“There!” exclaimed George. “I knew I had something at the end of my line.”

“Knew you had something?” ejaculated the Sergeant. “You knew you had something! Why, hang it, man, do you think I am going to be dragged out of my bed after a thirty miles ride because a blamed fool with the horrors or something hooks a handkerchief off the bottom of the Clarence?”

“It was more than that!” cried George, firmly. “I’ll swear I had a dead man on the hook.”

“I’ve a mind to put you on your oath about it,” said the Sergeant, tartly.

“I’d swear it in Court,” averred George.

“Nice Crown witness you’d make, wouldn’t you.”

“There!” cried George, suddenly stepping back and pointing tragically at the lamp-lit water.

“What!” ejaculated the Sergeant, gazing intently over the stern of the Greenwich.

“There!” repeated George, in the attitude of Macbeth locating Banquo’s ghost—“there! I told you so.”

[96]

“By gad!” cried the Sergeant, with a start. “A floating corpse!”

“The same one I hooked,” said George, in a hollow voice.

“You’ll get a name as a fisherman if you keep on,” observed the officer.

“I suppose it’s an inquest.”

“What’ll we do?” asked the first mate, excitedly.

“Hook him again!” replied the Sergeant, in a matter-of-fact voice. “You must have had him by the neck and the cloth gave way. The disturbance floated him.”

“Ugh!” cried George; “I’ll never throw out a blamed line in this river again as long as I live.”

“Well I will!” said the Sergeant. “I’ll throw one now. Lend me that shark hook a minute.”

The officer who was paid, not too liberally, by Government, to act either as assistant pathologist or undertaker, as occasion required, jumped upon the after grating with the end of George’s shark line in his hand.

A human head could be seen bobbing gently up and down with the swell and fall of the tide. It drifted neither to right nor left, but in a sort of ghastly oscillation waited—waited. There was a sardonic smile on the parted lips. The smile that is seen on the face of the murdered dead who come up again from under the earth, from the depths of the waters, anywhere. The dead who come for justice.

Livid and ghastly, and utterly unreal and horrible was the face of the corpse floating steadily in that pool of yellow lamplight. And when the Sergeant, after several throws with the line, succeeded in hooking on,[97] it came towards the stern without resistance. The man of law leaned over the low rail to make an examination.

“Fetch the lantern!” he called to the deck-hand, “and a rope.”

The tide lapped by softly, the little town lay wrapped in darkness, broken only by an occasional lantern in the main street, and the dim lamp at the hotel.

“Hold the light over till I see, can’t you?”

“Ugh!” cried the deck-hand.

“Well, turn your head away if you don’t want to look, or shut your eyes.”

“It’s horrible!” murmured George, whose face was deadly pale. “I don’t want to look at it.”

“Well, don’t!” exclaimed the officer.

“I can’t help it——”

“Great Scott!” ejaculated the Sergeant, taking another pull on the line.

“What!” cried George, his heart in his mouth.

“Murder!” exclaimed the officer, with a new interest in his voice.

“Murder!” cried George, hoarsely.

“Look! Yes, by Gad! the man’s been stabbed.”

“Stabbed! Oh, Lord!”

“Hold the light, can’t you?”

“No,” said George, sitting down suddenly; “I can’t. I’m hanged if I can!”

The Sergeant was busy with the rope. Notwithstanding his ride of thirty miles, he had become active and alert. He passed a slip-noose over the stern presently, drew it tight, and tied the end securely to a stanchion.

“Now,” he said, his mind already full of business;[98] “You’ll have to stay here and keep an eye on this while I go up town and make arrangements!”

“Me?” exclaimed George.

“Yes you! I’ll send the constable down by-and-bye.”

“How long will he be before he comes?” asked George, anxiously.

“Couple of hours at the outside; I’ve something I want him to do first——”

“Two hours!” cried George. “Here by myself, at night, with that—that—that thing tied up to the Greenwich! I wouldn’t do it for ten pounds!”

“But,” argued the Sergeant, “you must. I don’t want the town to know anything about it. I want to keep everything dark till I make a few inquiries. This is a very serious matter. There is a big case hanging to it—a big case for me!”

“I don’t care,” cried George doggedly, “What’s hanging to it or who! I won’t stay here by myself—that’s straight!”

“Oh, confound you!” exclaimed the Sergeant. “All right if you’re such a coward as that I’ll send someone down as soon as I go up to the barracks!”

“I ain’t a coward,” said George; “but I haven’t engaged with the owners of this boat to mind floating corpses. It ain’t part of my duty, and I won’t do it.”

“Remember you are to be a witness—an important witness—in this case,” said the Sergeant, severely.

“All right,” replied George; “but I’ll wait ashore up under the lamp, till somebody comes, I wouldn’t stop on the boat—and another thing, I’m hanged if I think I’ll sleep aboard of her after this!”

[99]

Whereat George stepped on to the gangplank and got ashore, so placing himself when he landed that various opaque objects would come between his line of vision and the stern of the steamer.

Tom Pagdin sat on the edge of the bed in Jacob Cayley’s farmhouse and thought hard.

Once he got up and tried the door very gently.

It was firmly locked.

He went to the window and pressed against it.

“There’s an iron bar or a chain across the outside,” he muttered to himself, “and the shutters is an inch thick. It’s no go!”

He felt the boards along the wall with his feet carefully; one of them seemed a little loose.

“If I could raise a bit of the floor and burrow out, like they do in some of those detective yarns, it would be O.K.,” he reflected; “but I got nothin’ to burrow with—unless I break the handle of the washin’ jug,” he added as an after-thought, “an’ sharpen one end.”

But another minute’s consideration convinced him of the futility of this idea.

“It’s all up,” he cried at last in despair. “I’ll be found out an’ took back or sent to gaol! I wonder where Dave is, anyhow.”

Just at this moment Tom heard a bird calling off somewhere towards the river bank.

“Morepoke,” he said listening. “I misremember ever hearin’ a morepoke callin’ so late at night.”

The cries of the night bird were repeated at regular intervals; they seemed to come nearer.

[100]

“A morepoke don’t walk about whoopin’ like that,” muttered Tom, “’specially this hour of the night. ’Sides he’s down in the corn. I never heard a morepoke in the corn before.”

A thought struck the elder pirate.

He slipped to the window, and putting his mouth to the shutter, called: “Mo’poke! Mo’poke!” softly.

“Mo’poke! Mo&r............