Chapter V: Part 5

London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound asleep when at length he paused for a minute’s rest in front of the Mansion House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday’s tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned frequently.

With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh’s frailty. An early cabby, cruising up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse, explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of his class, an intelligent and unfuddled cabby.

“Jump in, sir,” he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated the latter’s demands. “I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to me.”

The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another’s guidance. Once in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as reckless of the cab’s swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight glaring full in his tired young face.

He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness, tingling from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer qualm in the pit of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the driver on the step, shaking his fare with kindly determination. “Oh, a’ right,” he assented surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself climb out to the sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously and yawned discourteously in the face of the East End, he was once more himself and a hundred times refreshed into the bargain. Contentedly he counted three shillings into the cabby’s palm—the fare named being one-and-six.

“The shilling over and above the tip’s for finding me the waterman and boat,” he stipulated.

“Right-o. You’ll mind the ’orse a minute, sir?”

Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably. Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal’s head, pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall.

To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping.

Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way. Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock laborers going to their day’s work. Men of every nationality known to the world (he thought) passed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse’s head; Britons, brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians, Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, even a Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs were bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous procession, they shambled on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and unreal in the clear morning glow.

The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered waterman ambling more slowly after.

“Nevvy of mine, sir,” announced the cabby; “and a fust-ryte waterman; knows the river like a book, he do.”

The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.

“Thank you,” said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, “Your boat?” he asked with the brevity of weariness.

“This wye, sir.”

At his guide’s heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory passage, to come out at last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet below, perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles supporting the rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat lay moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated bailing out bilge with a rusty can.

“’Ere we are, sir,” said the cabman’s nephew, pausing at the head of the steps. “Now, where’s it to be?”

The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a friend, who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the _Alethea_, scheduled to sail at floodtide; further than which deponent averred naught.

The waterman scratched his head. “A ’ard job, sir; not knowin’ wot kind of a boat she are mykes it ’arder.” He waited hopefully.

“Ten shillings,” volunteered Kirkwood promptly; “ten shillings if you get me aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out more than an hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we’ll make other terms.”

The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. “’Arf a quid, Bob, if we puts this gent aboard a wessel name o’ _Allytheer_ afore she syles at turn o’ tide.”

In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impassive countenance. “Coom down,” he clenched the bargain; and set about shipping the sweeps.

Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern of the boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter, placed one sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous thrust pushed off; then took his seat.

Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the shore.

“How’s the tide?” demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing.

“On th’ turn, sir,” he was told.

For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full swing, the watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their unceasing urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with their towering, impassive warehouses broken by toppling wooden tenements, slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship was passed, sailing vessels in the majority, swinging sluggishly at anchor, drifting slowly with the river, or made fast to the goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety lest he should overlook the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and sterns for names, which in more than one case proved hardly legible.

The _Alethea_ was not of their number.

In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply inshore, bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the shadow of another tenement.—both so like those from which they had embarked that Kirkwood would have been unable to distinguish one from another.

In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one William.

Recognizing that there was some design in this, the passenger subdued his disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet.

In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above, rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and grimy fist.

“’Ello,” he said surlily. “Wot’s th’ row?”

“’Oo,” interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the stage, “was th’ party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?”

“Party name o’ _Allytheer_,” growled the drowsy one. “W’y?”

“Party ’ere’s lookin’ for ’im. Where’ll I find this _Allytheer?_”

“Best look sharp ’r yer won’t find ’im,” retorted the one above. “’E _was_ at anchor off Bow Creek larst night.”

Kirkwood’s heart leaped in hope. “What sort of a vessel was she?” he asked, half rising in his eagerness.

“Brigantine, sir.”

“_Thank—you!_” replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social intercourse in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off again.

And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters, shot with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows.

The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out beaded moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull with haze, through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of brass; overhead it was clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished mirror of the heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night.

On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the scene, in happy relief against the wearisome monotony of the river-banks; it came abreast; and ebbed into the backwards of the scene.

The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall Reach, Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt Town and the West India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick with shipping.

“Are we near?” Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of the younger waterman.

Again, “Will we make it?” he asked.

