For near upon four hours the ever-widening stream of the “London River” unfolded its moving panorama. The smoke and smell of Woolwich Reach gave place to lucid air made soft by the summer haze; the grey huddle of factories fell away and green levels of cattle-spotted marsh stretched away to the high land bordering the river valley. Venerable training ships displayed their chequered hulls by the wooded shore, and whispered of the days of oak and hemp, when the tall three-decker, comely and majestic, with her soaring heights of canvas, like towers of ivory, had not yet given place to the mud-coloured saucepans that fly the white ensign now-a-days and devour the substance of the British taxpayer: when a sailor was a sailor and not a mere seafaring mechanic. Sturdily breasting the flood tide, the tender threaded her way through the endless procession of shipping; barges, billy-boys, schooners, brigs; lumpish Black-seamen, blue-funnelled China tramps, rickety Baltic barques with twirling windmills, gigantic liners, staggering under a mountain of top-hamper. Erith, Purfleet, Greenhithe, Grays greeted us and passed astern. The chimneys of Northfleet, the clustering roofs of Gravesend, the populous anchorage and the lurking batteries, were left behind, and, as we swung out of the Lower Hope, the wide expanse of sea reach spread out before us like a great sheet of blue-shot satin.
About half-past twelve the ebb overtook us and helped us on our way, as we could see by the speed with which the distant land slid past, and the freshening of the air as we passed through it.
But sky and sea were hushed in a summer calm. Balls of fleecy cloud hung aloft, motionless in the soft blue; the barges drifted on the tide with drooping sails, and a big, striped bell buoy—surmounted by a staff and cage and labelled “Shivering Sand”—sat dreaming in the sun above its motionless reflection, to rouse for a moment as it met our wash, nod its cage drowsily, utter a Solemn ding-dong, and fall asleep again.
It was shortly after passing the buoy that the gaunt shape of a screw-pile lighthouse began to loom up ahead, its dull red paint turned to vermilion by the early afternoon sun. As we drew nearer, the name Girdler, painted in huge, white letters, became visible, and two men could be seen in the gallery around the lantern, inspecting us through a telescope.
“Shall you be long at the lighthouse, sir?” the master of the tender inquired of Captain Grumpass; “because we’re going down to the North-East Pan Sand to fix this new buoy and take up the old one.”
“Then you’d better put us off at the lighthouse and come back for us when you’ve finished the job,” was the reply. “I don’t know how long we shall be.”
The tender was brought to, a boat lowered, and a couple of hands pulled us across the intervening space of water.
“It will be a dirty climb for you in your shore-going clothes,” the captain remarked—he was as spruce as a new pin himself, “but the stuff will all wipe off.” We looked up at the skeleton shape. The falling tide had exposed some fifteen feet of the piles, and piles and ladder alike were swathed in sea-grass and encrusted with barnacles and worm tubes. But we were not such town-sparrows as the captain seemed to think, for we both followed his lead without difficulty up the slippery ladder, Thorndyke clinging tenaciously to his little green case, from which he refused to be separated even for an instant.
“These gentlemen and I,” said the captain, as we stepped on the stage at the head of the ladder, “have come to make inquiries about the missing man, James Brown. Which of you is Jeffreys?”
“I am, sir,” replied a tall, powerful, square-jawed, beetle-browed man, whose left hand was tied up in a rough bandage.