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Black Bag, The

<h2>IX</h2> <h3>AGAIN "BELOW BRIDGE"; AND BEYOND</h3> </center> Kirkwood wasted little time, who had not much to waste, were he to do that upon whose doing he had set his heart. It irked him sore to have to lose the invaluable moments demanded by certain imperative arrangements, but his haste was such that all was consummated within an hour. Within the period of a single hour, then, he had ransomed his luggage at St. Pancras, caused it to be loaded upon a four-wheeler and transferred to a neighboring hotel of evil flavor but moderate tariff, where he engaged a room for a week, ordered an immediate breakfast, and retired with his belongings to his room; he had shaved and changed his clothes, selecting a serviceable suit of heavy tweeds, stout shoes, a fore-and-aft cap and a negligée shirt of a deep shade calculated at least to seem clean for a long time; finally, he had devoured his bacon and eggs, gulped down his coffee and burned his mouth, and, armed with a stout stick, set off hotfoot in the still dim glimmering of early day. By this time his cash capital had dwindled to the sum of two pounds, ten shillings, eight-pence, and would have been much less had he paid for his lodging in advance. But he considered his trunks ample security for the bill, and dared not wait the hour when shopkeepers begin to take down shutters and it becomes possible to realize upon one's jewelry. Besides which, he had never before been called upon to consider the advisability of raising money by pledging personal property, and was in considerable doubt as to the right course of procedure in such emergency. At King's Cross Station on the Underground an acute disappointment awaited him; there, likewise, he learned something about London. A sympathetic bobby informed him that no trains would be running until after five-thirty, and that, furthermore, no busses would begin to ply until half after seven. "It's tramp it or cab it, then," mused the young man mournfully, his longing gaze seeking a nearby cab-rank&#8212just then occupied by a solitary hansom, driver somnolent on the box. "Officer," he again addressed the policeman, mindful of the English axiom: "When in doubt, ask a bobby."&#8212"Officer, when's high-tide this morning?" The bobby produced a well-worn pocket-almanac, moistened a massive thumb, and rippled the pages. "London Bridge, 'igh tide twenty minutes arfter six, sir," he announced with a glow of satisfaction wholly pardonable in one who combines the functions of perambulating almanac, guide-book, encyclopedia, and conserver of the peace. Kirkwood said something beneath his breath&#8212a word in itself a comfortable mouthful and wholesome and emphatic. He glanced again at the cab and groaned: "O Lord, I just dassent!" With which, thanking the bureau of information, he set off at a quick step down Grey's Inn Road. The day had closed down in brilliance upon the city&#8212and the voice of the milkman was to be heard in the land&#8212when he trudged, still briskly if a trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it known, was that the Alethea would not attempt to sail before the turn of the tide. For this was his mission, to find the Alethea before she sailed. Incredible as it may appear, at five o'clock, or maybe earlier, on the morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood, normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn, and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm and courage to be the shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a damsel in distress; according as to whether Mrs. Hallam had spoken soothly of Dorothy Calendar, or Kirkwood's own admirable faith in the girl were justified of itself. Proceeding upon the working hypothesis that Mrs. Hallam was a polished liar in most respects, but had told the truth, so far as concerned her statement to the effect that the gladstone bag contained valuable real property (whose ownership remained a moot question, though Kirkwood was definitely committed to the belief that it was none of Mrs. Hallam's or her son's): he reasoned that the two adventurers, with Dorothy and their booty, would attempt to leave London by a water route, in the ship, Alethea, whose name had fallen from their lips at Bermondsey Old Stairs. Kirkwood's initial task, then, would be to find the needle in the haystack&#8212the metaphor is poor: more properly, to sort out from the hundreds of vessels, of all descriptions, at anchor in midstream, moored to the wharves of 'long-shore warehouses, or in the gigantic docks that line the Thames, that one called Alethea; of which he was so deeply mired in ignorance that he could not say whether she were tramp-steamer, coastwise passenger boat, one of the liners that ply between Tilbury and all the world, Channel ferry-boat, private yacht (steam or sail), schooner, four-master, square-rigger, barque or brigantine. A task to stagger the optimism of any but one equipped with the sublime impudence of Youth! Even Kirkwood was disturbed by some little awe when he contemplated the vast proportions of his undertaking. None the less doggedly he plugged ahead, and tried to keep his mind from vain surmises as to what would be his portion when eventually he should find himself a passenger, uninvited and unwelcome, upon the Alethea.... London had turned over once or twice, and was pulling the bedclothes over its head and grumbling about getting up, but the city was still sound asleep when at length he paused for a minute's rest in front of the Mansion House, and realized with a pang of