The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he would; young William—as old Bob named him—had no breath for idle words. Kirkwood subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his ability; the men, he told himself again and again, were earning their pay, whether or not they gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors were titanic; on their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood out like discolored whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef, steaming with sweat; their eyes protruded with the strain that set their jaws like vises; their chests heaved and shrank like bellows; their backs curved, straightened, and bent again in rhythmic unison as tiring to the eye as the swinging of a pendulum.

Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young William looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded.

“Here?”

Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat.

“Sumwhere’s ... ’long ... o’ ’ere.”

From right to left his eager glance swept the river’s widening reach. Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal basin,—but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type.

The young man’s lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and soul, with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look back upon the time; and to fail, even though failure had been discounted a hundredfold since the inception of his mad adventure, seemed hard, very hard.

He sat down suddenly. “She’s gone!” he cried in a hollow gasp.

The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows, scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm. Young William drooped forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly with the current.

Old Bob panted: “‘Dawn’t—see—nawthin’—o’ ’er.” He resumed his seat.

“There’s no hope, I suppose?”

The elder waterman shook his head. “‘Carn’t sye.... Might be round—nex’ bend—might be—passin’ Purfleet.... ’Point is—me an’ young Wilyum ’ere—carn’t do no more—’n we ’as. We be wore out.”

“Yes,” Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, “You’ve certainly earned your pay.” Then hope revived; he was very young in heart, you know. “Can’t you suggest something? I’ve _got_ to catch that ship!”

Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William lifted his.

“There’s a rylewye runs by Woolwich,” he ventured. “Yer might tyke tryne an’ go to Sheerness, sir. Yer’d be positive o’ passin’ ’er if she didn’t syle afore ’igh-tide. ’Ire a boat at Sheerness an’ put out an’ look for ’er.”

“How far’s Woolwich?” Kirkwood demanded instantly.

“Mile,” said the elder man. “Tyke yer for five-bob extry.”

“Done!”

Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his palms on his hips, and fitted the sweeps again to the wooden tholes. Old Bob was as ready. With an inarticulate cry they gave way.

X DESPERATE MEASURES

Old Bob seemed something inclined toward optimism, when the boat lay alongside a landing-stage at Woolwich, and Kirkwood had clambered ashore.

“Yer’ll mebbe myke it,” the waterman told him with a weatherwise survey of the skies. “Wind’s freshenin’ from the east’rds, an’ that’ll ’old ’er back a bit, sir.”

“Arsk th’ wye to th’ Dorkyard Styshun,” young William volunteered. “’Tis th’ shortest walk, sir. I ’opes yer catches ’er.... Thanky, sir.”

He caught dextrously the sovereign which Kirkwood, in ungrudging liberality, spared them of his store of two. The American nodded acknowledgments and adieux, with a faded smile deprecating his chances of winning the race, sorely handicapped as he was. He was very, very tired, and in his heart suspected that he would fail. But, if he did, he would at least be able to comfort himself that it was not for lack of trying. He set his teeth on that covenant, in grim determination; either there was a strain of the bulldog latent in the Kirkwood breed or else his infatuation gripped him more strongly than he guessed.

Yet he suspected something of its power; he knew that this was altogether an insane proceeding, and that the lure that led him on was Dorothy Calendar. A strange dull light glowed in his weary eyes, on the thought of her. He’d go through fire and water in her service. She was costing him dear, perhaps was to cost him dearer still; and perhaps there’d be for his guerdon no more than a “Thank you, Mr. Kirkwood!” at the end of the passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he was not to forget that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was in her father’s hands, surely safe enough there—to the casual mind. If her partnership in her parent’s fortunes were distasteful, she endured it passively, without complaint.

He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time, that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that drew him on.

Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible person would have done—returning to London for a long rest in his hotel room, ere striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes—Philip Kirkwood turned up the village street, intent only to find the railway station and catch the first available train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.

A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would mend his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.

Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction, had no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the train was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for; and there was no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the carriages.

The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting impression of a woman’s startled eyes, staring into his own through a thin mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled himself to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended upon his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a notice blown upon the window-glass announced that it was “2nd Class Smoking.” Kirkwood promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the door the coaches were moving.

