“What’s the use?” He spread out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “I knew you wouldn’t believe it when I started. You _couldn’t_. It would be a kind of blasphemy against the sacred institution of pavements. You’re too damn smug, Ridgeway. I can’t shake you. You haven’t sat two days and two nights, keeping your eyes open by sheer teeth-gritting, until they got used to it and wouldn’t shut any more. When I tell you I found that yellow thing snooping around the davits, and three bights of the boat-fall loosened out, plain on deck--you grin behind your collar. When I tell you she padded off forward and evaporated--flickered back to hell and hasn’t been seen since then--why, you explain to yourself that I’m drunk. I tell you--” He jerked his head back abruptly and turned to face the companionway, his lips still apart. He listened so for a moment, then he shook himself out of it and went on: “I tell you, Ridgeway, I’ve been over this hulk with a foot-rule. There’s not a cubic inch I haven’t accounted for, not a plank I--” This time he got up and moved a step toward the companion, where he stood with his head bent forward and slightly to the side. After what might have been twenty seconds of this he whispered, “Do you hear?” Far and far away down the reach a ferryboat lifted its infinitesimal wail, and then the silence of the night river came down once more, profound and inscrutable. A corner of the wick above my head sputtered a little--that was all. “Hear what?” I whispered back. He lifted a cautious finger toward the opening. “Somebody. Listen.” The man’s faculties must have been keyed up to the pitch of his nerves, for to me the night remained as voiceless as a subterranean cavern. I became intensely irritated with him; within my mind I cried out against this infatuated pantomime of his. And then, of a sudden, there was a sound--the dying rumor of a ripple, somewhere in the outside darkness, as though an object had been let into the water with extreme care. “You heard?” I nodded. The ticking of the watch in my vest pocket came to my ears, shucking off the leisurely seconds, while McCord’s finger-nails gnawed at the palms of his hands. The man was really sick. He wheeled on me and cried out, “My God! Ridgeway--why don’t we go?” I, for one, refused to be a fool. I passed him and climbed out of the opening: he followed far enough to lean his elbows on the hatch, his feet and legs still within the secure glow of the cabin. “You see, there’s nothing.” My wave of assurance was possibly a little overdone. “Over there,” he muttered, jerking his head toward the shore lights. “Something swimming.” I moved to the corner of the house and listened. “River thieves,” I argued. “The place is full of--” “_Ridgeway. Look behind you!_”