“Come’s fast as I could,” growled the other. “Needn’t think you—put on airs!”
By tacit alliance, Miles and the girl found themselves leaning on the platform rail, peering together into the darkness. All below was invisible, but they heard the boat come grating to land, the mutter of the voices, and the hollow, jerky beat of oars departing quickly, straight out from shore.
“Come on,” whispered Miles. “Come along. Let’s follow and see!”
The whim was contagious and inspiring. Together they scrambled down the snow-bank, joining hands for the steep slide. At the bottom Tony’s boat loomed gray before them, buried like a knoll. The tarpaulin, loaded with snow, clung heavy and obstinate; but Miles ripped it off at last, and slid the boat gently from the chocks.
“Dragging it will sound like the mischief,” he said. “Could you manage the bow?”
Luckily the boat was light, and as they staggered down the beach, winding among the black open patches and avoiding the ice, he felt, with a singular pride, that the girl held up her end gamely.
He had allowed the two men a long start, and still listened, till their oars sounded feebly across the water.
“Ready,” he said at last.
She brushed past him into the stern. He shoved off, muffled the rowlocks in his woolen scarf and a boat-mop of frozen jute, and rowed slowly out, with only a faint creaking, and the steady trickle from the blades. Astern, as the shore retreated, the twin lights drew imperceptibly toward each other. Their glow left the water in darkness, and, dwindling, became fixed, lustrous points, as of two erring planets sunken low, on the wrong side of the horizon. Out here the river lay black under the starlight, which, no longer reflected by the snow, seemed to have raised and withdrawn aloft. Far ahead the oars were beating regular as a pulse,—a dull throbbing that alone disturbed the night, except when thin peals of untimely cock-crow sounded, faint as muted horns, from indoors, across wide distances.
“Don’t they seem strange?” said the girl, half to herself. “Like something—like a ghost story.”