Doss whistled a little tune as he rested on his cane.
The front door of the third houseboat up the eddy opened and closed. A man climbed the bank and passed the two with a basket on his arm. 116
“Come on down,” Carline urged.
“Not to-night,” Doss said. “I’ve got my room up at the hotel, and I’ll have to get my stuff out of the railroad baggage room. But I’ll come down about 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning. Then we’ll fit up and drop down the river. Good-night!”
Doss watched Carline go down to the dock and on to his boat. Then he went up the street and held earnest confab with a man who had a basket on his arm. They whispered ten minutes or so, then the man with the basket returned to his shanty-boat, and within half an hour was back up town, carrying two suitcases, a gun case, and a duffle bag.
Doss went to the smaller hotel with these things and registered. He walked down to the river in the morning and noticed that the third shanty-boat had dropped out into the river during the night, in spite of the storm that was blowing up. He went down and ate breakfast with Carline, and the two went up and got Doss’s outfit at the hotel. They returned to the motorboat, and, having laid in a supply of groceries, cast off their lines and steered away down the river.
“Yes, sir, we’ll find that girl if it takes all winter!” the fish-market man heard Doss tell Carline in a loud voice.
That afternoon a man in a skiff came down the river and turned into the dock. As he landed, the fish-market man said to him:
Yes.
“If you see any lady coming down, tell her a detector is below, lookin’ fo’ her. He’s a cheap skate, into a motorboat—but I don’t expect he’ll be into hit long, ’count of some river fellers bein’ with him. But he mout be bad, that detector. If you should see a nice lady, tell her.”