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The Right of Way: Charley

Five years later found him still more brilliant and more of a slave to the bottle. He had corrupted Kathleen's brother Billy, and demoralized the popular preacher, the Rev. John Brown. Billy forged Charley's name and squandered twenty-five thousand dollars of trust money, but Charley resolved to save him from ruin. He went that night to the "Cote Dorion" tavern, where he drank heavily, quarreled recklessly with some rough river-drivers, and was kicked senseless and flung into the river.

Just at that moment Jo Portugais, on a raft opposite the tavern, heard the scuffle and the splash, jumped into the water, and rescued the insensible man, whom he recognized as his former deliverer. Taking him to his hut on Vadrome Mountain, near Chaudiere Parish, he nursed him seven months till he was restored to health, but with his memory completely gone. After the cure's brother, M. Loisel, a skilled surgeon, operated on him his memory returned. He did not know Jo, but his eye chanced to fall on a newspaper which told him of his own death, of the marriage of his wife to a former admirer, and accused him of having embezzled the trust money.