Evidently the serious-talking young radical had a vein of drollery under his thoughtful exterior.
"You didn't 'urt yourself?" asked Dobbs, gathering his own dispersed members together.
"Not a bit. You're as good as a feather bed. I'd just enjoy tumbling on you four or five times a day."
But Dobbs, ruefully rubbing his barked shins, only ordered the boatman to "give way," which is nautical for "pull straight ahead," and in three or four strokes they were clear of the embankment and out in the full current of the flowing tide.
CHAPTER XXVI.
ITS CHICK PROVES PECULIAR.
Have you never lain back at midnight in the bow of a Whitehall, with your hands clasped behind your head and your legs lazily outstretched—no comrades but the oarsman amidships, and the fellow-passenger facing you from the stern, no sound but the gurgle of your own gliding, no sensation but the onward impulse of the boat, as gentle as the swaying of a garden swing, and the scarcely perceptible breeze aerating the surface of the river? Then the moon has never tinted the atmosphere for you with such voluptuous purity as it did for Robert Floyd that night, and the sparse, dim stars have never announced themselves so articulately as the lights of a grander city than that whose gloomy masses and scattered lamps they overhung. Even Dobbs' lighting of a cigar—no cosmic event, surely—did not jar upon the grand totality. The tiny flame, drawn in and then flaring up, gave flash-light glimpses of a face unmatched in the shrewdness and humor of its lines.
For fully ten minutes not a word was spoken. Suddenly Dobbs' voice snapped out:
"The hother duds, quick, chummy. There's a bobby on the draw."