The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [962]
Sickening forebodings crept over me, while Davies shouldered my Gladstone and clutched at the parcels.
'Aren't your men here?' I asked, faintly.
'Men?' He looked confused. 'Oh, perhaps I ought to have told you, I never have any paid hands; it's quite a small boat, you know--I hope you didn't expect luxury. I've managed her single-handed for some time. A man would be no use, and a horrible nuisance.' He revealed these appalling truths with a cheerful assurance, which did nothing to hide a naive apprehension of their effect on me. There was a check in our mobilization.
'It's rather late to go on board, isn't it?' I said, in a wooden voice. Someone was turning out the gaslights, and the porter yawned ostentatiously. 'I think I'd rather sleep at an hotel to-night.' A strained pause.
'Oh, of course you can do that, if you like,' said Davies, in transparent distress of mind. 'But it seems hardly worth while to cart this stuff all the way to an hotel (I believe they're all on the other side of the harbour), and back again to the boat to-morrow. She's quite comfortable, and you're sure to sleep well, as you're tired.'
'We can leave the things here,' I argued feebly, 'and walk over with my bag.'
'Oh, I shall have to go aboard anyhow,' he rejoined; 'I _never_ sleep on shore.'
He seemed to be clinging timidly, but desperately, to some diplomatic end. A stony despair was invading me and paralysing resistance. Better face the worst and be done with it.
'Come on,' I said, grimly.
Heavily loaded, we stumbled over railway lines and rubble heaps, and came on the harbour. Davies led the way to a stairway, whose weedy steps disappeared below in gloom.
'If you'll get into the dinghy,' he said, all briskness now, 'I'll pass the things down.
I descended gingerly, holding as a guide a sodden painter which ended in a small boat, and conscious that I was collecting slime on cuffs and trousers.
'Hold up!' shouted Davies, cheerfully, as I sat down suddenly near the bottom, with one foot in the water.
I climbed wretchedly into the dinghy and awaited events.
'Now float her up close under the quay wall, and make fast to the ring down there,' came down from above, followed by the slack of the sodden painter, which knocked my cap off as it fell. 'All fast? Any knot'll do,' I heard, as I grappled with this loathsome task, and then a big, dark object loomed overhead and was lowered into the dinghy. It was my portmanteau, and, placed athwart, exactly filled all the space amidships. 'Does it fit?' was the anxious inquiry from aloft.
'Beautifully.'
'Capital!'
Scratching at the greasy wall to keep the dinghy close to it, I received in succession our stores, and stowed the cargo as best I could, while the dinghy sank lower and lower in the water, and its precarious superstructure grew higher.
'Catch!' was the final direction from above, and a damp soft parcel hit me in the chest. 'Be careful of that, it's meat. Now back to the stairs!'
I painfully acquiesced, and Davies appeared.
'It's a bit of a load, and she's rather deep; but I _think_ we shall manage,' he reflected. 'You sit right aft, and I'll row.'
I was too far gone for curiosity as to how this monstrous pyramid was to be rowed, or even for surmises as to its foundering by the way. I crawled to my appointed seat, and Davies extricated the buried sculls by a series of tugs, which shook the whole structure, and made us roll alarmingly. How he stowed himself into rowing posture I have not the least idea, but eventually we were moving sluggishly out into the open water, his head just visible in the bows. We had started from what appeared to be the head of a narrow loch, and were leaving behind us the lights of