I seemed to have dropped back into the boy again, and half wondered that I was not tired and footsore, and longing for a ride on one of the bony horses.
And so it was all through our journey down.
Every lock seemed familiar, and at more than one lock-house there were the same green apples and cakes and glasses of sticky sweets, side by side with two or three string-tied bottles of ginger-beer.
Two or three times over I found myself getting low-spirited as I dwelt upon my journey up, and thought of what a poor, miserable little fellow I was; but Tom was always in the highest of spirits, and they proved at last to be infectious.
We had pretty well reached the spot at last where I had first struck the river, when we stopped to see a canal-boat pass through the lock, the one where I had stared with wonder to see the great boat sink down some eight or nine feet to a lower level.
The boat, which was a very showily painted one, evidently quite new, was deeply laden, and in one place a part of a glistening black tarpaulin trailed in the water. As the boat’s progress was checked, and the lock-keeper came out, the short, thick-set man who had been at the tiller shouted something, and a round-faced girl of about twenty, with a bright-coloured cotton handkerchief pinned over her shoulders, came up the hatch, and took the man’s place, while he douched forward to alter the tarpaulin where it trailed.
He was quite a young man, and I noticed that his hair was fair, short, and crisp about his full neck, as he bent down, pipe in mouth, while a something in the way in which he shouted to the boy in charge of the horses settled my doubts.
“Jack!” I shouted.
He rose up very slowly, took the pipe out of his mouth, and spat in the water; then, gradually turning himself in my direction, he stared hard at me and said:
“Hello!”