“Hook him again!” replied the Sergeant, in a matter-of-fact voice. “You must have had him by the neck and the cloth gave way. The disturbance floated him.”
“Ugh!” cried George; “I’ll never throw out a blamed line in this river again as long as I live.”
“Well I will!” said the Sergeant. “I’ll throw one now. Lend me that shark hook a minute.”
The officer who was paid, not too liberally, by Government, to act either as assistant pathologist or undertaker, as occasion required, jumped upon the after grating with the end of George’s shark line in his hand.
A human head could be seen bobbing gently up and down with the swell and fall of the tide. It drifted neither to right nor left, but in a sort of ghastly oscillation waited—waited. There was a sardonic smile on the parted lips. The smile that is seen on the face of the murdered dead who come up again from under the earth, from the depths of the waters, anywhere. The dead who come for justice.
Livid and ghastly, and utterly unreal and horrible was the face of the corpse floating steadily in that pool of yellow lamplight. And when the Sergeant, after several throws with the line, succeeded in hooking on, it came towards the stern without resistance. The man of law leaned over the low rail to make an examination.
“Fetch the lantern!” he called to the deck-hand, “and a rope.”
The tide lapped by softly, the little town lay wrapped in darkness, broken only by an occasional lantern in the main street, and the dim lamp at the hotel.
“Hold the light over till I see, can’t you?”
“Ugh!” cried the deck-hand.