Up and down he strode, examining all the locality, the moaning women following at his heels.
"There isn't a sign of anything here," he announced as he jumped down from a little landing from which he had been flashing his lantern on the water. "I've got a feeling, somehow, that this man Simkins would try to land at the wharf nearest his home. Come away—we'll go there."
"But you'll have to take me home first," I interposed.
"Is it on the way?" Gordon paused long enough to ask.
"No, it's the opposite direction."
"Then it can't be done," he answered, in a tone no Southern woman is accustomed to hear; "you'll have to come with us," and with a word or two more which I have forgotten, but whose tone of mastery I remember well, he asked the women which road to take. If his manner had been less noble and self-forgetful I would have said he was lacking in the chivalric deference I was accustomed to receive at the hands of gentlemen. But this never seemed to enter Gordon's mind, surrendered as it was to the business in hand. Before I knew it he was off, and I had no option but to follow.
A strange procession we must have made as we wound our way through the silent streets. In front marched Gordon, the lantern swinging to his stride, pausing now and then to enquire about a turn in the way; behind him shuffled the crooning women, gratitude and woe mingling in their constant moan; last of all came I, keeping up as best I could.
As we moved out on the rickety wharf, to which we came at last, I heard Gordon utter an exclamation of some sort and rush forward. Then he stopped, holding the lantern low; its beams revealed the face of a negro man, lying in drunken oblivion on the wharf. With shrill intonation, rudely shaking him, the women demanded of the unconscious Simkins the whereabouts of their children. But Simkins' only response was a temporarily half-opened eye, immediately reclosed, and a groan of drunken content as he sank deeper into his bestial slumber. An empty bottle lay beside him.
Gordon turned from him with a murmur of contempt, bidding the women cease from their pitiful pleading with the unconscious man. Swinging the lantern high, its farthest beams just disclosed a little skiff floating idly near the shore. "He's upset it climbing out, as sure as death," I heard him mutter—"it has shot out from under him." Then like a flash he made his way over the side, creeping stealthily down the unsteady timbers till he was at the water's edge, the lantern still in his hand.
A cry of horror broke from his lips, echoed in unreasoning woe from the women above him. He was peering down into the water.