“The tide races round this bend like fury,” he said. “Bear on the oars, sir.”
Seton thereupon came to Kerry’s assistance, and gradually the dinghy crept upon its course, until, below the little pier, they found a sheltered spot, where it was possible to run in and lie hidden. As they won this haven:
“Quiet!” said Seton. “Don’t move the oars. Look! We were only just in time!”
Immediately above them, where the boats were beached, a man was coming down the slope, carrying a hurricane lantern. As Kerry and Seton watched, the man raised the lantern and swung it to and fro.
“Watch!” whispered Seton. “He’s signalling to the Greenwich bank!”
Kerry’s teeth snapped savagely together, and he chewed but made no reply, until:
“There it is!” he said rapidly. “On the marshes!”
A speck of light in the darkness it showed, a distant moving lantern on the curtain of the night. Although few would have credited Kerry with the virtue, he was a man of cultured imagination, and it seemed to him, as it seemed to Seton Pasha, that the dim light symbolized the life of the missing woman, of the woman who hovered between the gay world from which tragically she had vanished and some Chinese hell upon whose brink she hovered. Neither of the watchers was thinking of the crime and the criminal, of Sir Lucien Pyne or Kazmah, but of Mrs. Monte Irvin, mysterious victim of a mysterious tragedy. “Oh, Dan! ye must find her! ye must find her! Puir weak hairt—dinna ye ken how she is suffering!” Clairvoyantly, to Kerry’s ears was borne an echo of his wife’s words.
“The traffic!” he whispered. “If we lose George Martin tonight we deserve to lose the case!”
“I agree, Chief Inspector,” said Seton quietly.