weapons that had so long

fitted my hand. So, even on that very morning when we set forth from

my farm to be pirates, my mind ran back to its old cunning, and I

recalled my earlier boast to myself that if I ever cared to be a

criminal I knew I could be able to cover my tracks.

Those writing-folk, therefore, who now wasted thousands of dollars in

pursuit of trace and trail of Black Bart, wealthy ex-lawyer, knew

nothing of their man, and guessed nothing of his caliber or of his

methods. They even failed to look in plain sight for their trail

maker. And having done so, they forgot that water leaves no trail. Yet

that simple thought had come to my mind as I had sat at breakfast in

my own house, some weeks before this time! Even then I had planned all

this.

Absorbed as I had been in this pursuit of Helena, baffled as I had

been by her, unhappy as I now was over her own unhappiness, fierce as

was my love for her, still and notwithstanding, some trace of my old

self clung to me even now when, her hand on my arm, I guided Helena in

silence over the creaking planks of the dock, and saw, at last, dim

beyond the edge, the boom of the Mississippi's tawny flood, rolling on

and onward to the sea. Here was a task, a problem, a chase, an

endeavor, an adventure! To it, I was impelled by my old training; into

it I was thrust by all these fevers of the blood. Even though she did

not love me, she was woman ... in the dark air of night, it seemed to

me, I could smell the faint maddening fragrance of her hair.... No. It

was too late! I would not release her. I would go on, now!




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