“I propose,” said Seton briskly, “that we borrow one of the other boats and pull down stream to where that short pier juts out. We can hide behind it and watch for our man. I take it he’ll be bound up-stream, and the tide will help us to follow him quietly.” “Right,” said Kerry. “We’ll take the small dinghy. It’s big enough.” He turned to Jervis. “Nip across to the wooden stairs,” he directed, “and tell Inspector White to stand by, but to keep out of sight. If we’ve started before you return, go back and join him.” “Very good, sir.” Jervis turned and disappeared into the mazes of rubbish, as Seton and Kerry grasped the boat and ran it down into the rising tide. Kerry boarding, Seton thrust it out into the river and climbed in over the stern. “Phew! The current drags like a tow-boat!” said Kerry. They were being drawn rapidly up-stream. But as Kerry seized the oars and began to pull steadily, this progress was checked. He could make little actual headway, however. “The tide races round this bend like fury,” he said. “Bear on the oars, sir.” Seton thereupon came to Kerry’s assistance, and gradually the dinghy crept upon its course, until, below the little pier, they found a sheltered spot, where it was possible to run in and lie hidden. As they won this haven: “Quiet!” said Seton. “Don’t move the oars. Look! We were only just in time!” Immediately above them, where the boats were beached, a man was coming down the slope, carrying a hurricane lantern. As Kerry and Seton watched, the man raised the lantern and swung it to and fro. “Watch!” whispered Seton. “He’s signalling to the Greenwich bank!” Kerry’s teeth snapped savagely together, and he chewed but made no reply, until: “There it is!” he said rapidly. “On the marshes!” A speck of light in the darkness it showed, a distant moving lantern on the curtain of the night. Although few would have credited Kerry with the virtue, he was a man of cultured imagination, and it seemed to him, as it seemed to Seton Pasha, that the dim light symbolized the life of the missing woman, of the woman who hovered between the gay world from which tragically she had vanished and some Chinese hell upon whose brink she hovered. Neither of the watchers was thinking of the crime and the criminal, of Sir Lucien Pyne or Kazmah, but of Mrs. Monte Irvin, mysterious victim of a mysterious tragedy. “Oh, Dan! ye must find her! ye must find her! Puir weak hairt—dinna ye ken how she is suffering!” Clairvoyantly, to Kerry’s ears was borne an echo of his wife’s words. “The traffic!” he whispered. “If we lose George Martin tonight we deserve to lose the case!” “I agree, Chief Inspector,” said Seton quietly. The grating sound made by a boat thrust out from a shingle beach came to their ears above the whispering of the tide. A ghostly figure in the dim light, George Martin clambered into his craft and took to the oars. “If he’s for the Greenwich bank,” said Seton grimly, “he has a stiff task.”