your tongue, you water-rat!’
Astonished by his friend’s unusual heat, Lightwood stared too, and then said: ‘What can have become of this man?’
‘Can’t imagine. Unless he dived overboard.’ The informer wiped his brow ruefully as he said it, sitting in his boat and always staring disconsolate.
‘Did you make his boat fast?’
‘She’s fast enough till the tide runs back. I couldn’t make her faster than she is. Come aboard of mine, and see for your own-selves.’
There was a little backwardness in complying, for the freight looked too much for the boat; but on Riderhood’s protesting ‘that he had had half a dozen, dead and alive, in her afore now, and she was nothing deep in the water nor down in the stern even then, to speak of;’ they carefully took their places, and trimmed the crazy thing. While they were doing so, Riderhood still sat staring disconsolate.
‘All right. Give way!’ said Lightwood.
‘Give way, by George!’ repeated Riderhood, before shoving off. ‘If he’s gone and made off any how Lawyer Lightwood, it’s enough to make me give way in a different manner. But he always was a cheat, con-found him! He always was a infernal cheat, was Gaffer. Nothing straightfor’ard, nothing on the square. So mean, so underhanded. Never going through with a thing, nor carrying it out like a man!’
‘Hallo! Steady!’ cried Eugene (he had recovered immediately on embarking), as they bumped heavily against a pile; and then in a lower voice reversed his late apostrophe by remarking (‘I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend may be endowed with philanthropy enough not to turn bottom-upward and extinguish us!) Steady, steady! Sit close, Mortimer. Here’s the hail again. See how it flies, like a troop of wild cats, at Mr Riderhood’s eyes!’
Indeed he had the full benefit of it, and it so mauled him, though he bent his head low and tried to present nothing but the mangy cap to it, that he dropped under the lee of a tier of shipping, and they lay there until it was over. The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.
They were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be shivering; the river itself; craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as there yet was on the shore. Black with wet, and altered to the eye by white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold. Very little life was to be seen on either bank, windows and doors were shut, and the staring black and white letters upon wharves and warehouses ‘looked,’ said Eugene to Mortimer, ‘like inscriptions over the graves of dead businesses.’
As they glided slowly on, keeping under the shore and sneaking in and out among the shipping by back-alleys of water, in a pilfering way that seemed to be their boatman’s normal manner of progression, all the objects among which they crept were so huge in contrast with their wretched boat, as to threaten to crush it. Not a ship’s hull, with its rusty iron links of cable run out of hawse-holes long discoloured with the iron’s rusty tears, but seemed to be there with a fell intention. Not a figure-head but had the menacing look of bursting forward to run them down. Not a sluice gate, or a painted scale upon a post or wall, showing the depth of water, but seemed to hint, like the dreadfully facetious Wolf in bed in Grandmamma’s cottage, ‘That’s to drown you in, my dears!’ Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistered side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a thirst for sucking them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water—discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, green dank deposit—that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event.
Some half-hour of this work, and Riderhood unshipped his sculls, stood holding on to a barge, and hand over hand long-wise along the barge’s side gradually worked his boat under her head into a secret little nook of scummy water. And driven into that nook, and wedged as he had described, was Gaffer’s boat; that boat with the stain still in it, bearing some resemblance to a muffled human form.
‘Now tell me I’m a liar!’ said the honest man.
(‘With a morbid expectation,’ murmured Eugene to Lightwood, ‘that somebody is always going to tell him the truth.’)
‘This is Hexam’s boat,’ said Mr Inspector. ‘I know her well.’
‘Look at the broken scull. Look at the t’other scull gone. Now tell me I am a liar!’ said the honest man.
Mr Inspector stepped into the boat. Eugene and Mortimer looked on.
‘And see now!’ added Riderhood, creeping aft, and showing a stretched rope made fast there and towing overboard. ‘Didn’t I tell you he was in luck again?’
‘Haul in,’ said Mr Inspector.
‘Easy to say haul in,’ answered Riderhood. ‘Not so easy done. His luck’s got fouled under the keels of the barges. I tried to haul in last time, but I couldn’t. See how taut the line is!’
‘I must have it up,’ said Mr Inspector. ‘I am going to take this boat ashore, and his luck along with it. Try easy now.’
He tried easy now; but the luck resisted; wouldn’t come.
‘I mean to have it, and the boat too,’ said Mr Inspector, playing the line.
But still the luck resisted; wouldn’t come.
‘Take care,’ said Riderhood. ‘You’ll disfigure. Or pull asunder perhaps.’
‘I am not going to do either, not even to your Grandmother,’ said Mr Inspector; ‘but I mean to have it. Come!’ he added, at once persuasively and with authority to the hidden object in the water, as he played the line again; ‘it’s no good this sort of game, you know. You must come up. I mean to have you.’
There was so much virtue in this distinctly and decidedly meaning to have it, that it yielded a little, even while the line was played.
‘I told you so,’ quoth Mr Inspector, pulling off his outer coat, and leaning well over the stern with a will. ‘Come!’
It was an awful sort of fishing, but it no more disconcerted Mr Inspector than if he had been fishing in a punt on a summer evening by some soothing weir high up the peaceful river. After certain minutes, and a few directions to the rest to ‘ease her a little for’ard,’ and ‘now ease her a trifle aft,’ and the like, he said composedly, ‘All clear!’ and the line and the boat came free together.
Accepting Lightwood’s proffered hand to help him up, he then put on his coat, and said to Riderhood, ‘Hand me over those spare sculls of yours, and I’ll pull this in to the nearest stairs. Go ahead you, and keep out in pretty open water, that I mayn’t get fouled again.’
His directions were obeyed, and they pulled ashore directly; two in one boat, two in the other.
‘Now,’ said Mr Inspector, again to Riderhood, when they were all on the slushy stones; ‘you have had more practice in this than I have had, and ought to be a better workman at it. Undo the tow-rope, and we’ll help you haul in.’
Riderhood got into the boat accordingly. It appeared as if he had scarcely had a moment’s time to touch the rope or look over the stern, when he came scrambling back, as pale as the morning, and gasped out:
‘By the Lord, he’s done me!’
‘What do you mean?’ they all demanded.
He pointed behind him at the boat, and gasped to that degree that he dropped upon the stones to get his breath.
‘Gaffer’s done me. It’s Gaffer!’
They ran to the rope, leaving him gasping there. Soon, the form of the bird