People in the rooms about the hall were roused by the noise, and were stirring. Someone called to him from a door in the darkness. He hurried down the outside stair. On Muscadine Street he saw Allen a half block away, walking slowly.
At the corner of the next street, as Allen stepped from the curb, the chisel dropped from his pocket, but he did not notice it, plodding on, with head down and dragging steps. Shays picked up the chisel when he came to the spot, stared at it stupidly, and thrust it in his pocket. The two kept the same distance apart and came out on the bridge.
The city and water-front for the most part were quite still, though it was nearly time for both to waken, and for the milk and market waggons to come in, and the trolley cars to begin running. The street lights had been turned off. There were forebodings of sunrise, over and beyond the disorderly roofs of East Argent. In the hush of that hour the muttering of the Muscadine whispering, rustling along the piers, seemed louder than by day. The dark buildings on the western river-front had the red glimmer of the sunrise now in their windows. No one was on the bridge except Shays and Allen, possibly a hidden and sleepy watcher in the drawbridge house.
Close to the drawbridge Allen stopped and looked back. Shays stopped, too, and muttered, “Wha's that for? Wha' for?” and found his mind blank of all opinion about it, and so, without any opinion what for, he began to run forward at a stumbling trot. Allen glanced back at him, leaped on the guard rail, threw his hands in the air, and plunged down into the river.
When Shays came there was nothing to be seen but the brown rippled surface; nor to be heard, except the lapping against the piers. He leaned over limply, and stared at the water.
“Wha' for?” he repeated persistently. “Wha's that for?” and whimpered, and rubbed his eyes with a limp hand, and leaned a long time on the rail, staring down at the mystery, with the other limp hand hung over the water pointing downward. “Wha' for?”
The city was waking with distant murmurs and nearby jarring noise. A freight train went over the P. and N. bridge.
Shays drew back from the railing and shuffled on till he had come almost to Bank Street; there he stopped and turned back, seeing a trolley car in the distance coming down Maple Street. He went down on the littered wharves, close to the abutments of the bridge, sat down on a box, leaned against the masonry, and took from his pocket the chisel he had picked up, stared at it, rubbed it in the refuse at his feet, and put it back in his pocket. The sun was risen now, the spot grew pleasantly warm, and he went to sleep muttering in the morning sunlight on the wharf by the Muscadine, and over his head went the trucks, waggons, trolley cars, the stamp of hoofs, and the shuffle of feet.