“Where two failed, three might succeed, eh?” he said sharply.
The man acquiesced. “Pulling randan we might do it,” he said—“two oars and the sculls.”
Abbadie, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless French dandyprat; Mr. Sheldon, the fourth of the party, was old and infirm; was it to be left to him, Sir Edward, a man of a large and weighty dignity, to set his back to a task about which he knew perhaps just enough to confound the efforts of the others? He hesitated; and, as he stood, a voice sounded behind him:
“Here’s at your service, master.”
Sir Edward started and turned round. It was the sleeper, it seemed, who had risen and come behind him unobserved—an immense shambling figure of a man, ragged and hoary. Power no less than age spoke in his massive frame, in his hands like roots, in his sinewy neck. Even the few teeth that remained to him were like bones of contention in a resolute jaw. Shadowy, a dim giant, he stood up in his mouldy duds in the starlight.
An opportune phantom, too foul and solitary for a spy. Sir Edward, under stress of urgency, took what the Fates had sent him.
“Can you pull?” he asked only.
The great creature jeered hoarsely.
“Aye,” he said, “though it were the house of Dagon about the ears of the Philistines.”
Sir Edward made a wry mouth; there was a tang in this of the pietistic cant he was old enough to remember. But the occasion was urgent.