despair that he was completely tuckered out. There was a dull, vague throbbing in his head; weights pressed upon his eyeballs until they ached; his mouth was hot and tasted of yesterday's tobacco; his feet were numb and heavy; his joints were stiff; he yawned frequently. With a sigh he surrendered to the flesh's frailty. An early cabby, cruising up from Cannon Street station on the off-chance of finding some one astir in the city, aside from the doves and sparrows, suffered the surprise of his life when Kirkwood hailed him. His face was blank with amazement when he reined in, and his eyes bulged when the prospective fare, on impulse, explained his urgent needs. Happily he turned out a fair representative of his class, an intelligent and unfuddled cabby. "Jump in, sir," he told Kirkwood cheerfully, as soon as he had assimilated the latter's demands. "I knows precisely wotcher wants. Leave it all to me." The admonition was all but superfluous; Kirkwood was unable, for the time being, to do aught else than resign his fate into another's guidance. Once in the cab he slipped insensibly into a nap, and slept soundly on, as reckless of the cab's swift pace and continuous jouncing as of the sunlight glaring full in his tired young face. He may have slept twenty minutes; he awoke faint with drowsiness, tingling from head to toe from fatigue, and in distress of a queer qualm in the pit of his stomach, to find the hansom at rest and the driver on the step, shaking his fare with kindly determination. "Oh, a' right," he assented surlily, and by sheer force of will made himself climb out to the sidewalk; where, having rubbed his eyes, stretched enormously and yawned discourteously in the face of the East End, he was once more himself and a hundred times refreshed into the bargain. Contentedly he counted three shillings into the cabby's palm&#8212the fare named being one-and-six. "The shilling over and above the tip's for finding me the waterman and boat," he stipulated. "Right-o. You'll mind the 'orse a minute, sir?" Kirkwood nodded. The man touched his hat and disappeared inexplicably. Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal's head, pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall. To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping. Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way. Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock laborers going to their day's work. Men of every nationality known to the world (he thought) passed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse's head; Britons, brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians, Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, even a Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs were bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous procession, they shambled on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and unreal in the clear morning glow. The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered waterman ambling more slowly after. "Nevvy of mine, sir," announced the cabby; "and a fust-ryte waterman; knows the river like a book, he do." The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly. "Thank you," said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, "Your boat?" he asked with the brevity of weariness. "This wye, sir." At his guide's heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory passage, to come out at last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet below, perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles supporting the rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat lay moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated bailing out bilge with a rusty can. "'Ere we are, sir," said the cabman's nephew, pausing at the head of the steps. "Now, where's it to be?" The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a friend, who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the Alethea, scheduled to sail at floodtide; further than which deponent averred naught. The waterman scratched his head. "A 'ard job, sir; not knowin' wot kind of a boat she are mykes it 'arder." He waited hopefully. "Ten shillings," volunteered Kirkwood promptly; "ten shillings if you get me aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out more than an hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we'll make other terms." The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. "'Arf a quid, Bob, if we puts this gent aboard a wessel name o' Allytheer afore she syles at turn o' tide." In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impassive countenance. "Coom down," he clenched the bargain; and set about shipping the sweeps. Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern of the boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart. "Ready?" "Ready," assented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter, placed one sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous thrust pushed off; then took his seat. Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the shore. "How's the tide?" demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing. "On th' turn, sir," he was told. For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full swing, the watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their unceasing urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with their towering, impassive warehouses broken by toppling wooden tenements, slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship was passed, sailing vessels in the majority, swinging sluggishly at anchor, drifting slowly with the river, or made fast to the goods-stages of the shore; and in keen anxiety lest he should overlook the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and sterns for names, which in more than one case proved hardly legible. The Alethea was not of their number. In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply inshore, bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the shadow of another tenement.