With a gambler’s throw, I tried one public-house not on my list, and George was not there; but as usual there were those who knew where to find him if the gentleman would wait.
I never met George, and, judging by his friends, I did not want to; though, to be just, he might have been blamelessly at home all this time with his family. And there, as a matter of fact, he very likely was, for I learned later, what everyone else knew and I might have suspected, that he had been paid off, as this was the Will Arding’s last trip before being sold.
We wandered back to the waterside and stood gazing at the slimy foreshore, the barges and lighters driving up on the muddy tide, the tugs fussing up and down, their bow-waves making the only specks of white in the gloomy scene, the bleak sooty warehouses, and the wharfs with their cranes like long black arms waving against the sky. We were declining rapidly into depression, when I saw emerging from the shadow of the bridge a stackie in charge of a tug.
How clean and dainty she looked, like a fresh country maid marketing in a slum! Her fragrant stack of hay brought to us a whiff of the country whence she had come, and a vision of great stretches of marshland dotted with cattle, and hayricks sheltered behind sea-walls waiting for red-sailed barges to take them away.
The tug slackened speed; the stack-barge was being dropped. She seemed familiar, and as she came nearer I saw her name, the Annie. Joe Applegate, the skipper, a trusted friend of ours, was at the wheel. How pleased I was now that I had spent those fruitless half-hours looking for George!
“Ain’t that a fair masterpiece a seein’ yaou here, sir!” shouted Joe in good Essex that raised our spirits like a bar of cheerful music. “And haow’s them little ould booeys?”
He had come with 70 tons of hay for the London County Council horses. We were doubly glad to look on his honest face when he came on shore and told us that he knew the Will Arding well and had traded to this wharf for years.
“Yes, yes, sir; knaowed her these twenty years. She belongs to a friend of my guvnor’s, and were built by ’is father at Sittingbourne, and ’as allus been well kep’ up by ’is son. She’d be gettin’ on for forty, I reckon, and a course she ain’t same as a new barge, but she’ll last your lifetime if you’re on’y goin’ to live in she and goo a pugglin’ abaout on her same as summer-time and that. She’ll ’ave a cargo of cement aboard naow—90 to 95 tons she mostly carry, and I ain’t never heard of ’er spoiling a bag yet. She’s got a good constitution, she ’as, but none the more for that yaou can watch she unloaded to-morrer if yaou’ve a mind to, and ef she suits yaour purpose ave ’er surveyed arterwards.”
The Mate asked about her character.
“She ain’t never bin in trouble but once, that I knaows on, and then she were run into by a ketch and got three timbers bruk on ’er port bow. No, no, sir; there ain’t nawthen agin that little ould thing.”