"We've spotted him sure enough," said the first, "and I think, sir, with due notifications at headquarters for all the precincts to-night, we can run him down and in to-morrow. If you've no more use for me, I'll just step round to headquarters and get the lines on him before daylight—that is, if they'll work." He looked dubiously at the sagging ice-laden wires.
"You won't need me any longer?" The second man spoke inquiringly, as if he would like to know Father Honoré's next move.
"I don't need you both, but I'd like one of you to volunteer to keep me company, for a while, at least. I can't give up this way, although I know no more of his whereabouts than you do. I've a curious unreasoning feeling that he'll try the ferries next."
"He can't get at the bridge—we've headed him off there, and it's a bad night. It's been my experience that this sort don't take to water, not naturally, on such nights as this. We might try one of the Bowery lodging houses that I know this sort finds out sometimes. I'll go with you, if you like."
"Thank you, I want to try the ferries first; we'll begin at the Battery and work up. How long does the Staten Island boat run?"
"Not after one; but they'll be behind time to-night; it's getting to be a smothering snow. I don't believe the elevated can run on time either, and we've got three blocks to walk to the next station."
"We'd better be going, then." Father Honoré bade the other man good night, and the two walked rapidly to the nearest elevated station on Second Avenue. It was an up-town train that rolled in covered with sleet and snow, and they were obliged to wait fully a quarter of an hour before a south bound one took them to the Battery.
The wind was lessening, but a heavy snowfall had set in. They made their way across the park to the "tongue that laps the commerce of the world."
Where was that commerce now? Wholly vanished with the multiple daytime activities that centre near this spot. The great fleet of incoming and out-going ocean liners, of vessels, barges, tows, ferries, tugs—where were they in the drifting snow that was blotting out the night in opaque white? The clank and rush of the elevated, the strident grinding of the trolleys, the polyglot whistling and tooting of the numerous small river craft, the cries of 'longshoremen, the roaring basal note of metropolitan mechanism—all were silenced. Nothing was to be heard, at the moment of their arrival, but the heavy wash of the harbor waters against the sea wall and its yeasting churn in the ferry slip.
Near the dock-house they saw some half-obliterated tracks in the snow. Father Honoré bent to examine them; it availed him nothing. He looked at his watch; at the same moment he heard the distant hoarse half-smothered whistle repeated again and again and the deadened beat of the paddle wheels. Gradually the boat felt her way into the slip. The snow was falling heavily.