A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other stops in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man in a hurry, that it set Kirkwood’s teeth on edge with sheer impatience, and made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do things differently—where the Board of Directors of a railway company doesn’t erect three substantial passenger depôts in the course of a mile and a half of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none disputed with him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he _had_ caught the Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time; a sense of deep dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with a realization of how completely a fool’s errand was this of his. He felt foredoomed to failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again; and his brain seemed numb with disappointment.

Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.

Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.

The trucks drummed it out persistently—he thought, vindictively: “_Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!..._”

And he had made—was then making—a damned fool of himself. The trucks had no need to din _that_ into his thick skull by their ceaseless iteration; he knew it, would not deny it....

And it was all his own fault. He’d had his chance, Calendar had offered him it. If only he had closed with the fat adventurer!...

Before his eyes field and coppice, hedge and homestead, stream and flowing highway, all blurred and ran streakily into one another, like a highly impressionistic water-color. He could make neither head nor tail of the flying views, and so far as coherent thought was concerned, he could not put two ideas together. Without understanding distinctly, he presently did a more wise and wholesome thing: which was to topple limply over on the cushions and fall fast asleep.

After a long time he seemed to realize rather hazily that the carriage-door had been opened to admit somebody. Its smart closing _bang_ shocked him awake. He sat up, blinking in confusion, hardly conscious of more, to begin with, than that the train had paused and was again in full flight. Then, his senses clearing, he became aware that his solitary companion, just entered, was a woman. She was seated over across from him, her back to the engine, in an attitude which somehow suggested a highly nonchalant frame of mind. She laughed, and immediately her speaking voice was high and sweet in his hearing.

“Really, you know, Mr. Kirkwood, I simply couldn’t contain my impatience another instant.”

Kirkwood gasped and tried to re-collect his wits.

“Beg pardon—I’ve been asleep,” he said stupidly.

“Yes. I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but, you know, you must make allowances for a woman’s nerves.”

Beneath his breath the bewildered man said: “The deuce!” and above it, in a stupefied tone: “Mrs. Hallam!”

She nodded in a not unfriendly fashion, smiling brightly. “Myself, Mr. Kirkwood! Really, our predestined paths are badly tangled, just now; aren’t they? Were you surprised to find me in here, with you? Come now, confess you were!”

He remarked the smooth, girlish freshness of her cheeks, the sense and humor of her mouth, the veiled gleam of excitement in her eyes of the changing sea; and saw, as well, that she was dressed for traveling, sensibly but with an air, and had brought a small hand-bag with her.

“Surprised and delighted,” he replied, recovering, with mendacity so intentional and obvious that the woman laughed aloud.

“I knew you’d be!... You see, I had the carriage ahead, the one you didn’t take. I was so disappointed when you flung up to the door and away again! You didn’t see me hanging half out the window, to watch where you went, did you? That’s how I discovered that your discourtesy was unintentional, that you hadn’t recognized me,—by the fact that you took this compartment, right behind my own.”

She paused invitingly, but Kirkwood, grown wary, contented himself with picking up his pipe and carefully knocking out the dottle on the window-ledge.

“I was glad to see _you_,” she affirmed; “but only partly because you were you, Mr. Kirkwood. The other and major part was because sight of you confirmed my own secret intuition. You see, I’m quite old enough and wise enough to question even my own intuitions.”

“A woman wise enough for that is an adult prodigy,” he ventured cautiously.

“It’s experience and age. I insist upon the age; I the mother of a grown-up boy! So I deliberately ran after you, changing when we stopped at Newington. You might’ve escaped me if I had waited until We got to Queensborough.”

Again she paused in open expectancy. Kirkwood, perplexed, put the pipe in his pocket, and assumed a factitious look of resignation, regarding her askance with that whimsical twist of his eyebrows.

“For you are going to Queensborough, aren’t you, Mr. Kirkwood?”

“Queensborough?” he echoed blankly; and, in fact, he was at a loss to follow her drift. “No, Mrs. Hallam; I’m not bound there.”

Her surprise was apparent; she made no effort to conceal it. “But,” she faltered, “if not there—”

“’Give you my word, Mrs. Hallam, I have no intention whatever of going to Queensborough,” Kirkwood protested.

