“You cain’t leave ’em so,” muttered the stranger.  “No; I seen you—­”

He did not finish.  Tedge had been setting himself for what he knew he should do.  The smaller man had his jaw turned as he stared at the suffering brutes.  And Tedge’s mighty fist struck him full on the temple.  The master leaned over the low rail to watch quietly.

The man who wished to save the cattle was there among them.  A little flurry of sparks drove over the spot he fell upon, and then a maddened surge of gaunt steers.  Tedge wondered if he should go finish the job.  No; there was little use.  He had crashed his fist into the face of a shrimp-seine hauler once, and the fellow’s neck had shifted on his spine—­and once he had maced a woman up-river in a shantyboat drinking bout—­Tedge had got away both times.  Now and then, boasting about the shrimp camps, he hinted mysteriously at his two killings, and showed his freckled, hairy right hand.

“If they find anything of him—­he got hurt in the wreck,” the master grinned.  He couldn’t see the body, for a black longhorn had fallen upon his victim, it appeared.  Anyhow, the cattle were milling desperately around in the pen; the stranger who said his name was Milt Rogers would be a lacerated lump of flesh in that mad stampede long ere the fire reached him.  Tedge got his tin document box and went aft.

Crump and Hogjaw were already in the flat-bottomed bayou skiff, holding it off the Marie Louise’s port runway, and the master stepped into it.  The heat was singeing their faces by now.

“Pull off,” grunted the skipper, “around east’ard.  This bar sticks clean out o’ water off there, and you lay around it, Hogjaw.  They won’t be no sea ’til the breeze lifts at sunup.”

The big black heaved on the short oars.  The skiff was a hundred yards out on the glassy sea when Crump spoke cunningly, “I knowed something——­”

“Yeh?” Tedge turned from his bow seat to look past the oarsman’s head at the engineman.  “Yeh knowed——­”

“This Rogers, he was tryin’ to get off the burnin’ wreck and he fell, somehow or——­”

“The oil tank blew, and a piece o’ pipe took him,” grunted Tedge.  “I tried to drag him out o’ the fire—­Gawd knows I did, didn’t I, Crump?”

Crump nodded scaredly.  The black oarsman’s eyes narrowed and he crouched dumbly as he rowed.  Tedge was behind him—­Tedge of the Marie Louise who could kill with his fists.  No, Hogjaw knew nothing—­he never would know anything.

“I jest took him on out o’ kindness,” mumbled Tedge.  “I got no license fer passenger business.  Jest a bum I took on to go and see his swamp girl up Des Amoureaux.  Well, it ain’t no use sayin’ anything, is it now?”

A mile away the wreck of the Marie Louise appeared as a yellow-red rent in the curtain of night.  Red, too, was the flat, calm sea, save northerly where a sand ridge gleamed.  Tedge turned to search for its outlying point.  There was a pass here beyond which the reefs began once more and stretched on, a barrier to the shoal inside waters.  When the skiff had drawn about the sand spit, the reflecting waters around the Marie had vanished, and the fire appeared as a fallen meteor burning on the flat, black belt of encircling reef.