A cab was brought, and, not without a glance at his unsavoury companion, Harry followed him into the vehicle.
“Hadn’t yer better let me ride outside, sir?” said the man, looking at the stuffed and cushioned interior with an aspect of disgust.
“No,” said Harry; “I want to know what more you have to say respecting this affair.”
The man gave a tug at an imaginary forelock, and then waited apparently to be questioned, while Harry took in his outward appearance at a glance.
He was rough and dirty enough to have passed for the veriest vagabond in existence, but all the same he did not seem as if he belonged to that portion of society that has been dubbed “the dangerous classes;” for there was a good open aspect to the brown face, and though the Bardolphian nose told tales of drams taken to keep out the cold river mists, on either side a frank grey eye looked you full in the face; while, greatest test of all, the fellow’s palms were hard and horny, and ended by fingers that had been chipped, bent, bruised, and distorted by hard labour.
“Well, sir,” said the man, “I ain’t got much to tell you; only that, seeing the reward up, my mate and me thought we might as well have it as any one else, so we set to and—”
“You found him?” exclaimed Harry, eagerly.
“Well, sir, that’s for you to say when you sees him. My mate generally sees people about these sorter things, but I come to-day; and a fine job I had to get to know where you lived, for I’d forgot the number; but I found out at last from a gal cleaning the door-step close by. It don’t do for us, you know, to go to no police—they humbugs a man about so; and I don’t know now whether they ain’t been down on my mate, ’cos you see we didn’t want to say nothing to them till as how you’d been and seen it.”
Harry shuddered at that last word “it;” there was something so repellent, though at the same time expressive, in the one tiny syllable it now, not him; and again he shuddered as he thought of the ordeal through which he had to go. He roused himself at last, though, to ask a few questions as the cab drove on, the driver making his way over the river to the Surrey side; and, as soon as they were in the comparative silence of the narrow streets, Harry learned that during the past night his companion had been successful in his search, and that what he had sought lay now in a boat-house far down the Thames in the low-lying district where wharf and dock and rickety stairs, or steam-boat pier, alternate with muddy-pile and drain, with bank after bank of slime, over which the water of the swift tide seemed to glide and play, here and there washing it up into a foul frothy scum, compounded of the poisonous refuse daily cast into the mighty stream.
It was a long ride, down deplorable looking streets, where wretched tumble-down tenements, with frowsy aspect and dingy, patchy windows, were dominated by lordly warehouses, with great gallows-like cranes at every floor—floors six, seven, and eight stories from the ground—from whose open doors men stood gazing down as coolly as if they were on terra firma, though a moment’s giddiness must have precipitated them into the street below.