“I don’t understand.” The nervous drumming of a patent-leather covered toe, visible beneath the hem of her dress, alone betrayed a rising tide of impatience. “Then my intuition _was_ at fault!”

“In this instance, if it was at all concerned with my insignificant affairs, yes—most decidedly at fault.”

She shook her head, regarding him with grave suspicion. “I hardly know: whether to believe you. I think....”

Kirkwood’s countenance displayed an added shade of red. After a moment, “I mean no discourtesy,” he began stiffly, “but—”

“But you don’t care a farthing whether I believe you or not?”

He caught her laughing eye, and smiled, the flush subsiding.

“Very well, then! Now let us see: Where _are_ you bound?”

Kirkwood looked out of the window.

“I’m convinced it’s a rendezvous...?”

Kirkwood smiled patiently at the landscape.

“Is Dorothy Calendar so very, very beautiful, Mr. Kirkwood?”—with a trace of malice.

Ostentatiously Kirkwood read the South Eastern and Chatham’s framed card of warning, posted just above Mrs. Hallam’s head, to all such incurable lunatics as are possessed of a desire to travel on the running-boards of railway carriages.

“You are going to meet her, aren’t you?”

He gracefully concealed a yawn.

The woman’s plan of attack took another form. “Last night, when you told me your story, I believed you.”

He devoted himself to suppressing the temptingly obvious retort, and succeeded; but though he left it unspoken, the humor of it twitched the corners of his mouth; and Mrs. Hallam was observant. So that her next attempt to draw him out was edged with temper.

“I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you ever were the latter, you’ve fallen so low that you willingly cast your lot with thieves.”

Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to twiddling his thumbs.

“I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole our—my son’s jewels?”

“Mrs. Hallam,” he said soberly, “if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or Mr. Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact.”

There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this; then, quickly, “But you hope to?” she snapped.

He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge in silence.

The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very carefully, before opening with a masked battery.

“Mr. Kirkwood, can’t we be friends—this aside?”

“Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!”

“I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you—”

“And I, too, have been rude.”

“Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you a proposal, a sort of a business proposition....”

“Yes—?”

“To come over to our side—”

“I thought so. That was why I went.”

“Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you’ve had time to think it over—?”

“I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam.” The green eyes darkened ominously. “You mean—I am to understand, then, that you’re against us, that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of a—”

She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and sardonic intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she crimsoned, treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had conceived while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything had been stolen by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little as Calendar.

As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained, ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded to mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to control her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman’s character and temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the circumstance that their specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them straight, set and hard, quite the reverse of attractive.

“So,” she said slowly, after a silent time, “you are not for Queensborough! The corollary of that _admission_, Mr. Kirkwood, is that you are for Sheerness.”

“I believe,” he replied wearily, “that there are no other stations on this line, after Newington.”

“It follows, then, that—that I follow.” And in answer to his perturbed glance, she added: “Oh, I’ll grant that intuition is sometimes a poor guide. But if you meet George Calendar, so shall I. Nothing can prevent that. You can’t hinder me.”

Considerably amused, he chuckled. “Let us talk of other things, Mrs. Hallam,” he suggested pleasantly. “How is your son?”

At this juncture the brakes began to shriek and grind upon the wheels. The train slowed; it stopped; and the voice of a guard could be heard admonishing passengers for Queensborough Pier to alight and take the branch line. In the noise the woman’s response was drowned, and Kirkwood was hardly enough concerned for poor Freddie to repeat his question.

When, after a little, the train pulled out of the junction, neither found reason to resume the conversation. During the brief balance of the journey Mrs. Hallam presumably had food for thought; she frowned, pursed her lips, and with one daintily gloved forefinger followed a seam of her tailored skirt; while Kirkwood sat watching and wondering how to rid himself of her, if she proved really as troublesome as she threatened to be.

Also, he wondered continually what it was all about. Why did Mrs. Hallam suspect him of designing to meet Calendar at Queensborough? Had she any tangible ground for believing that Calendar could be found in Queensborough? Presumably she had, since she was avowedly in pursuit of that gentleman, and, Kirkwood inferred, had booked for Queensborough. Was he, then, running away from Calendar and his daughter to chase a will-o’-the-wisp of his credulous fancy, off Sheerness shore?

