While these men and others pretended to address their remarks to David or to each other, their free glances were more and more directed to Pepeeta who began to be embarrassed by them and gently drew David away to more retired places.  He went with her reluctantly, for he was in need of excitement.  The thought of his crime was constantly agitating his heart, the prostrate form of the doctor with the bloody wound on his forehead was never absent from his mind, and through all the ceaseless rumble around him he could hear the dull thud of the stone upon the hard skull.  The efforts which he made to throw off these horrible weights that crushed him were like those of a man awakening from a nightmare.  He scarcely dared to speak for fear of uttering words which would betray him and which seemed to tremble on his lips.  Had he been on shore he would have fled to the solitude of a forest; but here he was resistlessly impelled to that other solitude—­a crowd.  The necessity of being gay with his beautiful bride and of concealing every trace of his terror and remorse taxed his resources to their utmost limit, and in his nervousness he kept Pepeeta moving with him all day long.  At its close she was completely exhausted, and retired early to her stateroom.  Freed from her company and craving relief from thought, David made his way straight to the gambling tables where the nightly games were in full swing.

The claim of the southerner that the excitement at those tables, when the river traffic was at its height, had never been surpassed in the history of games of chance, was no exaggeration.  Not a semblance of restraint was put upon the players, and experts from all over the world gathered to pluck the exhaustless supply of victims, as buzzards assemble to feed on carrion.  Fortunes were made and lost in a night.  Men sat down to play worth thousands of dollars, and rose paupers!  They staked and lost their money, their slaves, their business and their homes.  In the wild frenzy which such misfortunes kindle the most shocking crimes were committed, but the criminals were never called to account, for the law was powerless.

What the fugitive sought was diversion, and he found it!  Tragedies became commonplace in those cabins.  Men crowded into single hours the experience and excitement of months.  It was this very night that an encounter occurred which is still a tradition on the river.

An old planter approached a table where his son, who did not know of his father’s presence on the boat, was playing.  He stood in the background and watched a gambler strip the boy of his last penny, and when the young fellow rose from his chair, white as a sheet, he turned to look into the whiter face of his father.  The enraged parent did not speak a word, but took the seat left vacant by the boy and commenced playing.  Rage at the financial loss, mortification at the boy’s defeat, and old scores to be settled with this very gambler, conspired to rouse him to a frenzy.  His terrible earnestness paralyzed the dealer, who seemed to form some premonition of a tragic termination and lost his nerve.  In a little while, in the presence of a crowd of excited spectators, the father won back the exact amount his son had lost, and then rising from his chair sprang at the gambler, seized him, dragged him from the cabin and flung him into the river.