At last, full of this notion, and possessed, too, by his habit of accomplishing at all hazards what he had begun, August strolled back through the now quiet engine-room to the deck-passengers’ quarter.  It was about half an hour before six o’clock, when the dog-watch would expire and he must go on duty again.  In one of the uppermost of the filthy bunks, in the darkest corner, near the wheel, he discovered what he thought to be his man.  The deck-passengers were still asleep, lying around stupidly.  August paused a moment, checked by a sense of the dangerousness of his undertaking.  Then he picked up a stick of wood and touched the gambler, who could not have been very sound asleep, lying in hearing of the curses of the mob on the shore.  At first Parkins did not move, but August gave him a still more vigorous thrust.  Then he peered out between the blanket and the handkerchief over his forehead.

“I will take that money you won last night from that young man, if you please.”

[Illustration:  WAKING UP AN UGLY CUSTOMER.]

Parkins saw that it was useless to deny his identity.  “Do you want to be shot?” he asked fiercely.

“Not any more than you want to be hung,” said August.  “The one would follow the other in five minutes.  Give back that money and I will go away.”

The gambler trembled a minute.  He was fairly at bay.  He took out a roll of bills and handed it to August.  There was but five hundred.  Smith had the other four hundred and fifty, he said.  But August had a quiet German steadiness of nerve.  He said that unless the other four hundred and fifty were paid at once he should call in the sheriff or the crowd.  Parkins knew that every minute August stood there increased his peril, and human nature is now very much like human nature in the days of Job.  The devil understood the subject very well when he said that all that a man hath will he give for his life.  Parkins paid the four hundred and fifty in gold-pieces.  He would have paid twice that if August had demanded it.

CHAPTER XXIX.

AUGUST AND NORMAN.

In a story such as I meant this to be, the development of character stands for more than the evolution of the plot, and herein is the true significance of this contact of Wehle with the gamblers, and, indeed, of this whole steamboat life.  It is not enough for one to be good in a country neighborhood; the sharp contests and severe ordeals of more exciting life are needed to give temper to the character.  August Wehle was hardly the same man on this morning at Paducah, with the nine hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, that he had been the evening before, when he first felt the sharp resentment against the man who had outraged his father.  In acting on a high plane, one is unconsciously lifted to that plane.  Men become Christians sometimes from the effect of sudden demands made upon their higher moral nature, demands which compel them to choose between a life higher than their present living, or a moral degradation.  Such had been August’s experience.  He had been drawn upward toward God by the opportunity and necessity for heroic action.  I have no doubt the good Samaritan got more out of his own kindness than the robbed Jew did.