Spencer Tucker passed his hand through his hair and lifted it from his
forehead, with a gesture at once emotional and theatrical. "I am a man
with a price on me!" he said bitterly. "Give me up to the sheriff,
and you'll get five thousand dollars. Help me, and you'll get nothing.
That's my d----d luck, and yours too, I suppose."

"I reckon you're right there," said Patterson gloomily. "But I thought
you got clean away. Went off in a ship--"

"Went off in a boat to a ship," interrupted Tucker savagely; "went off
to a ship that had all my things on board--everything. The cursed boat
capsized in a squall just off the Heads. The ship, d--n her, sailed
away, the men thinking I was drowned, likely, and that they'd make a
good thing off my goods, I reckon."

"But the girl, Inez, who was with you, didn't she make a row?"

"Quien sabe?" returned Tucker, with a reckless laugh. "Well, I hung
on like grim death to that boat's keel until one of those Chinese
fishermen, in a 'dug-out,' hauled me in opposite Saucelito. I chartered
him and his dug-out to bring me down here."

"Why here?" asked Patterson, with a certain ostentatious caution that
ill-concealed his pensive satisfaction.

"You may well ask," returned Tucker, with an equal ostentation of
bitterness, as he slightly waved his companion away. "But I reckoned I
could trust a white man that I'd been kind to, and who wouldn't go back
on me. No, no, let me go! Hand me over to the sheriff!"