Disturbing reflection. He scowled over it, then considered the other side of the face. Presuming Mrs. Hallam to have had reasonably dependable assurance that Calendar would stop in Queensborough, would she so readily have abandoned her design to catch him there, on the mere supposition that Kirkwood might be looking for him in Sheerness? That did not seem likely to one who esteemed Mrs. Hallam’s acumen as highly as Kirkwood did. He brightened up, forgot that his was a fool’s errand, and began again to project strategic plans into a problematic future.

A sudden jolt interrupted this pastime, and the warning screech of the brakes informed that he had no time to scheme, but had best continue on the plan of action that had brought him thus far—that is, trust to his star and accept what should befall without repining.

He rose, opened the door, and holding it so, turned.

“I regret, Mrs. Hallam,” he announced, smiling his crooked smile, “that a pressing engagement is about to prohibit my ’squiring you through the ticket-gates. You understand, I’m sure.”

His irrepressible humor proved infectious; and Mrs. Hallam’s spirit ran as high as his own. She was smiling cheerfully when she, too, rose.

“I also am in some haste,” she averred demurely, gathering up her hand-bag and umbrella.

A raised platform shot in beside the carriage, and the speed was so sensibly moderated that the train seemed to be creeping rather than running. Kirkwood flung the door wide open and lowered himself to the running-board. The end of the track was in sight and—a man who has been trained to board San Francisco cable-cars fears to alight from no moving vehicle. He swung off, got his balance, and ran swiftly down the platform.

A cry from a bystander caused him to glance over his shoulder; Mrs. Hallam was then in the act of alighting. As he looked the flurry of skirts subsided and she fell into stride, pursuing.

Sleepy Sheerness must have been scandalized, that day, and its gossips have acquired ground for many, an uncharitable surmise.

Kirkwood, however, was so fortunate as to gain the wicket before the employee there awoke to the situation. Otherwise, such is the temper of British petty officialdom, he might have detained the fugitive. As it was, Kirkwood surrendered his ticket and ran out into the street with his luck still a dominant factor in the race. For, looking back, he saw that Mrs. Hallam had been held up at the gate, another victim of British red-tape; her ticket read for Queensborough, she was attempting to alight one station farther down the line, and while undoubtedly she was anxious to pay the excess fare, Heaven alone knew when she would succeed in allaying the suspicions and resentment of the ticket-taker.

“That’s good for ten minutes’ start!” Kirkwood crowed. “And it never occurred to me—!”

Before the station he found two hacks in waiting, with little to choose between them; neither was of a type that did not seem to advertise its pre-Victorian fashioning, and to neither was harnessed an animal that deserved anything but the epithet of screw. Kirkwood took the nearest for no other reason than because it was the nearest, and all but startled the driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk pace and a simple service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set forth his wants, jumped into the antiquated four-wheeler, and threw himself down upon musty, dusty cushions to hug himself over the joke and bless whatever English board of railway, directors it was that first ordained that tickets should be taken up at the end instead of the outset of a journey.

It was promptly made manifest that he had further cause for gratulation. The cabby, recovering from his amazement, was plying an indefatigable whip and thereby eliciting a degree of speed from his superannuated nag, that his fare had by no means hoped for, much less anticipated. The cab rocked and racketed through Sheerness’ streets at a pace which is believed to be unprecedented and unrivaled; its passenger, dashed from side to side, had all he could do to keep from battering the vehicle to pieces with his head; while it was entirely out of the question to attempt to determine whether or not he was being pursued. He enjoyed it all hugely.

In a period of time surprisingly short, he saw, from fleeting glimpses of the scenery to be obtained through the reeling windows, that they were threading the outskirts of the town; synchronously, whether by design or through actual inability to maintain it, the speed was moderated. And in the course of a few more minutes the cab stopped definitely.

Kirkwood clambered painfully out, shook himself together and the bruises out of his bones, and looked fearfully back.

Aside from a slowly settling cloud of dust, the road ran clear as far as he could see—to the point, in fact, where the town closed in about it.

He had won; at all events in so much as to win meant eluding the persevering Mrs. Hallam. But to what end?