&#8212both so like those from which they had embarked that Kirkwood would have been unable to distinguish one from another. In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one William. Recognizing that there was some design in this, the passenger subdued his disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet. In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above, rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and grimy fist. "'Ello," he said surlily. "Wot's th' row?" "'Oo," interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the stage, "was th' party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?" "Party name o' Allytheer," growled the drowsy one. "W'y?" "Party 'ere's lookin' for 'im. Where'll I find this Allytheer?" "Best look sharp 'r yer won't find 'im," retorted the one above. "'E was at anchor off Bow Creek larst night." Kirkwood's heart leaped in hope. "What sort of a vessel was she?" he asked, half rising in his eagerness. "Brigantine, sir." "Thank&#8212you!" replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social intercourse in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off again. And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters, shot with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows. The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out beaded moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull with haze, through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of brass; overhead it was clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished mirror of the heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night. On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the scene, in happy relief against the wearisome monotony of the river-banks; it came abreast; and ebbed into the backwards of the scene. The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall Reach, Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt Town and the West India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick with shipping. "Are we near?" Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of the younger waterman. Again, "Will we make it?" he asked. The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he would; young William&#8212as old Bob named him&#8212had no breath for idle words. Kirkwood subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his ability; the men, he told himself again and again, were earning their pay, whether or not they gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors were titanic; on their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood out like discolored whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef, steaming with sweat; their eyes protruded with the strain that set their jaws like vises; their chests heaved and shrank like bellows; their backs curved, straightened, and bent again in rhythmic unison as tiring to the eye as the swinging of a pendulum. Hugging the marshy shore, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young William looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded. "Here?" Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat. "Sumwhere's ... 'long ... o' 'ere." From right to left his eager glance swept the river's widening reach. Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal basin,&#8212but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type. The young man's lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and soul, with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look back upon the time; and to fail, even though failure had been discounted a hundredfold since the inception of his mad adventure, seemed hard, very hard. He sat down suddenly. "She's gone!" he cried in a hollow gasp. The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows, scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm. Young William drooped forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly with the current. Old Bob panted: "'Dawn't&#8212see&#8212nawthin'&#8212o' 'er." He resumed his seat. "There's no hope, I suppose?" The elder waterman shook his head. "'Carn't sye.... Might be round&#8212nex' bend&#8212might be&#8212passin' Purfleet.... 'Point is&#8212me an' young Wilyum 'ere&#8212carn't do no more&#8212'n we 'as. We be wore out." "Yes," Kirkwood assented, disconsolate, "You've certainly earned your pay." Then hope revived; he was very young in heart, you know. "Can't you suggest something? I've got to catch that ship!" Old Bob wagged his head in slow negation; young William lifted his. "There's a rylewye runs by Woolwich," he ventured. "Yer might tyke tryne an' go to Sheerness, sir. Yer'd be positive o' passin' 'er if she didn't syle afore 'igh-tide. 'Ire a boat at Sheerness an' put out an' look for 'er." "How far's Woolwich?" Kirkwood demanded instantly. "Mile," said the elder man. "Tyke yer for five-bob extry." "Done!" Young William dashed the sweat from his eyes, wiped his palms on his hips, and fitted the sweeps again to the wooden tholes. Old Bob was as ready. With an inarticulate cry they gave way. <center> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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