“We were in luck, though, this night, for a minute after there was a soft plash heard above the rushing of the river, something dark passed over where a miserable glim of a lamp was shining. Then there was a faint low whistle from over our heads, another from out of the black darkness where we heard the plash, and then a boat brushed close by us; there was the sound as of something being lowered down, and before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ we’d grappled that boat, and the man in it; slipped on the handcuffs, and got him fast, with a bale of silk handkerchiefs in his boat; and in a few minutes we’d got a couple of the sailors as well.
“You may guess my surprise and delight when I took a look at our prisoner with a lantern, to find that it was River Jack himself; and, to make a long story short, he was convicted and sentenced to ten years’ transportation.
“‘But I’ll be back before that, Tom Johnson,’ he shouts to me as soon as he had got his sentence; ‘and when I do come—look out.’
“He was hurried out of court before he could say any more; but those words somehow, for a time, sunk into my memory, and worried me a deal, till I got married, and then I forgot them.
“Well, my married life was just the same as any other man’s married life, except that my wife always had such a dislike to my way of business. Twenty times over she would have had me leave it for something else; but, as I said to her, ‘a bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush, ’specially if the one’s bread and cheese and the other ain’t.’ For, you know, what was the good of me giving up the certain sure for the certain chance?
“‘But I do have such horrible dreams about you,’ she says.
“‘Dreams never come true,’ says I.
“‘Oh, yes, they do,’ she says. ‘My aunt once dreamt that they were going to have the bailiffs in; only a month after, in they came.’
“‘Well, I don’t mind believing that,’ says I, ‘for it’s a very likely thing to happen to any of us.’
“‘But I’m always dreaming you’re being drowned,’ she says.