Abstractedly he tendered his lonely sovereign to the driver, and without even looking at it, crammed the heavy weight of change into his pocket; an oversight which not only won him the awe-struck admiration of the cabby, but entailed consequences (it may be) he little apprehended. It was with an absentminded nod that he acquiesced in the man’s announcement that he might arrange about the boat for him. Accordingly the cabby disappeared; and Kirkwood continued to stare about him, eagerly, hopefully.

He stood on the brink of the Thames estuary, there a possible five miles from shore to shore; from his feet, almost, a broad shingle beach sloped gently to the water.

On one hand a dilapidated picket-fence enclosed the door-yard of a fisherman’s cottage, or, better, hovel,—if it need be accurately described—at the door of which the cabby was knocking.

The morning was now well-advanced. The sun rode high, a sphere of tarnished flame in a void of silver-gray, its thin cold radiance striking pallid sparks from the leaping crests of wind-whipped waves. In the east a wall of vapor, dull and lusterless, had taken body since the dawn, masking the skies and shutting down upon the sea like some vast curtain; and out of the heart of this a bitter and vicious wind played like a sword.

To the north, Shoeburyness loomed vaguely, like a low-drifted bank of cloud. Off to the right the Nore Lightship danced, a tiny fleck of warm crimson in a wilderness of slatey-blue waters, plumed with a myriad of vanishing white-caps.

Up the shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury, and the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High and dry, a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,—a couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop yacht, dismantled and plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack also out of commission. About them the beach was strewn with a litter of miscellany,—nets, oars, cork buoys, bits of wreckage and driftwood, a few fish too long forgotten and (one assumed) responsible in part for the foreign wealth of the atmosphere.

Some little distance offshore a fishing-boat, catrigged and not more than twenty-feet over all, swung bobbing at her mooring, keen nose searching into the wind; at sight of which Kirkwood gave thanks, for his adventitious guide had served him well, if that boat were to be hired by any manner of persuasion.

But it was to the farther reaches of the estuary that he gave more prolonged and most anxious heed, scanning narrowly what shipping was there to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves with serene contempt, making for the river’s mouth and Tilbury Dock. Nearer in, a cargo boat was standing out upon the long trail, the white of riven waters showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to east a little covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were scudding before the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl, and bearing down past a heavy-laden river barge. The latter, with tarpaulin battened snugly down over the cockpit and the seas dashing over her wash-board until she seemed under water half the time, was forging stodgily Londonwards, her bargee at the tiller smoking a placid pipe.

But a single sailing vessel of any notable tonnage was in sight; and when he saw her Kirkwood’s heart became buoyant with hope, and he began to tremble with nervous eagerness. For he believed her to be the _Alethea_.

There’s no mistaking a ship brigantine-rigged for any other style of craft that sails the seas.

From her position when first he saw her, Kirkwood could have fancied she was tacking out of the mouth of the Medway; but he judged that, leaving the Thames’ mouth, she had tacked to starboard until well-nigh within hail of Sheerness. Now, having presumably, gone about, she was standing out toward the Nore, boring doggedly into the wind. He would have given a deal for glasses wherewith to read the name upon her bows, but was sensible of no hampering doubts; nor, had he harbored any, would they have deterred him. He had set his heart upon the winning of his venture, had come too far, risked far too much, to suffer anything now to stay his hand and stand between him and Dorothy Calendar. Whatever the further risks and hazards, though he should take his life in his hands to win to her side, he would struggle on. He recked nothing of personal danger; a less selfish passion ran molten in his veins, moving him to madness.

Fascinated, he fixed his gaze upon the reeling brigantine, and for a space it was as if by longing he had projected his spirit to her slanting deck, and were there, pleading his case with the mistress of his heart....

Voices approaching brought him back to shore. He turned, resuming his mask of sanity, the better to confer with the owner of the cottage and boats—a heavy, keen-eyed fellow, ungracious and truculent of habit, and chary of his words; as he promptly demonstrated.

“I’ll hire your boat,” Kirkwood told him, “to put me aboard that brigantine, off to leeward. We ought to start at once.”

