Pitiful heaven, was our tragedy, then, but a common fashion of the dreadful waterway we groped our passage along? How was it possible in all that harvest of death to find the one awn for our particular gleaning?
But here—though I was little conscious of it at the time—an impression took life in me that was to bear strange fruit by and by.
Dawn was in the air, menacing, most chill and gloomy, when we came out once more upon the riverside at a point where an old rotting bridge of timber sprawled across the stream like a wrecked dam. All its neighborhood seemed waste ground or lonely deserted tenements standing black and crookedly against a wan sweep of sky.
In the moment of our issuing, as if it were a smaller splinter detached from the wreck, a little boat glided out from under the bridge and made for a flight of dank and spongy steps that led up from the water not ten yards from where we stood.
Something in the action of the dim figure that pulled, or the other that hung over the stern sheets of the phantom craft, moved our unwearying guide to motion us with his arm to watchfulness and an immediate pause. In the same instant he hollowed his hand to his mouth and hailed:
“Any luck, mate?”
The man who was rowing slowed down at once and paddled gingerly to within a few yards of the steps.
“Who be you?” he growled, like a dog.
Our friend gave his authority.
“Oh,” said the fellow. “Yes; we’ve found one.”