The Captain, perhaps still exhausted from his fit, lay on the bed and, reaching back behind him to the bell board, pulled a bell pull marked “Negroes”. It was not long before a knock came at the door, and the invalid feebly begged me open it. I should not have been surprised quite so much as I was by the appearance of George Washington Irving and two other strapping fellows, once I had done so. More surprising still was the sudden disappearance of the cultured tones and immaculate diction in which that same man's warning had been delivered in the slave quarters.
'Cap'n suh, We's heah, Cap'n suh!'
This was accompanied by a rolling of eyes which would have disgraced a performer in a minstrel show. I could have sworn that Irving winked at me at one point.
Captain Grey said in a voice that did not inspire confidence,
'They's a package fo' disposal in Mistuh Nothrup's cabin, it's to go over immediate. To the mid-river side.'
'Yassuh, we'm gonna do dat bye'm'by' Irving said.
It was all I could do not to laugh. I walked over to the Captain and leaned over so that I might look him in the eye as I said:
'I shall supervise the operation, Holden. I trust you do not assume yourself discharged of any obligation to me?'
For answer he gave a vigorous shake of the head and he shrank away, almost far enough fall out of the enormous bed.
'Holden is beholden to me,' I laughed. The Captain, however, seemed not to care for the pun, since he merely turned over onto his side, the better to look away from me.
In my own cabin, Irving began by sending his fellow crewmen outside, or at least not allowing them to complete their ingress; since the cabin did not allow all four persons to stand in it. The door safely closed, he took a step toward me. Not wishing to fall on McGraw's relict, I did not recoil.
'Why on earth did you kill this man? You must make your rendezvous, you must!'
He seemed most agitated for someone yet to be convinced that I was Northrup. I put the question most apposite to his remark.,
'Why?'
'You need to take care, Mr Northrup.' He replied. Then he shouldered McGraw as though he were a half-bale of cotton and strode out of the cabin.
***********
I was waiting at the rail, carpet-bag in hand as the Grand Turk hove to at the jetty in Hannibal. It looked a busy little town; horses and carriages bustled about the streets beyond the river bank, in numbers sufficient to befoul the streets more than was pleasant. The architecture was a mixture of clap-board dwellings and false fronted pretenders to grandeur: I failed to see why the Brothers Clemens had been so inordinately proud of it. A look at my watch confirmed that the Pilot had been over confident in his own abilities concerning an estimate of my arrival. It was inconceivable that I might make my way down the gangplank and onto the wharf in the two minutes before the quarter-hour struck.
