It may be that my fondness for these less obvious things in the law
had rendered me a trifle different from my fellow men. I could never
approach any question in life without wanting to go all about it and
to the bottom and top, like a cooper with his barrel. I was thus
actuated, without doubt, in my relations years since with Helena
Emory--I knew the shrewdness and accuracy of my own trained mind. I
confess I exulted in the infallible, relentless logic of my mind, a
mind able and well trained, especially well trained in reason and
argument. So, when I put the one great brief of all my life before
Helena, my splendid argument why should she love me, I did so, at
first, in the conviction that it must be convincing. Had I not myself
worked it out in each detail, had not my calm, cool, accurate reason
guarded each portal? Was it, indeed, not a perfect brief--that one I
held in my first lost case--the lost case which sent me out of my
profession, left me a stranded hulk of a man?
But then, when these two pirate youngsters had found me and touched me
with the living point of some new flame of life, so that I knew a vast
world existed beyond the nature of the intellect, the old ways clung
to me, after all. Even as I swore to lay hold on youth and on
adventure (and on love, if, in sooth, that might be for me now), I
could not fight as yet wholly bare of the old weapons that had so long
fitted my hand. So, even on that very morning when we set forth from
my farm to be pirates, my mind ran back to its old cunning, and I
recalled my earlier boast to myself that if I ever cared to be a
criminal I knew I could be able to cover my tracks.
Those writing-folk, therefore, who now wasted thousands of dollars in
pursuit of trace and trail of Black Bart, wealthy ex-lawyer, knew
nothing of their man, and guessed nothing of his caliber or of his
methods. They even failed to look in plain sight for their trail
maker. And having done so, they forgot that water leaves no trail. Yet
that simple thought had come to my mind as I had sat at breakfast in
my own house, some weeks before this time! Even then I had planned all
this.
Absorbed as I had been in this pursuit of Helena, baffled as I had
been by her, unhappy as I now was over her own unhappiness, fierce as
was my love for her, still and notwithstanding, some trace of my old
self clung to me even now when, her hand on my arm, I guided Helena in
silence over the creaking planks of the dock, and saw, at last, dim
beyond the edge, the boom of the Mississippi's tawny flood, rolling on
and onward to the sea. Here was a task, a problem, a chase, an
endeavor, an adventure! To it, I was impelled by my old training; into
it I was thrust by all these fevers of the blood. Even though she did
not love me, she was woman ... in the dark air of night, it seemed to
me, I could smell the faint maddening fragrance of her hair.... No. It
was too late! I would not release her. I would go on, now!