It was dark as pitch there; but I said, in a kind of a coarse
whisper, "Jim !" and he answered up, right at my elbow, with a sort of a
moan, and I says:
"Quick, Jim, it ain't no time for fooling around and moaning; there's a
gang of murderers in yonder, and if we don't hunt up their boat and set
her drifting down the river so these fellows can't get away from the wreck
there's one of 'em going to be in a bad fix. But if we find their boat we
can put ALL of 'em in a bad fix-for the sheriff 'll get 'em. Quick-hurry!
I'll hunt the labboard side, you hunt the stabboard. You start at the
raft, and-"
"Oh, my lordy, lordy! RAF'? Dey ain' no raf' no mo'; she done broke
loose en gone I-en here we is!"


Chapter XIII.

WELL, I catched my breath and most fainted. Shut up on a wreck with
such a gang as that! But it warn't no time to be sentimentering. We'd GOT
to find that boat now-had to have it for ourselves. So we went a-quaking
and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, too-seemed a
week before we got to the stern. No sign of a boat. Jim said he didn't
believe he could go any further-so scared he hadn't hardly any strength
left, he said. But I said, come on, if we get left on this wreck we are in
a fix, sure. So on we prowled again. We struck for the stern of the texas,
and found it, and then scrabbled along forwards on the skylight, hanging
on from shutter to shutter, for the edge of the skylight was in the water.
When we got pretty close to the cross-hall door there was the skiff, sure
enough! I could just barely see her. I felt ever so thankful. In another
second I would a been aboard of her, but just then the door opened. One of
the men stuck his head out only about a couple of foot from me, and I
thought I was gone; but he jerked it in again, and says:
"Heave that blame lantern out o' sight, Bill!"
He flung a bag of something into the boat, and then got in himself and
set down. It was Packard. Then Bill HE come out and got in. Packard says,
in a low voice:
"All ready-shove off!"
I couldn't hardly hang on to the shutters, I was so weak. But Bill says:
"Hold on-'d you go through him?"
"No. Didn't you?"
"No. So he's got his share o' the cash yet."
"Well, then, come along; no use to take truck and leave money."
"Say, won't he suspicion what we're up to?"
"Maybe he won't. But we got to have it anyway. Come along."
So they got out and went in.
The door slammed to because it was on the careened side; and in a half
second I was in the boat, and Jim come tumbling after me. I out with my
knife and cut the rope, and away we went!
We didn't touch an oar, and we didn't speak nor whisper, nor hardly
even breathe. We went gliding swift along, dead silent, past the tip of
the paddlebox, and past the stern; then in a second or two more we was a
hundred yards below the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every last
sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it.
When we was three or four hundred yards downstream we see the lantern
show like a little spark at the texas door for a second, and we knowed by
that that the rascals had missed their boat, and was beginning to
understand that they was in just as much trouble now as Jim Turner was.
Then Jim manned the oars, and we took out after our raft. Now was the
first time that I begun to worry about the men-I reckon I h

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... He had been to the house or something. But it might have been when I
was a little girl, and so I wasn't offended that he didn't recognize me.
The stewardess-she was tall, handsome and flashing dark, a type that
they seemed to run to-asked me if she could make up my berth.
"-and, dear, do you want an aspirin?" She perched on the side of the
seat and rocked precariously to and fro with the June hurricane, "-or a
Nembutal?"
"No."
"I've been so busy with everyone else that I've had no time to ask
you." She sat down beside me and buckled us both in. "Do you want some gum?"
This reminded me to get rid of the piece that had been boring me for
hours. I wrapped it in a piece of magazine and put it into the automatic
ash-holder.
"I can always tell people are nice-" the stewardess said approvingly
"-if they wrap their gum in paper before they put it in there."
We sat for a while in the half-light of the swaying car. It was vaguely
like a swanky restaurant at that twilight time between meals. We were all
lingering-and not quite on purpose. Even the stewardess, I think, had to
keep reminding herself why she was there.
She and I talked about a young actress I knew, whom she had flown west
with two years before. It was in the very lowest time of the Depression and
the young actress kept staring out the window in such an intent way that the
stewardess was afraid she was contemplating a leap. It appeared though that
she was not afraid of poverty, but only of revolution.
"I know what Mother and I are going to do," she confided to the
stewardess. "We're coming out to the Yellowstone and we're just going to
live simply till it all blows over. Then we'll come back. They don't kill
artists-you know?"
The proposition pleased me...

Фрэнсис Фицджеральд (Francis Fitzgerald)
«The love of the last tycoon»

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