“Must go slowly here,” Hilliard explained, as the banks began to draw together. “There’s no sailing chart of this river, and we shall have to feel our way up.”
For some two miles they passed through a belt of sand dunes, great yellow hillocks shaded with dark green where grasses had seized a precarious foothold. Behind these the country grew flatter, and small, blighted-looking shrubs began to appear, all leaning eastwards in witness of the devastating winds which blew in from the sea. Farther on these gave place to stunted trees, and by the time they had gone ten or twelve miles they were in the pine forest. Presently they passed under a girder bridge, carrying the railway from Bordeaux to Bayonne and the south.
“We can’t be far from the mill now,” said Hilliard a little later. “I reckoned it must be about three miles above the railway.”
They were creeping up very slowly against the current. The engines, running easily, were making only a subdued murmur inaudible at any considerable distance. The stream here was narrow, not more than about a hundred yards across, and the tall, straight-stemmed pines grew down to the water’s edge on either side. Already, though it was only seven o’clock, it was growing dusk in the narrow channel, and Hilliard was beginning to consider the question of moorings for the night.
“We’ll go round that next bend,” he decided, “and look for a place to anchor.”
Some five minutes later they steered close in against a rapidly shelving bit of bank, and silently lowered the anchor some twenty feet from the margin.
“Jove! I’m glad to have that anchor down,” Hilliard remarked, stretching himself. “Here’s eight o’clock, and we’ve been at it since five this morning. Let’s have supper and a pipe, and then we’ll discuss our plans.”
“And what are your plans?” Merriman asked, when an hour later they were lying on their lockers, Hilliard with his pipe and Merriman with a cigar.
“Tomorrow I thought of going up in the collapsible boat until I came to the works, then landing on the other bank and watching what goes on at the mill. I thought of taking my glass and keeping cover myself. After what you said last night you probably won’t care to come, and I was going to suggest that if you cared to fish you would find everything you wanted in that forward locker. In the evening we could meet here and I would tell you if I saw anything interesting.”
Merriman took his cigar from his lips and sat up on the locker.