“Fishing boats,” Sandy murmured. “But they wouldn’t be going out this early in the evening, would they? He wouldn’t be reporting to work now if—”
He broke off as the man, up ahead, swung toward the opposite side of the long pier.
For the first time the boys saw that there were craft moored there too. It was too dark to make them out clearly, but they were obviously much larger than the fishing boats.
“Barges?” Sandy whispered questioningly.
They flattened themselves against the wall of the building, near its riverward end, to see what the man would do. When he reached the edge of the dock he seemed to wait a minute, perhaps peering around to see if he was alone. And then they could see his shadowy shape mounting what must have been a ladder against the craft’s side.
A moment later there was the sound of a door creaking open and shut, and then a weak yellow light appeared some distance above the water. It flickered, dimmed, and then brightened again.
“It’s a barge all right. He’s gone into the cabin,” Ken said. “Let’s go take a look.”
They hurried across the windswept dock into the partial shelter of the craft moored on the opposite side.
There were three barges, all of them large and each supplied with a small cabin aft. But only the cabin of the barge nearest the shore—the one the man had entered—seemed occupied. The barges were moored end to end, the flat stern of the first one backed up against the shore. Its heavy timber bulwarks rose some six feet above the level of the dock, and the boys could dimly make out the rough curve of its piled cargo rising even higher. It seemed to be coal or stone. At the aft end they found the ladder the man had mounted.
Their feet were almost silent on the concrete of the pier’s floor, but the wind was noisy enough to have covered any accidental sounds they might have made as they walked on down toward the end of the dock.