"An hour ago. I did not think it was so long. I came as quickly as I could." "I saw you pull a punt-race twenty-five years ago, sir, and you'd have beaten your pulling in the punt then by your pulling in the wherry this evening. Ay, sir, you'd have pulled that wherry round the punt." "How many were saved?" "About forty." "Were they landed at one or both sides of the river?" "They were all landed at Asherton's Quay over there." "Do you know--did you see any of the saved?" "Most of them. I helped to bring in some thirteen." "There is, if it is an hour since she blew up, no chance of any more being alive in the water, even clinging on to anything." "No, Mr. Grey." "Do you know----" His tongue was dry again, and he dipped his hand into the brackish water and drank out of his palm. The fisherman shuddered at this. "It's brackish at best," thought the man; "but after what has happened--ugh! He must be drunk or queer in his head." Grey drew in both oars before completing the question, "Do you know--Mrs. Grey--my wife?" "Yes, sir, I know her well. I often sold her salmon, and saw her with you on the _Rodwell_. I humbly hope, sir, she wasn't aboard this evening?" "You did not see her among the saved?" "Mr. Grey, I may be mistaken----" "Answer me, man, or----" He suddenly sprang up in the boat, and, whirling an oar in his hands, threatened the fisherman in the other boat. "Answer, man, or I'll brain you, d'ye hear? And if you tell me a lie I'll come back and brain you when I find it out. Is my wife saved?" "I did not see her," answered the man, shoving off the wherry. But Grey hooked the fishing-boat to the wherry with his foot, and, brandishing the oar aloft, whirled it over the head of the cowering man, and shouted out in a voice that crossed the waters and crept up the hushed shores: "Damn you, man, don't you see I mean to brain you if you won't speak?" "She was not saved. No one on the after-deck or in the saloon was saved. It was the boilers blew up, and all aft were killed or drowned." Grey unhooked his foot from the fishing-boat, and with his foot pushed off from her. Then throwing down the oar in the boat, he folded his arms tightly across his chest, and, still standing, drifted down the river, his large figure standing out in black against the fading purple of the west, his face turned towards the blackening east. "Only that he lost his reason with his wife," said the fisherman, "I'd take the law of him." "Ay," answered another man in the boat, "it's an excuse for a man to do any wild thing to lose his wife like this." They had drifted a bit, and were now pulling back towards the spot where they had first hailed Grey. "He's standing up still in that wherry. With a big man like him standing up in a cockleshell of a craft like that, the swell of a steamboat wouldn't think much of twisting her from under his feet," said the first speaker.