The man was ordinarily a silent companion, and to-night after a few exchanged words between the pair, he was as silent as usual.
Down the wide, turgid river the boat, propelled by Carter’s two oars, shot jerkily, the rise and fall of the glow in the rower’s pipe-bowl synchronizing with the lift and dip of the oars.
Hammond enjoyed the silence. There was a weirdness about this night trip on the river that fitted in with his mood. His brain had been considerably overwrought that day. The quiet row was beginning to soothe the overwrought nerves. Where he sat in the stern of the boat, he faced the clock-tower at Westminster. The gleaming windows of the great embankment hotels lay behind him. A myriad electric lights were on his right hand. The gloom and darkness of the unlighted wharfage on the Surrey side were on his left.
Only by a waterway miracle Carter cleared an anchored barge that, defying the laws of the river, carried no warning light.
“Drat ’em!” growled the man Carter. “They oughter do a stretch in Portlan’ or Dartmoor fur breakin’ the lor. There’s many a ’onest waterman whose boat’s foun’ bottom-up, or smashed to smithereens, an’ whose body’s foun’, or isn’t, jes, as the case may be, all becos’ they lazy houn’s is too ’ide-boun’ to light a lamp, cuss ’em!”
His growl died away in his throat. The glowing fire of his pipe rose and fell quicker than ever, telling of a fierce anger burning within him.
“Ssh!” he hissed. Hammond saw that his face was turned shorewards. He heaved aft towards Hammond, and whispered, “Kin yer see that woman, sir?” He jerked his chin in the direction of a line of moored barges.
Hammond had turned his head, and could plainly discern the form of a woman standing on the edge of the outer barge of the cluster.
The men in the boat sat still, but watchful.
“Do she mean sooerside, sir?” whispered Carter. “Looks like it, sir. Don’t make a soun’.”