The fisherman shifted his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek, grunted inarticulately, and swung deliberately on his heel, displaying a bull neck above a pair of heavy shoulders.

“Dirty weather,” he croaked, facing back from his survey of the eastern skies before the American found out whether or not he should resent his insolence.

“How much?” Kirkwood demanded curtly, annoyed.

The man hesitated, scowling blackly at the heeling vessel, momentarily increasing her distance from shore. Then with a crafty smile, “Two pound’,” he declared.

The American nodded. “Very well,” he agreed simply. “Get out your boat.”

The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the shingle, huge booted heels crunching, toward one of the dories. To this he set his shoulder, shoving it steadily down the beach until only the stern was dry.

Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to Sheerness. Nothing moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with a sterner problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket, and had promised to pay the man four times as much. He would have agreed to ten times the sum demanded; for the boat he must and would have. But he had neglected to conclude his bargain, to come to an understanding as to the method of payment; and he felt more than a little dubious as to the reception the fisherman would give his proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood, knew it to be.

In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable curiosity.

The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: “If ye’d catch yon vessel, come!”

With one final twinge of doubt—the task of placating this surly dog was anything but inviting—the American strode to the boat and climbed in, taking the stern seat. The fisherman shoved off, wading out thigh-deep in the spiteful waves, then threw himself in over the gunwales and shipped the oars. Bows swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory began to forge slowly toward the anchored boat. In their faces the wind beat gustily, and small, slapping waves, breaking against the sides, showered them with fine spray....

In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a gnarled hand grasping the latter’s gunwale to hold the two together. With some difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit, amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with clumsy expertness bringing the dory’s painter with him and hitching it to a ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an instant to stare into the East with somber eyes, he shipped the tiller and bent to the halyards. As the sail rattled up, flapping wildly, Kirkwood marked with relief—for it meant so much time saved—that it was already close reefed.

But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the halyards had been made fast to their cleats, the fisherman again stood erect, peering distrustfully at the distant wall of cloud.

Then, in two breaths: “Can’t do it,” he decided; “not at the price.”

“Why?” Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine, that was already drawn far ahead.

“Danger,” growled the fellow, “—wind.”

At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped his head, considering.

“Not at the price,” the sullen voice iterated; and he looked up to find the cunning gaze upon him.

“How much, then?”

“Five poun’ I’ll have—no less, for riskin’ my life this day.”

“Impossible. I haven’t got it.”

In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the cleats.

“Hold on a minute.”

Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his waistcoat buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon them altogether; he had designed to leave them as security for the two pounds, and had delayed stating the terms only for fear lest they be refused. Now, too late as ever, he recognized his error. But surely, he thought, it should be apparent even to that low intelligence that the timepiece alone was worth more than the boat itself.

“Will you take these?” he offered. “Take and keep them—only set me aboard that ship!”

Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in his broad, hard palm, eyes narrowing to mere slits in his bronzed mask.

“How much?” he asked slowly.

“Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me twenty.”

The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to escape a braining.

“How do I know?” objected the skipper.

“I’m telling you. If you’ve got eyes, you can see,” retorted Kirkwood savagely, seeing that he had erred in telling the truth; the amount he had named was too great to be grasped at once by this crude, cupidous brain.

“How do I know?” the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped watch and chain into his pocket, then with a meaning grimace extended again his horny, greedy palm.

“What...?”

“Hand over th’ two pound’ and we’ll go.”

“I’ll see you damned first!”

A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that the _Alethea_ was minute by minute slipping beyond his reach seemed to madden him. White-lipped and ominously quiet he rose from his seat on the combing, as, without answer, the fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began to haul in the dory.

“Ashore ye go,” he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning Kirkwood to enter the boat.

The American turned, looking for the _Alethea_, or for the vessel that he believed bore that name. She was nearing the light-ship when he found her, and as he looked a squall blurred the air between them, blotting the brigantine out with a smudge of rain. The effect was as if she had vanished, as if she were for ever snatched from his grasp; and with Dorothy aboard her—Heaven alone knew in what need of him!

Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the man and caught him by the collar, forcing him out over the lip of the overhang. They were unevenly matched, Kirkwood far the slighter, but strength came to him in the crisis, physical strength and address such as he had not dreamed was at his command. And the surprise of his onslaught proved an ally of unguessed potency. Before he himself knew it he was standing on the overhang and had shifted his hold to seize the fellow about the waist; then, lifting him clear of the deck, and aided by a lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him bodily into the dory. The man, falling, struck his head against one of the thwarts, a glancing blow that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself dropped as if shot, a trailing reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung as the boom thrashed overhead. It was as close a call as he had known; the knowledge sickened him a little.

Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory adrift; then crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of compassion disturbed him as he abandoned the fisherman to the mercy of the sea; though the fellow lay still, uncouthly distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he was in no danger; the wind and waves together would carry the boat ashore.... For that matter, the man was even then recovering, struggling to sit up.

Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the bows, and, grasping the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping back into the cockpit to get a stronger purchase with his feet. It was a struggle; the boat pulled sluggishly against the wind, the cable inching in jealously. And behind him he could hear a voice bellowing inarticulate menaces, and knew that in another moment the fisherman would be at his oars. Frantically he tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling with a will and a prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed to have fought with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped and he got it in.

Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the tiller, and seizing the mainsheet, drew the boom in till the wind should catch in the canvas. In the dory the skipper, bending at his oars, was not two yards astern.

He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang, Kirkwood pulled the tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a dozen feet separating them in a breath.

A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed. Careless alike of the dangers he had passed and those that yawned before him, he trimmed the sheet and stood away on the port tack, heading directly for the Nore Lightship.

XI OFF THE NORE

Kirkwood’s anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of passion—incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the temperature of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his chances without distortion, weighed them without exaggeration.

Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery and treacherous deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and peered ahead with anxious eyes, a pucker of daring graven deep between his brows.

A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the brigantine standing close in under the Essex shore. At times she was invisible; again he could catch merely the glint of her canvas, white against the dark loom of the littoral, toned by a mist of flying spindrift. He strained his eyes, watching for the chance which would take place in the rake of her masts and sails, when she should come about.

For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was his chance of attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But in time the brigantine, to escape Maplin Sands, would be forced to tack and stand out past the lightship, the wind off her port bows. Then their courses would intersect. It remained to be demonstrated whether the cat-boat was speedy enough to arrive at this point of contact in advance of, or simultaneously with, the larger vessel. Every minute that the putative _Alethea_ put off coming about brought the cat-boat nearer that goal, but Kirkwood could do no more than hope and try to trust in the fisherman’s implied admission that it could be done. It was all in the boat and the way she handled.

He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed them. He had sailed small craft before—frail center-board cat-boats, handy and swift, built to serve in summer winds and protected waters: never such an one as this. Yet he liked her.

Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught and heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed with stout plank and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep afloat in the wickedest weather brewed by the foul-tempered German Ocean. Withal her lines were fine and clean; for all her beam she was calculated to nose narrowly into the wind and make a pretty pace as well. A good boat: he had the grace to give the credit to his luck.

Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the beach. Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and spiteful but lacking force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell away, the rollers became more uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas met the cat-boat, from their hollows looming mountainous to the man in the tiny cockpit; who was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they would be negligible.

His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green swales; and left a boiling wake behind her,—urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her wisp of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with the mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.

Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and now and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some racing billow, the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood’s hands. Again and again this happened; and those were times of trembling. But always the cat-boat righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and swinging her stem into the wind again; and there would follow an abbreviated breathing spell, during which Kirkwood was at liberty to dash the salt spray from his eyes and search the wind-harried waste for the brigantine. Sometimes he found her, sometimes not.

Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to close in upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas she was staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For himself, it was nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would have risked a sixpence on the boat’s chance to live until she crossed the brigantine’s bows.

Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit, steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could not last much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone, muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course; though for a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented by each new, malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end inevitably must be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the certain end ... save and except the possibility of his gaining the brigantine within the period of time strictly and briefly limited by his powers of endurance.

Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of icy spray, that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom ankle-deep regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with the bailing dish. And the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were drawing together with appalling deliberation.

A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up hope; as the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to believe that if he could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would be justified ... though human ingenuity backed by generosity could by no means contrive adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.

But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it out.